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CHRIST CHURCH
THE COMMUNITY SERVICE
JANUARY 9, 2000
"AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
ABSURD REALITY OF LIFE"
ECCLESIASTES 1:1-11
DR. DAVE COLLINGS, PASTOR
Christ Church
19543 Lunn Road
Strongsville, Ohio 44136
(440) 572-7610
DR. COLLINGS: I would like to begin a new series today called Ancient Wisdom for the Absurdity of 20th Century Life. We are going to study through the book of Ecclesiastes together over the next 13 weeks. Hopefully, by studying the wisdom of Solomon, we will be able to understand life better and, understanding life better, live better.
So if you have your copy of the Scriptures, we will be looking this morning at Ecclesiastes Chapter 1, Verses 1 through 11. How fitting is it to have an absurd voice on the Sunday you are going to preach on absurdity? (Dr. Collings is hoarse this morning).
"Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you for your kindness. I thank you that you are gracious to us in many ways. Father, what we are asking for this morning and over the next 13 weeks is that you would grant us the grace to see the reality of life instead of trying to create a reality that does not exist. Help us to surrender our Pollyanna thinking and to be hard realists who understand life and choose to live wisely. Teach us your way, oh, Lord, in Jesus’ name. Amen."
If you were to go out this evening with a good telescope and look at the night sky, the farthest light that you would see is approximately 15 billion light years away. Now, I know some of you are good in math. Light travels six trillion miles in a year, so that light is six trillion times 15 billion miles away.
The universe is about the same size in every direction. It is not as if one light object is 15 billion light years away to the north, but if you look south, everything is closer. It is 15 billion light years away from every direction. That can mean one of two things: We are in the middle of it all, or, perhaps more realistically, we only have vision for 15 billion light years. Anything beyond that, we can not see.
The universe is incomprehensibly large. We can not associate it with anything we know, so we try to break this incomprehensible universe down into smaller pieces. There is a galaxy of galaxies that we call our Super Cluster, and we break the Super Cluster into the local group which is like a solar system of galaxies. The galaxy we live in is called the Milky Way; it is one hundred million light years across, and we happen to live on the outer edge of one of the spiral arms of our galaxy. When we break our galaxy down into a solar system, we happen to be the third planet from our sun. We are in what is called the "zone of life." If we were closer to the sun, the earth would not support life. If we were farther from the sun, the earth would not support life. If we were closer to the sun, we would have rainstorms of sulfuric acid, just as Mercury has. On Venus, lead is always liquid. If we were farther from the sun, we would be like Mars; and if we had water, it would be covered over by dust from the perpetual dust storms that are created on a planet where there is no vegetation.
We can break it down even further; we live on the planet earth on the North American continent, in the United States of America, which has a population of 280 million. We live in the state of Ohio, in Cuyahoga County. Our church is located in the city of Strongsville; we each live in a specific neighborhood in a house or apartment, and we relate to other people, our neighbors, and our families. Somehow, we think we can bring this orderly universe into our specific lives, so that if we just do everything right, life will turn out the way we want it. If I can just organize my life the way the universe is organized, and make the right decisions all along the way, life will turn out the way I want it to. I will be happy, and life will be good. The truth is life does not work that way. Life is not like mathematics where one and one always equals two. People who try to live that way are perpetually unhappy and develop wrong attitudes about God. In fact, life is absurd. In human experience, one plus one sometimes equal five. You can do things the same way two times in a row and not produce the same results, right? Life is absurd. Sometimes I love my family so much I can not stand it; sometimes I am so angry with them that I can not stand it. I like to blame it all on them, but it is probably not them. Life is absurd. Do you ever get grouchy for no reason at all?
CONGREGATION MEMBER: Never.
DR. COLLINGS: It’s a good thing you do not have to go to confession in this church.
I get grouchy sometimes for no Good reason. I have had a good night’s sleep, I had pleasant dreams, but I just wake up grouchy. Or I have had a good day at work and still come home grouchy. Life is absurd. We can not reduce life down to doing these ten easy things and life will always be fair, beautiful and wonderful.
I believe sometimes Christianity sends the wrong message; if you simply go to church, pray and do all the right things, life will be perfect. If you are buying into that kind of Christianity, you are going to live a very difficult life in the 21st century, because life does not work that way, and Christianity does not teach that it does. I know you can watch preachers on TV that say if you only had more faith, you would never be sick, you would be rich, and life would be beautiful and perfect. That is not what the Bible teaches.
Church, we want to look at the reality of life without rose colored glasses on. Life is absurd. Ecclesiastes, a little book in the Old Testament, speaks to that absurdity. I believe if we can understand the message of Ecclesiastes, we will be more equipped to live quality lives at the beginning of this 21st century. Let us look now in Ecclesiastes; these are the words of the teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. If you are using the International Version, chapter one verse two says "meaningless;" if you are using some of the other versions, it says "vanity," and I am going to argue that both of these are poor translations of the Hebrew word. I am going to translate this word as absurd. "Absurd says the teacher, utterly absurd, everything is absurd."
If you read commentaries, they are going to argue about who is the author of Ecclesiastes. The book wants to be read as Solomon being the author. But as with everything, when it comes to the Bible, you make your career in the university by proving that the Bible is not right at face value. There are several commentaries that suggests if Ecclesiastes was not written by Solomon about 900 years before Christ, it was written by an unknown person about 200 years before Christ who used Solomon’s name. The reason that they cite is there is vocabulary in the original text that is borrowed from Persian and Aramaic. The Persian and Aramaic languages were not common in Jerusalem at the time of Solomon, so, they say, Solomon could not have written it. I want to respond in two ways. First of all, when you read the book together with the history of Solomon, it becomes clear that they go well together. The narrative of the life of Solomon and the narrative of Ecclesiastes go well together. So we have to explain the vocabulary issue if we are going to say that Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes. When I was boy, we read the King James Version of the Bible. Later on, a paraphrase came out called the Living Bible. Does everybody remember that? Billy Graham made it popular. We use the New International Version for our pew Bibles. The vocabulary in all three versions are different, but the authorship is the same; right? The New International Version is written at about a fifth grade reading level; all the vocabulary is vocabulary that a fifth grader can read. Church, that does not change the authorship. The same thing doubtless happened in Ecclesiastes. Sometime around 200 years before Christ, someone read this book and decided to translate it into a more understandable vocabulary for that period of time. 2000 years later, certain commentaries declare that Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes because the vocabulary is not right. It is the same as saying that the New International Version can not be the Bible; the King James Version is the only Bible. The second thing I would like to say about the authorship of Ecclesiastes is that if Solomon did not write this book and it claims to be written by Solomon, it is a fraud. Church, I do not believe that a fraudulent author is going to speak to me in a meaningful way about life. If he has to be a fraud to get his book produced, then what does that tell me about what he had to do to succeed in life? If it is a fraud, it has no place in the Scriptures. Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. He calls himself the Qohelet. It is a Hebrew word that I think is very fascinating. Ecclesiastes is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Qohelet. Qohelet comes from one of two verbs, and the commentators are not sure. The first verb means, "the one who gathers." So Qohelet may mean the one who gathers wisdom. Solomon says, that in his life, he studied and gathered wisdom. Qohelet may come from a verb that means "to proclaim persuasively or to preach." I think if you put them both together, you have the meaning of Qohelet. Qohelet means someone who did their homework and then proclaimed the truth that they recognized. Solomon is going to tell us all the homework he did to draw the conclusions he drew. So then, if Solomon wrote the book, and he wrote it to proclaim the wisdom that he had gathered, what are we to do with this word "vanity" or "meaninglessness"? When I think of vanity, I think of looking in the mirror and saying, "Aren’t you beautiful?" Solomon was not talking about vanity. Meaningless, I do not think Solomon’s argument is, it does not matter what you do in life because life is totally meaningless. In fact, what I think he is saying is that life is absurd. Absurd means "unreasonable and inharmonious." He is saying life is unreasonable. Do not think that you could ever create a syllogism that says premise one and premise two always equal premise three and live life that way, because life does not work that way. Solomon is not saying that life is a stupid farce by a mean God. He is saying life is absurd. You can not make one and one equal two in human relationships. Life is not a mathematical formula. Life can not be run through the computer to spit out all the right answers, and if you only live by those right answers, you will be happy, wealthy, healthy and popular. Life is absurd. It is unreasonable and inharmonious. Some of our marriages would do a hundred percent better if we did not expect everyday to be like a perfect day that comes to us once in a while. Maybe the perfect day is the exception, and the normal day is the normal day. To be unhappy that everyday is not perfect is an unrealistic expectation of life. Maybe some of you would be happier in your work if you did not expect every day to be the top day of your career. Maybe you could understand that there are some days that are diamonds and some days that are stone. That is the reality of life.
The thesis of this study is the unreasonableness and the inharmonious nature of life and how to live well if you accept that as the reality of life. You can not live well if you think life is always fair and reasonable. You can not live well if you expect life to always be harmonious and beautiful. You can live well if you accept that life is sometimes unreasonable, unfair, and often inharmonious; and because that is the reality of life, I will commit myself to a certain behavior without expectation for it to produce perfect results. "What does a man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. Life is absurd because the workshop remains while the craftsman profits very little from his labor and passes away quickly."
I want you to imagine that you are 75 years old and that you have the disease that you know will end your life. You begin to reflect over your life and remember all the work you did as a family person - as a husband or a wife and as a parent. I have been picking up toys for 25 years. They are not my toys; I do not even like them. If they were fun to play with, that would be different. How many hours have I spent picking up toys? You know what is absurd? I take the garbage out every single Friday. How many hours will I spend in my life collecting garbage, putting it in the back of my pickup, driving it down to the end of the driveway and putting it at the end of the driveway? It is absurd. And what profit will I have from it at the end of my life? Has anybody ever handed you a ten dollar bill for doing the laundry or vacuuming? How much time do we spend doing laundry and vacuuming and getting no profit from it? Do you not find that most people think they are overworked and underpaid? I mean, honestly, do you not think that you deserve more for the work you do than what you get paid? Most people think they work harder than the people around them. We are going to come to the end of our lives and wonder of all the work I put in into my family, what is my real profit? Of all the things I did in my career, of all the money I made for my company, of all the golden moments I had, of all the things that made my business a better place because I was there, what did I profit? They gave me my retirement dinner and a watch, and six months later it was as if I never worked there. You may be thinking, I will be OK because I have money saved. So what, - you are 75 and dying. You can not take it with you. What is the profit of that saved money? You children will have a lot of money to fight over, that is all.
If you look over your life, and consider the heartbreak and struggle you have gone through; the effort and all of the energy you spent to accomplish the things that you did, you may be like most people and conclude that often the results are not what they should be. Sometimes I see my kids make decisions that I think are bad decisions, and I think I raised them better than that. This should not be the profit I receive for all the hours I spent trying to teach them to do right. Have you been there? Our parents probably feel the same way. The effort is inharmonious with the profit. And the real absurdity is the craftsman goes and the workshop stays. You see, we are all craftsmen, crafting a life. We leave, and the workshop that is much less valuable than the soul, stays. Solomon says, that is why life is absurd: You work real hard, and you never get the profit out of life that is commensurate to the amount of effort you put in. And then, in the end, you die, and the workshop stays. Somebody else moves into the workshop and starts all over again. Ecclesiastes 1:5: "The sun rises, the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing." Life is absurd because nature follows the same cycles, generation after generation, while people think their lives are unique. Solomon uses this beautiful picture of the wind patterns that the rotation of the earth creates. In North America, we have the jet stream because the earth’s rotation causes the wind to blow almost always from the west to the east, and it just blows and blows and blows and blows. We can always expect to get up in the morning and see the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. The patterns of rainfall and the evaporation of water go on and on, but somehow, we look at these things and we invest them with a uniqueness. One year during a family vacation to Nag’s Head, South Carolina, we all got out of bed early to watch the sunrise. We were looking out over the dark Atlantic Ocean, and pretty soon it started going from real dark to gray, and then, suddenly, a little ray of light breaks up out of the water and the sun rises. That memory is not special because the sunrise that morning was particularly special. That memory is special because I put a unique value on it. Can you relate to that? The sun pops up like that every single morning. There have been sunsets where the sky is just a wash of colors, and I have looked at it and thought, man, is that incredible! It is incredible because I impose an idea upon it. The sun sets like that every single night somewhere. Windstorms come and blow down the whole neighborhood. Somewhere, someone is saying, "I do not know why God did this to me," as if a windstorm happening somewhere is a freak of nature. Windstorms happen. If your house is where the windstorm happens, it is going to be damaged. That is the reality of life. It is not God punishing you. We impose that meaning upon it. The wind blows. It blows according to identifiable low pressure, high pressure, and barometric patterns. To blame God for the natural patterns of nature is ridiculous.
Then Solomon makes an insightful comment. He says we impose meaning on these natural things of life, but we can never see anything that is so incredible that we think that we never need to see anything great again. Why can’t the Cleveland Art Museum, sell everything it has and buy the 50 best paintings and put them up and let people look at them? Why does there have to be gallery after gallery of paintings? Why do they have paintings stored that they bring out and rotate from time to time? Why do they bring in special exhibits? Because you can not ever see something that is so beautiful and so overwhelming that you never need to see anything beautiful again. In fact, what I find in my life is the more I see beautiful things, the more I want to see them. Do you find that? Have you ever bought a new LP? There was just something great about having records. LPs had a culture of their own. Or maybe it was an eight-track, a cassette, or a CD. After buying it, have you ever played it to the point that you wondered what made you think it was so special to begin with? You become tire of it and search for something else. Why is it that you can never hear something that is so incredible that you say, "that is it; I am done for life. I never want to hear anything else again but this." Solomon is saying life is absurd; it is not rational. It can not be reduced to the patterns of nature. It defies that. It gets expansive and then it gets narrow. It blossoms beautifully and contracts and withers. Ecclesiastes 1: Verse 9: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Is there anything which one can say, "look, this is something new?" It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. There is no remembrance of old men, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Life is absurd because one generation rarely learns anything from the previous generation. I had this very powerfully worked out in my life in the whole business between Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Now, please do not run this through any political filter; run this through an historical filter. What might have Clinton learned from the whole Nixon experience? When I listened to the hearings, I could not tell that anyone ever remembered that there had been a Richard Nixon. It looked to me like all the same mistakes were repeated on both sides. Church, we rarely learn from previous generations because we live with this obnoxious myth that we are really the ones. I remember being a teenager listening to "Talking About My Generation," and I really thought that was true. I remember having an incredible generation gap with my dad, and I could not tell any difference between my dad and someone who had lived 500 years before him. I remember thinking, this guy does not have a clue. Well, my teenagers come along, and they are absolutely certain that I belong to the Neanderthal age. They never looked me in the face and said I did not have a clue, but they did say to me on multiple occasions, "You just do not understand." Every generation thinks they are the ones. We all live with the myth that we are just a little brighter than the generation before us; we have our act together – we are the ones. The problem is that is a myth that every generation creates.
One generation rarely learns anything from the previous generation. This century started with a generation saying they would fight a war to end all wars. They fought that war, and then they sent their sons to fight the Second World War, who sent their sons to fight the Viet Nam War, who sent their sons to fight in the Middle East, who will send their sons heaven only knows where. We rarely learn anything that changes the moral quality of our lives from previous generations, because we create this obnoxious myth that we are different. How can you learn from previous generations when they are so different – but, in fact, they are very much like us. Does anyone ever remember being a child and saying to yourself, "I will never say that to my kids," only to grow up and be possessed by your parents, yelling at your kids the very same thing that they yelled at you? My dad possesses me from time to time; he just speaks right through my mouth. But, you know what, it is probably not my dad. It is probably his dad, or his granddad, or his great, great granddad.
You see, here is the absurd truth: Life situations change, but the reality of life has not changed at all. The same issues that are issues for me were issues for my dad, were issues for his granddad, all the way back. Solomon says life is absurd because there is so much hard data from which we can learn and we are so close to it. Every generation slips into its own myopic time capsule, and we become so shortsighted we can only see our own generation. Have you ever had this experience? When I was a boy living in Minnesota, when the farmers cleared farm land, they left big patches of woods. I have been out in the woods with friends of mine. As we followed a stream down its course, we were totally surrounded by oak trees and Minnesota trees. I remember thinking, "I bet I am the first person who has ever been here in the world." I went to Canada with some men in the church, and had my picture taken up on this big rock. While I was standing on that big rock, I thought, "I bet I am the only person in the world who ever had their picture taken on this rock." There are probably 500 pictures on refrigerators all over America, of people who thought, "I am the only one." Have you ever had that experience? That’s the myopic time capsule that we create.
It is a wonderful myth. Have you ever been on vacation or a business trip, and as you are driving the four-lane highway goes through a neighborhood? You can see houses on both sides of the four-lane highway. Maybe you look at one house and can tell children live there because there is children’s playground stuff in the back yard. As you look at that house you think, there are people in that house that live a life just like me; they bought this house and they were real happy. They moved in here, they are raising their kids here, they barbecue in that back yard; they put their kids or grandkids in the swing and swing them. They have had some wonderful Christmases here, and they have had some ugly family fights here. They get up every day and go to work and they go to church somewhere. There are people who are living a parallel life to me, and I do not know anything about them, and probably never will. Have you ever had that feeling?
Once, I had just the opposite feeling. I was in Chicago to preach at my friend’s church. There are row houses in Chicago. I mean, blocks and blocks of houses that are three stories tall, just jammed together; no driveways, no garages, no parking lots. You just have to parallel park wherever you can. I can remember driving down the side street just lined with cars on both sides, row houses on both sides, and thinking, "When I was a boy, running free in Minnesota, another boy, who was born the same day as I was, came home to one of these row houses. When I was playing in a hay barn, he was playing wherever you play in a neighborhood like this. When I was surrounded by the open space, he was surrounded by concrete and bus fumes, and his life experience was radically different than mine. He is probably living in a row house on this street or around the corner, and while his life seems so normal to him, it seems foreign to me." Have you ever had that moment of awareness?
Life is absurd, because we are so shortsighted, and only rarely do we have bursts of insight into these incredible realities. Solomon said, here is what you need to know: Life is unreasonable and inharmonious, so plan on it. If you plan for life to be fair, if you plan to be able to figure everything out and make all the right plans, you are always going to be disappointed; you are going to have wrong expectations of people. You are forever going to be estranged from God because you are expecting God to play by your rules. Absurdity, absurdity, life is an absurdity.
I believe the Enlightenment produced more modern philosophers than any other intellectual movement. One of those philosophers was a man named Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was a German man whose parents were wealthy. They intended for him to go into business, but they gave him too much money, and he did not do it. He went to the university and became a philosopher. Schopenhauer wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Four-Fold Root of the Principle of the Sufficiency of Reason. Schopenhauer said reason will tell you every answer you need, and if you listen to reason, you will always live right. Shopenhauer thought that he was the smartest man who ever lived. He also thought that he was the only one who really had figured out life. He could not hold a job; they would not keep him at the university. If you respected him, he disdained you because you respected him. "Who are
you, peon that you are, to even know how smart I am to say that you respect me?" He was the philosopher of pessimism. He was an incredibly obnoxious man. But he came to a realization later on in life. He discovered the reason life does not work reasonably is every person has a will, and the will is unreasonable.
I will illustrate this for you. Have you ever known that something was absolutely right and refused to do it anyway? Have you ever known that something was absolutely wrong - your head told you it was wrong, everybody told you it was wrong - and you did it anyway? Life is absurd. Have you ever said to yourself, "Whatever you do, do not say that!" only to latter say it anyway? Even Schopenhauer, who had absolute confidence in reason, had to admit that reason was not the most powerful aspect of the human life; the will was, and the will was totally absurd. You see, the will works something like this: "That is probably true for everybody else but I am different." I have had people in my office talking to me about a problem that they are having, and they say to me, "You see, it is probably true for everybody else, but they do not feel the way I feel." I talked to a young man on the phone one day. He was in a park, and he should have been at work. It was about 11:00 AM, and he had already consumed a six pack. He was yelling at me on the phone about how unfair it was that everybody else in the world could drink but he could not. I told him that it may be unfair, but it is just so. He said that it was still not fair. So I told him that we were not talking about fair; we were talking about it being 11:00 Am and he was supposed to be at work, and instead he was at the park drinking beer. I predicted that he would not stop with just one six-pack. And he said it was not fair that he should be this way. I tried to say, it was not about what is fair, but what is true. He was overwhelmed with a sense that he should be able live that way and not have to have the consequences that went along with it. That young man is just like all the rest of us, except that his problem was more glaring. Every one of us carry around with us an absurdity that says, "It is not fair, I ought to be able to do what I want to do. I am different. Other people do not feel the way I feel." And Solomon is saying, at the core of absurdity is the nonsense that says I am radically different; what is wrong for other people really should not be wrong for me. Other people should have to obey this rule, but I do not have to obey it because I am different. After all, it is me. The absurdity of life is deeply rooted in our own self-awareness. Church, I can learn that and live well, or I can ignore that and be perpetually blind-sided by the absurd and inharmonious nature of life. Solomon says, if you want to live well, you live with the reality that life is not reasonable or harmonious, and you develop a strategy for life based upon that reality. The strategy for life is that life is absurd; we all need God’s help. You are not ever going to figure this out by yourself. You are not ever going to get your act together. You are not ever going to be able to reason through all the complicated aspects. It is all too convoluted; it is beyond us. We all need God’s help. "Our Dear Heavenly Father, we confess the absurdity of life; we acknowledge the absurdity of life; we are uncomfortable with the absurdity of life, and so we ask you for your help, in Jesus’ name. Amen."
I would like to say a special and public thank you to everybody who made last week’s service the greatest service I have ever attended in my life. For everyone who worked so hard, I am truly grateful to you.
"May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace."
