Advice for the Believer
Delivered in Magdalene College Chapel Cambridge
"You are old, Father William," the young man said
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head-
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth", Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before.
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door-
Pray, what is the reason of that?"
"In my youth", said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling the box -
Allow me to sell you a couple?"
"You are old", said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose with the bones and beak -
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth", said his father, "I took to the law
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life."
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose -
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father, "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"
Father William is old; his son is concerned that he might be overdoing things a little - after all, he ought not to be able to balance an eel on the end of his nose at his age. The son's anxiety is perfectly normal and is, no doubt, shaped by deeply held concerns about the inevitability of his own ageing process - distant though it might still appear. No new concern this. The preacher who wrote Ecclesiastes had considered the matter in some detail. Had he seen Father William performing handstands and somersaults, chewing with consummate ease, and performing balancing acts that showed near perfect sight, he would have been amazed. This is most certainly not what he thinks old age is about. In poetic language he describes old age as the progressive loss of faculties. In old age the grasshopper drags himself along - mobility is poor, those looking through the windows grow dim - eyesight fails, and the grinders cease because they are few - eating the bones and beak of a goose is pure Alice in Wonderland.
You will remember that Alice was obliged to recite the Father William poem to a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. At the time she was not feeling quite herself, being no more than three inches tall; but on the matter of growing up, the caterpillar would have some advice to give. As it crawled away into the grass it remarked, helpfully if not a little enigmatically, that mushroom "one side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter". Well, the advice did eventually prove helpful although Alice must have been thoroughly confused at the prospect of the mushroom having anything less than an infinite number of sides. But then the whole story of Alice is about what she can make of the confusing advice offered to her by a collection of splendid characters. And what should we make of the apparently confusing advice that the Preacher has given us this evening? What does this ancient caterpillar say to us? What is his advice about growing up?
He tells us 'Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see'; he is advising us, is he not, to enjoy our youth while we can. Follow your desires now, because as you grow older your ability to pursue your desires will be greatly curtailed. In a sense we might agree that we what we are hearing from the preacher is some kind of manifesto for hedonism. But we must be careful; there is a caveat: Know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment. Like Alice trying to work out what it might mean to speak of sides of a mushroom, we now wonder what it might mean to speak of following desires in the context of judgment. Our initial supposition, that this was hedonistic advice, is further questioned when we remember that the preacher also told us that 'youth and vigour are meaningless'. In fact at the end of his book he cries out "Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" Now, I'm really confused. Is he promoting, hedonism, nihilism, a fear of God, or a strange goulash made of all three? To answer this question let me go back to the text.
The sixties pop group gave a certain prominence to the book of Ecclesiastes with their hit single 'There is a time'. Perhaps another phrase from Ecclesiastes has also found its way into popular culture: 'There is nothing new under the sun'. The phrase 'under the sun', although not in the passage we heard, occurs 27 times in the course of the Preacher's short book. It is an important phrase, and I want to suggest to you that it's a phrase that helps us towards a more profitable understanding of our reading. When we heard the words 'Everything is meaningless' we did so in a kind of vacuum; for we were not aware of the Preacher's wider context. What he is saying to us is more specific than we might imagine; it is not that 'everything is meaningless' but that 'everything under the sun is meaningless'. By 'under the sun' he means quite simply this earthly realm. The preacher is a philosopher - not the kind that sits in an ivory tower alone with his thoughts, but a philosopher who closely observes life and its participants. So what has the Preacher, the philosopher seen: He says 'I have seen all the things that are done under the sun and all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind'. Yet he sees more 'I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun'. And on four occasions he tells us in some detail 'I have seen a grievous evil under the sun'. Now, all this seeing has been described and documented in the body of his book; we have heard no more than the tail. The tail has led us to believe that we were being given advice about how to live, but when attached to the body the whole creation is not about advice, it is an argument pure and simple. And the argument is simple: when you live under the sun you suppose that you live in the light but you are wrong. Under the sun you will be shown values that are valueless; under the sun you will be led into darkness; under the sun you will be devoured by meaninglessness. This is not to say that life itself is meaningless; far from it, it is a golden bowl of great value. Nor is it to say that we sit in perpetual darkness. Our reading began: light is sweet, and it pleases the eyes to see the sun. To live under the sun is one thing, to see the sun is quite another. Living under the sun, light shines all around you and you notice it not, but there are moments - brief moments - when you 'see the sun'. Young people are told 'remember your creator' not because he is their judge but because he was the one who powerfully said 'Let there be light'. What the Preacher is beckoning us towards is the great Biblical imagery of light and darkness. Under the sun we all too often encounter darkness, but there is another way, a way that points to the Creator, the origin of light.
This is not advice; it is an argument that proposes the reasonableness of faith. There is another realm; to remember your Creator in the days of your youth is a reasonable thing to do. There are, however, other aspects of this reasonableness. As his argument comes to a close he firmly tells us that after this life 'man goes to his eternal home'; in other words, our hope too is reasonable. And if youth live with faith and hope, surely they will work against all the oppression that the Preacher has seen, all the evil that he has had the misfortune to observe. They can be sure that while faith is reasonable, and that hope is reasonable, they can also be sure that love is also reasonable. After reading the book three things remain: faith, hope and love.
Is he right? In the light of Christ do we offer our assent? Let me make some brief observations on the reasonableness of faith, the reasonableness of hope and the reasonableness of love. When I speak of the reasonableness of faith I am not advocating a great systematic presentation of all aspects of Christian belief, a system that can be shown to stand up to reason. To do so would be to suppose that understanding would lead to faith. I have learnt that no amount of learning will bring about faith; the process moves in exactly the opposite direction. St Anselm was quite right when he wrote 'I believe so that I may understand'. In our community this notion seems daft; after all, we value above everything else our ability to reason. We spend all our time sharpening our intellectual swords. We prefer statements that begin 'I am certain' to those that begin 'I believe'. And yet, Sunday-by-Sunday, you and I stand say a creed that involves us thrice announcing 'I believe'. Because of our training we incline to thinking that such faith is no matter than blind trust. I want to suggest to you that it is not blind trust; the articles of the creed do not invoke blind trust. We recite them because we have confidence that what they describe is the case. I believe - I have confidence that it is certain that it is so. It is only with this confidence this faith that I can proceed towards understanding, but the faith itself is entirely reasonable.
The Christian hope tells of life after death, judgment, reconciliation, and the new creation of all things. Is it reasonable? It is grounded in the hope of God's promise to us in the person of Jesus Christ and it is witnessed to in the prophetic tradition. Throughout the Bible we have a kind of history of God's promises - God continually promises a future. It begins with Abraham and Sarah and it goes on to provide evidence after evidence that this is not only a history of word but also a history of act. God's history promises a future - that is the word and that is the reality. In Christ's resurrection we have seen the conquest of death; it is reasonable to have hope that that promise, made in the past, is continually present.
The reasonableness of love is the practical application of faith and love. 'Love' as defined in the New Testament is nothing less than the real presence of the living God in this world. It is the practice of God's kingdom, of his righteousness and justice in the here and now. We have heard this many times before and no doubt shuddered at the enormity of it. With all the problems of the world where should we start? In face of such enormity our energy evaporates, we are overcome with inertia. But it ought not to be so. We are finite beings and our love is bounded by our context; it is expressed in the way in which we relate to our own community. Our faith and hope cause us to practice God's kingdom in the here and now, within the walls of this College, within the University, within our relationships with those whom we love. Such love is not an impossible ideal it is reasonable.
The preacher has given us reasonable instruction. His programme of faith, hope and love finds its locus in the God who brought light out of darkness. He asks them to bring this programme to mind when he says: remember your Creator. St Paul in the verse immediately following our second lesson prompts us to the foundation of our faith, our hope and our love: Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead. This is my gospel.
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