Our Several Hills of Beans--July 9, 2020

“Our Several Hills of Beans”--July 9, 2020

"What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end." [Ecclesiastes 3:9-11]

You know the scene, I’m sure. Humphrey Bogart looks at Ingrid Bergman in the fog on the airfield, just before he puts her on the plane to continue in the Resistance with her husband, and he says to her, “I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.” And with that, and a very famous, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” the last scene in Casablanca unfolds. 

It might be one of the greatest moments captured on celluloid, but it’s also a pretty accurate description of the human condition. The work we do, the things we fuss over, the problems that so worry us today, they are in the grand scheme of things, a hill of beans. Maybe not even that much. 

On an ordinary day for us, we have such tiny concerns—has the milk in the fridge expired? What if I have to cross paths with that unpleasant person at work today? Will I have a date to the wedding later this summer? Oh, I hope I don’t get stuck in traffic today. Meanwhile, the news reminds us that we are living through a pandemic that is upending our usual order of life in just about every way… and of course, there are the sounds of helicopters over our skies reminding us that today someone is being Life-Flighted somewhere and that real crises are happening for someone today, while their loved ones watch and wait. And at the very same time, in other parts of the world, too many people went hungry yesterday and do not know where tonight’s dinner will come from… or more likely, they know it will not come from anywhere. Kind of humbling, ain’t it, to see our piddling little day to day concerns alongside the catastrophes and crises that other people are facing while we are debating which brand of smart-phone to buy or whether we feel our social calendars are full enough lately. All of a sudden, against the shadow of the real mountains of trouble that others will have to climb today, our list of pet peeves is revealed to be… less than even a hill of beans. 

And not to beat a dead horse here, but if we dare to zoom out a bit farther, our whole planet full of worries is really just a tiny blue speck against the inky blackness of our solar system, and our sun turns out to be a tiny yellow speck against the galactic pinwheel of the spinning arms of the Milky Way, which itself is in a vast swath of a universe we can barely begin to fathom. All of a sudden even “a hill of beans” sounds like we are giving ourselves too much credit. 

Ecclesiastes sees this about us. And he reminds us that part of the unique and bittersweet role of humans in that universe is that we, of all creatures, can recognize our smallness. We have to live with it. Other critters on planet Earth are just as small or smaller, but they are so wrapped up in digging tunnels or pollinating flowers or building the hive or chasing gazelles or not getting eaten by the lion that they just don’t recognize that they and their troubles don’t amount to that famous hill of beans. There is a certain blissful ignorance about that—I’ll bet that ants think, to the extent that they are even aware of it, that all their work supporting the colony is really vital, crucial stuff. They do not realize that the anthill they all live in doesn’t even amount to a hill of beans—or that it is easily squished with a wind-tossed tree branch or lumbering animal’s footfall. They are spared that humbling experience. 

Humans, the Teacher Ecclesiastes says, however, have the gift (although it is an odd and sometimes painful gift) of being able to look up from our work and see the mountains in the distance. We have the capacity to recognize the bigness of things, and our comparative smallness. God has placed “ha ‘olam” in our hearts. The NRSV here translates it as “a sense of past and future” that has been put into our minds. But in fact, the Hebrew is much richer and more wonderfully ambiguous. The Hebrew “ha ‘olam” is sometimes translated “the world” or “eternity” or “the universe.” It is about space, and time, and the extremes of both, all at the same time. (Funny to think that it took brilliant physicists like Einstein all the way to the 20th century to come up with the mathematics to tell us that time and space are really interrelated as part of one big continuum, one piece of fabric, when ancient Hebrew was saying the same thing three thousand years ago.) 

Anyway, that is in the human heart, Ecclesiastes says. God has put “ha ‘olam”—eternity!—into our hearts. In a sense, that is a heavy load for us to bear, because it means we have the capacity, and the burden, of being able to see Humphrey Bogart’s point—that in the grand scheme, our problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. And this crazy world is like the asterisk on a footnote in the vastness of all the volumes you could say about our solar system or galaxy or universe. Human beings have the burden—when we are not lying to ourselves and making ourselves the center of the universe or thinking that the third-quarter profits really are worth making a fuss over—of seeing in stark humility how small we are. And that is not often an easy thing to recognize. 

But at the very same time, come on—eternity! In our hearts! We have a sense of the big-ness of God within us! We have a sense hard-wired into us that there is more than building the ant-hill, that there is more than just moving around small green pieces of paper in the quest for happiness, that there is more than the shallow drive to get a bigger house, a shinier car, and a white picket fence to keep out the neighbors. We have the God-given ability not to be satisfied with just getting food in our bellies, but to keep reaching for relationship with the Eternal One. “We are all in the gutter,” said Oscar Wilde, “but some of us are looking up at the stars.” That impulse to see the immense and intricate beauty of the bigness of the world in which we have been placed—that has been placed in our hearts. That is “ha ‘olam”—eternity, the fullness of the universe, everything in space and time—and God has set our hearts to seek after it like a compass needle seeks north. 

Well, if that’s true, then no wonder we aren’t satisfied in life with just making money and dying with the most toys. Of course those are empty pursuits compared to the deep hunger we have for the divine—for the One who really is eternal. We won’t ever be satisfied with less. 

You can call that bad news if you really thought that buying a new car or taking a new job was really going to make you feel like you’ve “got it all.” Or you can call that Good News, for two reasons: For one, it explains why you can still feel empty even with all new shiny possessions, but full when you have that morsel of bread placed in your hand at the Table alongside sisters and brothers in Christ. And second, we hunger for God, for eternity, amid all the other piddling and petty things to fuss about in life, because God has made us to be able to find him and be filled with him. A compass needle points to the north because it was made to find north—and we are made with a God-shaped vacuum within us, an “infinite abyss,” as Pascal called it, because we were made to be in relationship with the Eternal One. No wonder all the beans in the world won’t do the trick. 

Lord God, give to us the humility of vision to see our smallness, and give to us the deep hunger to keep seeking to be filled with you in all your infinite fullness.