kingdom come

 Hooray! The book of Ecclesiastes!

That's one of those books that even Non-Christians will grudgingly say 'yeah, that one's okay.' It doesn't hurt that the Byrds wrote a banger of a song with the text of Ecclesiastes as the lyrics.  It's one of those books that it's always good for people to discover, and to rediscover. To find it again as though for the first time. 

And Here in the book of Ecclesiastes, it presents you with some weight from the preacher. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. Yes it is. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of men to be busy with. All is vanity and a striving after wind.

This gets to a pretty significant problem with the modern world, which casually and deliberately dropped meaning out of the conversation. That is, at a certain point we all agreed that being religious was like wearing chainmail, in that people didn't really do it anymore, and that led to a pretty interesting conclusion. If there's no God, and no paradise, and nothing around at all, then what's the deal with any of it? Why bother with anything?

And the thought was that we would be perfectly fine finding meaning within ourselves, etc etc, but in reality, that didn't really take off to the extent that it was supposed to. Atheist meeting houses that were built on the broken backs of churches posited a world where people would gather, sing Monty Python songs, and hear humanist messages about greatness and meaning, but it didn't catch on. Instead, a horrible, creeping, numbing apathy came in where people realized, as the preacher does in Ecclesiastes, that it's all chasing after the wind, you know. 

That's a pretty big problem - you're not catching that wind, it's not going to happen. So you're left with the horrible, terrifying reality that meaning has left the building, and it's not going to be recoverable.

Nietzsche fumbled through the death of God hypothesis, and unlike a lot of modern thinkers on the subject, worked out fairly rapidly that if the Christian basis for a worldview evaporated, then the Christian morals, ethics and nature of the worldview could not be retained. That is, you can't toss God out, and keep the rest intact. It all goes. He was concerned overall that if we abandoned God, as we seem to have done in the Enlightenment, then we would end up in crippling nihilism. Sure, there was the possibility that people would rise to being supermen, but the far greater concern was that we would find ourselves adrift permanently on uncharted seas that went nowhere.  And folks, you are here.

 

 

Now, something that is extremely important to learn is that you, as a human, are by and large standing on the shoulders of giants. A lot of people have done a lot of discovering to find a lot of things out that you yourself don't have to learn. The book of Ecclesiastes has worked this out for you, you know. It has gone to a lot of effort to parse through that very problem that meaningless has crept into everything, then  asks the very important question of where to find meaning after that.

 

For it is a great truth that when you drop the essential core view out, then everything else topples along with it. And you're going to be left with the disaster that is what remains, which is the trappings and nothing else. But I want you to think about the core teaching of the Christian faith - forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. I want you to think about how if you give someone a cup of water in the name of Christ that you've done something. The world you live in was carved out by generations and generations of people who lived lives quietly filled with deep meaning - where they had worked out that because God lives, everything that they do matters, and everything they do is of cosmic importance. Sure, the James Webb space telescope may show glimpses of far off dead galaxies from thousands of years ago, but your simple acts of grace and charity, of love and care, matter so much more because of the impact of what happens when you do them. If you are polite, kind, generous, and gracious to those around you, you are being kind and gracious to people who are going to last forever. For eternity. And that means that you're not chasing after the wind, or looking for meaning by running in a circle. you can find meaning right around you right now.