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Today's scripture readings are from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verses 1 through
18, chapter 3, verses 10 and 11, and chapter 12, verses 13 and 14, as printed in the liturgy.
A reading from the book of Ecclesiastes.
The words of the teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher.
Utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless.
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north.
Round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
And to the place the streams come from, there they return again.
All things are wearisome, more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again.
What has been done will be done again.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say, look, this is something new.
It was here already, long ago.
It was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations.
And even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
I, the teacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem.
I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens.
What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun.
All of them are meaningless.
A chasing after the wind.
What is crooked cannot be straightened.
What is lacking cannot be counted.
I said to myself, look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me.
I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.
Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom and also of madness and folly.
But I learned that this too is a chasing after the wind.
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow.
The more knowledge, the more grief.
I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the human heart.
Yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Now all has been heard.
Here is the conclusion of the matter.
Fear God and keep his commandments.
For this is the duty of all mankind.
For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Good morning, Christ Church.
It is so good to see you all.
And as Andrew said, especially if you are new with us for this Explore God journey,
if you've come along with a friend or received an invitation, we're delighted you're here.
We do hope that you've already been warmly welcomed.
And that you know this is a place where you can belong, whatever your spiritual or cultural background,
wherever you may be on that spectrum of belief or unbelief.
And we're excited to engage with you, explore God with you, and learn from you.
And if you're part of our Christ Church family, we just encourage you to take this.
The reason we gave it to you today is so you can give it to somebody else and invite them,
a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker along on this journey with us.
We have very busy lives, don't we?
And there's so many questions that we ask ourselves every day.
Like tomorrow morning, we're going to wake up and say, what should I wear?
And what's the weather going to be like today?
And what's happening at work?
And how am I going to fit it all in?
But there's also these questions that are bigger, right?
Like, why am I here?
And where are we heading?
And is this it?
And is there more to life than this?
These are life's big questions, but we rarely have the time to think through them properly.
And so that's why we're going to think seriously over the next seven weeks about these big questions of life.
And we're going to begin today with this question, does life have a purpose?
What's the meaning of life?
And in the coming weeks, we're going to explore other questions.
Is there a God?
Why does God allow pain and suffering?
Is Christianity too narrow?
Is Jesus really God?
Is the Bible reliable?
And can I know God personally?
And if you're like me, you hear those questions, you're like, well, I have like 20 more questions.
And so, as Andrew said, we do invite you to our Q&A time at the end.
And go easy on me, though, because it's kind of new for us.
When asked whether people think about the meaning and purpose of life, nearly three-quarters of people across the globe say that they do think about that question often or sometimes.
And if you were to ask me, is there a book of the Bible that really devotes itself to this search for purpose and for meaning?
And particularly that takes seriously the possibility that life may not have a meaning and that life may not have an actual purpose.
And a book that explores the consequences of that possibility.
I would have to say it's the book of Ecclesiastes that you just heard.
And I leaned to my daughter as I was being read.
I said, did you even know this is in the Bible?
She's like, no, I've never heard this in my life.
Meaningless, meaningless.
Everything is meaningless.
How can that possibly be meaningful?
And who in the world is this teacher?
Well, this teacher in this book, he's a parent who's trying to prepare his kids to live wisely.
And so he shares with his children his own agonizing struggle between skepticism and faith.
He says, look, I've already been there and done that.
And let me share with you this agonizing struggle that I've had between the absurdity of my existence and the fear of God.
Skepticism and faith.
And what we find is this book is full of skeptical questions.
And this teacher is really pushing his kids and he's pushing us to the logical conclusion of our positions.
He's trying to lay bare the foundations of our life and explore the boundaries of our thought.
And he says to us relentlessly, well, why do you believe that?
And do you know what that means?
And have you thought about the implications of your beliefs?
And this is a book that it does in the end, as you just heard, it affirms a faith in a generous God.
But it does so first by pointing us to the grim alternative of life without God.
And it really asks us to consider that.
What is life without God all about?
Before it tells us what the purpose and the meaning of life is, it seeks to clarify for us what the meaning and purpose of life is not.
And so that's what we're going to explore a little bit together.
Okay?
You ready?
I want to talk about the meaning crisis under the sun.
The problem with self-made meanings and meaning above and beyond the sun.
Those three things.
The meaning crisis under the sun.
The problem with self-made meanings and meaning above and beyond the sun.
And I want to start by talking about the meaning crisis under the sun.
And I want you to hear again these words in verse 3.
What does anyone gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?
And then he says in verse 14,
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun.
All of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
And this is a key word in this book is life under the sun.
He uses that phrase 29 times.
Just repeats it over and over.
And in that, the teacher is basically saying, let's do this.
This is a thought experiment.
Let's assume that nature, that material reality is all there is.
And let's bracket out for a moment anything that could possibly be above and beyond the sun.
Let's just say that there's no God who created you.
No one who's sustaining you.
No lawgiver, no judge, no heaven, no eternity, no afterlife.
And in this framework of all that's done merely under the sun,
he asks some questions.
What do we gain and profit from all of our labors?
And when all is said and done, what are we going to have to show for it all?
What will we have accomplished?
What difference will we have made in this life under the sun?
And then his answer to that question 37 times throughout this book,
it's just relentless, he says everything,
when you consider life only under the sun,
everything is utterly meaningless.
Everything he says literally in Hebrew, he says it's vapor.
It's a puff of air, it's just a breath that's here and then it's gone.
And that's the theme of this whole book.
And really the teacher's first goal is to get his kids and to get us to be realists.
And to face the fact that life under the sun is vaporous
and it's despairing and it's meaningless and it's absurd.
And in many ways, I can't think of a more contemporary book that if this teacher were here today,
he'd be critiquing the default belief system that's emerging in our culture,
which is secularism.
And I think it's captured very well in this article by James Wood in The New Yorker.
James Wood is a Harvard professor and he's a professor of English,
he's a literary critic and he's writing, really quoting a friend of his
who's an analytical philosopher and a convinced atheist
who wakes up regularly in the middle of the night haunted by a visceral angst.
And he's quoting his friend and he says,
how can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang?
How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose?
Can it be that every life beginning with my own, my husband's, my child's,
and spreading outward is cosmically irrelevant?
And then Wood, who's a secular man himself,
he admits that as one gets older and parents and peers begin to die
and the obituaries and the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place,
but local letters and one's own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral.
Such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing
and I find as likely to arise in the middle of the day as in the night.
It's a great article, it's called,
Is This All There Is, Secularism and Its Discontents?
And I want us to consider for a moment the belief structure of strict secularism.
And the beliefs of secularism are basically these,
that people are only physical entities without souls,
that when your loved ones die they cease to exist,
that our sensations of love and beauty are just neurochemical events,
and that there is no right or wrong outside of what we choose in our minds.
And that secularism tends to really flatten and reduce human life
so that as one author puts it,
all of our getting and spending amount to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death.
Now maybe you feel that way.
Many, many people in our lives feel that way.
They have good jobs, they have family, they have friends,
they have resources to live in a materially comfortable way,
but they say that their lives feel meaningless.
And maybe that's you.
I'm not really sure what all this activity that I'm doing is being done for.
All this making and getting, I don't know if it actually matters,
if it makes a difference, if it's accomplishing anything beyond itself.
And I'm not quite sure if I have an overall purpose for living
or making a difference by serving some good beyond myself.
Maybe that resonates with some of us.
And yet, you know, many of us feel conflicted.
We feel conflicted because we intuit,
either faintly or quite strongly,
that human beings and human loves and human aspirations
can't be reduced down to mere material reality,
that there's something more than just our chemistry
and our genes and our bodies, right?
So I think this teacher and his under-the-sun thesis
is an incredibly relevant contemporary thing
that speaks to this modern meaning-shaped whole
at the center of our culture.
Right?
And over the last century,
we had many, many people writing.
Chekhov, Kafka,
Camus,
Sartre,
and they talked about this existential dread
that sort of came over
Western 20th century life
and this sense of angst and despair
and absurdity
and the nausea that ensued.
And they basically said,
we're all like Sisyphus, right?
That Greek myth where there's that guy
just rolling his rock up the hill
only to see your rock
come rolling back down at the end of the day.
We're trying so hard to do good
for the people we love
and yet we know that that good doesn't last.
We know that the people that we love don't last.
As the philosopher Bertrand Russell argued
about the secular view,
he said that all of our human labor
and love and genius
is, quote,
destined to extinction
and the vast death of the solar system
and that results henceforth
in an unyielding despair.
And I think our teacher would agree.
Our teacher's trying to help us
live for a moment
in that unyielding despair
and he's begging this question,
can purpose,
can meaning for our lives
be found only under the sun
in this here and now reality?
Like material secularism
suggests that we should try to do.
And some people shrug at that
and they say,
well, whatever.
You know, I'm not really looking for meaning.
If the universe is truly meaningless
and indifferent,
then why should we think
that it ought not to be that way?
In fact, maybe we should just celebrate
meaninglessness
and acknowledge that it's liberating,
actually,
to relinquish our expectation
that there ought to be
some kind of meaning
with a capital M.
In fact, the result
of there being no meaning
is that now it's kind of great.
We're free to determine
for ourselves
how we want to live
and we're free to construct
our own meanings, right?
And this is the great crisis
of meaning in our culture.
Some people,
modern people,
grieving our meaninglessness
and our loss of meaning.
Postmodern people,
gleefully celebrating
that we have no more meaning
and this sense
that we're cosmically irrelevant
and that we share
no more meaning in common
in our lives together
has created quite a bit
of confusion
and conflict
and chaos
that I think we've seen
increase, even,
over the last five
to ten years
in our culture.
And I think our teacher
gives us this incredibly
haunting image
that this crisis
of meaning for us
is like a chasing
after the wind.
We're trying desperately
but unsuccessfully
to grab hold
of something
that's slipping
through our fingers.
You tracking with me
on this crisis of meaning?
You feel that
in your life
and in our culture?
There's a crisis of meaning
under the sun,
our teacher says.
But then he goes on
and I want to explore
the problem
with self-made meanings
because many secular people
might respond to this
and say,
well, I have to insist
that I actually do have
a satisfying meaning
in my life.
You know, I'm seeking
to be a good parent.
I'm serving a crucial
political cause.
I tutor underprivileged youth.
I enjoy and promote
great literature.
And all this gives me
great purpose
and assurance
that I'm doing some good
beyond myself.
I'm serving some good
higher than myself.
And it's true
that, you know,
people can live
with these smaller meanings
and not feel tortured
like Kafka
and gloomy
like Camus.
And we should,
you know,
it's a good
and admirable thing
to find true purpose
and meaning
in ordinary tasks.
But I want to suggest
to you
that there's a vast difference
between assigned meanings
on the one hand
and inherent meaning
on the other.
I want you to see
and think about
this difference
between subjective meaning
that you come up with
and objective meaning
that's just there
whether you discover it
or not.
Right?
There's a difference
between created meaning
and discovered meaning.
For example,
you might determine,
well,
I'm going to live my life
for political change.
I'm going to live
for influence
in my vocational field.
I'm going to live
for happiness
in my family.
And those might serve
for you
as energizing goals.
But our teacher
would say
these kind of
self-made,
subjective,
constructed meanings
are actually quite thin
and fragile
and temporary.
And they don't really
pass the rigorous test
and really the withering test
of our teacher
because he would come to you
and he would say,
okay, great.
You're living for a project
that's larger than yourself.
You're caring for your family.
You're alleviating poverty.
But what's the point of that?
What difference does that make?
And you say,
well,
I'm trying to make the world
into a better place.
But our teacher
would keep boring down on you
and say,
but what's the point of that?
And you answer
and he says,
well,
what's the point of that?
And what's the point of that?
And he says,
if you say,
if my meaning
is attached
to personal relationships,
the teacher would say,
well,
all those people
are going to die.
And if you say,
well,
my meaning
is invested
in future generations
and making the future world
a better place,
he would say,
but all that's going to pass away too.
He says in verse four,
generations come
and generations go.
And in verse 11,
he says,
there's no remembrance
of people of old
and even those
who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
Within this secular vision
of life under the sun,
he says,
your influence
and your impact
is in the grand view
of things
going to be quite negligible.
How many of us
even remember
the names
of our great grandparents?
Some of us
can barely remember.
Think about that
for your own life.
In 50 years,
who is going
to be talking about you?
If you leave
a ton of money
behind to an organization,
maybe they named
something after you.
In 500 years though,
are they going
to be talking about you?
Maybe if you ruled
over an empire,
we might be reading
about you.
But 5,000 years from now,
are we going
to be talking about you
and even remembering
your name?
Our teacher says,
you know,
you kind of have
to tell yourself
that your self-made meaning
matters even though
you know
that the universe
is going to cool down
or collapse on itself
and when it's dying,
it's never going to care
that you even existed.
And so you have
to train yourself
as a secular person
not to ask
these meta questions
about the point
of your life.
You have to discipline
yourself not to think
about the ultimate outcome
of all that we do,
which in the secular view
of things
is sheer nothingness.
And you say,
yeah,
but I just put it
all out of my mind
and I try to focus
on the meaning
of this present moment,
but that,
what you just said
is that you get
your feeling
of meaningfulness
by a lack of rationality,
that through a suppression
of your thinking
and reflection
on the larger reality,
you can kind of
conjure up
this feeling
of meaningfulness.
And some of you say,
well, gosh, okay,
maybe humanism's
kind of not the way to go.
And some of you say,
well, I kind of actually
left this version
of humanism behind
and at some point
I just embraced
kind of a straight-up
hedonism, right?
Hedonism says,
well, I'm not going
to live anymore
for other people.
I'm now going to live
for myself.
And my main goal
in life now
is to just experience
as much pleasure
and as little pain
as possible
and hope that I die
in my sleep.
Maybe you feel this way
or maybe you know
people that live
this way,
but our teacher
would respond to that
in verse 8
and say,
well, all things
are wearisome
more than one can say.
The eye never has
enough of seeing
nor the ear
its fill of hearing.
What makes you think,
the teacher says,
that your eyes
or your ears
or any other sense
perception
that's going to take in
all those pleasure
feelings
are ever going to say,
that's enough
or I'm full.
It's never going
to satisfy.
We know that we can't
get enough dopamine.
The more dopamine
hits you get,
the more you have
to go find.
And the teacher
of Ecclesiastes,
if you keep reading
this book,
which I encourage
you to do,
he says in Ecclesiastes 2,
I tried this.
I tried shearing myself
with wine
and I built houses
for myself
and planted vineyards.
I made gardens
and parks
and planted
all kinds of
fruit trees in them.
I amassed silver
and gold for myself
and the treasure
of kings
and provinces.
I acquired male
and female singers,
even a whole
harem of women,
the delights
of a man's heart.
He says,
I denied myself
nothing my eyes desired.
I refused my heart
no pleasure.
And yet when I surveyed
all that my hands
had done
and what I'd toiled
to achieve,
everything was
meaningless.
A chasing after the wind.
Nothing was gained
under the sun.
In the secular vision
of life,
dopamine is not only
not enough,
but you have to
remind yourself
that none of the
good things you feel
have any meaning.
When you fall in love
and you're attracted
to that girl
or that guy,
it's just an accidental
collision of atoms.
Your response
to her
is only a psychic
phosphorescence
arising from the behavior
of your genes
and nothing more.
when you hear
that beautiful music
and you think
to yourself,
ah, there's such
beauty and significance
here,
you have to tell yourself
that's a pure illusion.
That the only reason
you like it
is because your nervous
system has been
irrationally conditioned
to like it.
The same goes
for hugging a child
or watching a sunset
or reading a book
and you say,
ah, this feels good.
That's just electrochemical
responses in your nerves.
And you cannot say,
I'm just going to project
my feeling of meaning
onto this senseless universe.
And you say,
okay,
well,
this is why I'm not
a humanist
and it's why I'm
no longer a hedonist.
It's why I became
at one point
an existentialist.
And I said,
well, okay,
now I'm going to
fight for justice.
I'm going to fight
against oppression.
And with Dylan Thomas,
I say,
do not go gentle
into that good night.
Rage,
rage against the dying
of the light.
Yes,
life is meaningless,
but I'm going to rage
against life
and I'm going to rage
against all that meaningless
and I'm going to hope
that I do something
to put some wrongs
in this world
to right before I die.
And our teacher
would say to you
in verse 15,
what is crooked
cannot be straightened
and what is lacking
cannot be counted.
It takes a certain
level of narcissism
to think that you
finally are going,
you've arrived
to straighten everything
in this crooked world out.
And our teacher
would say to you as well,
where do you even get
your standard
for straightness
and fullness
by which you discern
that the universe
is crooked
and lacking?
have I lost you completely?
You would have to appeal
to some authority
above yourself
and above this world
to even say
that something's wrong
with this world.
And the teacher would say,
how can you say
that your origin
is insignificant
and your destiny
is insignificant
but while I'm alive
I'm going to work
for human rights
and human justice
as if somehow
those things
are significant?
You can't say that.
How can you say
that my origin
is an accident,
my destiny
is to be annihilated
but for right now
we should all love
our neighbors
as ourselves.
Where did you get that?
And is that even
consistent
with your vision?
That actually takes
an entire giant leap
of religious faith
and some kind
of transcendent reality
to say that human beings
have some sort
of inherent specialness
or dignity
that we should do
something for them.
But isn't it
more consistent
with the secular vision
of reality
to say the strong
should devour the weak
and might makes right?
That is actually
the ethic
that goes along
with your metaphysic.
And the teacher says
in verse 18
he says,
for with much wisdom
comes much sorrow,
the more knowledge
the more grief.
He says,
maybe you just
haven't lived long enough
because the more
you live,
the more you see,
the more you know
that all of these schemes,
humanism,
hedonism,
existentialism,
all the other isms,
they've been tried
in some form
or fashion
and they've been found
wanting.
They fall apart.
They come to nothing.
They end,
he says,
in sorrow
and in grief.
And at some point,
you know,
some of you have said,
okay,
this is the worst sermon
I have ever heard
and I hate this book
of the Bible.
But,
and I get that,
it's super depressing
but we have to think about
what the meaning of life
and the purpose of life
cannot be
if we're going to discover
what it actually is.
And so we,
if you agree
that there's some sort
of meaning crisis
under the sun
and if you agree
that all these self-made meanings
are quite thin
and fragile
and temporary
and don't stand up
to these tests,
then I'd like for you
to consider
for these last few minutes
a meaning above
and beyond the sun.
Because our teacher says
in the third chapter
of this book,
he says,
I've seen the burden
God has laid
on the human race.
He's made everything
beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity
in the human heart
yet no one can fathom
what God has done
from beginning to end.
The teacher says
your heart
is telling you something
if you'll listen
very closely.
Your heart is telling you
that there's something
more to life
than what's merely
under the sun
in the here and now
material moment.
Your heart
is longing
for justice
and for the world
to be put right.
Your heart
is longing
with a thirst
for some hidden spring
of spirituality
and mystery
and fullness
and coherence
that's beyond
the space, time
and matter continuum.
Your heart
is hungering
for love
and you know
somewhere in your being
that you're made
for other people.
And your heart
is desiring beauty
to stand
at the top
of that mountain
to be on the edge
of the ocean
to peer
into the eyes
of your beloved
and you know
in your heart
that all that justice
and all that love
and all that beauty
and all that fullness
is not meaningless.
You know that.
These are signs
that God has put
in your heart
pointing to eternity.
And more than that
God has put clues
of himself
into the world
divine fingerprints
everywhere
that cause us
to ask the question
why is there something
more than nothing?
When you think about
the fine tuning
of the universe
the speed of light
the gravitational constant
these weak
and strong
nuclear forces
and how all of that
is precisely calibrated
at one
in a trillion
trillion chance
that the universe
supports human life.
And you might say
well that's not a proof
that God exists
but I would say
it certainly seems
to be a cosmic
welcome mat
that says
I'm glad
you're here.
And this teacher
he entertains
the possibility
that life
is a tale
told by an idiot
full of sound
and fury
signifying absolutely
nothing
and maybe you believe
that.
The teacher also
you know
considers the idea
that maybe life
is a tale
told by nobody
and maybe that's
where you are
or maybe that life
is not even a tale
there's no narrative
structure to reality
you say.
But our teacher says
I thought about that
and I've actually
tried to live
by all these thin
and fragile
temporary
self-made
meanings
under the sun
and the result
in my own life
was that I became
cynical
and I became
bitter.
But what I want
you to do
my son
what I want
you to do
my daughter
what I want
all of you
to do
he says
is pay attention
to those signs
in your heart
pay attention
to all those
clues
in the world
and ask yourself
what do they mean?
He's begging
the question
is it possible
to live
a life
that's not merely
for what's
under the sun?
Is it
can we live
in a reality
that takes
into account
what's above
and beyond
the sun?
You see
our teacher's
brilliant
because he drives
us to despair
in this present
reality
and then he meets
that despair
with hope.
He drives us
to see the absurdity
of things
and then he meets
that absurdity
with meaning.
He drives us
to say
yes you're right
everything is a vapor
and then he confronts
us with the reality
of eternity
and he says
in the final chapter
of this beautiful
short book
he says
now all has been heard
here's the conclusion
of the matter
fear God
and keep his commandments
for this is the duty
of every human being
for God will bring
every deed
into judgment
including every hidden
thing whether it is
good or evil.
He says
my eyes see
that life
is meaningless
and life
is a vapor
but my heart
knows that God
is there.
My heart
knows that God
is someone
that I must deal
with.
My heart
knows that God
is somehow good
and wise
and just
and that he's
the one writing
the story of history
and the story
of my life
and so finally
finally
he tells us
the real purpose
and the real meaning
of our lives
in two words
fear God
that's the conclusion
of the matter
he says
it's the summary
of the whole
Bible
stand in awe
and wonder
of this being
who is permanent
and supreme
and worthy
of your highest
esteem
stop living
by what's merely
by sight
and what's here
under the sun
start living
by faith
and what's above
and beyond the sun
this God
who is your maker
this God
who's your judge
this God
for whom you were
made to love
with all of your heart
soul
mind
and strength
now I could
land the plane
right there
and hopefully
I've gotten you
to think about
the fact that
maybe secularism
is not really the way
maybe I should consider
deism
or theism
and that would be
a good thing
but the New Testament
says that this God
who's a maker
and our judge
has not only written
these signs
in our heart
and these clues
into the world
he's the author
who wrote himself
into the story
as the main character
as Jesus Christ
who was born
in the manger
and rose from the dead
when you look
at the gospel
of John
chapter 1
the opening words
of that gospel
say
in the beginning
was the logos
and the logos
was with God
and the logos
was God
and that's
an astonishing statement
it's this incredible
revolutionary claim
that Jesus Christ
he's the meaning
behind the universe
he's the reason
for life
that the universal
order of the cosmos
is in fact
an individual person
the power
that undergirds
all reality
this absolute
personal God
became human
and eternity
stepped in
to time
and he was there
and he saw us
under the sun
alienated
and cut off
from the life of God
because of our
preoccupation
with ourselves
because of our sin
and our pride
and so he came
from beyond the sun
and he became human
and he died on a cross
and on that cross
what did he say
my God
why have you forsaken me
and in that moment
God himself
experienced the darkness
and the meaninglessness
of life
without God
which is the penalty
for all of our sins
Jesus got life
without God
so that we could have
life
with God
he put himself
in our lives
of misery
and mortality
and meaninglessness
so that we could be brought
into his life
of joy
and immortality
and eternal
meaning
and so friends
I leave you with this
that meaning
is not a concept
or a cause
that you go out
to find
meaning
with a capital M
is a person
who's come
to find you
and the purpose
of life
is to fear him
to follow him
to put your faith
in him
and when you do that
you've found
why it is
that you're even
here
there's probably
a ton of questions
I'll see you
over here
at the Q&A
in just a little bit
but I'm going to
park it there
in the name
of the Father
Son
and Holy Spirit
Amen