Satisfied // Remember

 

sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 02/09/2014
video available at www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard
podcast here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/VineyardChurchOfMilan
or via iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vineyard-church-of-milan/id562567379

I’m 43 now, and fighting a losing battle with my body.

I went to play basketball with some friends from the church, and some neighbors a couple of weeks ago. On the way, we were all bemoaning various injuries and aches and pains. Quietly, in my head, I started cataloguing my ailments. My left wrist, for example. I hurt it a year and a half ago that still isn’t up to snuff, and no matter how well it gets, the odds of it ever being as strong as it once was are slim to none. My right wrist and hand I’d hurt when I slipped on the ice and fallen earlier that week. My left knee was sore from the same fall. My right Achilles tendon was tender from a 2 year old rupture that had been acting up while jumping rope the day before. My right hip was sore from compensating for it, and had been for about 9 months. My right ring finger is permanently disfigured from being disjointed playing touch football with some junior high students when I was a youth pastor.

I cracked a joke to the guys in the car from the back seat. “I feel bad for some of you guys. I’m just lucky that I’m not injury prone.” “Ha!” said Ross, who was driving the car and knew better from playing hoops with me since he was in high school. “We’ve got a pool on you. We all bought squares last week on what you’ll hurt next, and when.”

Bodies.

We've all got them.  Various sizes and shapes and conditions.  

They are also one of our greatest sources of dissatisfaction. Maybe they aren’t tall enough, strong enough, flexible enough, shapely enough, thin enough, fast enough, and on and on. They get sick. Injured. Old. Hairy. Bald. Blind. Sore. Wrinkly. Saggy. Smelly. We wish we had someone else’s. We wish ours was more like it used to be. Whatever.

For some of us, maybe many, satisfaction and our bodies is a constant struggle. We do that if I could just __________, then I’d be __________ equation all the time. If I could just lose 10 lbs (20, 30, 100?), then I’d be _________. If my _________ would heal, then life would be so much better. If I looked like _________, then ________. If I could just fix ___________, or have better ___________, then I wouldn’t feel shame.

Which is a bit of a problem all on its own, since research shows that the less satisfied we are with our bodies, the more likely we are to engage in behaviors that only make us less healthy.  But even beyond that, questions remain. What does a satisfied life look like when it comes to our bodies?  How do bodies fit in a satisfied life? How do we relate to them?

Before we look at Ecclesiastes 12 (our text for today), let’s briefly review a few key things we’ve learned from the Teacher in Ecclesiastes.

Every created thing in this world that is subject to time (what Ecclesiastes refers to as “under the sun”) is fleeting, insubstantial, and ultimately will resist even our best attempts to control it. It is, in the words of the Teacher, vapor.

The satisfied person, according to the Teacher, is not defined by the quality of their vapor management. They might be rich. They might be poor. Their lives might be all in order or all out of order. What they have in common is the profound awareness that life, all of it, is a gift from God to be appreciated and enjoyed.

This is why the teacher in Ecclesiastes is here to disrupt us. To shake us from chasing after the wind. To get us to stop. To look around. To feel the wind of God’s breath blowing against our skin right here, right now. To feel the warmth of the sun he made to shine on us. To receive God in the person before us, to receive him in the meal prepared for us, to receive him in the good work prepared in advance for us to do.

Because if he can get us to see how fleeting everything we look to for satisfaction truly is, if he can get us to see how little control it can really offer us, how little control we ultimately have over our world, then there is hope we might start, finally, to look to God for everything, where true satisfaction is found.

Jesus says it this way in Matthew 6v33

But seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well …

God’s kingdom started before time, and will extend beyond time. God’s love, his provision, his power, the life of the ages, it’s eternal. Don’t seek after what you will eat, or what you will drink or what you will wear – the pagans look for satisfaction in these things. The Father knows what you need.

It’s as if Jesus is saying, all of these things, food, drink, clothing, money, our bodies, our very lives, it’s all gift, an expression of the Father’s love, a container of his love, and when you see that, when you become aware of that, you’ll finally know what to do with it.

And so we are learning from Ecclesiastes how to let our lives be an expression of God’s gifts to us, a response to the joy we find in his gifts, instead of a search for satisfaction in anything other than God himself.

And we discussed a bit that the beginning of movement in that direction always starts by shifting our fear from the destructive fear of scarcity and futility (which are like shadows, unreality) to the life-giving fear of God, who loves us and is the foundation of all that is real.

With that all in mind, let’s look at Ecclesiastes 12, which is all about these bodies of ours (even though that may not be obvious, at first glance).

12 Remember your Creator

in the days of your youth,

before the days of trouble come

and the years approach when you will say,

“I find no pleasure in them”—

²before the sun and the light

and the moon and the stars grow dark,

and the clouds return after the rain;

³when the keepers of the house tremble,

and the strong men stoop,

when the grinders cease because they are few,

and those looking through the windows grow dim;

⁴when the doors to the street are closed

and the sound of grinding fades;

when people rise up at the sound of birds,

but all their songs grow faint;

⁵when people are afraid of heights

and of dangers in the streets;

when the almond tree blossoms

and the grasshopper drags itself along

and desire no longer is stirred.

Then people go to their eternal home

and mourners go about the streets.

⁶Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,

and the golden bowl is broken;

before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,

and the wheel broken at the well,

⁷and the dust returns to the ground it came from,

and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

⁸“Meaningless [Vapor]! Meaningless [Vapor]!” says the Teacher.

“Everything is meaningless [vapor]!”

The indentations in this section of the Bible are a way of indicating that we are reading poetry here. It’s poetry using another language (Hebrew), and using word images from an ancient culture that might be obscure to us, so it takes a little work to access its meaning. So let’s do that together first, and then we can try to learn what the Teacher is trying to teach us.

“In the days of your youth….before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark…”

What’s being set up here is the idea that our bodies start out young, but it’s not long before they begin to deteriorate and fail with age. And one of the primary experiences of that, especially in the ancient world, was blindness. Especially without corrective lenses. The moon and stars growing dark suggest failing eyesight. Even for me, in my relative youthfulness, if I go outside on a cloudless night without my contacts or glasses, the sky looks black to me. There might also be the suggestion of our bodies getting colder and having a hard time staying warm, and even the idea that our cognitive capacities can diminish over the years.

“…clouds return after the rain…”

This is what I’m experiencing with respect to aches and pains. It used to be, when I was young, I’d get hurt (that’s the rain bit) and then I’d recover fully, relatively quickly. The rain would come, but then clear skies. Now? Not so much. The clouds return after the rain. I get hurt, and maybe get a little better, but the chance of re-injury is just a matter of time. And the pain is almost never completely gone.

“…the keepers of the house tremble…”

Keepers of the house is a common metaphor for hands. So we’re talking about trembling hands here.

“…strong men stoop…”

Muscles go slack.

“…grinders cease because they are few…”

Losing teeth. [root canal experience…]

“and those looking through the windows grow dim…”

Failing eyesight again, here.

“…when the doors to the street are closed and the sound of grinding fades…”

Picture two doors, and when they are opened, the sounds of the street come into the house. The poet is describing hearing loss.

“…rising at the sound of birds...”

Not sleeping very well any more, woken even by birds whose songs you can only barely hear with your failing ears.

“…afraid of heights and dangers in the streets…”

Hard to get out and about anymore. Your driver’s license gets taken away.

“…when the almond tree blossoms…”

Hair going white.

“…the grasshopper drags itself along and desire is no longer stirred…”

Oh my. Please don’t make me spell this one out.

Maybe do this. Picture a grasshopper, which normally hops, strong and sure, explosively powerful legs…now dragging itself along, limping, limp.

We’re talking specifically about a man here. About his Jiminy Cricket.

There you go. Yup, you got it.

“…people go to their eternal home, and mourners go about…”

In Solomon’s culture, you’d hire professional mourners to grieve you publicly, getting the word out about your death.

Which reminds me…have you driven past Marble Memorial Cemetery on Platt Road, recently? Not long ago, this sign showed up in front of it…

After a minute of reflection, it was obvious that this wasn’t a cemetery sign, but an unfortunate (or brilliant!) placement for a sign from the city to give people a good feeling about Milan on the way out. Shortly afterwards, I saw this sign on Main, near Kroger, placed for people leaving heading west and leaving the city…

Which, it occurs to me, also would have been pretty funny in front of the cemetery….but alas, behind it, is this boarded up, dilapidated house…

 

Ok, enough of that…back to the text.

“…before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken…”

Imagine your soul connected via a sliver cord to your body, a valuable bowl containing oil, representing your life, and that cord being severed, and the bowl falling, shattering, the oil running out.

“…before the pitcher is shattered at the spring…”

A similar idea, but this time life like water that your body, like a pitcher contains.

“…dust returns…spirit returns…”

The last image is more familiar to us, rooted in the creation account in Genesis. Dust (out of which our bodies were formed) returning to the ground, our spirit (or breath – it’s the same word) returning to God who gave it to us in the first place, reaffirming the idea of our lives as a gift from him.

Through all of this, the Teacher is suggesting one thing we need to do. He’s laying out the human condition, the reality of our bodies that are sure to die, and that, at best, have only fleeting health and youth and vigor and full functionality, and saying, here’s what we should do in light of all that.

Remember your creator.

Simple and profound wisdom that changes everything when it comes to our dissatisfied, frustrated relationship with our bodies.

Remember your creator.

All of our dissatisfaction has its roots in forgetting our creator. In forgetting that our bodies are gifts from someone who formed them and gave them to us for a joyful purpose.

When we forget our creator, we look at our bodies and we want them to do something for us.

We want them to make us live forever.

We want them to give us pleasure.

We want them to give us control over our surroundings and our lives and our activities.

We want them to impress others.

Maybe to give us dominance over others.

Or at the very least, to keep us from being dependent on others.

We begin to see our bodies as us, as an expression of us.

We are arrogant about them, or shamed.

We have confidence in them, or fear of their failing or inadequacy.

We want them to give us something to love about ourselves, and instead we loathe them, and ourselves along with them.

They will never ever satisfy us.

They are vapor. Looking for satisfaction in them is like chasing after the wind.

Remember your creator.

God made something (you, your body) out of the vapor that is a container of and expression of his love. He has made, out of this fleeting, time-bound, under the sun stuff, an image-bearer that can contain eternity, the life of the ages, the life of God. A wonder that bears witness to his love to all who encounter it. You, an embodied synthesis of spirit and dust, are a wonder of wonders.

You are, first and foremost, a container of his love to you. You are an expression of his love to you. The creator took dust, matter, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, protons and neutrons, electrons, quarks, and shaped it into you. You are fleeting, insubstantial, under-the-sun vapor that can breathe. And feel. And think. And know. And live. And love with his love. Eternity is in your heart. Because he chose you. Because he loves you. He gave you a body. Through which and in which you can experience the gift of life.

You are the steward of this thing he has made. This body. It’s made by his hands, but it’s in your hands now. Under your dominion and care. Freely given to you in love.

What will you do with it? How will you relate to it?

Remember your creator.

This is the wisdom of the Teacher.

Remember your creator.

Each time you consider your body and you receive it afresh as a gift, a container of and expression of God’s love, you are remembering your creator. You are remembering that you were shaped and formed out of the vapor as a container of and expression of God’s love.

Each time you consider your body, and the question before you is, “how can I let this body serve as a container of and expression of God’s love to the rest of the creation” you are remembering your creator. You are remembering that you were shaped and formed out of the vapor as a container of and expression of God’s love. And that your relationship to your body is therefore one of steward, not creator.

Sing. Shout. Dance. Kneel. Raise your arms. Stretch out your arms. Clap. Play an instrument.

Does fear of scarcity or futility drive your actions?

Then you have forgotten your creator. You have taken the gift and made yourself yours, dependent on yourself.

Or do you do what you do as a response to the joy that comes from receiving the gift?

If so, you are remembering your creator.

Recreation.

Athletics.

Exercise.

Art.

Labor.

Rest.

Does scarcity or fear of failure drive your actions?

Then you have forgotten your creator. You have taken the gift and made yourself yours, dependent on yourself.

Or do you do what you do as a response to the joy that comes from receiving the gift?

If so, you are remembering your creator.

The primary benefit in remembering your creator, of course, is that your satisfaction is rooted in God, and not in your body. Which means your satisfaction is secure and deep. Because God is above the sun and eternal, unlike your body which is under the sun and fleeting.

There is a secondary benefit, too. Which is that when our satisfaction is in God and not in things under the sun, we relate in much healthier ways to all the fleeting things, including our bodies. We can creatively cooperate with God in increasing their capacity to be containers of and expressions of his love. We can actually enjoy the gift of our bodies, in whatever state they are currently in, without our joy being stolen or corrupted by fear. And we can steward them out of that joy, which is the only effective kind of stewardship.

One final thought before a practical suggestion or two.

This remembering thing goes two ways.

The first way, we just talked about. We remember our creator, and we have a profound awareness that our bodies are gifts from his hands. And they become containers of and expressions of his love again, agents of joy in our lives, moment by moment, as long as they last.

The second way follows from the first, and is perhaps even more exciting.

When we remember our creator, our fleeting lives are connected to eternity, and become bound up with eternity.

And the promise of Jesus and his resurrection is that God will remember us after our old creation bodies have released our spirits.

He will re-member us.

He will give us new creation bodies like Jesus’ resurrection body.

Do you recall the thief on the cross next to Jesus?

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Today, Jesus said, you will be with me in paradise.

John Polkinghorne, a physist and angelical priest, says that all matter is, at the most basic level, information. That we are, fundamentally, information about how all of our atoms are arranged, information about how they relate to one another, information about the experiences that caused them to be in those arrangements. And he says that when we die, God holds the information, every last detail of it, all of it that makes us who we are, bodies and spirits, in himself. And at the resurrection, he re-members us. He takes the information that is us, and re-creates us out of the new creation materials of the second creation, no longer fleeting, subject to decay, the heavens and the earth no longer divided between that which is under the sun and that which is above the sun.

[Bible nerd note: God remembers Noah and the animals in Genesis 8 – the flood is a foreshadowing of the new creation / remembering is how new creation begins…]

Do you recall what time it was when Jesus rose from the dead? It was before dawn it says in the scriptures. His resurrection body was a body made before the sun had risen. A body still that breathes and eats and feels and contains the record of his suffering in his scars, but also a body that suffers no longer, that decays no longer, a body that has eternity not just in its heart, but is shot through with the stuff of heaven.

This is what awaits all who, with Jesus, remember our creator, and receive our bodies as gifts from his hand, to be stewarded with joy, surrendered in worship as living sacrifices to God, and offered to the world as containers of and expressions of God’s immense and wondrous love.

Practical Suggestions:

1. Remember your creator in Worship.

Sing. Clap. Do something with your body posture. Kneel. Bow. Raise your hands. Dance if you want. Avoid a posture of firm control. If your work is physical at all, this week, mindfully offer your physical effort as worship. Or your exercise or play or recreation or even sleep.

2. Remember your creator in meals.

Use eating as a chance to be aware of the gift of your body. Give thanks for the meal. Enjoy the flavors and textures and pleasures of eating.

Satisfied // Séamus and the Slinky

 

sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 02/02/2014
video available at www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard
podcast here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/VineyardChurchOfMilan
or via iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vineyard-church-of-milan/id562567379

When I lived in Northern Ireland, there was always a bit of tension between the Irish locals and the British soldiers who would be stationed there. The story going round was about a sergeant who’d been assigned his new posting at a base there. He heads down a local pub in town with the soldiers in his squad, hoping to have a little sport with the locals.

They look for the oldest, drunkest Irish guy. And there, at the end of the bar, they find Séamus. Séamus looks to be pushing 90 with most of his sheets to the wind. The sergeant tells his men, “Watch this.” He puts a new, shiny coin, a 1 lb. coin on the bar in front of Séamus. Then he pulls out an old, crumpled 5 lb. note, and sets it next to the shiny coin. Turning to Séamus, he said, “Which do you want, Séamus? Look, you can have this shiny coin here, or this old, dirty piece of paper.” Séamus looks up from his Guinness, picks up the coin, bites into it, and says, “Aye, Mister, I’ll have this coin, please.” Giving it to him, the soldiers can hardly contain their laughter. They proceed to go from one Irishman to the next, trying the same joke, always getting the same hilarious results. One after another, to a man, takes a shiny new coin instead of a crumpled note.

In a corner table, a young American woman (probably there in Ireland to track down her ancestors), saw what was happening and is horrified. She felt bad for the way the Irishmen were being taken advantage of. Later in the night, after the soldiers have left, she goes up to the Irish guys and says, “What are you doing? Don’t you know the 5 lb note is worth 5 times the 1 lb coin?”

“Oh no, Love,” said Séamus. “Of course we do. But if we took the 5 lb note, they’d stop playing the game.”

The point is, when you’re anxious about money, when you imagine it’s the thing that might actually give you control over your life, protect you from the Scarcity monster, money stops being a gift and becomes something you have to chase, something you’ll never be able to get enough of, something that you will never be satisfied with.

But, if you can relate to it as the gift that it is, not unlike Séamus and his friends, then there is joy in the receiving and you don’t have to worry and fret and chase. Because you know that the giver has more to give, and loves to give.

Of course, God, the true giver is nothing like the sergeant and his men. He’s not playing a game with us, having a laugh at our expense. He’s providing for us because he delights in us. Our every breath is a gift, each moment of life alive with his presence is a gift, all created things having the capacity to be both expressions of and containers of his love for us to receive and enjoy.

This is the essential lesson of Ecclesiastes. Everything under the sun is fleeting, it’s vapor. Everything in creation, everything bound by time is not ultimately under our control. We can’t ensure anything. All we can be sure of is that it futile to depend on ourselves or the vapor around us, and that our true hope is depending on God, the uncreated one above the sun who loves us.

At the same time, God has placed eternity in our hearts, he’s placed within us the capacity to receive every fleeting thing, all of the vapor, as a gift from his hands. To right now, recognize that this breath, this place, this body, this moment is, in some way that by his grace we might recognize, an expression of and container of his love. Only God’s love can give substance and meaning to the moment by moment reality of our fleeting lives. If we learn to receive it and live out of it, we can be connected to him and sustained by him, and one day, as the resurrection of Jesus bears witness to, join him in his substantive life.

We’re going to talk more about money today. About how we get right in our relationship with it and God in light of Ecclesiastes’ wisdom. First, though, I want us to look at another passage from Ecclesiastes that furthers the discussion we were having last week about money, even though money isn’t specifically mentioned.

Listen to Ecclesiastes 9:

9 So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them. ²All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good,

so with the sinful;

as it is with those who take oaths,

so with those who are afraid to take them.

³This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. ⁴Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!

⁵For the living know that they will die,

but the dead know nothing;

they have no further reward,

and even their name is forgotten.

⁶Their love, their hate

and their jealousy have long since vanished;

never again will they have a part

in anything that happens under the sun.

⁷Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. ⁸Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. ⁹Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. ¹⁰Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

¹¹I have seen something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift

or the battle to the strong,

nor does food come to the wise

or wealth to the brilliant

or favor to the learned;

but time and chance happen to them all.

¹²Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:

As fish are caught in a cruel net,

or birds are taken in a snare,

so people are trapped by evil times

that fall unexpectedly upon them.

Ecclesiastes 9

Here’s what this has to do with money. Money cannot do anything for us that it promises to do. As we talked about last week, the promise underneath every promise money makes is that it will give us some measure of control. The author of Ecclesiastes is saying nothing under the sun can offer us any control. We can’t know any particular thing about what will come in this life. No one knows what’s coming around the corner; no action you take now can guarantee any particular outcome in the future. The only guarantees come from God’s promises, and our only security comes in our relationship with him.

We’re a lot more like Slinkys, in other words, than we’d like to be. Specifically, we’re like the bottom of the slinky. And the sooner we come to terms with that, the sooner we can get on with living life with joy that comes from depending on God alone, week by week, day by day, moment by moment.

Wait, Slinkys? Yes, Slinkys.

Watch this. Carefully.

[Hold slinky, letting it stretch towards the floor, suspended until it’s stable, and then release it from the top...]

You’d expect that it would all start to fall when you release it, wouldn’t you? But did you notice that the bottom of the slinky, just for a fraction of a second, doesn’t move at all after the top is released? It just hangs there, seeming to defy gravity.

Why doesn’t the bottom of the slinky fall? How does it hang there, suspended in midair with nothing holding it anymore?

Well, there are various ways of understanding when it will fall based on the math of waves and such, but the simplest, and purest, and I think, truest explanation, according to the physicists, is that the bottom of the slinky doesn’t know. It doesn’t know that the top has been released. The information takes a while to get to it. And until it knows, it stays suspended, as if it’s still being held up.

We, and essentially everything else under the sun, are in a similar condition as the bottom of the slinky. Cancer could be forming in your body. Blockages might be developing in your arteries. But you don’t know about it yet. Somebody somewhere else might be getting in their car and heading towards the road you are about to drive on, water might be starting to freeze, a tire might be slowly losing air in your tire right now, and a car accident is just waiting to happen. But you don’t know. There might be a secret meeting in a skyscraper in the financial district in Manhattan happening right now, and decisions are being made that will cause your savings or your employer’s solvency to completely disappear on Monday afternoon. Heck, the sun itself may have ceased to exist 2 minutes ago, and we, right now, have no idea. Not until the light stops arriving in 6 minutes.

And even so, what could we do about it? I mean sure, we do have some power; we’re not as helpless as the bottom of the Slinky. We could avoid smoking and other things to lower our risk of cancer. We could eat better and exercise to keep our heart healthy. We could drive cautiously and carefully, keep our cars maintained. Keep our money in gold bullion under our bed. But still. Still.

Ecclesiastes says, basically, that’s great, but that can get you only so far. And what then? Our control is ultimately limited by finite information, finite processing power, and finite resources. We chase more information, more processing power, more resources – but it’s a chasing after the wind. Something will always be just out of our grasp.

Ecclesiastes says, chase all you want, but you won’t find satisfaction. So don’t look for satisfaction or security or control there. Instead, rest in the gifts that are present to you right now, in this moment, like the staggeringly wonderful bottom of the slinky, suspended in defiance of gravity, the force that shapes everything on planet earth, only by its ability to be content with what God has given it now.

⁷Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. ⁸Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. ⁹Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this fleeting life that God has given you under the sun—all your fleeting days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. ¹⁰Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

So, coming back to money now with clear eyes, recognizing it only has fleeting power in our fleeting lives. How are we to relate to it? What are we to do about it?

Step one. Receive money as a gift from God, an expression of and container of his love. Give thanks for it. Delight in it. Enjoy it. Everything you’d do with a gift when you receive one from someone who loves you and knows you well. Do what seems good to do out of the joy that comes from receiving God’s love and resting in his promise of continued provision.

Step two.

There is no step two.

However.

Most of us haven’t spent our whole lives practicing step one with respect to money. Most of us have at some level, at some point

Depended on money or chased after money for security

Related to money as if it said something about our value as people

Come to understand money as reward for our labor

Fixed our heart’s desire on money

Bought money’s lies and listened to its false promises

Let ourselves become fearful or anxious about losing money

All of which is just another way of saying we’ve related to money not as a gift from God, but as one of our gods.

Because we really can only depend on God.

God is our only security.

Our value as people comes from the fact that we are made in the image of God.

God is the true reward for our labor.

God is our hearts true desire.

God is the only one who speaks truth worth selling everything to possess, and offers promises we can take to the bank.

The loss of God is the only loss we should ever fear.

This is why Jesus says:

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Matthew 6

By hate and despise, Jesus isn’t referring to an emotional response, necessarily. He’s simply meaning we’ll treat it as if it doesn’t matter, as if it has no life to offer us. So, we’ll either love God, depend on God, trust God’s promises, want more of God, find our value in God, fear losing God and see money as vapor that only has significance to us so much as it is an expression of and container of God’s love. Or, we’ll love money, depend on money, trust money’s promises, want more money, find our value in money, fear losing money, and see God as something fleeting and insubstantial that only has significance to us so much as he helps us get more money.

So maybe the real question we need to ask now is this: if we’ve got things flipped around, how do we set them right? How do we get right with money? How do we turn our money from our god into a gift from God? How do we let God be our God again?

Well, this is where we do what Jesus tells us to do. We repent, and trust the good news of God’s kingdom.

Repenting just means we turn around. We stop going one direction and we start going another. We stop chasing money and we start chasing God.

This step will be different for every single one of us, because we are all at different places in this particular area. Some of us are full on money addicts. Maybe Jesus instruction to the rich young ruler is what we need to hear.

Sell your possessions. Give to the poor. Come follow me.

Some of us are maybe at other points along the dependency continuum, and so the Holy Spirit has a specific next step of discipleship for you that isn’t quite so radical because you’re already moving in his direction.

Maybe, for example, what we need is to start practicing some of the disciplines God has given to the people who are learning to be his people again, after he’s set them free from slavery to Egypt.

Tithing for example. Giving 10% of all the gift that God gives you back to him in the form of cheerful giving to the church.

I think there are at least two reasons tithing goes to the church, and not just generosity towards one good cause or another.

One is that you don’t have control over what that money does; you’re putting it in the hands of people who are doing their best to figure out what God wants done with the money. So that helps us get freedom from using money as a form of control; it puts it back in the gift category.

The second reason is that when you give it back to God through the church, the giving becomes then a form of worship. A way of saying, in a way that means something to us, you’re good, God and I trust you and I want to give you a tangible expression of my love for you.

Jesus said:

²⁰But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; ²¹for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6

If you want God to have your heart, rather than money having your heart, then invest your treasure in God’s kingdom. Your heart will follow, like a dog on a leash. (Jesus seems to place it in that order on purpose, as if he knows something about our hearts and their connection to money. You want to love God? Yes, I see that you do, but it’s hard, what with how wrapped up your heart is in other things. Well, try this. Give your treasure to God. Your heart will come along.)

The truth of the matter is that we are stewards of all this vapor. Our money, our bodies, our talents, our time, our stuff, our influence. It all belongs to God. Everything created under the sun has been given to us image-bearers to steward. We were just made to be high priests in this temple of his, this place he’s chosen to dwell called earth. So it all belongs to him, all of it. A tithe just represents that we acknowledge that, that we remember where it comes from and who it all belongs to in the first place.

Practical suggestions:

1. Start tithing, at least until Easter. (If you already are, add 10% to your 10%, bringing it to 11%.) Just see what happens in your heart. See if God maybe finds ways to reinforce to you the good news of his promises that he loves you and that he’ll provide for you. Because he longs for you to have life, and have it to the full, and he knows what you need.

Even if you fail, even if you don’t have the faith or wherewithal to follow through, let the attempt reveal to you where your heart is at with money and with God, and let Jesus show you the next step he wants you to take.

2. Hang up a slinky somewhere in your home or office. Somewhere that it can serve as a reminder to receive the vapor of this moment as a gift, a container of his love and expression of his love. And as a reminder that you’re control is limited, but that’s Ok, because there is wonder and beauty in depending on God to be present to you right now, even when things seem to be falling apart all around you, and you don’t see anything to hold you up in the midst of it.

Satisfied // Toil & Burden

 

sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 01/26/2014
video available at www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard
podcast here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/VineyardChurchOfMilan
or via iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vineyard-church-of-milan/id562567379

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

Sam Polk, founder of Groceryships

When he was a kid, Sam’s father would say to him, “Imagine what life will be like when I make a million dollars.”

Sam says when he grew up, money made him feel powerful. It was like a drug. Kept him from having to deal with the pain of the powerlessness he felt as a child. His first $40,000 bonus thrilled him. Now millions weren’t enough. He wanted a billion.

Money’s like that. You get a raise, and it feels great for about a month. And then, it’s just your salary. And you want more.

Sam said when he realized what he’d become a wealth addict (which he compared to being a drug addict willing to do anything – in his words, “walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma, [anything] to get a fix”), he finally had the courage to walk away. To, in the language of Ecclesiastes, stop “chasing after the wind.”

But it wasn’t easy. He said he was terrified of running out of money. Of not being able to get enough in the future. He’d wake up at nights panicked. He still buys lottery tickets sometimes.

But over time, it’s gotten better. As Sam describes it, he started to realize he had “enough.” And that if he needed more, he’d be able to get it.

Sam’s describing the same dynamics we see in Ecclesiastes, isn’t he? Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.

That money is, like so many other things “under the sun,” just vapor. (Remember, meaningless better translated vapor.) A thing we think will satisfy us, make us feel powerful, give us the power to do what we want to do, protect us, make us happy, and on and on. But when we get it, we realize the main thing that it does is make us want more. Its satisfaction is elusive, fleeting, insubstantial, not very long-lasting. Nonetheless, sometimes, we become willing to abandon our selves, our values, our integrity, so that we can have more. So that we can have enough. We’re chasing after the wind. Miserable. Running over whoever gets in our way.

So what are we going to do about money? This massively addicting bit of vapor that we have to deal with every day. It’s not like we can just go home, flush all our money down the toilet, go cold turkey, get clean, and avoid going to banks and atm machines.

(On the other hand, I suppose something like that is a valid option – after all, Jesus did tell the rich young ruler to sell everything he had, give his money to the poor, and follow him.)

Seriously. What are we going to do about money?

How many of you, if offered a 3.6 million dollar bonus at work tomorrow, would gladly accept it?

How many of you, at the same time, believe that Sam is on to something in his realization that money promises more than it can deliver, and that any one of us could get caught in the same addictive relationship with it that he found himself?

How many of you would say, in fact, that you’ve already felt something of that desperate, anxious pull of more money? That you know can identify with the temptation to sacrifice all kinds of things that you know are good and healthy – say, rest, time with your family, spiritual pursuits, helping others, etc. – in order to get more money. Not because you’re greedy, but because…

Well, because you need it. Because the opportunity to get more may pass you by if you don’t take it now. Because although you might have enough now, today, you’d feel a lot better if you had more for tomorrow. Because someday you’d like to have enough to really enjoy life. Because you’ll be respected more if you have more. Because others will judge you if you don’t go after it. Because you’ll feel more in control if you had more money. Because you could prove someone wrong if you had more.

As we continue our series, Satisfied, we’re going to take two weeks to explore how the wisdom of Ecclesiastes would reshape our relationship with money. Let’s read the first part of chapter 3.

3 There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

² a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

³ a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

⁹What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹²I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

This passage doesn’t have the word “money” in it at all; nonetheless, it’s all about money. Verse 9 is our first clue. “What do workers gain from their toil?” In our modern world, the first answer that would come to mind is, “a paycheck.”

We’ll spend some time unpacking this, because it’s not immediately apparent in our first reading of the passage, but here’s what Solomon is driving at: satisfaction comes from trusting God for everything that we need, and trusting money for none of it. Our relationship with money is healthy when we see it as a gift from God, not as a reward for our labor. And our relationship with God is healthy when we fear the loss of him, and not the loss of money.

Solomon, the author of this book, Ecclesiastes, understands how immersed we are in our materialistic view of the world. As we talked about last week, it’s no small task to disrupt our current entrenched and dysfunctional perspective so that we can receive a new, life-giving one.

We tend to trust in ourselves and our resources to get for ourselves what we need, and trust God will reward us for our productivity and good resource management. God helps those who help themselves, right? We see money as a reward for our labor, an affirmation of our worth as human beings. We fear the loss of money, and when it happens, we think we are out of God’s favor. Not realizing along the way that our double fisted preoccupation with self-dependence and the accumulation of money has caused our hands to be closed to every good gift of God long ago.

So Solomon gets to work.

He describes our lives, the varied experiences which fall on different ends of the spectrum in our lives. Birth and death. Weeping and laughing. Mourning and dancing. Scattering and gathering. Tearing and mending. War and peace. He’s really just laying out the full spread of human existence out for us to look at, without flinching, without avoiding any of it. Saying, basically, “Look, we’re all going to experience all of this, or a least a lot of it. Some of it we’ll be excited about, some of it we’ll wish we could avoid. But it’s all part of the package. It all comes and goes in its time, like birth and death.”

It makes for a beautiful song. A song that is usually played as a plea for peace, it’s last line being a time of peace, I swear it’s not too late.

But that’s not the heart of the Ecclesiastes passage. At its heart is this message: There is a lot you can’t control. Just like you can’t control the seasons. The sun will shine and it will be warm and summer, and then fall will come, and then it will be bitterly cold in winter, and then the spring will come and the ground will thaw and birds will return and soon it will be summer again. Your power is real, but it’s also limited. You feel this sense of agency in your life – which is all well and good, and true, up to a point. But step back for a second and look at the big picture. Forces larger than you can wrest that control from your hands. You are laughing now. But the day of weeping will come, and you can’t avoid it. You are in mourning now. But a day of dancing will be here eventually. You were born. You will also die. Regardless of your best efforts between now and then. (See Ecclesiastes 9v11-12 if you’re not convinced…)

And then Solomon asks,

What do workers earn for their toil?

This is the big question. “So what does all the money you earn buy you?” This is the reality check that pokes the hole in money’s balloon. Can it buy you a pass on death? Can it buy you peace and laughter and dancing and love without ever having war or tears or sorrow or hate? Can it buy you life that goes on and on without ceasing?

No.

We know that’s the answer.

We just don’t like the answer.

This is the burden God has laid on the human race.

We’re made in the image of God. Which, in part, means we have will and agency. We have desire and ability, the capacity to exert power. But our ability, our capacity, our power is limited. We can only do so much. Get so much. Control so much. And it’s never enough to fulfil our desire.

But we want control. So badly. We’ll do anything to feel like we have control. We’ll listen to anything that tells us it can offer us a sense of control.

This is the burden God has laid on the human race.

We have this incredible gift to do, to get, to plan, to achieve, to organize, to create. Yet, we have this one task that we must do before any of that matters. We must learn to wait on God. We must rely on him.

We are creatures who imagine we can be gods. We desperately want to eliminate our neediness and dependency. We hate powerlessness; we’ll trade away our best shot at joy even for a shot at feeling powerful. At least, that’s what Adam and Eve did. And it’s what we who follow in their footsteps have so often done.

This is the burden God has laid on the human race.

The word for burden might also be translated painful effort or grievous task.

It is a painful effort to let go of control.

Yet it’s the only way to a satisfied life.

The writer says God has made everything beautiful in its time.

Control is all about what’s going to happen. Ensuring we have a say in how it all turns out.

Everything beautiful in its time means being fully present right now, right here, to what is before us. To the gift that God has for us to enjoy.

We aren’t in control when we are receiving a gift, are we?

Yet, that’s how God invites us to live, moment after moment after moment.

And then it says God has set eternity in the human heart. The Hebrew word for eternity is olam. It is that which is outside of birth and death. It is outside of the created. It is not “under the sun” like everything which is vapor. It’s that reality we experience when we step, for a moment, outside of time.

We’ve tasted it, felt it, haven’t we?

You know how sometimes time can fly by, like when you’re having a great time with a friend. Or how it can drag on and on, as slow as molasses, when you’re waiting for news. Or for your number to be called at the secretary of state?

But sometimes, when you are most alive, when joy has filled up your very being – an experience of awe, or powerful love, or pure beauty, or you’re right in the midst of doing what you were born to do with full focus and effortless competence – and it’s as if time has simply ceased to be and everything is just now. That’s olam. Eternity. What the New Testament writers in Greek call aeon zoe, eternal life or the life of the ages. It’s the kind of life, the experience of timelessness that God enjoys always.

God has set that in our hearts. The unending, ongoing, God-inhabited, love-soaked experience of joy that is only accessible as we receive what he has for us, moment by moment, day by day.

It was a painful effort for Sam to leave his multimillion dollar Wall Street job. To face the wounds inside of himself. It was terrifying, anxious work. But it is giving way to real satisfaction. To the liberating experience of enough.

If you’re chasing after the wind, you’re running away from the eternity in your heart.

I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all their toil – this is the gift of God.

There is nothing better for people than to rejoice (a better translation of “be happy”) and do good.

Rejoicing is just a way of recognizing and celebrating the goodness and beauty of God’s gifts now. Whatever they may be.

Rejoice and do good. Do that thing that flows from your joy in the gift. What is it you would do that flows from the joy of the gifts God is giving you? That will always be a good thing. Do that good thing.

Eat the food God has provided you as a gift. Drink the drink God has given you as gift. See the good in the work God has given you to do. Rejoice in the beauty of what God has given to you now, today. Do the good that flows from that joy.

The one who lives in this way has access to the eternity God has set in his heart.

Compare that to the life that seeks control. We see only the danger, the bad, the threat all around us. If we see anything “good,” it’s only the good that’s off in the distance, that we might be able to get if we get enough money, if we play our cards right. If we have any joy, it’s the momentary joy of succeeding in our goal, but even our joy is like vapor. It’s fleeting, not lasting, and it can be taken away by the seasons changing. And we “do good” far less than we’d like. Far too often, we are doing what seems necessary to get ahead, to make ends meet, to get enough money.

Oh, right, money. We started all this by talking about money.

Pull out some money, if you’ve got any.

Look at it.

What’s your relationship with that money? What is it to you?

Is it something that’s going to help you get something? Do something? Feel something about yourself? Make something happen?

Or is it a gift from God, an expression of and container of his love for you?

When you look at it, do you think to yourself, man, I wish I had more of this? Man, I don’t know if this is going to be enough. I wonder how I’m going to get more?

Or do you think to yourself, wow, God’s sure taken care of me of me well. Look, I’ve got extra! Hmm, I wonder what joy he intends for me with this?

Now think about all the money you have, savings, debt, investments, cash and your current income, salary, what have you. Your financial status.

When you think about that, if it’s like a good, solid amount, do you think, I’ve worked really hard for that, made some good decisions with it. I feel pretty good about myself. I think others would think pretty highly of me, too, if they could see it. Or if it’s not a pretty picture, do you think, oh man, I hope no one ever finds out the true picture of my financial situation. That would be embarrassing.

Or, instead, do you think – if you feel like you’ve got a lot - God’s really provided a lot for me. It’s a joyful thing and a privilege to figure out what to do with all this gift. Or, if you are in a place of need – God promises to take care of me as I depend on him. What a joyful thing and a privilege to be in a place to watch him come through on my behalf and glorify himself.

Let me say again what I said earlier.

Satisfaction comes from trusting God for everything that we need, and trusting money for none of it.

Our relationship with money is healthy when we see it as a gift from God, not as a reward for our labor.

And our relationship with God is healthy when we fear the loss of him, and not the loss of money.

Let me add one last thing.

Every promise money makes is a false promise. Money can’t promise anything. Because money is “under the sun” just like every other created thing. Like all the vapor, it only has substance and power when it is an expression of and container of God’s love.

Only God can make promises that he can keep. Because he is uncreated, above the sun. He isn’t subject to the seasons; he’s the author of the seasons. His promises can be trusted.

Everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.

Unlike money, God has substance and power. Unlike money, he loves us. Unlike money, if we have him, we have everything. Unlike money, if we don’t have him, we have nothing.

Let’s make our lives a response to him and his love.

Next week, I’ll tell you the joke about Shamus, the 1 pound coins, and the 5 pound notes, and we’ll have fun learning how to get right with money and get right with God. Oh yeah, and maybe we’ll get to the slinkys next week too! (I’m kind of excited about the slinkys.) For now, though…

A practical suggestion:

Put your money in its place. Re-gift 10%.

Figure out how much money you have. The kind that’s available to spend. Not locked up in investments or whatever. Just your most liquid accounts. Include savings accounts if they are the kind you can get money out of pretty easily. Figure out what 10% of that is. Now take that amount and figure out some fun ways to give it away. If it’s a lot, maybe give it away over the course of the year. If it’s less, maybe you can do it all this week. If you want to get more bang for your buck, do it prayerfully in cooperation with God. But the main point is having fun giving it away. Give it to someone you know who it would bless because they have financial needs of some sort. Give it to someone it would bless because it would surprise them and make their day. Give it to a cause you really care about. Adopt a compassion child. Give it to a student for the 30 hour famine. Buy a present for someone who’s really been wanting something but wouldn’t ever spend the money for it. Give it to the church. Give it to another church. Talk with your family about what do with it. Or your small group. Or have fun all by yourself thinking of how to give it away. Whatever you do, take 10% of your money and let it become a gift again, a sign that all of it was gift in the first place.

If you don’t have any, or worse, you’re in the hole, then take 10% of your week’s work hours and give them away. Say, 4 hours, if you’d work a 40 hour week. Give them away to someone. Babysit their kids. Shovel their snow. Clean their bathrooms. Help at compassion ministry. Go help with the homeless ministry in Ann Arbor on a Friday night. Come clean the church.

Satisfied // Fear & the Cross

sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 01/12/2014
video available at www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard
podcast here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/VineyardChurchOfMilan
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⁵Fools fold their hands

and ruin themselves.

⁶Better one handful with tranquility

than two handfuls with toil

and chasing after the wind

Ecclesiastes 4v5,6

Fear drives so much of destructive human activity. In our struggle to survive, we see two great enemies. The enemy “futility” or “failure” that threatens to frustrate all of our efforts if we take action in our lives. The other enemy is “scarcity” or “not enough.” It drives us like a slavemaster, never letting us rest in the quest to stay one step ahead of it.

One enemy says, give up!, satisfaction is available to no one. The other enemy says fight!, satisfaction is only available to a few, the ones at the top.

If we fear futility and failure, we never actually live. We stay back, in hiding, from the wild world where life happens. We try to satisfy ourselves with comfort, with what pleasures we can, with escapism or numbing agents to dull the pain from the marks futility has left on us. We waste away. We live in a world of make believe, where we convince ourselves we’ve made the best choices, but somewhere deep down, we know there was meant to be more to us than this.

And we end up in the same condition as if we’d never gotten started in the first place.

We’ve got our hands folded, consuming our own flesh.

If we fear scarcity, we strive and chase and run and fight and claw to get to the top. Or at least high enough that it slows down to feast on those below us, buying us some time. The big problem is that no matter how high we climb, satisfaction proves elusive. Always just around the corner.

A little more money. One more promotion. A little thinner. A little more beautiful. A little more success. Respect. Fame. More obedient kids. A better spouse. More caring friends.

We’ve got two fists full of labor and striving after the wind.

But we never ever catch it.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”

says the Teacher.

“Utterly meaningless!

Everything is meaningless!”

Listen to this conversation between two partners on HBO’s new drama, True Detectives…

[show video clip…you can view it by watching the stream from www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard on January 19th, starting at about the 17:50 mark]]

I’ve got an idea. Let’s make the car a place of silent reflection from now on.

Which maybe isn’t such a bad idea, is it? Because if we go on what we can observe about life – which is what the Teacher in Ecclesiastes is forcing us to do – it would be easy to come to the conclusion that suicide is really the best way out. Unless, like Matthew McConaughey’s character suggests, we just don’t have the constitution for it.

What a dark view! But like Woody Harrelson’s character realized, it’s hard to argue with it. Echoing the same observations as Solomon, both Egyptians and Babylonians came to the conclusion that when you add it all up, everything is meaningless. In light of the meaninglessness of life, the Babylonian wisdom literature even recommended suicide as the wisest course of action.

But doesn’t something in you resist? Doesn’t something in you say, no, wait, there has to be more to the story?

As we began to see last week, the writer of Ecclesiastes agrees with that something in you that resists. Because the sense of life’s meaning can’t come from what is seen – what is “under the sun,” in the language of Ecclesiastes – but rather from what God makes known.

In other words, there is more going on in the world than meets the eye. There is an uncreated One above the sun who inhabits our vapor filled world and gives it substance and meaning through his love. There is a way to not seek satisfaction from the vapor – the fleeting, insubstantial pleasures and successes and things and activities under the sun – but instead to receive every thing, every present moment, every person, every task set before us, every joy and even every hardship as a gift from God’s hand. And in so doing to discover a true and lasting satisfaction in the God who is the giver of every good and perfect gift. And along the way to discover that all that is “under the sun,” – our own selves and lives included – exists to be an expression of and container for God’s love.

Purpose of Ecclesiastes is to teach that there is no basis for confidence in ourselves; our only confidence is in what God will do for us.

This is why the teacher begins with disruption. He disrupts our confidence that we can ever achieve satisfaction for ourselves. Because as long as we buy the lie that we can eventually have or achieve enough to be satisfied, we will keep chasing after the wind, and discover that everything is vapor. Fleeting. Insubstantial. Unsatisfying.

[This is one of the fundamental flaws of the prosperity gospel – its appeal rests in advertising itself as the best vapor management scheme. It says the way to get enough is to be obedient to God’s instructions, and then we will have enough to be satisfied, nay, more than enough – we will be truly, abundantly, prosperous. Its flaw is that it peddles the lie that vapor – prosperity, money, wealth, good things – matters at all on its own. It doesn’t! It’s meaningless. It will be gone someday. It will be given to others who will mismanage it. Until what little we have is received as an expression of and container of God’s love, as a gift, then getting more doesn’t do anything for us.

Here’s the truth that the prosperity gospel twists. Once we receive what we have as gift from God’s hand, why then it’s filled with joy for us, such that we have no lust for more. And then finally, perhaps, we can be good stewards of it, and then God may entrust us with more.

But the more that God gives us will never be our source of satisfaction, and as long as that’s what we want, it won’t matter how much we have. It will all be vapor, a chasing after the wind. And so it will be taken from us, so that it can be transformed again into an expression of and container of God’s love, to be received by another who can receive it as gift.]

So if you read all the way through Ecclesiastes, you will come to Solomon’s conclusion, right at the end of the book, in chapter 12.

³Now all has been heard;

here is the conclusion of the matter:

Fear God and keep his commandments,

for this is the ⌈duty⌉ of every human being.

Fear God and keep his commandments.

The word Fear here comes from a Hebrew word meaning fear.

Huh? So our problems stem from the fact that we are afraid, and how we either cower in response to that fear or strive and claw in response to that fear. And now the solution to our fear is just another fear?

Well, yes.

Of course.

Except that this fear has a very, very different outcome.

Scarcity and futility are lies. They are the perversion of reality into unreality. They are smoke and shadow. They are less than vapor, less than meaningless. Why would we bend our ear to them? Why would we build our lives in response to them? Why would we pay them our attention? Why would we account for them in the equations of our actions. The fear of scarcity and the fear of futility drives us to death.

But God is reality’s deepest foundation. He is the Truth that undergirds all truth. He is substance. Fire and light. He is the one to whom we should bend our ear. Build our life in response to. Pay attention to. He is the one to factor into all our actions equations. The fear of Elohim – the creator of the universe – leads us to life.

Where then does wisdom come from?...It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing…God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells…And he said to the human race, “The fear of the Lord – that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.”

Job 28

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Proverbs 9:10

When we human beings are afraid, our amygdalas, the more primitive parts of our brain, hijack our frontal cortex and bend it towards the amygdala’s primitive, fear-driven purposes. [For what it’s worth, this is part of why the politics of fear are so effective …if you can make someone afraid of something, you can get them do almost anything you want, even if it’s not in their best interests.] We lose our sense of humor when we are afraid. We can’t think straight. Our memory doesn’t work very well. We have a hard time learning.

So what is God to do if he wants to rescue us fearful human beings, enslaved in fear to slave masters who are bent on our destruction?

He turns our misplaced fear towards himself, the one who loves us. So that he can arrest our attention, and begin to lead us to joy and hope. The condition in which we thrive.

Think about Jesus’ disciples out in the boat, in the storm, rowing hard and getting nowhere. Isn’t that the human condition? Surrounded by fearful things, in the dark of night. Straining so hard to get to the shore, pinning our hopes on the shore. But not getting any closer no matter how hard we try. Thinking, the problem is the storm, this wind, and these waves. If I just try a little harder, I can overcome them. I can get there, and then I can rest. Or maybe thinking, I should just give up. What’s the point? It’s all futility, failure. Let me enjoy my last moments before the waves swallow me up, at least.

And then they see Jesus out on the water, and they are frightened.

“Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

The disciples’ attention is turned from the wind and waves to Jesus – they are still afraid, perhaps even more so, or at least they are conscious of their fear for the first time, so much so that they cry out. And this is exactly what Jesus needs from them to give them life. Now he can engage with them. Show them who he really is. Invite them into a life without fear, walking on the water with him. Calming the wind and waves. Getting in their boat. Being worshipped by them – because now they are experiencing life as gift, and sure enough he gets them to the other side (immediately!), but that’s not what they care about. They just care about the fact that the Son of God is with them in their boat. That’s enough for them. They’ve got nothing to fear anymore.

All wisdom literature is designed to strengthen our trust in Yahweh. To get us to fix our eyes on him and realize that he is good. That he loves us. That he is going to provide for us. That there is no scarcity to worry about. That futility and failure aren’t valid concerns because his love isn’t conditioned on our performance. That all he wants from us is that we would trust him, depend on him, wait for him, so that he can bless us. That all he wants is for us to be free of fear so that we can enter into his love, his perfect love that drives out fear.

This is the goal of Ecclesiastes, as we see in its last verses. And yet, it spends all its energy on immersing us in an experience of meaninglessness. What’s going on?

What if the Christian life really begins by following Jesus to the cross and participating in the loss that we find there? The doubt that cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” What if that’s true faith? What if that’s where life is found? In that kind of death?

I entered 2014 unsatisfied,

and without any particular expectations of satisfaction on the horizon.

Unsatisfied with the results of my life to date.

Unsatisfied with my prospects for the future.

Unsatisfied with many of the things that felt like they mattered.

Not a pleasant place to be.

Don’t get me wrong.

I had hope in the existential sense. I knew God was good. That he delights in doing good. That he has good ahead for us. For me.

I knew I was surrounded by all sorts of good.

Good things. Good people. Good goings on.

But I didn’t know what I was supposed to be going after.

What the point of anything was, really.

It all felt pretty meaningless.

Which was strange, a bit, because I know, that basically, I’ve done as God has asked me to do. I know I’ve followed his leading, more or less, but surely on the whole, I’ve followed to this place where I found myself.

It wasn’t clear what I was supposed to be doing, now.

I mean, I know that what I am doing is a good thing.

But as I looked at my life, at God’s promises, at the things I care about

And I looked at what I could see on the horizon

The prospects for satisfaction looked bleak to me

Nothing was adding up to any form of satisfaction in the foreseeable future.

What I wanted was rescue. A particular kind of rescue. I wanted God to miraculously re-arrange the vapor in a way that looked more satisfying to me.

Have you ever been there? I can’t imagine I’m the only one.

But I think what God wants for me – and may I be so bold as to suggest, us – is true rescue. The kind that begins as we follow him to the cross. A journey that we can’t take if we are responding to the fear of scarcity. Nor one that we can take if we are responding to the fear of futility. A journey that we can only take if we are responding to the fear of the Lord. Because if we have the fear of the Lord, we won’t be afraid to stand to toe to toe with Scarcity, as Jesus did on the cross. To stand toe to toe with Futility, as Jesus did in the tomb.

This is what the teacher in Ecclesiastes is inviting us into. Into an experience where we come face to face with the loss of everything we’ve been chasing after. Dying to it. Dying to the idea that money or relationships or success or stuff or fame or people (a spouse, a child, a friend) or respect or good health or even holiness or ministry effectiveness is anything more than vapor, a chasing after the wind.

What if the only way we’ll ever be freed to receive everything as a gift from God, encountering him moment by moment with fear that gives way to peace and joy, is if we first experience the fullness of meaninglessness. If we first experience the cross of Christ that is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Everything under the sun is meaningless, says the Teacher.

But not the sun.

The sun itself has meaning, gives meaning.

The sun bathes the world in light.

Everything under the sun that can receive its light and reflect its radiance can receive meaning from it, and become meaningful because of it.

Jesus rises from the dead just before dawn on the first day of a new week. Just before the sun has had a chance to shine and give meaning to world that is now about to be filled with the living presence of God.

God is light.

God is love.

Love is meaning.

Love brings all real things into existence.

Love bathes the world in light.

Love is that which illuminates others, not herself.

Like the wind, she can be received and felt and delighted in, but never grasped.

Practical Suggestions:

1. Write down two things and bring them to communion to leave at the cross.

One thing you have not done out of fear of failure or futility. Something you really wanted to do or felt God calling you to do at some point in your life.

One thing you have chased after out of fear of scarcity, hoping that if you got enough you’d be satisfied. Money. A person. A job. Success. Popularity. Appearance. Etc.

At communion, say, “I’m done being afraid of you. God, help me to fear you instead.” Do that every day until you encounter God in that fear and feel what it is to be afraid of him.

2. Pray for one person you know locally – that you interact with monthly at least, and preferably weekly – and that isn’t, so far as you know, aware of God’s love for them. Pray that they would experience everything in their life, in an increasing way, as God’s gift to them, an expression of and container of his love.