The Sum of the Matter • Ecclesiastes 12:1-2, 8, 13-14

0:00The scripture reading is from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, chapter 12, verses 1 through 2, 8, and 13 through 14. 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 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark and the clouds return after the rain. Meaningless meaningless says the teacher, everything is meaningless. Now all has been heard. Here is the conclusion of the matter. Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil. This is God's word. Good morning again. Pretty early on in my marriage, my wife Natalie, we adopted a little rescue cat. She had been saved from a coal mine, believe it or not. My wife came home very

1:00seriously one day and sat me down. She said, we have to talk about something. I said, okay, what is it? She said, I read that we need to come up with five distinguishing features of our cat so that if she ever gets out and gets lost, we will be able to separate her from the rest of the animals in the pound. We need to be able to know that's our tabby, not some other persons. It's pretty easy because of the coal mine situation. She had a tooth knocked out and her right nostril always ran. It was just constant mucus. So if you find a snotty cat, that's ours. We came up with five distinguishing features. We even joked when we brought our son home from the hospital. Maybe we should do it. I was like, I don't think there's a pound for kids. It doesn't seem like that's really relevant. But the features conversation that we had, it was more than just how would we recognize her. It's a question of how we know one another. We are shaped a lot by things that others might regard as imperfections, things that are unique to us, not necessarily. I wouldn't call them imperfections. But maybe even in some cases scars and damage. The writer, Kormat McCarthy says, scars have the

2:07strange power to remind us that our past is real. That our past is real. It reminds us of who we are in some way, some experience that we've survived. And of course, I'm not just being literal. I'm talking about all kinds of scars, emotional scars and spiritual scars. They shape us. They shape the way we think about our life. And they shape very importantly our memory. We're going to talk about memory today. This is the final sermon in a series we're calling under the sun, the search for meaning in life. We're looking at the book of Ecclesiastes. And if you've been following along, the book of Ecclesiastes is rich. But it's also heavy. There's a lot of crying out in anguish over just how hard life can be and how sometimes it can feel so meaningless. And it's been building up to this final chapter. Here we are Ecclesiastes 12. We've heard all the depressing news. Now it's time for the good news, right? What's the answer? Right? And for the writer of Ecclesiastes, known as the co-helet in Hebrew, that means teacher or leader of the assembly.

3:10He's like a worship leader guiding us and asking these questions. We get to the end and hopefully it's not a whimper instead of a bang, but it might not be exactly what you were expecting. For this co-helet, for this teacher, for this person, meaning in life is tied to our memory, to how we remember God and when we remember God. So let's talk about that this morning. Two ways that we can understand this passage. The matter of memory and the meaning of fear. The matter of memory and the meaning of fear. To really get a sense of how chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes starts off kind of suddenly, to really get a sense of how much of a shift it is in the way we've been thinking. You just have to go one verse back, the end of 11, where the writer says this, so then banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body for use and vigor are meaningless. Youth and vigor are meaningless. That word meaningless is the Hebrew

4:11Hevel, which means vanity. It means breath or vapor. It's something that can't be held onto. And sometimes our life, we try so hard to squeeze the things that we find our meaning in. If you ever noticed how the tighter you squeeze, the more it sometimes slips through your fingers. And so if you're building your life and your identity around staying fit, and I don't just again mean literally physically fit. I'm talking about some version of yourself that you're holding onto. I can do this on my own, my youth and my vigor, but don't you all know that it doesn't last? You don't need me to tell you that. You don't need the cohoet to tell you that. Every day my son bounces up from a fall that would utterly change the future of my body. It's just part of what it means to be young. They're resilient. They bounce back. Kids are resilient. John just physically, but also emotionally. They get over it pretty quickly, sometimes. But we know as the years wear on, it's a little harder to bounce back. It's a little harder to get right. It's a little harder to straighten out the back,

5:15approach even the posture of prayer and our spiritual life. And unfortunately, what the cohoelet is saying, what the teacher is saying is he's saying, remember your creator in the days of your youth. Why that? Why the days of our youth? Why not the days of our elderly ages? The point is that when we feel strong, when we have that vigor, when life isn't quite so hard and heavy and complex, it's easy to forget that we need God. It's easy to forget that our life is not fully complete on our own strength and our own power. So what he's saying is even when the days aren't long, remember God. Even when the days don't feel overwhelmingly complex, remember God, even when you can get out of bed without groaning, remember God, remember your creator. I think some of us have this idea in our head and I certainly think I do or did that our strength

6:18can kind of be stored up, that we can kind of carry over. I'm just going to be really good on the good days. I'll just keep building myself up. And then when the bad days come out, I'll be able to get through it on my own accord, on my own strength. But have you ever experienced what I've experienced, which is no matter how rested and well you are, it doesn't take much to take all the wind out of your sales, that you can do everything in your power to prepare for those bad days. But when the time comes, not only do you not know what to do, you don't know who to turn to. And that's why memory plays such a powerful role in our spiritual life. I find this the most shocking thing about the entire conclusion of the book of Ecclesiastes. Of all the things this teacher could have said, be obedient, do good, you know, go to church every Sunday, or the synagogue, right? All the things he could have said, he said, remember that word in the Hebrew is so rich, it actually comes from an ancient Assyrian word for name, a name. So you ask yourself, how do we get from a word for name

7:25to the word for remember? Well, isn't one of the ways we remember one another through our names? Why is it that if someone forgets where you were born, you're like, oh, well, I mean, I don't expect me to remember. But if you've met them a ton and they don't remember your name, it feels personal, right? It hurts. Names they represent something of our identity. Our whole lives are shaped by what we're called and why we're called it. So to remember God, he's actually saying not just to remember God, to name God, to put it on the tip of your tongue to know who he is, not just his name, but what that name represents, that he is good, that he's worthy of trust. So this word memory is really rich. I had a professor in undergraduate. I went to a pretty small college and most classes were around 15, but this professor taught classics, ancient Greek, epic, and mythology, and these classes were packed, 50 to a class, and there was a wait list. And he would teach two sections of semester. So 100 students. And he would do the same thing every semester because I took him as

8:30much as I could. He would have everyone write down their name, their year, freshman, sophomore, whatever, and where they're from. And the second class, he would begin the class by addressing everybody, by their last name, Mr. and Miss, all 50 students. And every time he would get a standing ovation. What brings a 19 year old cynical, you know, young student? What makes them come out of their chairs and clap for a professor on the second day of his semester? It's that he knows me. He went home in 48 hours and put my name to memory. Has a power. It shapes us. And so what I'm trying to encourage is when he says, remember your creator in the days of your youth. He's saying, remember the God who made you, who knows you, who knows you by name. Remember that rich feeling even on the days where life already feels okay. Where life doesn't feel overwhelming. Get in the

9:33practice of reminding yourself that you are limited, you're finite. Life in general, we do not get stronger and healthier and better. A lot of life moves the opposite direction. We call that entropy and science. Our lives are hard. So on the days when you have the strength to acknowledge your limitations, to remember your creator, it will prepare you for those bad days better than anything else. In the church, we often call this confession. The practice of acknowledging our limitation is confession. It's saying, even on my best days, I can't do it on my own. So this is the encouragement of the writer of Ecclesiastes. Remember your creator. Remember your creator in the days of youth and vigor, but also in so doing, you will be prepared for the days of trouble. When the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, I find no pleasure in my life. Isn't that sometimes the last straw of the hardest days in weeks of our life?

10:34It's when we get to that point where we go, it's not just that it's hard. It's that I can't even imagine enjoying tomorrow. I hope you haven't experienced that, but if you have, know that humans throughout the centuries back to the BC years of the writing of Ecclesiastes, people have wondered, what do I do when the light of my life slips through my fingers? Where do I turn? The writer of Ecclesiastes says, you turn to the God who is worthy of your trust, the God who is good. And in fact, very interesting. I want to say this is the last Hebrew, but it might not be, I don't know. Trust and remember, same word, in the Psalms, Psalms 20, you will read this line, some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. That word trust is the word remember in Ecclesiastes, the car. So a paraphrase might be some, you know, when the days of trouble come, some remember the strength of chariot, some remember the strength of horses, but we remember not just the strength of

11:38God, but his very name, because he's revealed it to us. The greatest act of kindness in the old testament to me is that God says, I'm not just going to be with you, I'm going to reveal everything that I can about me, my name, and I will know you by name, and I'm inviting you into a relationship with me where we can remember one another, where we know one another. The great Tony Morrison in an essay on memory says this, I think about this a lot, probably because I live in Houston, you'll see in a minute. Occasionally, the river floods these places. Floods is the word they use, but in fact, it is not flooding, it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be, all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. You ever think about that? The world was designed in a certain way, and then we built cities, and we built concrete and infrastructure, and we redirect rivers and biuse, and they're not maybe in the way we were supposed to, and we didn't have the ecological foresight to be able to say, what happens if the

12:39water gets here, and it turns it into a bathtub, have you ever seen I-59 in the rain? You're like, it's not our river, but it wasn't supposed to be. Water is trying to get back to the natural course of who and what it is, so are we, our memory is laced with who and what we're supposed to be, but what we do instead is we are like urban planners that build infrastructure around our lives. I-you know, we forget that we need God, and we put together some strategies, we get that promotion, we start building this identity that we think will ferry us across the high waters of our life, but then we wake up one day, not only is the infrastructure not working, it's created new kinds of floods. Oh, I-I've found meaning in my work, I made my identity in my work, and then I lost my job. Hmm, I put my meaning in who I was seen as in my church or my community, and then someone saw me on a really bad day. Someone saw me in traffic. If that's where we find our meaning,

13:40we will find our lives flooding through infrastructures, we did not know we were building, but in the same way that that water is trying to find its way back to its source, to its riverbed, or lakebed, to its original place, so too is our being laced with reminders of the Creator that made us. This is exactly what Paul is saying in his letter to the Romans. When he says, since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what, what has been made, what has been created. First and foremost, us, the divine image bearers of his being. So when Paul says, he understood from what has been made, he says, remember your Creator. Remember that you are his creation. Remember when the flood waters rise, that you were never meant to be left in the flood. That God is a God who is working out all things for your good.

14:43Memory is a powerful force in shaping our faith. But then there's another part to the story. It's not just the matter of memory and the way that memory is a form of trust, but also at the very end of this passage, at the very end of the book of Ecclesiastes, the last two verses, he says, here it is. It's about fear. And that gets a little complicated for us. Before I even dive in, after the first service this morning, someone came up to me and they said, I have always struggled with the meaning of fear God in the Bible. I said, well, was that helpful? And they said, no, not really. I said, okay, yeah, no, I mean, I appreciated the honesty. It was very graciously shared. And the temptation is to go back there and be like, okay, so fear is going to be just not enough time. So I can't promise it's going to be satisfying, but I'm going to try. But fear is one of those concepts in Scripture. If you have any church hurt, if you have any past experience with religious trauma or the ways that some people can leverage fear to get you to behave

15:45a certain way, then fear can feel very fraught, very loaded. But I want to argue and I want to suggest that is not the kind of fear that the writer is writing about. It's about a healthy fear. It's about a different kind of fear than we have in English. So let's talk finally about the meaning of that fear. Youth is an interesting way that the youth shape this passage, remember your career in the days of your youth. When I think about youth, I think about a fearlessness. There is a way in which kids have to learn some hard lessons to build up their fear. And so sometimes even in our adolescence or our teen years, we think the youth and the vigor is going to last forever. We think life is just going to unfold before us like a red carpet, but that is not always the case. The bard himself, Shakespeare, he says in Hamlet, laertes is comforting his sister Ophelia, who's the love interest of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark. And he's a little suspicious of Hamlet. He thinks his sister is going to

16:47get hurt. And he says this, be wary then best safety, lies in fear, youth to itself rebels though none else near. I love Shakespeare. Even I was like, I'm not Google this one, I don't know exactly what's being said. So you're not alone if you feel that way. Youth to itself rebels is a phrase meaning youth doesn't need an outside influence. When we are young and impressionable, temptation can come on its own accord. We don't need others outside. So youth can just rebel on its own. That's one thing. So because of that awareness, laertes advice is the best way to be safe in life is to have a degree of healthy fear, best safety, lies in fear. I think there's a way in which the writer of Ecclesiastes is echoing that sentiment. Or rather, Shakespeare is echoing Ecclesiastes. Here's how the writer puts it at the end. Now all has been heard. Here is the conclusion of the matter, the sum of the matter. Hold your breath. We're going to get all the answers we've been longing for.

17:49Fear God and keep His commandments. For this is the duty of all mankind. It's okay if it feels like a letdown. It's okay if you're thinking, I don't know what that means. And it does sound intense and a little hard to understand how to put it into practice. There's a little bit of wordplay here because the word all, this is the conclusion of the matter, all has been heard. That word all is actually what he says at the end. For this is the all of mankind. The word duty is not in the text. We provide the word duty in a translation because we want people to understand that's what is being implied here. But the entirety of our lives, what it means to be human is in some way to learn a healthy fear of God. And I want to call that healthy fear. I want to call it trust. So to the person who was wondering, I'm still looking for a definition. We can argue about this. You can at me. You can email me. You can stop me afterwards. But I want to suggest

18:51that part of what the writer is saying is trust God and keep His commandments. Because a healthy fear knows that life outside the walls of our safe little existence is fraught with danger. And what God wants is he wants to redirect all the fears that occupy our mind and put them in one place called himself. This is exactly what the coheleth, the writer, is saying only a few verses earlier. He describes what happens when we're overrun by fear. He says when people are afraid of heights and of change and of dangers in the street, when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no longer is stirred. It's a beautiful phrase. Even that phrase, almond tree blossoms, have you ever seen an almond tree blossom? It's actually gray and white leaves that shoot out of the almond tree. So this is an ancient Hebrew expression for when your hairs grow gray and when you get older and you start to lose maybe that hair. And so he's saying there is so

19:55much that can fill our minds with fear. It could be dangers in the street. In our moment, maybe it's just our culture. Maybe we don't worry about roving bands of pirates in Houston. But maybe we're looking at our digital, anxious age. Maybe we're trying to navigate being parents. Maybe we're trying to navigate a changing workforce. And there's just so much uncertainty and it's just that's all the fear we can muster. And what that does is it crowds out God. In some ways, it's fear can shake our trust. Right? And so if we have the right trust, the trust in God, that can be a form of healthy fear. And so after all these things that the writer is telling us about, all the things that we end up getting frustrated about, the dead ends, the meanings, the pursuits of meaning that don't end up coming to fruition. He says one last time as he said many times before, meaningless, meaningless as the teacher, everything is meaningless. Can you relate to this? Do you ever just have a day

20:58where you go meaningless, meaningless? Yesterday, my dad's football team, I watched a college football game, his team, our team got beat 45 to nothing and someone texted and said, I'm so sorry. And I said meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. I'm going through a season in my life. I've got a toddler and we're talking about just figuring out how to like discipline, correct, and reading books about conscious discipline and gentle parenting and all these things. And I read this thing the other day and I said, I got it. I figured it out. I know how I'm going to respond next time. I got an opportunity 30 minutes later and it didn't work at all. And I walked out of his room going, meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Perhaps you are in a season of work where you have the memory of when it was better, which is hard. That's a version of a scar on our imaginations. And you have a day in the office where you walk out the door and you go meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. So what this is, what I want you to hear is that this is normal. I feel like a therapist. What

22:03you're feeling is normal, but that the holy words of God's scripture gives voice to those frustrations. You're allowed to say, boy, does this feel meaningless? And as a side plug, if you are in a season of work and trying to balance integrating your faith and purpose and meaning, we have a work reimagined cohort that is starting in a couple of weeks. You heard about that earlier, but just put it in your ear. I think what has to happen in order for us to have the healthy fear I'm describing is that we have to hold intention, God's perfect power with His perfect goodness. And that goodness is not just for believing people. Here's how the Psalms puts it. The Lord is good to all. He has compassion on all He has made. Notice not the Lord is good to those who attend three out of four Sundays. The Lord is good to those who believe in Him. The Lord is good to those who trust Him or who fear Him. The Lord is good to all. Full stop. So if you're in a season where you don't know what

23:08you believe, if the idea of fearing God feels very intense, maybe the first question is, is this God you're talking about good? And I would love to tell you and defend that point and I will that this God is good. Worthy of our trust. And so when we fear Him with a healthy fear, it's not a fear of what God might do if He's mad at us. It's actually this. It's the fear of not having Him in our life. What if instead of the fear of Him, it's the fear of not having Him? Just a question. The hardest thing about faith, the hardest thing about trust is that it's faith. It requires suspending some of our relentless energy that we orient toward the empirical and the data-minded, right? It requires a degree of suspending or holding intention or desire to know. We just want

24:10to know. Don't we? Wouldn't it just be nice? I can't tell you what's happening 30 minutes from now, much less 30 years from now. The great writer, Windleberry, passed away this week at 92, a Christian writer. He says this, one cannot know enough to trust. To trust is simply to give oneself. The giving is for the future for which there is no evidence. That may sound a little bit extreme and reminded, remind, remind, do he's a Christian writer, but he's saying that there is a degree to which when we look at the future, we don't have evidence of what's coming, but we give ourselves that future if and only if we can trust the God who is authoring that future. That is the challenge of the book of Ecclesiastes. At the end of all these pursuits, when we feel the meaningless mount and the purposelessness comes to its point and we want to have a clear answer, many of us want more knowledge. But what the book says is that knowledge will not sustain you, only trust will.

25:17Knowledge will not give you the answers you long for. You might want a PhD in the spiritual life, but degrees only go so far. Trust me. You have to hand yourself over to the author of your story, the creator. Remember him in the days that are good, the days that are simple, but remember him in the days that are complex as well. Remember him when all of your best laid plans come to nothing, and remember him when you had no plan at all and it seemed to work out because he is a good God. And at the end of the question, this note that Ecclesiastes ends on says, fear God, keep us commandments, and maybe you are still seeing they are going, but like I would like some evidence. Well, I have got really good news. He has given us the best evidence imaginable in the person of his son, the work of Jesus Christ, who came and tasted the meaningless pursuits of a human life, who understood the vanity and the vapor and the breath of all of our

26:19restless pursuits. And he tasted even of the most meaningless thing of all death itself, which was never meant to be. And when he tasted that, we get to taste eternity. We get to know that God is good, that our future is safe with him, because he would give up the thing most precious to him, to bring us to himself. Let that be a theme that we bring into our most painful days, but also remember every day that we live. Let's pray. God, your goodness is not only worth remembering, it should be the song of our hearts, that when the days do grow long and when the almond tree blossoms and desire and pleasure are hard to find, when we don't know where our future is going, we know where your future is going. You are a God bringing perfect justice, perfect beauty, perfect glory, and we get a glimpse of that in the person and work of your son,

27:20Jesus, and it's in his name we pray. Amen.