Our Search for Meaning in a Fallen World

Passage: Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

The year was 399 AD.  The place was the capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinople.  We know it today as Istanbul in Turkey.  The Emperor was Arcadius who ruled the eastern half of the Roman Empire.  Because he was a weak ruler he was easily dominated by strong ministers of state, like Prime Ministers to a king.  Sort of like a Joseph to the Pharaoh but without the moral character.

In fact, like Joseph, an ex-slave, Eutropius, ruled Constantinople by controlling the puppet emperor.  His trouble started when Eudoxia married Emperor Arcadius and quickly discovered that Arcadius was weak and was being dominated by Eutropius.  She wanted to be Empress and gain more power, so she began to plot Eutropius’s downfall.  She got her husband to expel him.  As a fugitive he fled to the Great Church of Constantinople, St. Sophia, and clung to the altar.

The pastor of this great church happened to be John Chrysostom, considered the greatest preacher of the early church, one of the great early church fathers.  Both the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church consider him a great saint.

When Eutropius fled to the church, armed soldiers entered, demanding that Chrysostom release him but he refused to give up his church’s right to be a place of sanctuary.

The next day was Sunday morning and with Eutropius clinging to the altar for dear life, John Chrysostom preached what may have been one of the most dramatic sermons ever preached.  His text was Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity,” and he used the decline and fall of Eutropius as the sermon illustration of all sermon illustrations.