An Oasis of Happiness in the Desert of Absurdity

(Ecclesiastes 3.1-15)
A sermon preached by Dave Shull
Spirit of Peace United Church of Christ
Sammamish, Washington
The third in a summer series on topics the congregation wants to hear sermons about.
The focus for today: What is the context and meaning of the Ecclesiastes text,
'To everything there is a season'?

Friday afternoon I was facilitating a group for my other job at The Recovery Café. One of the members asked, "If your prayers aren't answered, how can you justify continuing to believe in God?" Members of the group started to answer. One said, "God is a God of love. So God never gives us more than we can handle." Another said, "God answers prayers in his own time. And God's time is never our time." A third said, "How God answers my prayers usually isn't how I want them to be answered. But God knows best. God knows best what will help us succeed and prosper.
The guy who asked the question clearly wasn't getting the answers he hoped for. He asked, "How can you say God never gives us more than we can handle when you look at Auschwitz?" And he went on, "I've never felt held or loved or comforted by God. Everywhere I look I see people whose lives are screwed up, and no matter how much they pray, I don't see any of them getting better."

This guy didn't realize it. But he was doing an amazing job answering the question for today's sermon. The writer of Ecclesiastes talks about a God whose presence and friendship with us is absent.; the writer of Ecclesiastes says God has left us to fend for ourselves on in lives of toil that end only in death (W. Sibley Towner, "The Book of Ecclesiastes," The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. V, Abingdon Press, 1997,p. 280). Which is how the guy at the Recovery Café was saying he experienced God.

So we come to the passage for this morning. For my generation, it's probably one of the better known verses in the Bible. In 1959, Pete Seeger wrote a song based on these words. And the Byrds released a version of it in 1965, when it became the #1 song in this country. Other generations discovered it because it was featured prominently in the 1994 movie Forrest Gump.
To everything (Turn, Turn Turn) there is a season . . .
But what might these words mean? What do they have to say to us today?
Let us listen for a Word from God.

There's an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on earth.
A right time for birth and another for death,
a right time to plant and another to reap,
a right time to kill and another to heal,
a right time to destroy and another to construct,
a right time to cry and another to laugh,
a right time to lament and another to cheer,
a right time to make love and another to abstain,
a right time to embrace and another to part,
a right time to search and another to count your losses,
a right time to hold on and another to let go,
a right time to rip out and another to mend,
a right time to shut up and another to speak up,
a right time to love and another to hate,
a right time to wage war and another to make peace.

That's where the song Pete Seeger and the Byrds sing ends.
There's a right time for everything on earth. What I hear in these words is that life brings us all of these things. Birth and death, laughing and crying, constructing and destroying, making war and making peace: all of these happen to us and our world. But notice what these verses don't say. There's no promise that the joyful and the painful will be nicely spaced out. No promise we'll only have one or two of the painful things to deal with at any given time. No promise that our lives will know more joy than pain. And the song doesn't tell us how we might have more joy than suffering.
Which is why Suzi hit the proverbial nail on the head by the way she asked the question for today's sermon. She wrote, What is the context for this passage? The context for this passage gets at the question about how we can get more of the joy and less of the pain and suffering.

Here's what comes after the song the Byrds sing ends.

But in the end, does it really make a difference what anyone does? I've had a good look at what God has given us to do – busywork, mostly. True, God made everything beautiful in itself and in its time – but has left us in the dark, so we can never know what God is up to, whether God is coming or going. I've decided that there's nothing better to do than go ahead and have a good time and get the most we can out of life. That's it – eat, drink, and make the most of your job. It's God's gift.
I've also concluded that whatever God does, that's the way it's going to be, always. No addition, no subtraction. God's done it and that's it. That's so we'll quit asking questions and simply worship in holy fear.
Whatever was, is, whatever will be, is.
That's how it always is with God.
—The Message © 1993-96, 2000-02. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Listen to these phrases! Does it really make a difference what anyone does? Whatever God does, that's the way it's going to be. Quit asking questions and simply worship God in holy fear – which means obey the God whom you live with all of being.
The context for the Byrds' song seems to be saying, There's not much you can do to increase your joy and decrease your suffering. Because God has created a world that is no bed of roses. The experiences of the writer of Ecclesiastes have convinced him that life isn't fair. Life isn't just. Some good people die poor and lonely and young. Some cruel people die with friends and money after celebrating their hundredth birthday.
The experiences of the writer of this book tell him if you expect to get rewarded for being good, you're setting yourself up to suffer even more than you will anyway. The same if you expect the world to follow some kind of order or expect the world to make sense. Expecting these mean you'll never be happy. Life is hard. God is one whose presence and friendship is absent. God has left us to fend for ourselves in toil that ends only in death. Life is random. One minute someone is alive and expects to live for years to come, and the next they've been killed in a freak accident. No sense to it. No reason for it. It just is. Expecting there to be a reason only strips you of what happiness and joy are available to you.

As she reflects on this message from Ecclesiastes, a professor of the Hebrew Scriptures thinks about how she always expected life to be good and fair and ordered:
In the script I wrote [for my life], God rubber-stamped all my ambitions and justified all my actions. In my screenplay, my good habits led to good health, and my cooperation and kindness to others is reciprocated without fail. In my autobiography, the future is no mystery. Rather, my planning and common sense lead to an orderly, altogether admirable life! [I want to believe the favorite quote a local TV anchorwoman sent to my son's 6th-grade class: 'If you can conceive it and believe it, you will achieve it'.]

But her life hasn't quite turned out that way. She says, Now, at mid-life, I come to find out that, while I have conceived it, and at times even believed it, I have not thoroughly achieved it (Alyce McKenzie. Preaching Biblical Wisdom in a Self-Help Society, Abingdon, 2002, p. 158-9). Because life doesn't turn out life it does in self-help books. We might follow all 17 of the steps the book promises will lead to prosperity and happiness . . . and achieve nothing.

The one hopeful message this book seems to offers is that God wants us to be happy. The writer of Ecclesiastes says God wants us to be happy. God wants us to have joy. Listen to this odd verse from this morning's passage: "[T]here's nothing better to do than go ahead and have a good time and get the most we can out of life. Eat, drink, and make the most of your job. It's God's gift" (3.13).
God wants us to be joyful and happy in the present moment. And in an absurd world that isn't fair and that makes no sense, the only way we can find moments of happiness and joy is if we eat, drink, and work well at the work we've been given. In the midst of our suffering and our experience of God's absence, the only way we can be happy is if we gather with people who love us, and do good work at whatever our work is. If we do this without expecting it to be any different, we can create an oasis of happiness in the midst of a desert of absurdity (phrase from W. Sibley Towner, "The Book of Ecclesiastes," The New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. V, Abingdon Press, 1997, p. 303). For we will not expect life to be anything but absurd.

This isn't much to work with. If this were the only book in the Bible, I don't think Judaism or Christianity would have survived. This picture of God and human life is not enough to build a faith on. There are 65 more books in the Bible. And most of them offer a different view of God. And a different picture of what human life is like. Most of these other books tell stories of a God who hears our cries and responds. A God who rages at injustice and calls people to acts of compassion and mercy and peacemaking. The New Testament tells stories of the God who took human form in Jesus. Jesus said, I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10.10). Jesus refused to stop loving the poor and the excluded, and the enemies of the Empire, even though he knew loving them would lead to his murder. I'm glad these 65 other books of the Bible offer us a different view of God and human life than Ecclesiastes.

And I'm grateful Ecclesiastes is there. It's an embarrassing book to have in your Bible. And it's in the Bible because the Jews refused to be silent about what they knew to be true. They had experienced God's absence and the absurdity of human life. Think about your own life. Haven't there been times when you felt like God had taken a trip and was far, far away from you? Haven't there been times when you expected life to be fair and to make sense and to reward you for doing what you should? Then the book of Ecclesiastes speaks to your experiences.

When I think of people Ecclesiastes speaks for, I think of a woman in the church I grew up in. She was one of the kindest, gentlest people I've known. She watched her husband die of a rare, hereditary disease before he was 40. And then she lived with the horrific powerlessness of knowing her three sons were all going to die of the same illness by the same age.
I don't know how she survived burying her husband and then each one of her three sons. When I try to imagine what this hell would have been like, I know one thing. There would have been times I would not want to have heard anyone tell me God loves me, or tell me God knew the number of hairs on my head and would prevent me from harm. It would have been cruel to talk about such a God with one whose world had crumbled around her. And I wouldn't have wanted anyone to tell me that God holds this world, and has a plan for this world, and God never gives anyone more than they can handle. I think at times I would have wanted to hear from the writer of Ecclesiastes. Who reflects my experience when he talks about the God whose presence and friendship is absent. And when he says life is hard, hard toil that ends in death. In the meantime, the world just spins without direction or purpose on its absurd axis. I would have wanted to hear the writer of Ecclesiastes talk about the right time for life and death . . . and what he implies without saying it: that there also can be a wrong time for life and death. He would give me permission to scream to an unanswering universe: Dying at age 40 is never the right time to die!
So what does the writer of Ecclesiastes say this lovely women can do in response to the too-early deaths of her entire family? In a world that is absurd, oases of happiness can only be found by eating, drinking, and doing well the work that has been given to you. Fleeting moments of happiness and joy are possible in this life only when we gather with people who love us, and when we do good work. That is all we can do in this desert of absurdity to find and create oases of happiness

The poet Mary Oliver gives voice to Ecclesiastes' vision of what offers happiness

Work, Sometimes
I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.
The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.
What are we sure of? Happiness isn't a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.
Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.
You have had days like this, no doubt. And it wasn't it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!
As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.
—New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, Beacon Press, 2005, p. 6
Eat, drink, and do well the work you've been given. Gather with people who love you, do good work. Then happiness and joy might bless you in this life. Amen.