Meaninglessnesses.

Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!
All week, without any prompting from me, Ecclesiastes has come up in natural conversation four times.

1. Ecclesiastes was the topic for one of the Tuesday Women's Bible Study leaders.
2. A youth came in with a very good question: Why does it seem that everyone's totally okay with the fact that we're all going to die?
3. Another youth asked how Jesus would be treated by the church if he were to come back today, which naturally led me to the Grand Inquisitor sequence of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, in which Jesus is brought before the Inquisition and, well, I don't want to spoil anything.
4. I received a book in the mail with 25 short stories about The Christ, including The Grand Inquisitor.

While you may be thinking that none but the first have anything to do with Ecclesiastes, you would be wrong, for in this book lie the seeds of existentialism, of which Fydor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky is the acknowledged progenitor.
Is there a message for Christians in Ecclesiastes? Absolutely. As Lutherans, we love the third chapter, set to music by the Byrds 40 years ago, that there is a time for everything. We love "a cord of three strands is not easily broken." We also believe, teach and confess that the message of this holy book is found in 8:15:

So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.

But the verse right before that one is this:

There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless.

But then how do you reconcile that message with individual passages like "For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow?" (6:12)

Pretty hard to paint a sun with a smiley face on the cover of this book. How do you set the bravery of Stephen the martyr, much less our Lord and Savior, against a passage like 9:4b "even a live dog is better off than a dead lion"?

Sure the rest of the Bible consistently warns against riches, and here as well: "Whoever has riches never has riches enough." But is this the same author who spent a third of his book of Proverbs extolling the virtue of wisdom and another good chunk of it praising hard work, who then writes here: 

So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.

Despair.

That's a strong word, used only a dozen other times, and only once in the New Testament when Paul reminds us that we are crushed, persecuted and oppressed, but never in despair, because despair implies "no hope."

So what's the answer to this anomaly, this section of seeming despair in a book that's promised to give us hope and a future, as it says in Jeremiah.

First, we don't gain our theology from the Wisdom books. If we did, "Spare the rod and spoil the child" would be part of the 10 Commandments, and we would be reading passages from Song of Songs in church on Valentine's Day. 

Secondly, I reminded my class that Solomon - if he is the author - probably wrote this later in his kingdom after he'd seen the ravaging effects that his capitulation had on God's people. This could be a frank appraisal of a kingship gone bad. Look what good all that wisdom did me, he says.

Third, we're not absolutely convinced that "eternal life" was a for-sure done deal for 10th century Hebrews. Their "salvation" was from oppressors, not necessarily for eternal life.

And finally, as I told the class a few weeks back, "If you're a pessimist, you're not crazy." Every village needs two things: an idiot and a curmudgeon. While the Bible is lacking an idiot, I would put forth Ecclesiastes as the Norwegian bachelor farmer of Scripture: "Ah what do you know? You think that's a new idea? That's as old as the hills. Your cat died - well, sure. That happens. You put your faith in the economy? The stock market? HA! you think you're so smart? Let me tell you something, you don't know nothing, sonny. Nonsense. All of it nonsense."