Ecclesiastes 1.1-11
Psalm 46
Preached Canberra Baptist Church
10th September 2006
The Season of Creation, from early Spring to the feast of Francis of Assisi in October, is a time for Christians to reflect upon Creation and our place within it as a part of all that has been brought into being by the creative action of God. We reflect on the beauty all around us and realise again that God loves the world, all that he has created, not only humankind. We are a part of the web of life that connects all living things, all plants and animals. The forests and the rivers, the clouds and the breezes, the animals and insects and grasses of the field – these are all our sister creatures, for we believe God made them also! It is a time for remembering and reflecting on the primal mandate God has given to every human being: to care for the earth and have dominion over it, not as landlord, exploiter or vandals, but as stewards and trustees. We focus on these realities in the context of an ecological crisis, of widespread environmental degradation and increasing scientific consensus about global warming.
If Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are right, these matters are not just scientific debates or issues for policy experts and politicians: they are spiritual issues that run to the heart of our faithfulness as the people of God! Much of the material prepared around the Season of Creation celebrates our oneness with the other things that God has created, our “unity in creatureliness”. This connects us with a tradition of nature mysticism that is a precious part of the church’s history. Having just spent several days on the beaches down the coast and travelling back through wild forests and mountains, I have a keen appreciation for these themes. But I wish to focus our thinking and praying around our roles as stewards, as trustees of the creation as well as part of it. I want to explore with you over the coming three weeks our experience of space, of the earth as our home and place of habitation, of time, particularly the moral challenge of time, and finally of life, the limitations of life and our experience of finitude.
Last week in the nature walk the children brought back rocks and stones and we gave thanks it our prayer for a place to stand, for foundations under our feet. If life on this earth means anything it means the security of a firm foundation. Earth as reliable home, as trustworthy habitat is a basic element of our experience. The primal fear of inundation, of the safe place to stand and grow food being covered in flood water is the subject of the Noahic Covenant in Genesis. The rainbow is given by God as a sign that he will never again covert the earth with water, that
as long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8.22).
This sense of a reliable environment is celebrated in the poetic opening of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is a part of the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament. Wisdom celebrates a particular approach to faith and ethics distilled in literary form in the Psalms and Proverbs, the Book of Job, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. This part of the Biblical witness explores ‘Wisdom’ as an important element of our relationship with God. ‘Wisdom’ is almost personified, made into a being, or a mode of God’s presence with us. In the New Testament Wisdom is identified with Christ (e.g. 1 Cor 1) but it is in the Eastern Orthodox traditions that the role of Wisdom as a form of God’s presence with us, is most fully taken up and developed.
In Ecclesiastes the path of wisdom seems to come up against its limitation, its end point. The theme of the book can be summed up in its repeated slogan by its writer, simply identified as ‘the Preacher’: “Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity!” In other words ‘everything is futile, life is useless – there is no purpose that we can discover in living!” Some have found it a depressing book: my old teacher Athol Gill always claimed that Ecclesiastes was the low point in the Bible. It is, however, a powerful analysis of the human condition, and it has been helpful, especially for those who have experienced the kind of meaninglessness that the Preacher brought to such clear expression. It also points to ways forward, in not being too depressed by the struggles of life and grounding life always in God who alone is to be trusted with our ultimate meanings.
In the poetic introduction of the book, the eternal and unchanging structure of the world is proclaimed: a generation comes and a generation goes, but the world remains the same (Ecc 1.4) In four short verses the poet includes the whole sweep of the created world in the unchanging and pointless vista:
A generation goes and a generation comes
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the places where it rises.
The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north
And on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full
To the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.
Here in the wonderful opening of the book the poet has painted word picture of the whole world, endlessly and pointlessly cycling around without change or diminution, without purpose or effect. Of, course the first hearers, people interested in wisdom and grounded in the ancient worldview of the Greeks, would have heard a description of the four elements of ancient cosmogony: the earth, the sun (the element of fire), the winds (element of air), the rivers (element of water). The unchanging and reliable nature of these elements and their endless cycling meant that human activity did not impact on them at all. His conclusion, given the unchanging nature of all of nature? That life was pointless and insignificant! Everything leads to weariness, a weariness too great for words: the eye is not satisfied with seeing and the ear is not filled with of hearing. What’s happened before will happen again. There is nothing new in the whole world. Ecclesiastes sees in the reliability of earth a trap, something oppressive to the spirit. In a world of no change, there is no point. Nature rules and in the eternal return of the same, human life is diminished.
For us, of course the premise of his argument does not hold true: we know that suns and stars have a lifecycle, and that our sun will not for ever rise burning in the morning sky. It will take many, many years, but the sun will eventually burn out. We do not have to wait to see whether the rivers run endless to the sea. Drive to the Coroong in South Australia and see how humans have to dredge the river mouth to keep the river flowing into the sea! Watch your television sets over coming weeks as two men in a ‘tinny’ travel our rivers and document for us how fragile is their flow. If you think the winds and weather will endlessly blow in their established patterns, look at the climate data that suggest the weather systems that bring rain to southern Australia are slipping south leaving the inland areas like Canberra drier. The Preacher could not see a world where humankind could so probe the mysteries of the heavens that we could predict the death of the sun! The Preacher could not see a world where humankind could so impact weather and river systems that their cycles could be seriously distorted or even stopped completely!
We might yearn for the settled and unchanging world of the Preacher. There are many in the environmental movement who would love us to return to such a world where the patterns and rhythms of nature have not been disturbed. It would make so many problems disappear. Yet the preacher correctly identified the deep problems of such a world: is a world of wearying sameness and ultimately it is purposeless! The safe world where nature rules (OK) is not the world we know, nor can it ever again be. Humankind has struggled for millennia to manage and control the natural environment, sometimes with devastating effects, but, as Genesis 2 makes clear, it is the essence of who we are. If nature is finally resistant to our efforts and our management, life is also made meaningless and wearying.
We are now encountering the truth is that nature is vulnerable and can be damaged, perhaps even destroyed, by humanity and our technology. It is not ultimately the reliable foundation upon which we stand and on which our lives are based, despite the romantic fantasy and ideology of many environmentalists. The Christian perspective is quite the opposite: we do not ground our confidence upon the earth and the created order, on the endless cycles of the natural world. We ground our confidence and our hope in God! As Psalm 46 expresses it so powerfully, because God is with us, we will not fear even thought the mountains might tremble and fall into the sea. Far from being reliable foundation, “the earth will be rolled up like a carpet, the mountains will tremble and smoke when touched by the finger of God”. As the Psalmist affirms “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble Therefore we will not fear thought the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.” (Ps 46.1-2) The Psalmist goes on to describe the true desolations wrought upon the earth by the Lord (vss 8-9). These are not the desolations of nature but of History – the ending of war, the breaking of the bow and the burning of the shield.
This does not mean that we ignore and exploit and destroy the world, as some Christians would have us do. This reliance on God some interpret as disregard for the earth. Based on a distorted view of the end-times their doctrine is “we are bound for heaven so the earth can go to hell and it will!” Such a view abandons to earth to the processes of pollution and destruction which some Christians even see as God’s will, despite the clear and repeated declaration in Scripture of God’s love for the world and desire and act to redeem and renew it.
We are called to live in reliance upon, and hope in, God, through Jesus Christ. Our foundation is not the given-ness of earth and the stability of nature but the breath of the Spirit and the love of God. While gravity anchors us down to the earth, and human greed endlessly searches for what wealth can be won from the ground by planting it or digging it or selling it, we are called to live ‘upside down’ as it were, with our foundations in hope, and spirit (air, wind) and the promised future, not the fragile present.
And it is this freedom and risk that energises life – the life of all created things, not just our human life. As Romans 8 expresses it, the whole of the created order is groaning in childbirth, waiting for the liberty and freedom of the children of God to be revealed. As Psalm 46 affirms, the categories of God’s action are the categories of history, not nature. The future of the planet is not a matter or restoring some primal balance but of realising in history our role as stewards, trustees, custodians of earth.
Instead of finding our selves as the passive spectators of an imperturbable Nature, we are actors and builders, stewards and artists who are called to co-create with God in our care of earth. That is why we are putting in the Bulletin some small practical things we can do to live more creatively and simply on the earth.
The work of Christ is the redemption of the world, renewing the whole creation, empowering his people to oppose human sin, all that despoils the Creation. We are called to ground our lives in the coming Kingdom of justice, wholeness and peace, not in the created reality of the world around us. The world is the outworking of God’s creative action, not the ground of our being nor the horizon of our possibility. The world is not a foundation of human life, it is the fruit of God’s life, God’s love, God’s intention.