The Point in Pointlessness
Homily delivered the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13; Year C RCL)
The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson,
SCP, Ph.D.
3 August 2025 9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Luke the Evangelist, Grants Pass (Oregon)
Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-11; Colossians
3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
It is so good to be back here at St. Luke with you! I am feeling particularly blessed. Three years ago, when I last preached these texts, I was just coming out of a long period of mourning in which I had emotionally shut down. This year, Will and I have been traveling regularly, gardening, and working out. I am teaching and weekly find joy in seeing my students, who started two years ago without even knowing the Hebrew alphabet, reading and interpreting the Bible in Hebrew. I have had the blessing of getting to know the folks at Emmanuel Episcopal in Coos Bay, doing supply for them while their rector is on sabbatical. So I am feeling pretty good about the world.
And so what do I get from the Lectionary to preach on this first
day in a while back with you? The most
pessimistic verse of the whole Bible!
הֲבֵ֤ל
הֲבָלִים֙ אָמַ֣ר קֹהֶ֔לֶת הֲבֵ֥ל הֲבָלִ֖ים הַכֹּ֥ל הָֽבֶל׃
Haveyl havalim ,’amar Qohelet, Havel havalim, hakkol havel.
“‘Zero of Zeroes,’ says the Gatherer [of Sayings], ‘Zero of Zeroes, it’s all a big Zero.’”
These grim intonations begin the book of Qohelet, or, as it is called in Greek, Ecclesiastes. There a jaded old man condemns all human effort, whether frivolous and sinful or even serious and responsible. They all are, in the words of the King James Bible, “vanity of vanities” (totally pointless). They are “chasing after the wind.”
The Psalm picks up the theme: “We cannot pay the price for our life, the price of not dying and escaping the grave, because it costs more than any of us can afford. Even the prudent and wise end up dying just as the foolish and stupid. Their legacy is the place they rot, like wild animals.” Another passage in Qohelet puts it this way: “What difference does it make whether we love or hate? Both are equally pointless, because we all share the same end, whether just or wicked, good or bad, clean or unclean, religious or irreligious. As it is for the good person, so it is for the sinner; as it is for those who take their oaths seriously and those who violate them. Among all the things under the sun, this is the worst: that the same end awaits us all. This fact fills our minds with evil, our hearts with madness as long as we live: for in the end, we all end up dead… and a dog alive is better off than a lion dead” (Eccl 9:1-5).
These words speak deeply to us because it does seem at times that life is pointless. But isn’t God’s word supposed to tell us of hope and meaning, say that love will overcome hate, and we should keep hope rather than pursue nihilist pleasure? “Eat, drink, and be merry; we’re all going to tomorrow!” says Qohelet. “And this too is pointless.”
The Bible is not a single book that teaches a single message. It is field notes of a whole lot of people over a 2,000 years. They disagree with each other. Many ideas and teachings included in the Bible express a partial truth on the way to fuller revelation. Some are there, I think, simply by way of bad example: the Deuteronomist says that God commanded genocide against idolatrous peoples; Ezra says God commanded men to abandon their wives and children because they were the wrong ethnicity and religion. The Psalmist prays that soldiers will bash in the heads of his enemies’ babies…
This is the Bible we’re talking about here! “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
So even though many other biblical passages condemn such a pessimistic take on the world, it still hurts when we read such blatant cynicism there.
Within the whole arc of scripture, admission of the pointlessness of life apart from God is in fact the first step to meaningfulness, something pointed out in today’s epistle. In light of Jesus’ resurrection, we know that in death life is not ended, but rather changed. All will be right in the end, and if things are not all right, then it is not yet the end.
But in this life, we walk by faith and not by sight, and Qohelet’s specter of pointlessness still haunts us.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus himself is pretty pessimistic: he says, with Robby Burns, that the best-laid plans of mice and men are useless In an exquisite little parable, a man who is a model of responsibility and prudence finds his efforts are pointless. A wealthy farmer plans carefully to insure his security, only to be caught unawares that very night by unexpected death. He talks to himself: “Self of mine, you have many good things stored up for years to come. So take it easy; eat, drink, and enjoy it to the max!” He is quoting Qohelet’s line without realizing that “this too is pointless.” He talks to himself as if to a stranger. Such chasing the wind means alienation from self.
That is because it reflects alienation from God, who replies, “You idiot! This very night your life will end! Now who’s going to get all that stuff?”
“You idiot!” The reference is to Psalm 14:1, “The idiot says in his heart, there is no God.” The rich farmer has bought into the lie that “God helps those who help themselves.” He has acted for all intents and purposes as if there were no God. He is an atheist in practice. His praiseworthy prudence has distracted him from the truth that in this life, nothing apart from God is truly secure. Nothing can be taken for granted; all things should be the occasion of gratitude.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus points to birds and wildflowers as signs of God’s love. If God feeds and clothes his lowly creatures so well, there is no need for worry, no need to strive for more: “Your Heavenly Father knows all that you need… So work first for God’s Reign and the justice it demands, and God will make sure you get what you need” (Matt. 6:19-33). The point is gratitude and the compassion that comes from it, not being “righteous.” “God sends the blessings of Sun and Rain both on the Godly and the Ungodly alike” Jesus says. “We cannot enter God’s Reign unless we become helpless like little children.”
“Being rich for God” or “storing up treasures in heaven” for
Jesus is not another struggle, a way of bribing love out of a supposedly
unloving God, or of showing how much better we are than others. All that, too, is pointless chasing after the
wind.
Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Criticized
regularly for being too lax in his expectations of his followers, he throws
parties and regularly says to rejoice and be thankful (that’s why “hallowed be
thy name” leads in the Lord’s Prayer). On Jesus’ lips, “eat, drink, and be
merry” is not a cry of isolating despair, but of welcoming gratitude.
Acting as if God were not taking care of us, were not a good and loving Parent, as if we thought that God did not exist, or that God were not unconditional Love itself—this is foolishness, idiocy, “totally pointless.”
Our eyes must see God at work in the world about us, and our heart must be thankful, set on God the giver of every good gift. In this world that appears so forlorn of love, so seemingly pointless, there is no room for illusion or fantasy. No room for self-alienation, seeing yourself as a stranger. No room for alienating others, identifying them as enemies or competitors, or scapegoating and blaming them for our own failings. No room for letting our fears, anxieties, and guilt run rampant and blot out the table of plenty already set before us. Acceptance, thanksgiving, and openness are the right posture of any soul that would enter the heart of God. Greed—whether for money, security, pleasure, power, prestige, beauty, knowledge, sanctity, or perfect domesticity—greed is baggage that simply cannot fit through the narrow door.
And that, I
think, is the ultimate point in life’s apparent pointlessness. As William
Sloane Coffin said, “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth
and too small for anything but love.”
If we're not quite there, that's OK. Remember Jesus said our heart
will follow where we place our treasure. We can act as if we had faith,
and faith will come. Fake it ‘till you make it.
This is not hypocrisy:
hypocrisy is pretending to be something you’re not so you can continue
being the way you are. Faking it ‘till
you make is so you can actually change. And it works.
Jesus here is not telling us to forgo any thought of modest retirement accounts
or prudent savings. Elsewhere he tells us to be harmless as doves but
smart as snakes. He expects street smarts, and part of this is putting
aside chasing after wind, being idiots.
In Flannery O’Conner’s troubling story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” a serial murderer called the Misfit abducts a family in the rural South. A grandmother tries to talk him out of killing her by repeating tired banalities about prayer, the Church, and Jesus. The Misfit answers:
“Jesus… [has] thrown everything off balance. If He did what he said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”
This Misfit takes the cynicism of Ecclesiastes to a very sick logical conclusion. O’Conner once wrote that “The story is a duel of sorts between the grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt involvement with Christ’s action, which set the world off balance for him.” O’Conner’s point is that there’s no use in saying you believe in Jesus or God unless that changes your life and affects your view of everything: “Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live. ... I see from the standpoint of classical Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.”
Practical atheism is not an option. We mustn’t tart up our greed and say it is prudence. We mustn’t justify our desire to be in control by saying this is our right. We mustn’t act as if our lust for pleasure is anything other than pointless distraction. Our trust in God must show fruits in our life, in how we use our time and resources. Jesus does not call us all to be spiritual supermen, or ascetics. He calls us all simply to take up his easy yoke, his light burden: trust and love God, be honest, and act with the compassion for others that grows from this. In a word: Work justice, do kindness, and walk humbly with our God.
In the name of God, Amen.
