You can watch this sermon on the Idlewild Presbyterian Church Livestream. The sermon begins at 37:25.

This morning’s scripture text is one of my favorites. It’s such a favorite that when my wife and I were married a number of years ago we had it read as one of our wedding texts. But whenever I tell my students that this was our wedding text, they laugh at me. “That’s not a very good wedding text, Dr. Williamson. How did you wife even let you get away with that?”

The text goes like this:

Go, eat your food joyfully and drink your wine happily because God has already accepted what you do. Let your garments always be white; don’t run short of oil for your head. Enjoy your life with your dearly loved spouse all the days of your pointless life that God gives you under the sun—all the days of your pointless life!—because that’s your part to play in this life and in your hard work under the sun. Whatever you are capable of doing, do with all your might because there’s no work, thought, knowledge, or wisdom in the grave, which is where you are headed. (9:7–10)

Now my students love the first part of this passage. Apparently it’s entirely wedding appropriate. Ecclesiastes says we should eat and drink joyfully and appreciate the gifts God has given us. We should wear clean clothes and take a shower every day. We should spend time with a partner we love, sharing a life together.

“Why didn’t you just stop there?” my students inevitably ask. “That’s beautiful! Why did you ruin it with all that stuff about pointlessness and death and the grave? That’s just depressing!” You know, they might have a point.

Everything Fades

But the author of Ecclesiastes insists that you can’t just separate the shiny and happy things in life from the difficult and depressing ones. And I think he’s right. It’s the nature of human existence that the two are always mixed up together. Things end. People die. The good ole days fade. Nothing lasts forever. To pretend otherwise is to do an injustice to the reality of the human experience.

Now the author of Ecclesiastes expresses the impermanence of things with his famous opening line “Vanity of vanities. Vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity.” When he says this, he doesn’t mean that everything is vain in the sense that you think this song is about you don’t you. Rather, he means that everything is temporary. In Hebrew, the expression means something like “everything is just vapor” or “everything is merely a breath.” He means that a human life—and everything in it—is like the vapor that appears when you exhale on a crisp winter evening. It’s there, and then it’s gone. It seems like something, but when you try to grab it, it’s nothing. And then it disappears.

Life, he says, is like that. It’s like a breath. It’s here and then it’s gone. When you try to grab onto it, it slips through your fingers. It disappears and leaves no trace.

The question Ecclesiastes wrestles with is: How do you live in a world like that? How do you find meaning in a world where everything eventually fades? How do you live a life knowing that you will one day die and the world will go on as though you never were?

What Has My Life Added Up To?

The author of Ecclesiastes starts by asking the question, “What has my life added up to?” The way he says it is, “What profit does a person have in all the toil that they toil under the sun?” (1:3). If life is a balance sheet and death is the end of the fiscal year, what is the profit leftover? What has it added up to?

Of course Ecclesiastes has already given its answer. “Everything is vapor. Nothing lasts.” And so, “You’re life has added up to nothing.”

To help us understand his point, the author of Ecclesiastes imagines himself to be a king—the richest and most powerful person he can think of—and he sets out to do the things that kings do to create a legacy for themselves. He plants lush gardens and installs elaborate pools (2:5). He acquires servants, cattle, and sheep (2:8); he amasses wealth and luxury more than anyone else.

Yet when he looks over all he has done, all he has built, all he has acquired, all he has achieved, he concludes,

It was pointless [hevel]—a chasing after the wind.
There is no profit under the sun.

The problem, he says, is that we die. And people’s memories are frail. And time eventually ravishes all things. People will someday forget you. The great gardens you plant will be overtaken by weeds. The palaces you construct will crumble. The books you write will gather dust in a forgotten library. The building you put your name on will one day be replaced by a newer building with someone else’s name. Your kids may be fools who waste their inheritance. Or the stock market might crash and wipe it all out. And by the third or fourth generation even your own descendants will have no memory of you.

So what will your life have added up to?

“Just as they come from their mother’s womb naked,” Ecclesiastes says, “So they’ll return, ending up just like they started. All their hard work produces nothing.”

Enjoying Your Life

By now I suppose by now you may be even more confused about why on earth I would have used Ecclesiastes as a wedding text. It really is pretty depressing. Or maybe it is really truthful about depressing things we’d rather not talk about.

But once Ecclesiastes has shown us that our lives ultimately add up to nothing, it offers us another possibility. “What has my life added up to?,” it says, “Is the wrong question.”

In its place, Ecclesiastes gives us this advice: “There is nothing better for human beings than to eat, drink, and experience pleasure in their hard work because that’s their share in life.”

Here Ecclesiastes has shifted the categories from talking about profit to talking about a share. Where a profit refers to something left over at the end, Ecclesiastes uses the word share to refer to something that has value—but only temporarily. I think of it like a gift card someone gives you that expires tomorrow. It has value right now. But it doesn’t have value you can hang on to. You can enjoy it today, but it’s value won’t last forever.

The true value available to us in life, says Ecclesiastes, is the value of day-to-day moments. It’s the value of the little things like good food and good wine, good work and good companions. We can’t add up that value. We can’t hang onto until the end. But we can sure enjoy the moments we are given to enjoy.

The great tragedy of life, says Ecclesiastes, is not that our lives don’t add up to anything. Rather, it’s that we often expend so much energy trying to make our lives add up to something that we forget to enjoy the life that is present to us in this very moment.

Life Moves in Seasons

Ecclesiastes encapsulates this view in the famous poem that is probably the best known passage from Ecclesiastes. It says,

There’s a season for everything
and a time for every matter under the heavens:
a time for giving birth and a time for dying,
a time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted,
a time for killing and a time for healing,
a time for tearing down, and a time for building up,
a time for crying and a time for laughing,
a time for mourning and a time for dancing,
a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones,
a time for embracing and a time for avoiding embraces,
a time for searching and a time for losing,
a time for keeping and a time for throwing away,
a time for tearing and a time for repairing,
a time for keeping silent and a time for speaking,
a time for loving and a time for hating,
a time for war and a time for peace. (3:1–8)

Every person’s life passes through seasons, says Ecclesiastes, and we shouldn’t expect it to be otherwise. We will celebrate births and mourn deaths. We will find new relationships and let go of old ones. We will dance in celebration and mourn in lamentation. We will celebrate beginnings and we will mourn endings.

Because life moves in seasons, there is no experience that will last forever. In one sense this is good news. When we are living through something difficult, we know that a better time will come. Dawn eventually breaks on even the darkest night of the soul. Yet, this poem also insists that the good times can’t last forever, either. Laughing will eventually turn into mourning, and peacetime will eventually revert back to war. We can create enormous anxiety for ourselves by trying to hang on to something good beyond its time. We already know that things can’t last.

So enjoy the moment, says Ecclesiastes. What will come will come. Just be here now.

Yet there is another aspect of this poem that is easy to miss. If we look back at the poem asking the question of profit, w realize that all of the seasons of life add up to zero. The poem presents life not just as a series of seasons, but as a series of opposite seasons: crying and laughing, mourning and dancing, loving and hating, war and peace. If we ask what the poem adds up to, we are forced to conclude that it has a zero-sum balance. Each season is met by its opposite. This life cancels itself out. It is as though it never was. It is nothing.

But surely birth and death, uprooting and planting, killing and healing, tearing and building, crying and laughing, mourning and dancing, throwing and gathering, embracing and avoiding, searching and losing, keeping and throwing, tearing and repairing, refraining and speaking, loving and hating, war and peace—is not nothing. It is emphatically something. It is human life in all its beauty and horror, in all its hope and despair, in all its joy and pain, bound together by birth and death.

Living Each Moment Authentically

So when my students ask why we read Ecclesiastes in our wedding, this is what I tell them. The reality of death—the inevitability of endings—the relentless passing of life from one season to the next—reminds us to appreciate the moments we have while we have them. It gives us permission to enjoy the people we have while we have them.

By naming death in our wedding, and by making Ecclesiastes a part of our story, we committed to living and loving each other authentically, in each and every moment, knowing that nothing is guaranteed and that all things will come to an end. We can’t hold on to the gift-card of life forever. We have to enjoy it and appreciate it while we can.

And so it is for all of us. Ecclesiastes reminds us to live life simply, cheerfully, and lovingly—not as a way of denying death, but precisely as a way of making meaning in the face of it. Knowing that life is fleeting, knowing that memory is frail, knowing that death is inevitable, enjoy the moments you are given: Love the people you love. Enjoy the work you do. Eat good food and drink good wine. Savor even the stupid little pointless moments, because that is your share in life. You can’t live forever.

Amen.

For more on my interpretation of Ecclesiastes, see The Forgotten Books of the Bible: Reading the Five Scrolls for Today.