NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST August 1, 2004

(Ecclesiastes 1:12-14, 2:1-7, 11; Psalm 19; Colossians 3:5-17; Luke, 12:13-21)

I think I’ve told this story before when I’ve talked about prayer, but it is one that I think makes an important spiritual point, particularly when connected with the lesson from Ecclesiastes that we heard this morning.

I had a friend in college named Make Hubbard whom I had known since 6^th grade. He was a psychology major at Iowa where I was a comparative religion major. Every once in a while he would have to do experiments and would recruit people as guinea pigs, when real guinea pigs wouldn’t do. I was always happy to oblige since we got pain $15 for our trouble which was a lot back in the days of 35 cent beers. And also because, since the psychology department was totally experimental, behavior, scientific, and materially based, I always looked for an opportunity to throw in a religious perspective.

Anyway, this particular experiment had to do with learning and it involved this very complicated instrument panel. The panel was contained in a sound-proof room with Mike sitting outside observing and taking notes. The panel was fairly high so you had to sit on a drafting chair to work at it. It had two dials on the top, a slide mechanism like some kinds of volume controls at the bottom left, a calculator key pad on the bottom right, and a counter in the center, like the odometer on a car, except that it would click up each number with a very audible sound.

Mike just had you go into the room with no instructions and you had to figure things out from there. It seemed clear though that the point was to accumulate "points" to make the "odometer" go higher. But to do that you had to figure out what each dial did, what the slide thing did, how to work the calculator, and that wasn’t something all that obvious. Sometimes you would do something and it would get you points and sometime you would do the same thing and the points would disappear. So it seemed like the order in which you did stuff was somehow important.

You looked for connections. You looked for patterns in order to achieve positive results or avoid negative ones. Every so often you would do something and all the points would vanish. You would have to start all over again, and I remember that possibility bringing particular stress into the experiment.

After the experiment, which took about half an hour, Mike debriefed me to find out how much I had "learned". I had thought I had figured out how to get points, but not how to keep from losing them. (Which actually has sort of been a pattern in my life, now that I think about it.) I had even begun to wonder, if when it came to losing points, if it might not have anything to do with what I did, but rather depended on how I did it. How I sat, or how quickly or slowly I reacted, or something else that then caused Mike, who was observing me, to do something that cost me the points. Maybe it was really all his fault, or somebody else in some other room … (Not knowing why your are losing points can make you a little paranoid!)

As it turned out, the whole thing was entirely random. The dials, the slide, the number on the calculator weren’t connected to anything. Mike didn’t even control the points. Gaining or losing just happened.

The writer of Ecclesiastes expresses the same opinion about most of the way we live most of our lives. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and the chasing after wind."

I know that may sound cynical, but we have all had that same experience of vanity in many more areas of our lives than college psychology experiments. I’ve had it in raising children for example. Over the past nearly twenty-five years as a parent I have seen standards of parenting shift, great insights rise and fall, breakthroughs come and go, from "enriched environments" in the playpen to "touch love" for teenagers, from discipline to freedom to benign neglect and back again. After all that somebody comes out and says that the only thing that is really important is consistency.

Still, my kids have turned out okay, more or less, so far. (That is another thing, I thought parenting stopped when they were 18!) The important thing is that, I really do like my kids. And I think that’s all that really matters.

Now I’ve known families that have followed pretty much the same path I have whose kids have turned out really great, and others who have followed pretty much the same path I have whose kids have had a really hard time. I was pretty consistent in my inconsistency with both of my kind, and they are very different from each other. There are just too many factors involved to do all that much predicting and prescribing. A creative challenge for one person can be a disabling trauma for another, or for the same person at another time and place. I know kids can be broken. I could have broken Mike’s machine in frustration, and I wouldn’t have gotten any points – or the 15 dollars. But short of that extreme I guess I am saying we are probably just not very much in control. We just pretend to be in control, pushing the buttons and turning the dials, and that helps to keep the panic down . And that may be a worthwhile thing in itself, but it can end up in vanity of we really buy into that delusion of control.

I found the same thing to be true in my work with people suffering from mental illness. Nature, nurture, medication, therapy, it all worked some but never really predictably. Every time some new idea would come along about a cause or a cure for mental illness it would as if people were saying, "We used to think that this elephant was gray, but now we know it’s actually big."

I have seen it with the Church as well. Church growth programs, stewardship programs come and go. They may keep us occupied and out of serious trouble. But God is doing something here that we are not in charge of, and to pretend to be in charge may just get in the way.

The problem with arrogantly thinking we have it all figured out, that the surface answers and latest self-help books can deal with real problems of real life, is not just that we get caught up in vanity, but that the vanity blocks us from seeing the deeper truth. It blocks us from access to the true power beyond our false presumptions of power. It blocks us from God.

That’s what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel today. Then, as now, wealth was a way to exercise control, to find a kind of security. The man in the parable thought about building more barns, I check out my IRA in the mutual fund list in the newspaper, and look at the sales price for comparable houses with mind. It is the same sort of thing.

But Jesus says, "This day your soul is required of you." Anything can happen. We can’t find real security in retirement accounts or airport checks or orange alerts. We are just pushing buttons and turning knobs, trying to keep the panic down. All of which is okay, but only if it doesn’t keep us from finding true security that can only be found in relationship with God. We try so hard sometimes to paddle up stream. We never seem to make way. The only difference is that we won’t see the rapids as we approach them. Only if we turn around – which is the real meaning of the word conversion – only if we go with God’s current instead of against it, can we ever hope to steer a little, and that is the most we can do…along with enjoying the ride.

It is interesting. The New English Bible translated the word that here is translated as ‘vanity’ by using the word ‘emptiness’. "Emptiness, emptiness, all is emptiness and a chasing after wind." And that really is the root of the word ‘vanity’. It is connected with the world ‘vanish’. It may also be connected with the word ‘pane’, as in windowpane that has to be empty in order to see through.

Such emptiness is a spiritual truth in many traditions. It is at the heart of the non-attachment I talked about a few weeks ago. We have to be empty in order to be filled. We have to see past the vanity, the surface of the world, through the emptiness of the objective and the apparent in order to see the truth, to go with the flow. The flow of the spirit, the breath of God, the wind of God.

Emptiness, emptiness, all is emptiness, and a chasing after … spirit? AA would just say, "Let go and let God."

That does not mean we stop raising children, or treating the mentally ill, or working for the growth of the church, or saving for retirement. It just means that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.

We still pray. We still do good works. We go about our lives with as much skill as we can muster and try to use our paddle to avoid at least the visible rocks. Maybe we will end up with points left over. We get the $15 no matter what. But we are not in control.

Let go and let God. But also realize that God doesn’t really need our permission.

Thanks be to God.