A Letter to the Church on Swiss
Kevin McGill, a bond servant of Jesus Christ, to all the pilgrims of Jesus Christ who are on Swiss Ave, including the core group leaders. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Dear brothers and sisters. You are my blessing in human form. My cousins and aunts and crazy uncles. You are my children, mother and father, my niece and nephew. You are my family tree.
Before I continue with our study through Ecclesiastes, I want you to hear a song that I have fallen in love with. It is from the album, Amelie. This particular song speaks of a person struggling with the great world around us and its many pressures. The singer knoss that life is about holding fast to one’s convictions while enjoying the daily life, but part of him longs to break free of personal conscience and join the kings and queens of this world, living with them in the Alps of Affluence.
But on another level, the music plays as if in a circus. We are the evenings entertainment, convincing ourselves and others that we are great characters in the three-ring circus of life. And for only ten cents, you too can take delight in the greatness that is “Kevin McGill.” And by talent alone, he will take you to other worlds, stars, heaven itself! But at night, we sink into despondency because we all feel like nothing more than circus freaks, stuck in our own sideshows.
Les Jours Tristes by Yann Tiersen:
I am writing to you from Crooked Tree off of Routh St and Mckinney Ave. Last we spoke, I told you that I would share what the Spirit revealed to me in Ecclesiastes. This is that letter.
Having studied, prayed and read the book of Ecclesiastes, my first revelation to you is this:
I’m an idiot.
What have I gotten myself into? You have to understand. When I sat down to study the book of Ecclesiastes, I had intended to mine the riches of God, and present them to you from my lofty, Spirit-ordained stool. I didn't sign up for this! As most people who dare to teach God’s precepts learn, God will put us through that which we dare to teach. I dared to teach Ecclesiastes, a book that questions the meaning of life on Earth. Two-and-half weeks ago, I cracked open my gold lined NASB, and God responded by cracking open my pride, leading me through my own personal crisis. Questions began spilling out. Questions about my life as a pastor, ministry, the church and the nationwide appeal of crocs (seriously, I asked a shoe salesman why crocs were such a big deal. They’re jelly shoes for adults! He nodded, and then said, “You see, they’re a status symbol. If you want to be someone Kevin, you need to buy a pair. I promptly bought two). Since the book of Ecclesiastes is about the questions of life, Those questions are the rest of my letter.
Ecclesiastes 1 – Meaningless? Meaningless? Everything is meaningless? The earth. World history. My job. Me. Everything! I’m uncomfortable with this phrase, especially in light of the gospel and how it is supposed to give life meaning, so I look up other interpretations of this word. Thank goodness that “havel”, the Hebrew word for meaningless can be interpreted other ways. Here are other delightful options: worthlessness, emptiness, fleeting, fraud, futile, and vapor. Nice. Vapor, now that’s an interesting one. I do a quick word study and find that Solomon uses other word pictures dealing with “breath” and “wind” in Ecclesiastes (review 2:11). I then check with some other scholars I respect and find that vapor is a better translation. But I begin to realize that this doesn’t help. Now I’m vapor, steam, a breath. I’m a spritz, a cough. But wait, what about imago dei? The theological belief built on Gen 1-3 that I am made in the image of God? Solomon even says, “God has set eternity in our hearts” (Eccl 3:11). I’m a sneeze made in the image of God? Still not helpful. But as I think more about it, it’s obvious that my pride is attached to the fact that I want to be set apart - not regarding God, but regarding his creation. It should be enough that I am made in his image, vapor or dirt clod. But it isn’t. I want to be significant regarding my time on planet Earth. I want my career, my marriage, my friendship, my life to be worth something! I want the waitress to remember my order when I say, water no ice! I want to be feared and respected. But Solomon comments on this too. He says that this is chasing the wind in Eccl 2:11. Interesting. I am wind, chasing wind. If this is Solomon’s answer to the self-help book, we are all in trouble. So, the question is – can I make this meaningless life meaningful?
I push through - actually, I slosh through the passage. Immediately, I recognize different people trying to say the same thing. Sometimes Solomon is an ambitious king trying to grasp life by the tailpipe. Sometimes he is a critical sage meting out wisdom without consequence. And sometimes he is the everyday man, seeing the sadness of his fellow workers being subjugated under the taskmaster. And with each personality, we are swung back and forth on a three point pendulum. Seething, he tells us life is meaningless in chapter 1. He then tells us that God has burdened us, because he will not allow us to have satisfaction in our ambitions in 1:13 and 6:2. But then he reminds us that the gift he has given us is food, drink and the capacity to enjoy our work that is before us, if we so desire (3:13). He has given us the gift of life, of “today”.
As I continue to read, I ask myself, where is it’s shape? As it must have become obvious to you, Ecclesiastes is a mess. It’s not really poetry, nor is it narrative, it’s not even necessarily wisdom literature. The scholar from Union Theological Seminary, William Brown says, “Not surprisingly, a coherent and tidy literary structure is distinctly lacking in Ecclesiastes. Attempts by scholars at delineating a clear structure through numerical analysis, polar structures, redactional levels, or concentric rings have proved largely unsuccessful.”
In short, scholars would rather take a ball-pen hammer to the head than try to outline Ecclesiastes.
It lacks the smooth, buttery logic of Paul, or the three course meal with morality for dessert of the narrative gospels. But most surprisingly, it is not a cup of coffee, bold and obvious like the Proverbs . Yes, it is the sphinx of the Hebrew bible, the unsolved riddles of history and life. But it does have shape, just different than what we are used to. Ecclesiastes writes like the ocean tide. It swells with despair, crashes into sobriety, then recedes in a quiet rush of hope. And eventually, the tide pulls the ocean from the shore, revealing its wisdom by that brilliant statement, “fear God”.
Continuing, Ecclesiastes is truth, mixed and mashed together with life from the lips of a leader. Why does this make me so uncomfortable?I don’t want my leaders to be honest, I want them to be right. I don’t want them to tell me how they feel, I want them to tell me what to do. Even growing up, I didn’t want to know that my father might be weak because that would mean I was born of weakness. But maybe that is exactly what we need right now. The economy has failed us once again and so has our leadership. More so, life has only gotten more difficult for a number of us in our church. If you don’t know by now, there are two prerequisites to joining Church on Swiss. Lose your job, or become deathly ill and have to be admitted to a nearby hospital. It’s then I realize, If mankind could write a journal, it would be Ecclesiastes. Truly, I believe that God loves us so much that he makes sure that at least one book of the Bible recognizes how messy and frustrating life can become. This would make sense, since we know that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.” (Hebrews 4:4)
According to Rabbinic tradition, Solomon wrote Song of Solomon in his youth, Proverbs in his prime, and Ecclesiastes in his old age. This would also make sense. Passion for youth, exactitude for middle age and a sober honesty for the elder years. Yet, the elder Solomon doesn’t keep his wisdom for his lounging geriatric buddies. He turns his words to the youth, to us. We have so much going for us: ambition, dreams, drive. We chase after love in potential marriage partners, influence in our careers, and affirmation in friendship. But the one thing we do not understand is how to live with the inner-man or woman. We do not know how to live with the honest, raw words of our soul which is meant to keep us true and good. So we lock that person away. Now, it’s not that the inner-man or woman doesn’t ever get out. Like my ancestors a 100 years ago – the slaves of the south, the inner-man does escape and runs away. When he gets out, we chase him down, fight with and then lock him away in heavier chains. But maybe he wouldn’t cause so much trouble if we simply set him free and allowed him to work along side of us as he should.
This letter was not about answers, not really. As Solomon makes us wait patiently, dig deeply for the answers, so will we. But this letter is about stopping and looking into the mirror of the inner-man or woman. Tonight is about being honest with self and asking, "What am I chasing?" Ambition? Relationships? Pain unresolved? And then letting my community peer inside and tell me what they see.
OK. Maybe I do have one answer. Consider this. Ecclesiastes 2:11 tells us that our ambitions of life are “chasing the wind”. Chasing the wind in Hebrew would be varut ruach. That word, Ruach is not just a word for wind, it is also the word for the Spirit. Check Genesis 1. Maybe it’s not so much that we are chasing the wind, maybe it’s we are chasing the wrong wind? Maybe we should be chasing the Spirit-wind? Even better, maybe we should let the Spirit chase us like a sail boat, letting Him blow us in the direction He wants us to go?
Live the life God gives. Love one another. Prays for all the saints of the church. Remember me and the other servants of Church on Swiss as we continue to pour ourselves out for you and others. Tell Steve I want my book back. That guy never returns my stuff. Tell Matthew I want my pride back. He beat me at NBA all-star jam for Xbox three times in a row.
The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.
What are you chasing?
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