Hilton Head Island, SC – January 1, 2011
The Chapel Without Walls
Ecclesiastes 9:11-18; Luke 13:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
The Great Texts Series - Text – Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all. – Ecclesiastes 9:11 (RSV)
Most preachers preach for at most forty years, and then they retire. Assuming I live three more years (which I do assume, but obviously cannot guarantee), I will have preached for fifty years, and then I shall retire.
It is in the last decade of this half-century span of time that I have become the most unconventional in my thinking and in my beliefs. If the truth is told, however, I became increasingly unconventional as the years have passed, but especially so in the past several years.
One example of that is that in my advanced age I have become more and more drawn to the book of Ecclesiastes. When I was young, Ecclesiastes sounded like the grousing of an old guy who had become very skeptical in his old age, and it didn’t interest me. Perhaps because I am now an old guy myself, I find Ecclesiastes fascinating. No one knows for sure who wrote this peculiar biblical book, but in it he identifies himself as Koheleth, a Hebrew word which means the Preacher. Much of what he says is at odds with most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible.
A good example of that is our text for this morning. Parts of it may be familiar to you. “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.” Those sentiments do not echo most of the other parts of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms. Again and again we hear that those who follow God’s laws will be particularly blessed. And because they do what they should do, they shall win the race, and the battle, and more than enough bread, and riches, and the favor of both God and humanity. “Uh-uh,” says the Preacher, “time and chance happen to them all.”
Do you catch the drift of his sardonic pronouncement? Things don’t always work out the way we think they should. If God truly is in His heaven, then all should be right with the world. But it isn’t always so, says Koheleth. Sometimes the good guys lose and the bad guys win. Sometimes jerks succeed, and very able people fail. Time and chance happen to the best of folks.
Many years ago a man named Robert Short wrote a book called The Gospel According to Peanuts. He was a professional writer, but as a result of writing the Peanuts book, he decided to go to seminary, and he became a Presbyterian minister. His contention was that Charles Schulz, the evangelical Christian who wrote the widely-read comic strip Peanuts, had many religious truths gently woven into the diminutive characters of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Schroeder, et al.
I have never forgotten a two-frame strip that Robert Short chose to put into his book. In the first fame, Charlie Brown said “Good luck!” to someone. In the second frame, Linus, the resident theologian of the Peanuts gang, said, “Charlie Brown, ‘Good luck’ is not theologically sound.” And it isn’t. There has been a strong tradition in both Judaism and Christianity that whatever happens happens for a purpose, and that God is behind everything. Therefore, according to this idea, there is no such thing as good luck or bad luck. God preordains it all.
Yet here is Koheleth telling us that if we live long enough, we shall experience both good luck and bad luck, because the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, etc., etc. On New Year’s Day it is well to realize that not everything that happens in the next 365 days will be good stuff. We need to be prepared for that. Some bad stuff is also very likely to occur as well. And why? Because time and chance chip away at every idyllic existence of anyone who ever lived. God doesn’t reach out to prevent bad things from happening to good people. Or, as the wise grocer Morris Bober said in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant, “If we live, we suffer.” Bad things happen to everyone, despite all the good we may do or all the skills we may possess. It can’t be otherwise.
Much as Jesus usually proclaimed that God rewards the just and He punishes those who do evil, he too gave us hints of what Koheleth said in Ecclesiastes. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declared that the rain falls on the just and on the unjust. There is a certain implacability in the way things work themselves out. Even if we are always good (which is undoubtedly a self-delusion), time and chance will throw roadblocks into our path. It is inevitable.
In the 13th chapter of Luke, Jesus referred to a sad incident which must have occurred in Jerusalem shortly before Jesus commented on it. He was talking about how we naturally assume God will keep tragedies from assaulting any of His chosen saints. It doesn’t work that way, Jesus said. “Those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No.”
Then, to augment his point, Jesus told an unusual and one might even say very earthy parable. He said there was a man who planted a fig tree in his vineyard. After three years it still bore no fruit, so he told the keeper of the vineyard to cut it down. But the vineyard keeper said, “Let it alone, sir, for this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure.” Then, if it still didn’t bear fruit, he said he would cut it down for his master. The King James Version states it more pungently. The vineyard keeper says that he will “dung it.” Sometimes in life, to make things better, we need to have some dung spread around. But sometimes that might make things worse, in every respect. Time and chance happen to everyone and everything, says Ecclesiastes.
Every now and then we read in the paper or hear on the news that somebody who won the lottery before wins it again. Whenever that happens, we are likely to declare, “Some people have all the luck!” And sometimes it seems like that is true. But however much “good luck” anybody has, they also are bound to have “bad luck” as well, even if expressions of “good or bad luck” may not technically be theologically sound. Time and chance happen to everyone.
Koheleth hits the nail on the head. The words “happen,” “happy,” and “unhappy”” are linguistically closely related. When we are happy, we often think it is because we have been children of God who have followed the rules and have been rewarded for our noble efforts. Not so, linguistically. “Happiness” “happens” to everyone from time to time, but it “happens” by chance; it “happens” by “happenstance.” The same is true for “unhappiness.” It isn’t necessarily that God gives us our happiness or that our good works result in our happiness; it is that happiness and unhappiness happen to everyone, often without respect to what we do or don’t do. True, we can make ourselves unhappy or even miserable if we insist on doing certain foolish things, but doing the right things won’t always issue in unexcelled bliss, either. Time and chance happen to us all.
Who determines when anyone dies? I am astonished at how many people think it is God and God alone who selects the exact moment of our death. On the basis of having been confronted by hundreds of deaths as a minister, I confess that notion makes no sense to me. If it were true, God has a terrible concept of both time and chance. Why do highly praiseworthy people die at 24 or 36 or 48, and undeniable nincompoops live unimpeded lives with nary a sick day and then die in their sleep at 92? We all die when we die because the accident happened when it did, or the terminal illness happened when it did, or we happened to give up on life when we did. The great English poet and clergyman John Donne said of death, “It comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.” Or, as The Preacher said in one of his most memorable declarations, “There is a time to be born, and a time to die.” Time and chance happen to us all. We can debate that issue forever, but in the end, it is a painfully accurate observation.
Last Wednesday I played bridge with three other geezers. When you play cards, on some days you get great hands and on other days terrible hands. On Wednesday I got some of both. But in the end I came in last out of the four of us. Time and chance happen to us all, but playing the cards well (which I didn’t) also is very important.
I met one of the bridge players for the first time that afternoon. He was born in Germany, and I asked him where he was from. He grew up in a village east of Dresden. I asked him where he was in the firebombing of Dresden by the British Air Force. He said that on that fateful day, Feb. 19, 1945, he was fourteen years old. He happened to take the train from his village into Dresden that day. Had he left thirty minutes earlier he would have been killed, along with tens of thousands of other innocent civilians. It was incredibly good luck for him, but incredibly bad luck for everyone else. Time and chance.
I suspect most of the people who come to The Chapel Without Walls feel highly blessed. We are a pretty positive passel of people. We may even feel blessed far beyond anything we deserve. We might not see it precisely in this way, but were anyone to say to us, “Bon chance, Buena suerte, Good luck,” we would say that indeed we have been the beneficiaries of extraordinarily good luck. Further, we would probably admit that our good fortune is much more due literally to good luck than to good management. “Good fortune” is another expression for happy “time and chance.”
Have you ever owned an old car with many thousands of miles on it, but, like the Energizer Bunny, it just kept going, and going, and going? You changed the oil and you rotated the tires and bought new ones at the proper time, and it just kept on keeping on. There were almost no repairs ever. “Why is that?” you asked yourself. It was because that was the way it was. It just happened. As we would say, you were lucky. You didn’t do anything to make it happen, really; it simply happened. However, one day, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s wonderful one-horse shay, that great old car completely fell apart. It was bound to happen. But as long as it kept going, you kept going in it.
Or have you ever been amazed at how well your old body has held up - - - or not? You have not only survived into your eighties or nineties, but all things considered, you have actually thrived. On the other hand, maybe you have done everything you could to take care of yourself, but it has seemed like one miserable thing after another has plagued you for eighty or ninety years. Why is that? Time and chance, Koheleth tells us; time and chance. Good health or bad health have a strong relationship to whether we take care of ourselves, but some of us are completely careless and yet are as healthy as an ox, however healthy an ox is supposed to be. Others do everything they should do, and still they are frequently as sick as a dog, however sick a dog is supposed to be.
Remember Joe Bzuzfzuz from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner? I can’t validate that his last name was Bzuzfzuz, but it was spelled something like that, and in any case his first name was Joe. Joe Bzuzfzuz always had a small dark cloud drawn by the cartoonist above his head, because everything in his life was always bad. Nothing ever worked out properly for poor old Joe. But could that really be true? Is there anyone for whom nothing ever turns out well?
The other side of Koheleth’s observation, “Time and chance happen to them all,” is that even people who have mostly bad luck are bound sooner or later to have good luck. That is just the way reality operates. No one gets only good things and no one gets only bad things. We all get a mixture of both. The percentage certainly isn’t the same for everyone, and some of us are far more fortunate than others, but time and chance guarantee everyone some good and some bad.
Here, I trust, is good advice for people of faith: We should always be prepared for the bad, but we also always should live with hope for the good. Sometimes skepticism or pessimism are warranted on the basis of what happens to us, but in the end, only optimism really pays off. And everyone needs a pay-off in life. Otherwise life would simply be too heavy a burden to bear.
Ecclesiastes is included in that five-book section of the Hebrew Bible that is called “the Wisdom Literature.” Specifically, it consists of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. It beats me why the last one is in the Bible at all, let alone in the wisdom literature, because the Song of Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs, is the closest thing to an X-rated book as can be found in any holy writ from anywhere. Read it sometime; it will rouse thoughts in you that may not have been roused for years.
Anyway, these particular books of the Bible are meant to nurture the notion of wisdom within each of us. Among the many Germans of Wisconsin when I was growing up there was an excellent aphorism which had been handed down for generations among Teutonic immigrants in the new country: “Ve grow too sold old und too late schmart.”
For all his sardonic skepticism and even biting cynicism, Ecclesiastes, Koheleth, The Preacher is trying to inculcate wisdom in those who are willing to respond to his dark but piercing intellect. Don’t be carried away by the mistaken idea that if you believe in God, the world will be your oyster. God will help us get through whatever trials we must face, but He will not prevent these trials from coming.
Instead, as faithful followers of God, we must learn to stand fast in the midst of whatever cards life deals to us. Any why? Because time and chance happen to us all, and therefore we have no other choice than to play the cards we are dealt as well as we can. When we don’t believe God is with us, we may conclude that we can’t win. When we believe God is with us, we may conclude that ultimately we can’t lose - - - despite time and chance.