Meaningless

I've really enjoyed delving into the Old Testament of late, so several thoughts might appear here as a result of that experience.
While I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for all of my lectures - as well as listening to the amazing education that Pastor Brian and Tracy delivered - the book that stuck a chord with me the most was Ecclesiastes because of its frank description of the meaninglessness of life.
I'll dig a little deeper into the actual content of Ecclesiastes on another day. Today's thought is about the Headline Word of Ecclesiastes (1:2), and how the various versions have translated it.

• "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" New International Version NIV
• "Vanity of vanities." KJV, ESV and NASB, though the former footnotes it "futility of futilities."
• "Nothing makes sense. Everything is nonsense." Contemporary English Version CEV
• "Useless! Useless! Completely useless!" New Century Version NCV.
• "Smoke, nothing but smoke." The Message MSG

Part of the fun thing about not knowing Hebrew or Greek is being able to try to figure out why a word was chosen for the different English versions, and what shade of meaning is meant by each.
The most popular offering by far is Vanity of vanities, which I think is a milquetoast word. I understand vanity here means hollow and without value and worthless, but for 21st century readers, it is a pretty mild rebuke for the ultimate condemnation The Teacher has for a striving after X,Y and Z. It probably had more pop for 17th century readers, who were more familiar with the second commandment being 'Don't take the name of the Lord your God in vain.' For many of us, the implication is that Solomon is looking at his mirror, and just sees arrogance everywhere. One argument I've heard for it being "the right word" is that when you compare Vanity of vanities to Holy of holies, it makes a pretty nice boxed set.
"Nonsense" is word my mom used on us when we were full of it. "The plum juice just happened to spill all over your freshly-waxed floor." "Nonsense," she'd say. Or "Stop that nonsense!" A bunch of silliness.
"Useless," too, has the shade of meaning of being the salt that loses its saltiness; it is a thing that used to have importance, but it has lost it. It is useless now, but it wasn't always thus. I don't know if that's the direction The Teacher was trying to lead us.
By far the most interesting of the bunch is The Message, which is not unusual. (It seems a little bizarre, doesn't it, to live in an age, when I could drive 45 minutes from here and ask the guy who wrote this version, "Why did you pick that word?" and probably get a response.) The Message is pretty famous for picking some vibrant word choices. I like the image of the things that are important in this world as being nothing but smoke, especially since we have done a pretty successful job at demonizing smokers! Match that up with "Where there's smoke, there's fire" and you could come up with a pretty decent Ash Wednesday sermon: wealth, hard work and wisdom are the source of the flame that turns to smoke. And what are you left with? Ashes.
But the word I like best (and again, your favorite word depends largely on your world view) is meaningless, if for no other reason than its a word that's completely out of character with the rest of Scripture. I love it that this word - and this book - is in our holy Writ. Sure, the rest of the Bible takes sin to task for being meaningless, but wisdom? Hard work? Solomon spent 10 chapters of Proverbs extolling the wonder of wisdom, and had a whole sub-class of Proverbs asking us to look at ants, of all things, to teach us how to live. So how do we hold those two books in the same hand?
Stay tuned.




Our Savior Lutheran Church

Habakkuk the Mucky Muck

So many things to write about, so little time.

The Old Testament Equip class is coming up this Friday and Saturday, so I'm deep into the detritus of the meaninglessness of Ecclesiastes, Abishag's significance and the structure of Obadiah.

In the midst of all this, though, I'd like to share how half of a verse from the second chapter of Habakkuk changed the world.

Now Habakkuk 2 happens to be one of my favorite chapters in the Bible - yes, class, I know I say that about any chapter I'm reading at the time, but this time I mean it. What's not to love about it? It starts out by quoting Bob Dylan (wait, who came first? Dylan or Habakkuk? I think they knew OF each other, but were not FB friendly.) "I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower," which is a clear allusion to “All Along the Watchtower.” The balance of the chapter is a condemnation of the Chaldeans, and lists five woes upon them.

And you know how I love a good woe. Don't get me started on Jesus' seven woes against the Pharisees in Matthew 23. Dead men's bones. Priceless.

Habakkuk's first three woes have to do with venal wealthy and powerful, and that's its own bit of wonder. Then the fourth woe is one for our time - a woe upon drunken perverts. (I haven't forgotten my main point - the half verse - but I have to go one more step off the track for a second). For all the family values folks out there who are looking for an explicit condemnation of drunken perverts, and find that some of Paul's lists of sins (“the sexually immoral”) doesn't really have the teeth they are looking for, turn ye to Habakkuk 2: 15-17. Fifth woe? Don't make idols. Ho hum. But the first four are cracklin' good. They pop!

That's why I love Habakkuk 2. Woes for our time. But you don't change the world criticizing the rich and powerful - necessarily - nor at poking fun at drunken perverts. You change the world by shaking up the religious establishment of your day, by creating new religions and stuff.

Top two candidates: Jesus and Martin Luther.

There are some who say that the most important moment in Luther's life was not nailing/posting/stapling/post-it-ing the 95 Theses on the Door of Wittenburg, his defense at the Diet of Worms, the publication of the New Testament in German or marrying a nun. Some say the most important moment of Luther's life was his Tower Experience, in which he read Romans 1:17 (“For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”) in a completely different light. Some say that when Luther read that, his vision of God changed from Angry Judge to Loving Father.

Who are these "some" who say that?

One of those "some" is Martin Luther.

He wrote: "Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the statement that "the (righteous) shall live by faith." Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before "the righteousness of God" had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.”

For Luther, Paul’s verse was a gate to heaven. But who gave Paul the verse?

Habakkuk.

“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.” Hab. 2:4

A half verse by a minor prophet inspires Paul, who inspires Luther, who inspires me.

Is this what they mean by “the inspired Word of God?”