Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2014 | 11:00 a.m.

The Good That Never Goes to Waste

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 111
Ecclesiastes 1:1–11
Isaiah 55:6–11

“So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55:11 (NRSV)

Peace is not . . . silence. . . . Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity.

Oscar Romero

“It’s a good thing that Isaiah and Ecclesiastes were not set side by side in the Bible. Had these two books bumped up next to each other, a fight would have no doubt broken out.” This is what biblical scholar William Brown said about Isaiah and Ecclesiastes (The Seven Pillars of Creation, p. 197). Having heard from these two books this morning, we too can sense the tension between them. We can almost hear them raising their voices at each other: the prophet with his divine proclamation, “Look, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19) and the cynic with his flat refutation of “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9b).

While the Bible includes contrasting voices on any number of issues, the dissonance between Isaiah and Ecclesiastes is especially loud. Though both the prophet and the cynic sought to make sense of human existence in light of what they could say about divine providence, their conclusions couldn’t be more different. And we may not be able to reconcile them. We may at best only be able to hear them speak back and forth in our minds until we let one of them have the last word.

I am curious to know who, in your mind, would have the last word: the prophet or the cynic?

Let me outline some of their significant differences. Whereas the prophet proclaims the word of God given from on high, the cynic collects and codifies wisdom from the bottom up. In fact, the cynic concludes that God is so mysterious and hidden that there is no point in striving to discern God’s purpose; therefore, you might as well live as though life has no purpose. Observing all that happens under the sun, the cynic concludes that the only way to make sense of everything is simply to recognize that “all is vanity.” Thirty-seven times he uses that word. The word that he uses for “vanity” is also translated as “vapor.” It expresses his sense that life, when really examined, is discovered to be futile and fragile, empty and useless. When the cynic looks at each moment of life, he sees its fleeting, vapid quality. When he takes a longer view of life, he sees its monotonous repetition. The sun rises and sets—just to do the same thing again. The wind blows round and round just to return to where it started. Streams continue to flow into the sea, and yet the sea does not fill up. Despite its incessant motion, nature seems to have no purpose. The same, he says, is true for humanity. Why bother working so hard when no one will remember you or anything you have done anyway?

While the cynic relentlessly repeats the refrain that everything amounts to nothing, the prophet of the book of Isaiah is confident in the promise that nothing will go to waste. By the mercy of God, all, even the wicked and unrighteous, will be redeemed according to the higher purpose of God. So much higher are God’s thoughts and ways than ours that it is hard for us to know fully what God intends. Nevertheless, for the prophet, history is the realm in which God’s word is made known. By interpreting history, we can gain insight into God’s purpose. Nature, too, offers evidence that God’s purpose is indeed at work in all things: “rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” And just as the rain and snow accomplish their purpose, so will the word of God. The prophets writes, “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

Let me ask you: Are you finding yourself leaning more toward the cynic or the prophet? Does one worldview resonate more strongly than the other?

The significant differences between Isaiah and Ecclesiastes really shouldn’t surprise us. It shouldn’t surprise us that their worldviews clash when they so apparently could not see eye to eye on something as fundamental as time. Underlying their writings are very different conceptions of time. They could not agree on whether time consists of beginnings and endings or of a continuous recycling of the same old things. They disagreed on whether eternity is built into the very nature of things or all things are fleetingly vapid. They disagreed on whether time held all things in relation to one another or instead was made up of a series of small and separate moments. However they understood time made a big difference, maybe even all the difference, in their attitudes.

In the book Time, to which I find myself returning again and again, writer Eva Hoffman considers the inevitable impact of how we construct time not only on how we organize and spend our lives, but also on how we emotionally cope with life. She draws out the difference that our conceptions of time can make not just on how we manage our external lives but also on how we arrange our interior lives. As a Polish immigrant who made her life in America, she developed a more heightened awareness of these differences. About American time and the impact it has on American attitudes, she observes,

It was not only that time moved faster in America—it pressed onward in more stressful ways. People worked much harder, of course; but also it seemed to me, more anxiously. I was witnessing, even if I did not initially realize it, the phenomenon of “American nervousness.” . . . The nervousness had always been diagnosed as a function of a peculiar American insecurity, underlying the ostensible confidence; an uncertainty which followed perhaps partly from the country’s perpetually renewing newness, but also from the extreme competitiveness of American institutions and the very possibilities of upward mobility. People worked very hard. But even if not everyone used every minute of their working day to be optimally productive—so I noted during my tenure in some major American workplaces—everyone suffered from the stress of not doing enough, or the possibility of doing more, or at least feeling good and guilty about it. (Eva Hoffman, Time, pp. 5–6)

Eva Hoffman admits, for better or worse, to having learned from and being shaped by American time. For better, she has come to value the merits of efficiency and rigor, to weigh the worth of one’s hours, to assert her right to have more personal time, and to direct herself toward goals and follow through on a plan. For worse, she has experienced and has had to cope with the stress, anxiety, nervousness, and guilt that are the emotional by-products of American time.

We all learn from and are shaped by the constructs of time that condition our lives. We all develop certain dispositions as a result of how we live and move and have our being in time. As we saw for the cynic of Ecclesiastes and the prophet of Isaiah, their different understandings of time produced very different attitudes: cynicism for the one and hope for the other. And you yourselves may feel closer to one than the other. What is the construct of time that is at work in and upon your lives and how has it shaped your dispositions?

As a pastor, I have had the privilege of accompanying people at times in their lives when they have felt these questions most acutely. When life is most difficult, we tend to think more about time: how we have spent our time and how we want to spend the time we have left. And more than once I have heard people say that the disposition they want to recognize first and foremost in themselves is that of gratitude. I sense in these conversations that the gratitude of which they speak is a close cousin to dispositions of awe and wonder.

In a small book on prayer, writer Anne Lamott confesses, “I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe . . . that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help. Thanks. Wow.” To keep it simple, Lamott boils down prayer to those three words. Interestingly, when Anne Lamott writes about moments of thanks, it often sounds like she is also speaking of moments that have wowed her. ‘Thanks” and “wow” are often said in the same breath.

The two go together, don’t they? It is not surprising that when we are wowed by something, we are at the same time inspired to thank God for it. Recognizing the interconnectedness of things beyond what we could even imagine, we feel both awe and gratitude.

Complex connections among things take place over time. As both the cynic of Ecclesiastes and the prophet of Isaiah recognized, there is no way that we can comprehend the full end toward which all things are working. And so the cynic, in his honesty, throws up his hands and sets his vision only on the things in the moment. Rather than striving to discover a grand providential design in which all things are interconnected to work for some good end, he focuses on discrete objects that, though perpetually in motion, lack any interdependence or relation to everything else. Because he does not consider the interconnections among things, he cannot see their purpose or potential.

The lesson that the cynic wants to teach us is this: in all our striving, we risk missing the fleeting opportunities to enjoy life in the moment. Good things like food and fellowship have to be enjoyed in the moment, because they won’t last. They won’t wait for us to finish other things before we get around to them. While this is a good lesson for us to take to heart, and a challenging one for us who have been so shaped by the construct of American time that it is even hard to take Thanksgiving Day off, it nevertheless would not satisfy the prophet Isaiah and shouldn’t satisfy us either.

For Christians, history is the realm in which God exists in relation to everything and in which God will ultimately redeem the whole of things. So when the cynic raises the question, “What is the point of striving for and hoping for anything in the future? What’s the point of working to achieve some good?” Isaiah would likely not rest until he had the final word. Good deeds, the prophet would likely say, are never wasted. The good we do will be joined to the good that others do. What may be left incomplete in one lifetime will be completed when joined to another lifetime. Over the course of history, people who never knew each other during their lifetime become partners in making good things happen. This is how the Rabbi Harold Kushner would describe God’s law at work; it is how the eternal God gives our deeds a measure of eternity. Unlike Murphy’s law that states that “anything that can go wrong will,” God’s law, Rabbi Kushner says, promises that “anything that should be set right sooner or later will” (Harold Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, p. 184).

Though the food and fellowship that we can enjoy today may feel like enough to be thankful for, what I pray for you on this Thanksgiving Day is a gratitude mixed with awe: awe and gratitude for all that God has done, is doing and will do—for everything around us, more amazing and gracious than we could ever plan on our own.