Between Text & Sermon

E. CARSON BRISSON
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia

When there is no bread, there is no learning.

When there is no learning, there is no bread.
Rabbi Elazar

THIS TEXT FROM QOHELETH OFFERS THE PREACHER or teacher an opportunity to

encounter with the community of faith: (1) aspects of Qoheleth's understanding of the
nature, necessity, and limits of wisdom in service to faithful living; (2) the wisdom, accord-
ing to this sage, of knowing what time it is by discerning appropriate actions within the
promise and risk ofthat particular time; (3) the question of the present reality and future
possibility of a new kind of time, a kind of time in which it may be wise to receive time
itself as host and herald of the good news that there is now and will indeed be something
quite new "under the sun."

WISDOM AND QOHELETH

There were many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them. But most
of the paths were cheats and deceptions and led nowhere or to bad ends; and most of the passes
were infested with evil things and dreadful dangers. [It would require] wise advice ... knowledge
and memory... [tofind]the right road to the right path.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Wisdom traditions evidenced in biblical and in extra-biblical literature may be charac-

terized, in part, as literary expressions of the belief that not every path in the mountains is
necessarily a path through the mountains. Accompanying this belief, oftentimes, is the pop-
ular and reasonably just corollary that the heavens dispense rain on fields and sunshine in
lives in a fashion that corresponds to who is on which sort of path. This idea is movingly
contested in, among other places, the book of Job and gospel portraits of the teachings, life,
and execution of the first-century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.

Theodicy notwithstanding, wisdom traditions seek to serve the experienced, remem-

bered, valued, articulated, and received insight that there are practices or patterns of con-
duct, not simply Sabbath sanctuary practices but what one might call "Monday-to-Friday"
practices, that tend to life and practices that tend not to life. While working with this text,
the preacher or teacher may wish to ask: What visions of wisdom are operative in my life
and in the lives of individual congregants and in the collective life of the congregation? Are
ECCLESIASTES Interpretation 293

these visions explicit? What are their sources? What are their goals? In what ways do they
differ from each other and how are these differences valued? By what means do we as a
community of faith measure how wise or unwise our wisdom traditions may be?

In its various biblical manifestations, wisdom can range from the acquisition of accu-
rate information about flora and fauna to insights into human nature, from fair and just
decisions to the cultivation of skills and arts that stretch from barley field to tribal counsel
to royal throne to sacred temple to the very heavens themselves. Uniting and elevating each
of these expressions of wisdom, from care and feeding of donkeys to philosophy, is wis-
dom's source within the larger framework of God's sovereign and life-giving intentions, and
the consequent possibility and invitation for individuals and communities to shape
responses appropriate to these intentions. That is to say, from the beginning, before any
response is possible, wisdom is lodged vertically, even while destined to be realized horizon-
tally, and concerns the gift of being apprehended and rightly directed, equally in all walks of
life, by the God who is creating and offering the universe at all times. Knowledge, tech-
nique, and strategy separated from this joyfully holy framework may be powerful, but they
are folly and not wisdom.

The sage Qoheleth found himself in creative tension with wisdom as a fully satisfying
explication of life and faithfulness. On the one hand, he recognized its virtue: "Wisdom
gives strength to the wise more than ten rulers that are in a city" (7:19). On the other hand,
he found even the idea of the possibility of wisdom troubling: "When I applied my mind to
know wisdom . . . then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happen-
ing under the sun even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it
out" (8:16-17). Qoheleth's dilemma might offer an opening in the sermon or lesson plan
toward those whose faith is anything but simple or easy. To those who find little or no rest
in even the most compelling constructs of the faith, or in their appraisal of the moral pat-
terns of rainfall and sunlight, a word of relief, even hope, from this text may be that they
are not alone in their reservations or outright fatigue. They are, in fact, in canonical compa-
ny within the circle of faith through their articulate companion Qoheleth (see further the
thoroughness of Qoheleth's critique in 3:16-20 and 7:15).

A POEM UNDER THE SUN

One of this sage's most sustained positive treatments of wisdom is located in his coun-
sel concerning time expressed through the sparkling and now-familiar poem placed at the
beginning of Ecclesiastes 3. This poem, one that Qoheleth may have borrowed at least in
part, is introduced and governed by commending to the wise the virtue of knowing what
time it is.

The poem itself unfolds as fourteen contrasting pairs of human activity and experi-
ence. These are offered so the reader or hearer may sample Qoheleth's commendations on
the relationship between knowing what time it is and wisdom (3:2-8). Taken as a whole,
these fourteen pairs of yoked opposites lend to the poem a sense of fullness, and may in
294 Interpretation JULY 2 0 0 1

number symbolize enough days to build and drench with complexity the world twice over
(William P. Brown, Ecclesiastes, IBC [Louisville: John Knox, 2000] 41-42). The preacher,
and perhaps the teacher as well, may serve her or his community best by avoiding a detailed
explication of each of these sets of contrasts, though the ambiguous reference to gathering
and hurling stones in 3:5 may be impossible to pass by in silence.

Rather than a linear treatment that focuses on individual lines or patterns between or
among them, an image that points toward the poem's function within the larger theater of
Qoheleth's thought may be useful in the sermon or lesson. I propose such an image, though
it is most imperfect: the poem appears to lodge much wisdom in seeing time as a suspend-
ed wheel, held in its shape by spokes composed of the full range of human experience
from joy to sorrow, from birth to deathturning (more than turned) dependably, steadily,
repeatedly, and completely, as the sun above, a blister as often as a star, observes without
comment. This wheel is capable of real joys and delicious memories and limited meanings,
and it is wise to relish these for the good gifts they are. It is also capable of sorrow and
irreparable loss. This, too, those who would walk wisely shall ponder as much as protest.
And, since one's life is not a permanent guest within this wheel, it is also wise to value the
gift of what time is given. Above all, living wisely in this wheel means knowing what time it
is by knowing what to do when. The wise recognize and accept as gifts of equal value both
the possibilities and the limits that come in the form of life's experiences offered in their
various seasons.

The promise of this wheel consists of its spokes and its rotation. These assist each other
and offer ordered blessing and ordered loss; time, hence, becomes an invitation to well-
ordered, wise receipt of and response to both blessing and loss.

The aching of this wheel is its location. The wheel is forever suspended; it does not
actually make contact with a road, if a road there even be. The wheel spins, but it does not
move. It does not seem to dare a more distant meaning, let alone one that is finally beauti-
ful. The wheel is alive, but such life does not have a destination (Brown, ibid.). This life is
not ultimately breath, rah, but vapor, hebel Finally, while the sun above notices the wheel,
and even dependably sets out eternal servings of light for the wheel's activity, the same sun
does not seem to be at all in contact with, let alone moved by, the wheel's rotation.

A storm may blow through this cosmos. Its winds may cause such temporary confu-
sion as to give rise to a glimmer of hope that something really new may emerge: some for-
merly doomed blind thing begins to move in a direction it has not known before, lifted
through the cold deep toward light and sight. But every storm will pass, and the temporal
gravity of time will in time escort back to its place anything that dreamed to become a new
thing.

NEITHER A BLISTER NOR EVEN A STAR

Through his wonderful reflections, Qoheleth brings us, happily, to an important junc-
ture: that place where the importance of what time it is and time's final unknowing cross. I
ECCLESIASTES Interpretation 295

recommend here two acts. First, let us, in the sermon or lesson itself, thank Qoheleth with a
loud voice, four times. Let us thank him as seer for the courage and honesty of his seeing.
Let us thank him as religious philosopher for the lesson that it is wise to know time, in loss
and in gain, as an invitation to well-ordered covenant response. Let us thank him as poet
for the compelling and enjoyable way the message is presented. And let us thank him as pil-
grim for his contribution that faith can include an outspoken unknowingan unknowing
that serves the wise community, that is a needful challenge to all communities claiming to
broadcast absolute virtue, be they of the right hand or of the left, and that apparently does
not frighten God.

Then, let us find a way to proclaim, in the sermon or lesson itself, the good news that
we live in and bear witness to the experience and hope that we are in fact being found by a
new season, by a new kind of time. Within this time, we find ourselves met by the wonder
and joy and possibility of creative response to something new, quite new, under the sun.
Indeed, time itself is being made new, full and not empty, by a kind of time that is not a
neglect, disrespect, triumph over or cancellation of chronos, but rather is an elevation of it,
the very on-going and finally joyful redemption and recreation of time itself. Isaiah
glimpsed it. Mary sang it. John longed for it. In this kind of time, the sun is now and will
finally be neither a blister nor even a star. All sermons and lessons will cease (Jer 31:34).
And instead of a time to sow and a time to reap, in this kind of time, in life and in death,
there is no longer any time that is not harvest (Rev 22:2).
 ^ s
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