October 11, 2026
Subjected in Hope
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 and Romans 8:18-25
This morning we are beginning seven weeks in the book of Ecclesiastes. Our theme this year is “Alive to God,” and this small book in the Old Testament is a long and honest look at life.
Ecclesiastes may be the least familiar book we have used in worship in a long time. Many of us only know a few lines from chapter 3, and we know that because “The Byrds” made it famous. “Turn, turn, turn…”
If you’re looking for this in a Bible, it sits among the wisdom books of the Old Testament, near Proverbs and Job. The speaker is called Qohelet in Hebrew, translated Teacher. He speaks in the voice of King Solomon, the wisest and richest king Israel ever had, though the book was written centuries after Solomon, at a time when Israel was struggling.
A few lines of Ecclesiastes are famous. “A time to be born, and a time to die.” “Nothing new under the sun.” “Vanity of vanities.” At his heart, Qohelet is the Bible’s great realist. He looks at life with such brutal realism he is nearly in despair. People of faith often have not known what to do with him, but he has an important word to say.
Let’s start where he starts, with a poem. If you lift a few of these verses out by themselves, they sound like a book you would read to a child at bedtime. Picture a parent on the edge of the bed, the lamp turned low, turning thick cardboard pages.
A generation goes, and a generation comes, and the earth stays right where it is.
The sun comes up. The sun goes down. Then it hurries back to where it started, and comes up again.
The wind blows to the south. The wind turns to the north. Round and round it goes, and back around again.
All the rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. And the rivers go back, and run again.
Can you see the child’s eyes getting heavy?
And then the parent says goodnight, leaves the rooms, and cries: “Futility! Utter futility! Everything is futile!”
That is the opening of Ecclesiastes. A gentle poem about seasons that come and go, given with a verdict about the meaninglessness of life.
Why does the Teacher feel so much dread? Many of us are comforted by changing seasons. How does a poem about sunrise and rivers cause this Teacher to feel that everything is meaningless?
The clue is in the question he asks right at the beginning of the poem. Verse 3: What does anyone gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?
“Gain” is the key word. It means profit, legacy. The Teacher wants to know what is left over at the end of a life of work. After all the planning, preparation, and effort. What has been accomplished that will last? The world runs in circles. The sun ends where it started. The sea is never full. People come and go. Is there a point to anything?
If you come to the world looking for a lasting achievement, the turning of the seasons can feel like an occasion for despair.
When I was working on my PhD, in the dissertation phase, it took a long time to write, and there were a few years where I made no real progress at all. Sitting on the beach in the summer was my annual reminder that another year had passed, and had not done much. There was the inevitable conversation at Thanksgiving or Christmas. How’s it going? When do you think you’ll finish? The return of the season was always measurement of how little had moved, and I’d wondered what difference it would make to even finish.
You don’t have to write a dissertation to know that feeling. When I was a young adult, I knew an older man in the community who was fastidious about the way he kept his home and yard. It was his pride and joy. If something broke, it was repaired immediately, within a week. The garage was organized to the last nail and screw. He had a squirt bottle full of weed-killer, and in the cool of the evening after a lovely meal he would walk through the lawn and zap any weeds that dared show their face.
A couple of years after he died, the city where he lived determined that the local entertainment arena needed a larger parking lot. They claimed the house, the garage, the lawn, and the whole neighborhood, by eminent domain, and paved it over.
Futility, futility, all is futility. These questions are just below the surface. What lasts? What has my time been worth? What should I do with what is left? Those questions live just under the surface.
They live under the surface of a life; they also live under the surface of the whole human story.
We are living in a time when the seasons of the world are turning. We are moving out of an era, born in the mid-twentieth century by the ideals of people like Roosevelt and Truman and so many more. Driven by a belief in the power of noble ideals, that peace was possible through cooperation. We seem to be heading back toward a world of power politics and spheres of influence, where noble ideals are mocked, where self-interest supersedes cooperation, and peace is a pipe-dream.
The Teacher, “Told you so.” He would say, of course it’s this way. The wind blows south, and then it turns north. What has been, is what will be. Did you think the line of progress only went up?
That is a hard word for a culture built on the belief that each generation will do better and be better than the one before. It is a hard word for a congregation like ours, full of thoughtful, caring people who pour their lives into making things better. It is a hard word for me. Everything in me wants to believe that our efforts can add up to make a difference. My heart is not ready to give up on a better world.
But the Teacher has brought us a challenging word. The world turns, generations pass away. All is futility. We need another voice. Is there another voice, another word?
In our second reading, from Romans 8, listen to how Paul describes the world.
“The creation was subjected to futility.”
Did you catch that word? Futility. That is the Teacher’s word. In the Greek Bible that Paul read, it is the same word used for the Teacher’s refrain: futility of futilities, all is futility.
Paul agrees with the Teacher to a point. The world as we have it is subject to futility. It does circle. It does decay. It does forget.
But the Teacher is wrong to say there is nothing new in the world. For there is a new thing, and Paul knows what that is. It is the incarnation of God in Christ. It the Savior God promised who would rescue the world. The new thing God’s redemption and promise of restoration in Christ.
With faith in Christ, Paul can say: creation was subjected to futility by the one who subjected it, “in hope.”
In Ecclesiastes the sun acts, the wind acts, the rivers act, but God is never mentioned. Now Paul looks at creation, God is acting. The turning world is in God’s hands, and God has a good purpose. God’s good purpose and promised future is the answer of faith for those who despair over upward progress.
In 1914 Karl Barth was twenty-eight years old, the pastor of a village church in Safenwil, Switzerland. He had been trained by the finest theologians in Germany, and they had taught him a confident faith. Humanity was advancing. Culture and science and Christianity were rising together. Yes, there were ups and downs, but the trend always went up.
Then world war came. In its first months, ninety-three of Germany’s leading intellectuals signed a public statement in support of the Kaiser’s war. Barth read the names, and nearly all of his teachers were on the list. What they had taught him about God, and history and progress fell apart in his hands.
But Barth had a job as a pastor, and Sunday was coming, and he still had to preach. So, he opened the Bible and looked for something to say. In the summer of 1916, he began working through Paul’s letter to the Romans, line by line.
In that letter, he met the living God, a God whose promises are so much greater than the illusion of progress or even faith in noble ideals.
In Romans, Paul asserts that God is doing the work of new creation, and he gives us an image that we can take home and spend time with. He says that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains.
Labor, as many of you know far better than me, comes in cycles. The pain comes, eases, and comes around again. But no one calls it futile. The groaning is not the sound of despair. It is the sound of hope, of new birth.
Optimism says the line always goes up, but the evidence is against it. The Teacher says the wheel turns and turns, but nothing ever arrives. Paul says God is bringing about a new creation, and the world groans and we groan with it because we are in labor, awaiting new birth.
That is our hope. Right there. We hope, not in the seasons of life or in the course of history, but in the God who raised Jesus from the dead and began the new creation in him. We hope because the Spirit is alive in us, and in the world, as the first fruit of a new creation, birthing signs of God’s goodness and promised future.
When you catch that Spirit, and see those signs, you can feel restless about the world as it is. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is.” They begin to suffer under it, he said, and to contradict it. They contradict it – speak back against reality – with the hope of new creation.
That was true of Barth. When his confidence in progress fell, he kept preaching, and he stood with the textile workers of his village as they organized for fair wages. People called him “the Red Pastor.” That was a political insult — even back then.
It is true of you, too. You preach good news with your life and your love. You do not have to give into despair or forsake love. We have just marked two years since Hurricane Helene and celebrated what has been rebuilt and remade–and the love and compassion that has rebuilt and remade it.
Some of that work is still going on. And it is happening in valleys and flood plains where everyone knows the river will rise again.
The Teacher might say, well that’s hopeless. The river will come back. The wind will turn. There is no gain. And yet we labor, with the Spirit’s help, as a sign of new creation. That is what hope looks like.
The persistent and steadfast love of God bears witness to the promise of a new creation born from above and sustained in love. Every repaired home is a first fruit of the world God is bringing to birth.
The same is true of smaller things. An hour of love spent sitting with someone who is dying. Another Saturday given to respite and relationship at Saturday Sanctuary. An hour spent in artistic creation, or prayer, or study. The Teacher asks what is gained. Paul says the gain belongs to God.
We are called to wait and work with the Spirit.
The world and the wind are ever turning. The Teacher is right about that. But we do not have to worry what accomplishments will last.
God has promised to give the gain, God has promised to redeem the toil, God has promised to restore what is lost, God has promised a good future.
We are free to do the good that is in front of us. We are free to love the people on our path. We are free – this is the glorious liberty of the children of God – to love God and neighbor and to leave the harvest in God’s safe-keeping.
The parent who reads to the child about the rising and setting of the sun and the turning of the seasons closes the book, turns out the light, and leaves the room. But this time, there is no cry of futility.
The child will one day learn – as all of us do – that the turning of seasons will bring comfort, yes, but also pain. Much may be lost.
But God is good. Christ is risen. The Spirit is here. We are not without hope. Thanks be to God.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina