Life: A limited Treasure
Ecclesiastes 11.7-12.8
Luke 12.13-34
Preached Canberra Baptist Church September 24th 2006

We have been exploring Creation and how we might base our response to the pressing ecological issues of the day. We looked at space, at how the physical world around us is not the foundation of our existence but the outworking of God’s creative purpose. We reflected on time, and the crucial importance of acting in a timely manner, focussing on the now and not deferring critical decisions and responses. Today I want to engage life, and tease out the implications of our experience of existence for how we respond to the creation around us.

Of all God’s gifts – everything in time and space – life itself is the most amazing. Life is the great treasure in creation. As the parable of Jesus about the rich man building barns makes clear, a person’s life does not consist of what we can accumulate: life itself is not secured by such strategies. Life can be taken back from us at any time. Life is a limited treasure. In understanding the limits of life, the traditions of Israel and Jesus offer us strategies for living effectively and well, and have important implications for our care for the rest of creation.

As he finishes his exploration of the human condition, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes comes in chapters 11 and 12 to his conclusions. Light is sweet (remember light, which along with time were the two sisters of the primal creation in Genesis 1?) and it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. From his gloomy affirmation of non-existence, that those who have never been born are more fortunate than the living or the dead, the Preacher at the ends turns back to affirming existence ‘under the sun’.

Then comes a wonderful exhortation and a sober description. The exhortation is that we should all live life and enjoy it to the full. There is no kill-joy asceticism here! Rejoice young man while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclinations of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. (vs. 9)  We should not be sad but joyful and we should not do evil. What follows is a wonderful poetic description of what it is to be old in which metaphors of the house and the activities of the village express the fate of the aging body. I am coming to an age when these issues are of more than academic interest, and while the theme is sobering the poetry is marvellous:

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; on the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.

As a more recent commentator, the actor Paul Newman, succinctly put it: “Getting old ain’t for sissies!”

In all this exhortation to live and enjoy life the Preacher has articulated two intrinsic limits to living.  The first is judgment. Part of the framing of life is responsibility: there are consequences to our actions and we are responsible for them. God will bring us into judgment (11.9). Judgment is a doctrine about which we hear little preaching these days. Perhaps we still smell a little fire and brimstone when preachers wander into this territory. This is a great shame (and I use that word intentionally!) because judgement is about responsibility. Note that it doesn’t say God will judge you but that God will bring you into judgement. God brings us into judgement initially through conscience and our personal sensibilities of discernment, regret, guilt and even remorse. The paintings of the final judgement by William Blake, with streams of human souls on one side of the painting ascending into heaven and other anguished souls sinking into hell, is interpreted by many critics to be an allegory of those internal processes of discernment and decision by which we affirm or condemn ourselves, Judgment is, in the first instance, personal. It is also communal – the “ways of judgement” (title of a recent book by Oliver O’Donovan) include the social, legal and political structures and processes by which responsibility is discerned and authority is exercised. Finally there is the eschatological sense of judgement, the “Last Judgement” in which all things are made clear, and in some unknown divine process we are confronted with our sin, purged of all wrong and made fit to live always with God.

Life has this intrinsic structure of responsibility, there are consequences to the way we live and we cannot avoid them.

The other limit to life described so eloquently, if disturbingly, by the Preacher, is aging and death.  “Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die”,  said Hamlet’s mother.  Death is a limit condition of life. The Existentialist philosophers of the last century encouraged us to live authentically in the face of death, but with a kind of Stoical, almost begrudging acceptance. The Preacher’s words, I think, are more positive than this: the process of aging in a world before restorative dentistry and hip replacement, is not described with horror but with a gentle domestic imagery drawn from everyday life. It’s an honest and friendly picture of aging, ennobled at the end with the images of the snapping of the ‘silver cord’ and the breaking of the ‘golden bowl’, the fracturing of the ‘pitcher at the fountain’ and the ‘wheel at the cistern’, the technology of the village well that sustains all life. Despite their sober honesty these are tender, perhaps loving, words.

Responsibility through all of life, and aging and death at the end: these are the limits within which we enjoy this treasure called life.

The teaching of Jesus in Luke 12 also reflects these limits but with a significant twist – a twist central to our current ecological dilemma. The opening of this passage is instructive. Jesus is responding to a dispute about inheritance, a squabble over what has been left by the former generation. Jesus warns about covetousness. In the parable of the rich man and his barns we see a man for whom life is wealth and acquisition: accumulating possessions and adding property to property. Unexpectedly and suddenly the limit conditions of life are encountered: “This night your life is being demanded of you” – words with overtones of both death and judgement. Who then, concludes Jesus, shall enjoy all he has built up? To people arguing about how goods shall be shared, Jesus reminds them of their deaths and the pointlessness of trying to control goods and wealth as a strategy for securing life. He then, like the Preacher, exhorts his followers to live life, without worry or anxiety. He affirms that life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing (vs 23). We must live without anxiety, in simple joy and dependence upon God. Strive for the kingdom, not for human wealth. “Fear not, little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom”. Life is not found in barns and banks, in storehouses or in stocks: it is a gift of God to be received joyfully and gratefully, and lived humbly within the limits of responsibility and death!

In the context of the current age that message is vital (vital: to give life!) The centre of our current ecological dilemma is that we have built economies dependent upon growth and lifestyles focussed on accumulation of wealth without thought as to what the planet can sustain. We are a generation only belatedly asking what responsibility we bear for the consequences of our actions. We have recent seen a spate of rich men divesting themselves of part of their massive wealth and seeking to address various global problems - Warren Buffett, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Richard Branson (who has given his wealth specifically to address global warming!)  They get publicity and affirmation for their actions, but very little comment that they (and we) have lived perhaps without much responsibility!

We have lived without due regard for and acceptance of death! In the proper order of things it should be us who die – not the planet! Yet there are many signs of a deep aversion to death in our society and our lifestyles. When we see people in their 70’s with the faces of thirty year olds we might marvel at the skill of the plastic surgeons, but we should recognise that we are looking at something rather sad and quite sinful: a refusal to accept and honour age and death. That’s why the funeral service invites people to acknowledge and engage “the certainty of our own coming deaths”. A generation ago the novelist Evelyn Waugh made a critique of the modern Western way of death in his novel The Loved One, about a lifeless mortuary worker whose job was to make the dead look as if they were alive. The avoidance of death through a lifestyle of wealth now threatens to visit creeping death upon the planet.

How do we approach death: friend or foe? I know a small monastic community who often are asked to pray for someone with a life-threatening illness. They convene in their chapel and pray for that person, in one focussed, loving, intense service of prayer. If the person is healed they praise God. If they continue to sicken and die they revere and support that person in their journey as “the one who is living out the mystery of Christ in our midst”.

Death can be a wonderful act of witness. There is the manner of one’s dying of course. Some people have noble and inspiring deaths, but we can’t all be patient and strong. What we do say in death is said in our Last Will and Testament: What do we say to those who follow? To what purposes and projects in the world do we bequeath our assets? That is our final testimony, the last act of witness, and it can be a very powerful act of witness.

Life is the greatest treasure of Creation, but it is a gift within limits. We must live with responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We must live with respect of aging and death, accepting that we are only here for a little while, that what we bequeath to others is more important than what we have accumulated for ourselves.

Along the edges of Port Philip Bay in the 1940’s and 50’s orchards and farms stretched for many miles. One man, watching the encroaching Melbourne suburbs added to his landholdings until he owned an enormous acreage, much of which he then gradually sold to developers for the new suburbs of what became known as the Sandbelt. By the time he died he was by far the wealthiest and most powerful man in that part of the world. Hundreds turned up to his funeral.  As the cortege entered the cemetery the minister and the funeral director walked ahead in solitary and stately dignity, quietly talking to each other out of the side of their mouths. The funeral director was trying to pump the minister for information:
“You would have known the family pretty well, wouldn’t you?” asked the undertaker.
“Yes I did”
“He would have owned two or three suburbs over his lifetime, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes”, said the minister, “he sure did.”
“He must have been a pretty wealthy man by the time he died?”
“Yes”, said the minister, “he certainly was!”
“How much do you reckon he would have left?” asked the undertaker.
“All of it, mate, all of it!” 

When it is time for this generation to go, I pray we might leave all of it: the trees and the clear blue of the oceans, the rain-clouds in the sky and the glorious diversity of living things in their species. May we leave “all of it” to those who follow in their turn to take up the golden thread, the silver cord, and sing the praise of God, and tend the garden of God and carry the word of the gospel to generations yet unborn.