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Text: Ecclesiastes
1:2, A Lasting
Achievement In the
name of Jesus, dear brothers and sisters in Christ: I’m be willing to bet that most of you here today have prepared
and have on file somewhere a Last Will and Testament. It’s a good and responsible thing to have
because it helps ensure that when you are gone, your wealth, your assets, and
all the various family heirlooms you have will end up in the hands of those you
have designated. Without a will spelling
out your intentions, these decisions are left up to the state, and also very
often to heirs who usually have conflicting ideas about who should inherit
what. You probably know families that
have been thrown into turmoil – brothers, sisters, sometimes grandchildren –
becoming bitter enemies because someone died without a will, or because there
was a will, but it was incomplete, out of date, or thought (at least by some)
to be unfair. And so, like I said, a
current will is a very good thing to have.
Of course, it’s less important when you’re young, relatively unattached,
and haven’t yet accumulated much in the way of worldly wealth; but there comes
a point in most people’s lives, once you’ve begun to acquire property and other
assets, and “significant others” – a spouse, children, and so forth, when you
begin to think about how you want your estate distributed in the event of your
death. Sooner or later, the old truth,
“You can’t take it with you” hits home, and you begin to take stock of what you
will leave behind, and to whom you want to leave it. And the more you
accomplish and acquire in your life, the more important this becomes. A person who has been very successful, built
up a business, say, taking it from nothing but an
idea, and who through lots of determination, hard work, self sacrifice, and
wise planning, creates a thriving, profitable enterprise, wants to ensure that
his or her life’s work will not be lost.
You can’t take it with you, but you would like it to be that there was
some way to guarantee that those who inherit the fruit of your labor will at
least appreciate and continue to build upon it.
And so we might put certain stipulations in our wills to try to continue
to control the result of our work even when we’re gone. There are many ways to do this, but a simple
example for someone with minor dependents may be to decree that certain funds
are to be held in trust, to be used only for education, until the heirs reach a
certain age. It’s an effort to ensure
that the estate won’t be squandered away on sports cars and fancy clothes by
someone too young to be fully responsible; but more than that, it’s an example
of how we all want to guarantee that our life’s work will endure and continue
to be useful. But the sad truth is
that you can’t do that either. We all
know of cases in which the accumulated achievements of successful entrepreneurs
all came to naught soon after their deaths despite their best efforts to ensure
that it wouldn’t happen. It happens with
businesses, corporations, kingdoms, farms, and even churches – those who work
so hard to build something end up having to hand it over to others who
eventually lose it. Sometimes (very
often) it’s due to the foolish mishandling of what they’ve been given. Other times it’s due to circumstances beyond
their control: like war, natural
disasters, or changing conditions in the world and market that make what was
once a viable enterprise (or nation) no longer so. The bottom line is that you cannot control
the future or the actions of your heirs, so it’s likely that after you’re gone,
maybe immediately or maybe within a couple generations, everything you’ve
accomplished will be lost. That’s what King Solomon
is lamenting in today’s Old Testament lesson from the book of Ecclesiastes. This fascinating book is a record of
Solomon’s quest to find the meaning and purpose of life – and as you read
through it, you discover that as wise as he is, he can’t seem to find the
answer. He says as much in the opening
lines: “Vanity of vanities, says the
preacher, vanity of vanities. All is
vanity …” Sometimes
the same phrase is translated with the word meaningless
or emptiness instead of vanity.
The Hebrew word that Solomon uses there actually means “breath” or
“vapor”. The idea is that in this life
there is nothing to hold on to, nothing that really lasts … everything you try
to capture eventually slips away between your fingers. And as Solomon pursues
the question of the meaning of life, he goes from one possibility to the
next. “Maybe life is about enjoying
pleasures”, he thinks, “or maybe it’s about attaining wisdom, or acquiring
wealth, or power, or fame …”
So he tries each one in succession, throwing himself body and
soul into each possibility. With each
attempt he comes up short of the answer he was looking for. Pleasures grow tiresome. After some time every novelty wears off. Wisdom has its limits; and no matter how
smart and educated you are, there’s no way to avoid ending up in the same place
as all the fools: six feet under in the
grave. Wealth also has its allurements. But they don’t last, and in the end it too
fails to bring the happiness it promises.
And so it goes with everything.
Nothing Solomon tries brings him the lasting peace and satisfaction he
seeks. That’s why he comes to the
conclusion that all things “under the sun” are ultimately futile and
meaningless. In the section we heard
read, Solomon wrote of trying to find the meaning of life in work and human
accomplishment. “Maybe”, he thought,
“our lives are about what we achieve”.
And so he set out to do great things.
And though we’ve already heard his final judgment about this possibility
– that it’s not the answer – it’s worth noting that we live in a culture,
indeed, most of us have assimilated the values of this culture,
that holds that what you do with your life, what you achieve, is
the measure of your human worth. For example, we usually
define ourselves by what we do. We say,
“I am a pastor, or farmer, or carpenter, or teacher, or parent, or whatever.” What we are saying is: “I am what I do.” And we all know people who are almost
entirely consumed in their work. To some
degree, it’s safe to say all of us are.
When we are young, the question we ask ourselves is, “Will I be a
success?” And then we spend the rest of
our lives evaluating our progress, specifically measuring it by the standards
of our chosen fields of work. A
businessman measures it by the amount of money he makes. It’s not necessarily that he’s greedy or
materialistic; it’s how he keeps score.
It’s how he determines, “Am I successful?” In a pastor’s line of work, it’s often
measured by how big is the church, how many new members come
in, and what percentage of the congregation shows up on a Sunday
morning. Other fields have their own
standards of measuring “success”. And
it’s interesting to me that in our culture, being “good at what you do” is more important than just about any other quality. These days it is not uncommon to hear people
say of even the highest office holders, “I don’t care what kind of morally
bankrupt man he is, he’s doing a good job.” And today Solomon says,
“So what? So what if I break my back
sweating and working to accomplish great things? So what if I change the world with my wisdom
and skill? It won’t help me; I’ll be
gone. And the fruits of my labors are
going to fall into the hands of people who do not appreciate them because they
haven’t had to do the work. As a result,
nothing I’ve done will last.” And so
Solomon comes to the point where he says he hates his work. The daily grind of trying to get ahead
becomes drudgery to him because he realizes it’s all ultimately in vain. And I want to stress here that it’s not that
there’s anything wrong with working and doing a good job – that’s a good thing,
just as wisdom, and pleasure, and fame and fortune are good things; the mistake
is trying to find the meaning and purpose of life in such things, because none
of them will last. Well, perhaps it was
prophetic insight, or perhaps it was because he knew his son’s character pretty
well, but it turns out that Solomon’s assessment of the situation was right
on. The kingdom Solomon inherited from
his father, David, was war weary, economically depressed, and fairly unstable. But when Solomon took the reins, he poured
his heart and soul into making the nation flourish. Wealth streamed in, magnificent civil projects
were built to include many palaces and, most notably, the spectacular And as I thought about
that, it occurred to me that even the achievements of God are doomed to pass
away. When Solomon writes of pouring his
knowledge and skill into his work, only to hand it over to fools who would lose
it … well, it sounds like something God could have said of his own work of
creation. What greater or more glorious
work has ever been done than the creation of the physical universe? What infinite wisdom and skill went into that
work? And what greater fools than we
have ever received – and lost – so great an inheritance? If Solomon found his work to be a let down,
imagine how God felt about losing his.
But because of our sin, both the sin of our first parents and our own
individual guilt, everything God has created, every work of God that you see
all around you, is going to pass away.
It’s no wonder that no human achievement can last. How can we expect it to, when even everything
God has done will be lost too? Except one thing. There is one achievement that will last
forever. And because there is only one
thing that will last, if we are looking for the enduring meaning and purpose of
life, then our only hope of finding it is in that one achievement that will
last forever. What is it? Strangely enough, even though it’s our sin
that caused everything to be undone, it is the task of the sinner
that will endure for all eternity. How’s
that? We read in the text, “To the one
who pleases him, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the sinner
he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give it to the
one who pleases God.” There it
is: the sinner’s job is to toil in pain
and grief, and to find no rest in his anxious struggle, to work until he drops,
and then hand over all he has earned to those who please God. I refer, of course, to the work Jesus Christ
accomplished when he suffered the consequences of our sin upon the cross. As the Scriptures say, “He who knew no sin
became sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God.” His work upon the cross as the
Sinner, his death, burial, and resurrection for us, is the only achievement
that has ever been done that will last forever.
It is the one accomplishment that bridges the gap between time and
eternity. Though the whole work of
creation will pass away, the work of Christ on the cross will remain, and upon
it the new creation will be founded. That’s why if we are
looking for meaning and purpose in life, the only place to look for it is on
the cross. And what we will find there
is a treasure greater than anything we could have imagined. We will find that our lives are really all
about God’s great love for us as so clearly displayed in the price he paid to
redeem us. We will find too that our
lives, the lives that will endure forever, are something we inherit because of
the Lord Jesus’ Last Will and Testament.
He gave up his life for us, so that the life we live now is his – the
one he gave us when he died. It is the
life he continues to give us in his Word that endures forever, and in the
Sacrament of his Last Testament in which he gives us the fruit of his
labor: the body broken and the blood
shed to cleanse us from sin. When we have this understanding of the purpose and meaning of life,
everything else falls into perspective.
God’s good gifts of work, and wisdom, and pleasure, and wealth, and
family relationships, and friends, and whatever else we pursue can be enjoyed
precisely because they are not our reason for existence. They are gifts God gives us because he loves
us in Christ. That’s our
foundation. What’s more, because the
work of Christ on the cross will endure forever, anything we build upon that
achievement will also last. Our work
done in Christ Jesus, the lives we help bring to him, the wisdom we learn in
him, the love we share because of him – all these things will also last
forever. So let’s
make it our goal to build on this lasting achievement, so that, as Soli Deo Gloria! |
