Readings: Proper 13, Year C, Revised Common Lectionary
“VANITY OF VANITIES, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
Well, now, that’s one way to start a reading, all right. I mean, sure, we all have our bad days, but that bad? I don’t know about that.
But the first reading for this Sunday is from the Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the wisdom texts in the Hebrew Scriptures, and it’s a bum rap for wisdom, usually a quality quite revered in the wisdom texts. Usually, wisdom’s pictured as a female figure and offers not just her intelligence but also her mercy.
For Christians, she serves as not just a personification of wisdom and intelligence and patience but also as an icon of Christ, an addition to the meaning of the original text, of course, but one that has been useful for Christians since at least the middle ages.
But this is a different way of reading the concept of wisdom: here, the author, traditionally Solomon, the wisest human ever, is the author of this book, but here wisdom might better be translated “experience.”
Traditionally, the author, Solomon was at the end of his life and Ecclesiastes is his chance to look backwards along the path of his life. And what has he learnt from all his wisdom?
“I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me — and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.”
That’s not good. Money, for us, can be seen to solve all ills, and to a certain point, that’s true enough. However, as Solomon has found out to his despair, you can’t, in the old phrase, take it with you. Worse, you can’t really ever control what your heirs and assigns will do with it. Thus, earning those funds, working so hard, won’t do you much good in the end. All this does is not good for us, especially for those of living in the U.S. who do have money: like Solomon, we ask, “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.”
Certainly, I see plenty of sleep products in my email and on Facebook.
Jesus had the same concern.
When he was asked to adjudicate a family inheritance, he said “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”
He then goes on to tell the story of a businessman who had too many goods to store — so he simply planned to build more towers to store them even though he already had enough and then, he said, “I can relax,” except that God calls him a fool, and basically ends his life that night, not so much a punishment as a warning that we can never know when our time to die has come.
And here I thought the problem was high levels of cortisol, per the millions of ads for that and other health products that pop up on my screen. (Before I turned 50, it was all “how to get an early retirement.” Now at over 60, it’s all be healthy by taking vitamins and using ointments, and eating this but not ever that, even though last year I was supposed to eat that but not this. Go figure.) But as I get older, I want to have things going a bit slower, a bit more easy.
I’m very type A, but as I move deeper into retirement, I want to be more type B, to take things easy, to sing along with the “59th Street Bridge Song” (aka “Feeling Groovy) written by Paul Simon: “Slow down, you move too fast / You got to make the morning last / Just kicking down the cobblestones / Looking for fun and feeling groovy…”
Well, yes, we say to ourselves, if we’re too busy with the Type A things, but when do I do this or get that done?
In my personal life, the Hubbie has started to ask when I will start slowing down. I don’t yet know the answer for myself.
But besides just being busy, God help us, every one, there’s a greater malaise over the U.S. right now.
All of us are either ignoring what’s going on or being angry about it. That’s how it feels anyway: whether Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Communist, regardless of our politics, we feel that things are just plain wrong here in America. And that anger sometimes feels like it’s growing with every passing week.
We generally don’t like feeling we’re out of control here.
So maybe we should turn to today’s second lesson from Paul’s letter to the Colossians: “But now you must get rid of all such things — anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language from your mouth. [ … . ] In [our] renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!”
At least for Christians, we need to clothe ourselves with the Self of Christ and continue to fight hating, lying, stealing. If we’re rich, it may be time to begin getting rid of the stuff we have and start giving it to others.
More importantly, we need to give of ourselves. In the old phrase, we need to let go of “time, money and possessions.”
It’s time both to slow down and to let go of what we have, and give away what we have to others. That will please God and help us to be happy as well.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.
