* * *
There is nothing new under the sun.
Can I get
an “amen”?
[sigh] There is nothing new under the
sun.
I’m going to be honest with y’all,
I don’t
know what to do about Bennie.
Bennie’s a
homeless guy who hangs out on the porch
at the Edge
campus ministry house where I work.
He sits on
a chair, watches folks pass by,
tells us
the same story ten times in as many minutes,
eats a sandwich
when we offer it
—he’s
clearly unbalanced, but he always seemed harmless.
But he’s
been sleeping on the porch, too, sleeping off a drunk.
And he’s
been leaving garbage.
And peeing
on the porch.
And just
two days ago, he kicked one of my ministry partners
when she
told him he needed to leave.
According
to the public defender’s office,
he’s the
current record-holder for arrests in Hamilton County
with more
than 470
and has
more than three warrants out right now.
And he’s a
violent, mean drunk
who has
walked away from or been kicked out
of every
social service agency in town.
So, what to do, eh?
As
a person of faith, what do I do?
He can’t
sleep and pee on the porch, that much is clear.
And I can’t
have someone who could turn violent in a moment
around my
students—that’s not fair to anyone.
So, we have
set up a no trespassing order and,
after the
kicking incident, have filled out an arrest warrant
—so we’re
one of the three.
The
behavior cannot go on
—and I
think Jesus would be with us on that, at least.
Jesus was no
doormat
and challenged
to the people he met both in word and action.
But what’s
the hospitality side of this?
How can we
actually help Bennie in any meaningful way?
Can we,
even?
I don’t
know. I don’t know.
And this might lead some folk to
despair.
Some of
ya’ll might be thinking “all is vanity and a chasing after wind”. Maybe.
“There is
nothing new under the sun” you might be thinking,
and you’d
be right.
We’re not
the only ones to deal with friends or relatives
who have
mental illness or alcoholism or even poor table manners.
We’re not
the first people to feel overwhelmed by poverty
or to struggle
with evangelism.
On the
deeply spiritual TV show Battlestar
Galactica,
a line
which gets repeated often is
“All of
this has happened before and all of this will happen again.” [Seriously, it’s a
great show. And darkly appropriate to Ecclesiastes.]
Y’all might know Ecclesiastes
better by another passage:
“For
everything there is a season,
and a time
for every matter under heaven:
a time to
be born, and a time to die;
a time to
plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…”
That’s
chapter three,
almost
directly after this reading we heard from ______________.
Ecclesiastes might have been a
crotchety old man
or maybe he
was just a realist.
Either way,
his book is filled with a kind of heaviness.
He seeks
after and finds wisdom,
yet it
doesn’t last
and only
shows him the futility of human endeavors.
He seeks
after pleasure, yet it doesn‘t last and dies with the person.
He builds
and plants and creates and,
though he
enjoys the building and planting and creating themselves,
the results
do not last but crumble
and cannot
be taken past the grave.
“All is
vanity and a chasing after wind.”
And who
among us has not had a similar experience?
At the very
least, many of us have watched toddlers play.
Or, rather,
destroy.
Typical of
preachers, I’m talking about my own family
—my daughter Abby is a year and a half
and she
loves building towers.
Or my
building towers for her.
She loves
admiring them for a moment,
then
destroying them like Godzilla.
And I could
take the depressing route and say,
“Why should
I toil in vain
and build
towers that my daughter knocks down?
It is vanity
and a chasing after wind”
No, I build
it again, because I see her delight.
Maybe you
know more viscerally
that
experience of “chasing after wind”
—maybe you
have built a business only to see it fail
or to succeed
better for another owner,
maybe you
poured your heart and soul into someone beloved
who was
suffering only to see her die.
Many folks think Ecclesiastes is depressing,
but some of
us find it comforting.
Perhaps
it’s the Lutherans I work with rubbing off on me,
but it
suggests to me that it’s not our works
—good or
evil—that save us.
God does
that.
What we do or
create is important,
but that ultimately, it’s all in God’s
hands.
That I
don’t have responsibility
for making everything turn out okay. Phew.
I wonder if we have a hard time
with evangelism
because
maybe we really believe the story ends with “this is vanity”
rather than
how it actually ends.
The
assigned lesson for today ends with
“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.”
Did you
find yourself wondering what you’re supposed to do with that?
A bit like
my quandary about Bennie,
you had
something complicated and heavy dropped on you
and now
what?
I’m not
sure why this is,
but the
compilers of the lectionary often cut off the reading
before it
is ripe.
Remember
that more famous bit of Ecclesiastes that I mentioned
comes almost directly after our reading?
Yeah,
Here’s part of what we missed:
“There is
nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink,
and find
enjoyment in their toil.
This also,
I saw, is from the hand of God;
for apart
from him,
who can eat
or who can have enjoyment?”
This
changes everything.
I think we sometimes dislike
Ecclesiastes because he is us.
He
writes what we all think
—that
we have a hope, but it’s pretty tissue thin
and what
does what we do amount to anyway?
Particularly
when it comes to spirituality?
We think,
if we shared our stories with friends, neighbors, strangers,
no one
would listen to us,
and even if
they did, what would we say in the first place?
It’s
pointless and a chasing after wind.
We think we
have to have all the answers
—about how
salvation works,
about who’s
in and who’s out,
about the
church’s problematic history,
about the
Trinity or the two natures of Christ or whatever—but we don’t.
That’s not
the story!
That’s not
the good news that God offered
in Jesus’
life, death, and resurrection.
Evangelism
only asks us to be honest with one another
about our
lives and our experiences of God.
Evangelism
is sharing part of your story with someone else,
it’s
building relationships with folks you meet,
from friends
to aggressive homeless guys
who pee on
your porch.
It’s
certainly not easy,
and I don’t
yet know how to build relationship
with
Bennie.
It’s not
easy, but it is freeing.
The good news is that we don’t have
to shoulder the responsibility
of fixing
everything.
The good
news is that eating, drinking, and enjoying our toil
—whether
it’s our paying job,
whether
it’s putting storm windows on someone’s house,
whether
it’s writing a song or running a marathon,
or being
rejected in our attempts to connect
—the good
news is there is nothing better for us
than to try
and all of
it comes from God.
The good news is
“there is
nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink
and find
enjoyment in their toil”
because, as
brother Paul of Tarsus wrote,
“If we live,
we live to the Lord,
and if we
die, we die to the Lord;
so then,
whether we live or whether we die,
we are the
Lord’s.”[1]
Hallelujah.
[1]
Romans 14:8