Ecclesiastes 1:2-11
Have
you ever had your own brush with mortality?
If not, you will.
September
17, 1989. St. Croix, U.S. Virgin
Islands. With Hurricane Hugo bearing
down on the territory, residents were hunkered down wherever they were, with
heavy rains being driven by winds that were gaining intensity every
moment. As that Sunday evening came and
it grew dark, no longer could you tell how bad the situation was by looking out
a window at the bending trees. For that
matter, it was unwise to go near windows because flying debris was everywhere
and if anything hit the windward side it could mean a face full of flying
glass. Reports came over the radio. The wind hit seventy-five; one hundred; one
hundred, twenty-five miles per hour.
Eventually the instrumentation for measurement would break and blow away
somewhere above two hundred miles per hour.
Before that, the radio station would be out of commission anyway.
Before
that happened, though, the programmer demonstrated either a dark sense of humor
or a grim sense of duty (going down with the ship, as it were). The play list switched to a handful of songs:
“Bad Moon Rising”, “Stormy Weather”, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, “Who Will Stop
the Rain?”, and then came the very last song before the station went down.
“I close my eyes
Only for a moment and the
moment’s gone.
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes with
curiosity.
Dust in the wind,
All they are is dust in
the wind.
Same old song:
Just a drop of water in
an endless sea.
All we do
Crumbles to the ground,
though we refuse to see.
Dust in the wind, all we
are is dust in the wind.
Now, don’t hang on.
Nothing lasts forever but
the earth and sky.
It slips away
And all your money won’t
another minute buy.
Dust in the wind,
All we are is dust in the
wind.
Dust in the wind,
Everything is dust in the
wind.”
This sermon, by the way, is less of
a study of the scripture than my own, personal witness, because after that song
I was left there to ride the night out, unsure if I would live to see the
morning. As I had feared, the window in
my back bedroom was smashed by something, and I went to the side away from the
wind, crawled under the desk, and pulled a cushion across the opening just in
case the same thing would happen in that room.
Then I curled up and waited.
There was plenty of time to think
while I was there, and to examine what I was feeling. Under that desk, I realized that I was
afraid, but that my fear was not of dying, but of whatever horrible and painful
injury might cause it. I realized that
when it came to consideration of death itself, that the kind of thing I had
heard myself say in the pulpit about trusting that Jesus had taken care of
preparing us for eternity, and that we can place ourselves securely in God’s
arms when the time comes, that there is forgiveness of sin and that what matters
is God’s love for us, not anything we have or have not done – that those things
are for me a living reality. I did not
want to go to eternity by bleeding out underneath a desk, but I knew that if
that happened, I could face it with assurance and even confidence. Since then (and it is probably a matter of
age) I have even come to see that there can be a sense of relief and even
comfort in the thought that things will go on without me, or any of us.
“The wind blows to the
south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its
circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not
full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.” [Ecclesiastes 1:6-7]
You can see that as
sorrowful.
“All things are
wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or
the ear filled with hearing.”
[Ecclesiastes 1:8]
You can see it as
meaning that what we do is futile.
“What has been is what
will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new
under the sun.” [Ecclesiastes 1:9]
But let me tell you
something that I never suspected until I saw the desolation of the island many
hours later.
When the eye of the storm went over,
there was a brief period where the neighbors all went outside to check on each
other. They say never to do that in a
hurricane, but “they” never went through it, and don’t know how important it
is. A trailer across the street was
gone. We never saw any of it again. The people inside had fled to another house
and were alive. The people who lived
above me had hid in a closet when part of the roof came off, and they spent the
second half of the storm in my place.
They were all from the island itself, and when the day finally came and
hours later the winds dropped, they looked out and what they saw was a land
that had been bombed, or burnt over. The
trees were stumps and the grass itself was stripped away. Mud was everywhere, and twisted galvanized
metal from the roofs. But what the
people from “off-island”, from the States and Europe and Canada, saw in the
same scene was winter.
For
us there was a category of experience, even a kind of emotional familiarity
with the landscape that let us say to those around us, “This will all grow
back. This is not the end. The destruction is temporary. Look, the roots are not gone from the
plants.” From that there could grow the
awareness that yes, we are dust and to dust we return, but that is not all that
we are. It’s true that everything we
build will one day fall down, but the things that we build are not the
point. What matters is not the house,
but the love within it. What matters is
not the school, but the learning. What
matters is not the sanctuary, but the prayer and praise. What matters is not the body, but the soul
that it houses, and the love of God that embraces all of it together.
“You
are dust, and to dust you will return,” yes.
But also, “Repent and believe the good news.”
“The people of long ago
are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by
those who come after them.”
[Ecclesiastes 1:11]
Once again, very true.
But God does not forget the way we do.
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