The Joshua Victor Theory

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Some think the book of Ecclesiastes is a rather depressing or bleak book, and you can get a glimpse of why, from the short excerpts you heard in today’s reading. “ Vanity of vanities! All is vanity … It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with…I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun...I gave up my heart to despair over all the toil of my labors…what has a man from all the toil and striving of his heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest.” The words may strike us as an expression of dark pessimism or even leaning towards unbelief…or perhaps we can secretly identify with his frustrations about work and life in general. Does your work or life ever seem like an unhappy business? Do you even hate your work? Or maybe even if you...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul uses the analogy of a tent to describe life in our earthly body. Not everybody loves tent camping, but for many it’s a fun, summer family activity. But even die-hard campers—have stories of the frustrations of tent-living—floods and leaks, mosquitoes, cooking problems or food issues. And mostly we can laugh about them—because tent living is usually no more than a temporary vacation for us. But for Old Testament Israel, for 40 years, a whole generation of hundreds of thousands of people lived in tents on the move. Generations of Israelites afterward were to commemorate this in the Feast of Tabernacles or “Tents”, when they would live in a tent for one week, as a reminder of how God preserved Israel through the 40 years in the wilderness. The 40 years was no “fun camping trip” that could be cut short when things got uncomfortable and they wanted to head home early for the comforts of a...