The section we are looking at today, is by far what Ecclesiastes is best known for - the preacher’s personal search for meaning and value in this world. It is such a pivotal and provocative section that some interpreters of Ecclesiastes never get beyond it and interpret the entire book through the themes of this chapter. I don’t go that far, but I will say personally, that the argument and the experience set forth in this chapter are convincing to me, so convincing to me that it has carried me through my own seasons of doubt or times in which I have been tempted to give up my faith.
I want to start today by talking about dishes. You may think, what do dishes have to do with Ecclesiastes. You may know that Ecclesiastes is one of the most philosophical and complex books of the Bible, but I’m starting out the beginning of the series by telling you it's about dishes. See, here is the mystery of dishes. Think about the dishes in your home. You wash them everyday, every meal. You prepare the water, the soap, the sponge; set your dirty dishes in order, wash them, scrub them, rinse them; set them in the drying rack, wipe down the counter, the sink; set the soap and the sponge back in their designated places. And then you leave the room for a minute - and come back to find more dirty dishes in the sink! Where did they come from? How did they get there? And guess what: they will be there tomorrow and the next day and everyday of your meaningless life! And that’s an exaggeration - your life isn’t meaningless … but it will feel meaningless because you spend it all doing dishes! How much time do you spend doing dishes? Well, according to a study in “Changing Rhythms of American Family Life”, the average American woman spends 66 minutes a week doing dishes, the average American man 42 minutes. What is funny is that when they asked men and women how much they thought they did dishes, women said 5 1/2 hours and men 2 hours 40 minutes! So we don’t actually spend all that much time doing dishes - it just feels like we do! And if it is not dishes, its laundry, or commuting, or shopping, or changing kids diapers, or sitting at your desk doing the daily grind, or scrolling and scrolling and surfing and scrolling, whatever, so many tedious things that need to be done every day, just to live. How many times have you woken up with amazing plans of what to do today, and then past through the day and wonder what you did?
Whenever I’m trying to figure out our next sermon series I reflect back on conversations I’ve had with you and I brainstorm notes. Some of the topics I wrote down on that reflection were things like, dealing with the monotony of life, finding my purpose, struggling with anxiety or a feeling that I am missing out, what’s God’s point in putting me in a dead end job, how do I redeem the moments of my life and live for something greater, what do I do about these doubts and hard questions that creep in at night - these were all things I jotted down and as I reflected on them, as often happens, a book of the Bible came into focus and I realize that it addresses head-on many of the topics and issues that I had written down. And so that brings us to the Book of Ecclesiastes. For Ecclesiastes teaches us how to deal with the dish-iness of life. Today I want to just look at the first few verses, and really get to the question that the Preacher raises:
As I’ve already said, as Christians we receive as one the benefits of knowing God, the assurance that the universe has a purpose, that life has meaning and that our individual and collective lives are being lived in fulfillment of God’s intent for us. “We are,” the scripture says, “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Yet its not only the sense of overriding meaning and purpose that God gives to our lives, but also, as we are part of the Body of Christ, we become part of God’s mission in the world, to exalt his Son Jesus Christ in every corner of the globe, and to seek and save a people for himself from every nation. He shares this mission with His Son, when He sent Him into the world, and His Son then shares that same mission with us: “As the Father has sent me”, He said, so now i send you”, and in the very first chapter of the book of Acts, the book we’ve been studying, Jesus gathered the disciples around him and told them, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to all the ends of the earth.” So we, the church, the called out people of God, are given not only a purpose, but a mission.
The first major section of Acts was to set in front of us the Jerusalem church as a model church, a church for all ages. The second major section of Acts was to demonstrate for us the new people that God is calling us to become, a church for all people. This section is not focused around a specific church or a specific city, but the focus of these chapters is the mission itself - we now see the church fulfilling the words of Jesus that we will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.
