Many of us are prone to disregard the book of Ecclesiastes. The author was, at least in part, King Solomon. Ascending to the throne of his father David at the age of twelve, he asked God for an extra measure of wisdom to rule his people. This request seemed to strike a heavenly chord. Some would say it was because of this gifting that Solomon experienced an explosion of good fortune, others would say that he landed in this world at the right time and place. Both opinions had an influence upon him and his kingdom.
In the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon speaks to us from the balcony of excess over his later years. Divine wisdom had gradually melted away and Solomon, as God’s man, seemed to have become hardly recognizable. He increasingly taxed the people mercilessly and prioritized the pursuit of a self inflating grandiose kingdom. Solomon succeeded in almost everything meaningless. Wealth, power, fame and all the toys were his, however no longer was he God’s man.
Does this scenario sound familiar, is it wisdom? As individuals we can relate to Solomon’s struggle to find and maintain integrity with God. Like him we are sinners or failures who misuse our God given blessings in the mistaken attempt to cement our place in this universe. Like him we tend to prioritize our earthly circumstances to the extent that our God given potential is snuffed out. Morality by any description is not the issue, are we wise enough to live in but unattached to this world? That is the story of our days, that was Solomon’s story and he failed.
This failure should not diminish what Solomon has to say to us. He speaks from the pinnacle of excess and he would warn us that all of life, including success, is meaningless. What does being alive mean? Does it mean social, economic, religious or political success? We all answer that question in the decisions we make every day. We expose the condition or intent of our hearts and reject our inbred desire to reach beyond this world by our daily decisions that prioritize our circumstances.
At this point in our discussion it would be easy to make the Book of Ecclesiastes a morality play on the evils of success. Let’s don’t. Success is not evil but it is extremely dangerous, it is a hook that will attach us to this world and inflate us with overwhelming self importance. That self importance mentality will eventually humble us whether in this world or the next. It will humble us all on a personal level, our families, our friends, our politicians, our sport heroes and our nation.
In my younger days, full of the idealism that our world could change, a saying hanging on a seminary wall was a cause for upset. The plaque read, “the more things change the more they stay the same”. I thought, this world cannot be so predictable. But the years have wised me up to the reality that we are limited by who we are. We are sinners, failures and spoilers who will eventually write a story that is all to familiar to all of us.
A case in point is the Roman Empire of the Christian era, 2000 years ago. Please check out what winnetka on the internet has to say about the decline of this empire. Historians credit a number of factors. They include the following: excessive taxation (Vegatus), prosperity (Gibbon), combination of historical events (Bury), technology of the horseshoe (Richt), corrupt governmental system that included no real budget and overspending (Toynbee), a growing percentage of the population became takers of the governmental dole (Toynbee), the politics of the day made ever increasing promises, raising expectations and dumping of these expectation on an ever depleting tax base (Toynbee), a creeping socialism (Bartlett), the dependence on slave labor to prop up a failing economy by chasing the family farmer to the city (Diamond), endless political infighting and civil wars that depleted the national identity (Goldsmith), fracturing societal good by organized labor, unions and guilds (Bartlett). Is this not similar to the turmoil in these supposed United States of America in 2010?
What are we to do? Are our lives together to be so limited? Is the progress of humankind an impossible dream? Will our propensity for overwhelming self importance rule all our days? Solomon would say yes. The less excessive question would be, will the propensity for overwhelming self importance influence all our days? To this question all of us should be able to acknowledge the above human weakness as a life long struggle. Solomon’s theology, his word’s and life, help us to confront this weakness at two pivotal points.
First, in our life process we must accept our place in the universe. Solomon declares over and over that all things on earth are meaningless, plenty or famine, success or failure, slave or free. To the starving African it is practicably impossible to regard the next meal as having no meaning. Yet, whether food is there or not, whether the individual lives or dies, the world will go on as if he or she had never been. Regardless of how connected we are to others, in 100 years we will all be a distant memory, most of us will be completely forgotten. As the Bible states, as Solomon states, we are just the dust of the earth. This is the humility factor, do we know our place?
Solomon sees humankind as another animal, we all live and then we die. The similarities in form and function, let alone DNA, are striking. This observation was Solomon’s alone for upwards of two thousand years or 100 generations. Even today there are those who would dispute the obvious but dogma can be a crutch for some to bolster their self importance. For them it is more comforting to snuggle up to the attributes of God than to be who we are.
Some in the church believe that even the punctuation marks of the King James version of the Bible are directed by God. To these folks, may I suggest you examine the long avoided passage of Ecclesiastes 3:18, “As for human beings, God tests them that they may see that they are like the animals”. The seeing has come slowly, it has been a long ugly struggle but modern science has returned us to the observations and testing procedures of Solomon.
Second we need to acknowledge what Solomon was not wise enough to treasure, our one unique life gift. Early in the book and probably early in his life he believed “God has set eternity in the human heart (3:11)”. This is the unique potential of the human animal, it is what God has done for us not what man has done for himself. It is that part of the human animal that cannot be explained by DNA, at least not yet. Solomon neglected this gift. Before we get too self righteous, none of us have ever been as sorely tempted and we fail mightily.
The path that Solomon chose brought him to a place of extreme disappointment, overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of life. Toward the end of his days he was to reduce our response to our God given uniqueness by encouraging us to enjoy life as best we can and do our religious duty out of the fear of God’s judgment. He deposits this supposed cure in chapter 12 but Hebrew scholars, including a number of conservatives, question whether this answer came from Solomon. It sounds like a religious suffix of later authorship, out of character with the rest of Solomon‘s words.
The authorship should be questioned but the directive itself is boring and insulting. Of course, there are those who are comfortable complying with the church and it’s dogma. However, some of us prefer mining for truth, as Solomon mined, from experience to tested dogma. Religious duty is as old as time itself, it is an example of the reductionism that has plagued the church both in it’s Hebrew and Christian contexts. It explains the great sin of the church, that is making science an enemy.
The Church says that God’s gift of eternal possibilities can only be explored or envisioned through compliance with the Church and it‘s myriad of authority figures. This overreach has been a two thousand year disability that has plagued man’s quest for God and turned off the curious to the truth of the bible. The Church cannot in any form at any time say, “look at me and you will see God”. The church can say, look at me and you may see glimpses of God amidst all that other earthly stuff, of course you and I have the same opportunity to so advertise.
G.Goslaw
May 3, 2010
Victorville, Ca
