You can blame my Hebrew Bible professor for our theme this month. I distinctly remember him saying, “You never hear anybody preach on the Wisdom Literature, but there’s so much good stuff in there! It’s so relevant to our world today!” I’ll admit that I heard those words as a challenge. When Doug Donnelly and I started talking about a theme for this month, it sounded like a golden opportunity to accept that challenge to delve into the Wisdom literature. So, thank you, Dr. Sena. And you’re welcome.
The wisdom tradition shows up throughout the bible and in a variety of voices, but isn’t the melodramatic, nihilistic author of Ecclesiastes kind of relatable? In their sermons, Paula and Maia each mentioned the whole “All of life is ephemeral, but at least there’s chocolate!” message. Who can’t relate to that mental space? It’s honestly a perfectly valid strategy for getting through a hard day, which is exactly what the wisdom tradition is all about. Unlike a lot of the Bible, wisdom literature is not concerned with mastering life, or deep theological analysis of humanity’s relationship to the sacred. It’s about how to get through the day with some degree of authenticity while not forgetting that we’re ultimately accountable to God.
Wisdom literature’s lessons, particularly in Ecclesiastes, teach what impacts one’s actions have on how easy or hard your life is on you. There’s wise action, which results in harmony both with others and with God, and actions described as folly—those that deny or fail to see the possible future consequences of an act. Life is about making choices. We can choose the path of folly by taking shortcuts and using people on our way to the top, or we can choose the wise path by remembering that everything has its time, including a time for God’s eventual judgement on the choices we make.
This morning’s passage lays out the crux of the life challenge that the sage explores in Ecclesiastes: in the knowledge that we all die and that everything we do will be forgotten, what is the point of it all? We hear the lament of an exemplary person, Koheleth. A former king turned teacher, a student of lived experience who sought to learn about everything, wisdom and folly. He lived as much of life as he could: he grew richer and wiser than any of his peers, any former king. He experienced every joy, from those of the flesh and from doing good deeds, and what did he learn? That none of it would outlive him. Sure, he enjoyed himself, but at the end of a long and what everyone in his culture would call a successful life, he felt empty. Like it was all just ephemeral, vapor, breath. Vanity.
In over 2,000 years that tension hasn’t gone away, has it? We still yearn for significance, for wisdom, for material happiness. Our culture speaks in clichéd mixed messages encouraging us to deny ourselves the finer things or to just lean into pleasure. You can’t buy love. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. And. . . you only live once. You can’t take it with you. What is wisdom and what is folly?
In his book, Dynamics of Faith,[1] the words that theologian Paul Tillich puts to this tension resonate with me. Tillich writes that to have faith is to put one’s ultimate concern someplace as a way of ordering one’s life and priorities. You can imagine how some people, from the time of Ecclesiastes right through to today, put their ultimate concern in money, or career, or nation. From his own description of his life in this morning’s reading, one wonders whether Koheleth is one of these folks.
For those who believe in God or divine presence or the sacred, that sense of the divine and our relationship to it is the ultimate concern. For Tillich, a Christian, this is proper since God is defined as ultimate, beyond words and bounds, infinite. There is alignment when one puts one’s highest concern in that which is highest, and a profound dissatisfaction that arises when we place our ultimate concern in something that is finite like wealth and career achievement, for the exact reasons that Koheleth experiences in the passage.
But even when we place our ultimate concern in the ultimate a different kind of discomfort arises. When we label something infinite, it’s only a matter of time before we confront our own finiteness. Tillich observes that when this confrontation hits, we can be overwhelmed, consumed by the bigness of God and creation and our own limits. In awe we see the infinite complexity of every level of life around us, from a single strand of DNA, to the socio-political systems at play with over eight billion human beings on planet Earth, to vastness of the cosmos. An element of human nature, based on this ability to conceive of infinity is that we’re not happy to just observe it; we aspire to it ourselves. It’s the Genesis story of the Tree of Knowledge. And our ambition searches for a container, a pathway to enlarge ourselves. We build careers and estates and empires, we surround ourselves with the finest things, we search for more knowledge, all in a lifelong attempt to somehow bridge the gap with infinity and relieve the discomfort of the shortness of our days.
But whatever we do to bridge the gap or distract ourselves from its existence, we come back to square one, just like our spiritual ancestor, Koheleth did.
So, what do we do about all this uncomfortable tension between our finite nature and our desire for the infinite? Are we simply doomed to lives of empty frustration and meaninglessness? Where can we rest? Where can we find meaning?
One voice of spiritual comfort and meaning in my life is the theologian and teacher Father Richard Rohr. His book, Falling Upward, explores this same territory. Central to his response is an expansion of how we think about the narrative arc of our lives. Understandably, we focus on the part of our lives that we can see. We’re born, we make lives, and we die. But the Christian tradition and many other faith traditions hold that our story doesn’t begin with our birth or end with our death; we come from God and return to God when we die, and while we’re alive we don’t lose our relationship with God. Rohr frames the discomfort of our disconnection from the infinite not as a uncrossable chasm that we as individuals must strive to conquer, but as a profound homesickness that both motivates us and saddens us. He writes:
We are both driven and called forward by a kind of deep homesickness, it seems. There is an inherent and desirous dissatisfaction that both sends and draws us forward, and it comes from our original and radical union with God. What appears to be past and future is in fact the same home, the same call, and the same God.[2]
This claiming of our true, ultimate home in God, this shifting of our starting and ending points moves our source and destination from a shaky, lonely place to a sure one. If we think of our home as where we were born, then the point of reference for our life journey is our childhood home. How can we maintain or recreate the comfort we felt there, or how can we create a life for ourselves that provides the comfort that we lacked? It’s a drive that we often use productively, but making comfort and security in this life our ultimate concern can feel like sand slipping through our fingers. Like we can never get enough.
But in Rohr’s worldview, we are on a hero’s journey. Our home is with God, we are sent into the world with a quest, and we return to God. Our quest, just like all heroes, is to rediscover and reclaim our true identity and true power as God’s beloved children.
In Christian teaching, we don’t need to be the most successful king in the history of Israel or build vast wealth to have a place in the story. Yes, some will do those things, and it may be done from a place of wisdom or folly, but that is not where the meaning is to be found. Our ultimate concern, the meaning in our existence, is to be found in the home we claim in God and what we do with that identity.
I invite you to try making this shift in how you think about home and your life journey now. Just take a moment and envision yourself as a member of God’s household, where you came from and where you will return. What do you notice in your body? In your spirit?
I’ll conclude with a “stay tuned” teaser for next week. One of the great things about the wisdom tradition is that it doesn’t teach that you need to choose between these two homes, these two identities. In fact, you need to figure out how they can coexist. We’ll think about that idea next week.
In the meantime, may we be intentional about where we place our ultimate concern. May we remember our true home, and may that knowledge bring us a peace that we can share with the world. May it be so.
[1] Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, (Harper & Row: New York, 1957).
[2] Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2011), p. 89.