Sermon for the Last Sunday after Trinity

Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

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In the summer of 2007, I drove with my dad from Boston, Massachusetts to Seattle, Washington en route to California to begin my training for ordination. I had lived in New England for the better part of six years by this point, on my own, and I rarely had passaengers in my car.

So, when the unfamiliar presence of my father met my perhaps too-heavy reliance on habit, my backpack, containing my laptop holding the entirety of my work from my undergraduate years, including my honours thesis and countless pieces of creative work, ended up on the roof of the car, instead of resting safely on the front passenger seat where it would usually have gone.

And so it was that, as I accelerated onto Interstate 90, which in due course, via the 80 and the 5, would take me to San Francisco to begin my studies to become a priest, my first words on the journey were unrepeatable here, as I saw my backback slip off the car roof onto the pavement to be instantly run over by a following van.

Six years of writing, some of it pretty decent, destroyed in an instant.

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Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

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I would wager that most everyone in this room is at least a little ambitious. Wants to make something that will last. Whether that is a family or a great deal of money, a vaccine or a brokered peace between enemies, or a novel or a monograph or a discovery that might change the way that we look at the world, we want to know that what we do will have a future beyond ourselves.

And to all of these things, the writer of Ecclesiastes says, All is vanity.

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I come from a triumphalist country. We spend a great deal of time talking about how special America is, and it is taken for granted that the American experiment has a providential destiny to make the world a better, or at the very least when we are honest, a more American place.

This is a narrative with an end-point, a goal to which we are working: an achievement to be reached and claimed at some future date. This mythos underwrites much of how my fellow Americans imagine and talk about ourselves and others — we assume that by hard work and, to a lesser extent, clean living, the world will be made safer and better, inexorably, into the future.

And so it is very difficult for my American ears to hear the writer of Ecclesiastes say that none of this matters. That all will become *hevel* — vanity, useless, vapour, breath on the wind.

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This may be why I have always found one line of Tolkien’s great novel The Lord of the Rings so disturbing and so moving:

Speaking to the hobbits, Galadriel says, ‘… the Lord of the Galadrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings. He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted; … and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.’

How, in a book of such heroic vision, can one speak of a long defeat? It certainly did not work with Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, as he refashioned the tale into a tight narrative of adventure and heroic deeds.

But the vision of history as a long defeat is anything but pessimistic, and it gives us a key to open the seemingly bleak vision of Ecclesiastes.

Tolkien’s elves have spent years uncounted working against an evil that they doubt they will ever overcome, and this renders each act of defiance against the darkness that much more precious — each act of valour or kindness or generosity which saves even one life for some time is valuable in and of itself.

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Tolkien, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, took it for granted that all that is has its being in and from God who is full of loving kindness for all things.

It is in this context that all things come and go, shine brightly and pass away. Elsewhere, the writer of Ecclesiastes famously observes that to everything there is a season: a time to be born, a time to die, a time to sow and a time to reap, and on and on.

From our limited vantage, things enter and leave an ever-moving present.

Now we make, and now it passes away. Now we work, and now we rest. Now we study and learn, and now we fall in love, and now we are given the opportunity to be kind, to save a life, to allow ourselves to be saved by another.

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Hevel, vanity, can also be translated as breath.

Just as a breath is insubstantial and disappears the moment is passes from our bodies, it is nevertheles the means by which we continue our living. Though each breath enters our bodies only to leave again, without this succession of vaporous, elusive wisps of very little at all, we would have no life at all.

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In Ecclesiastes’ vision, life is a succession of moments, all grounded in the reality of God, the stilness and root of all things, that which is most real, the active presence which, one way or another, tells us the truth about ourselves, about how we live and who we are.

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As the vision of Ecclesiastes was brought into the emerging Christian tradition following the early Church’s experience of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, history takes on a particular destination, as the first Christians came to understand that what Dante Alighieri would one day call ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars’ indeed has a motion toward itself.

Far from any idea of inevitable progress, however, the Christian vision remains embedded in our history of finitude and disappointment, Galadriel’s long defeat. We still live in a world in which years of work is destroyed on the interstate, in which there is far greater and more mysterious suffering. It was not until the technological optimism of the Industrial revolution took hold of the modern imagination that most of us became convinced that the world would get better and better until some final culmination. Recent history and the propect of climate degradation, of course, tell a different story, and the wisdom of Ecclesiastes lies in not letting us look away from it.

And yet we are not permitted to lose hope. In each moment, we are called to courage and generosity, to kindness and to care, and in this way to continue the breath of our shared life. Not that in doing so we might earn some unspecified reward, but rather in the understanding that living in this way is the most full participation in the being and love which hold all of reality in itself.

The future is a mystery, and the past only lives in and through the present. All that remains to us is the passing breath of today. How shall we live in it now?