EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
Prayer of the Day: Benevolent God, you are the source, the guide, and the goal of our lives. Teach us to love what is worth loving, to reject what is offensive to you, and to treasure what is precious in your sight, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 2:22-23.
The little book of Ecclesiastes is given scant attention in the common lectionary. It is usually not the text of choice for preachers either, particularly in the United States where it runs contrary to that dominant religion that is America. Ours is the land of opportunity where everything is possible for anyone with enough grit and determination. Strain and toil build wealth, create opportunities and secure a future of ease and comfort. At least, that is how it is supposed to work. But the American dream has turned out to be a cruel hoax for many of our neighbors who work two, sometimes three jobs, yet struggle to pay the rent, put food on the table and cover medical expenses. With the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” many of us will find that the American dream has sailed even further out of sight as our toil, strain and sleepless nights prove to have been in vain.
But is life any better for those of us who manage to achieve the dream? A survey of college students in the United States in 2023-2024, a group one would expect to represent the most successful families in our society, found that around 38 percent had symptoms of depression. These included loss of interest/pleasure in things once found enjoyable, feelings of sadness and hopelessness, fatigue, changes in sleep and thoughts of death or suicide.[1] Psychiatrist Claudia M. Elsig, MD observes that wealth can cloud moral judgement and distort empathy and compassion. Evidence suggests that wealthy people are disproportionately affected by addiction.[2] Studies show that anxiety suffered by children in wealthy families is 20-30% higher than it is among the less affluent, and that affluent kids are more prone to substance and alcohol abuse. Many of us who have doggedly chased the American dream and finally caught it discover that it is really a nightmare, a dead end from which there is no escape.
The words of Ecclesiastes are attributed to King Solomon.[3] Solomon reigned over the united kingdom of Israel at the peak of its wealth, power and cultural influence. Solomon’s reputation for wisdom and learning brought visitors from as far away as northern Africa. International trade flourished as Israel’s territorial acquisitions reached levels never before achieved and that would never be matched again. Of course, the Temple in Jerusalem was completed by Solomon, a structure considered one of the most impressive architectural accomplishments of the century. According to the Chronicler, “silver was as common in Jerusalem as stone.” II Chronicles 10:27. If anyone had reason to expect the happiness, satisfaction and enjoyment promised by the American dream, it was King Solomon. Yet Solomon’s great wisdom, wealth and power seem only to have sharpened his conviction that his life was empty and pointless. He reached the top only to find out that there is nothing there.
Such is the fate of the “rich fool” in our gospel lesson. Here we meet a man who has reached the nirvana of financial security for which all of us Americans are urged by our financial advisers to strive. Accordingly, he does what most of us would probably do. He takes an early retirement. And yet, there is something a little off about this character. You would think that after landing such a windfall an ordinary guy would be down at the local waterhole with his buddies announcing that tonight, the drinks are on him. Or you might expect him to call the wife and tell her to start packing up the kids because “we’re heading for Disney World.” But the only one this rich fool ever talks to is himself. “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Luke 12:18-19. “I, I, I, over and over again. Does this fellow have anyone he cares about? Anyone with whom to share his abundance? One gets the picture of this sad sack spending the rest of his life in opulent luxury, eating and drinking-alone every night for the rest of his life. Perhaps God was doing him a favor by ending his lonely, selfish and empty existence before it began.
Recall that this parable was sparked by a dispute between two brothers over their inheritance. I cannot help but wonder whether these two men were sons of the “rich fool” in the parable. Sad enough that this hollow man had nothing he cared about more than his stuff. How doubly sad for him to have fathered a couple of sons who immediately fall to quarreling over his wealth while his corpse is still warm. What a sorry and pathetic legacy! Wealthy as this man was in the conventional sense of the word, he was profoundly poverty stricken on a much deeper level. His sickness, I believe, is one that affects us all individually and corporately.
The Book of Ecclesiastes captures the emptiness and despair of a community on the verge of decline. It is the mood of an empire that no longer believes in its gods, no longer offers to its subjects a cause worth living or dying for and has no vision of the future. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9. A people blind to the future and unable to see a way forward ultimately ends up looking back. They try to revive the old faith, repeat the practices of the past to which they attribute their success and turn away from the horror of their emptiness. They strive mightily to whitewash the signs of rot, spray with perfume the stink of decay and shout down every voice that dares suggest that everything is not all right. Let me say clearly that I believe what we are seeing with the MAGA movement is the last terrified gasp of an empire that can no longer believe the lies it has told itself about itself for all the years of its existence. The United States is in a terminal phase of decline. It has lost its faith in its constitution, its courts and its legislatures. Nothing remains of the confidence once placed in these quasi religious symbols, without which only raw power can hold a nation together. History more than suggests that power cannot do so for long. Whether I am right about the fate of the United States, history will be my judge. I am confident, though, that both Jesus and the preacher of Ecclesiastes have put their finger on a mortal sickness infecting our culture.
There is, of course, a gospel counterpoint to this malaise and despair, but we must be wary of drawing near too hastily. Much of what passes for gospel these days is little more than Pollyannaish optimism exhorting us to “Keep on the Sunny Side.”[4] The prophetic outlook is always one of hope, even for such as that old storm crow Jeremiah. But the promise of a new day always comes on the far side of judgment. For the prophets and for Jesus, the new creation cannot be born without the death of the old. There was no salvaging the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Their culture of oppression, enrichment of the royal household and its cronies at the expense of the poor and their twisting of the covenant faith into a propaganda arm of the state had gone too far. A new day for the people of God would come, but not through evolution. Nothing short of revolution could bring about a fresh start.
As I see it, the most significant divide within the Body of Christ today is not between modernists and fundamentalists, conservatives and liberals, high church and low church or on any point of doctrine. The most significant divide is between those of us who envision the reign of God implemented incrementally through reforms in the existing order and those of us who view the old order as an impediment to God’s reign that must be removed. Most of us reared in American Christianity fall among the former. Our clergy pray regularly for the nation at civic events, often blessing its wars and lionizing its warriors. Our ministries are embedded in the United States Armed Forces with chaplains owing a dual allegiance to the nation and to the God and Father of Jesus Christ confessed in our creeds. Whether we are Christian nationalists seeking to transform our government into an instrument for imposing some kind of religious moral culture on the United States, or whether we are progressives seeking justice through incremental reforms, the underlying assumption is the same: the future lies in a renewed America. We are all trying to save America because we cannot imagine a future without it or face the existential horror of its demise.
I am afraid that those of us American Christians prepared to look beyond the American dream for a new day will need to sit with the preacher in Ecclesiastes for a while. We will need to learn again to pray psalms of lament that see no reason for hope in the world around us. For the only good news to be had is the assurance that the God of the enslaved, the oppressed, the hungry and despondent-the God of the cross-hears our prayers. “The Lord works vindication for the oppressed.” Psalm 103:6. But we might have to wait four hundred years under the lash of the oppressor before it comes. We might need to spend a generation in Exile before the way into the land of promise opens up. We may cry out with the psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” but receive only silence in reply. In the meantime, we plant seeds we may never see take root. We plant trees from which we will never taste the fruit. We do as much justice as we can, practice as much kindness as opportunity affords, even when it is not enough to bring about the change we long for, even when it does not make a difference, even when it appears counterproductive. We do all of this because we believe in a future we cannot see and find nearly impossible to imagine based on the evidence.
This is not the sort of good news that fills auditorium sized megachurches with happy clappy worshipers. It is not the kind of good news that galvanizes activists with death defying enthusiasm. It is not the kind of good news that sends you away from worship with a spring in your step and a song in your heart. This is good news for those of us who cannot see any good news in the status quo, who have tasted the bitterness and betrayal of the American dream, who can no longer believe in the mythology of the American empire and its empty promises. This good news is the stubborn conviction that the engines of oppression enshrined in our society, the national creed of white supremacy systemically infecting our institutions and the hateful ideologies dominating our politics with violence do not get to have the last word. The way of Jesus is the way of eternal life. Our participation in that way of compassion, justice and peace in the midst of a cruel, oppressive and violent world takes hold of that abundant life. What little we can do that is true, beautiful and good outlasts everything else.
Here is a poem by Wendell Berry giving expression to the kind of hope required of disciples in these days.
Enriching the Earth
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
Source: The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry (c. 1964 by Wendell Berry; pub. by Penguin Books). Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a poet, novelist, farmer and environmental activist. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. You can read more about Wendell Berry and sample more of his works at the Poetry Foundation website.
[1] “Percentage of college students with symptoms of depression in the United States in 2023-2024,” Preeti Vankar
[2] “The Psychology of Wealth and How It Affects Mental Health,” Claudia M. Elsig, MD, Calda Clinic Blog.
[3] Most biblical scholars agree that this attribution is more literary than historical. That said, I am not ready to dismiss the potential contribution of Solomon to either of these two books. Wisdom literature reaches “back into the earliest stages of Israel’s existence.” Crenshaw, J.L., Wisdom in the Old Testament, Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume, (c.1976, Abingdon). It was during the reign of Solomon that the Israelite monarchy reached the height of its international prominence. Solomon formed treaties with Egypt and the Phoenician kingdoms transacting commerce and military compacts. Cultural exchanges would have followed naturally and thus exposure to wisdom literature from these sources. The authors/editors of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes may well have had access to collections of sayings from this ancient and illustrious period.
[4] See the Carter Family’s rendition of this jolly classic.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 