O God, we give you thanks for the blessing
of a life worth living ✠
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In May, if you so choose, you can attend a conference called “In Pursuit of Happiness.” It’s hosted by the magazine The Atlantic in Half Moon Bay, California at the Ritz Carlton and will feature artists, business leaders, philosophers, and neuroscientists who, the event registration webpage promises, will give you “the skills to cultivate new rituals and pursue more purpose.” Registration is $700, and you’ll still need to cover lodging at the Ritz, airfare, and food. It’s brilliant marketing – take the message of Jesus, strip out the God-language, and charge people hundreds of dollars for the stuff that the Church has known for centuries. Suffice to say, I’m not planning to attend. And if you’re thinking of attending, just stay here and I’ll give you a better price on pursuit of happiness.
The
fact that many people will likely spend thousands of dollars to attend this
sort of conference really does say a lot about our society. We are in search of
“the good life” and trying to find something that will bring happiness to the
mundane of everyday life. Truly, I’m glad that some people are at least
exploring the topic intellectually instead of instinctively – as many lives
have been destroyed when people look for happiness in less healthy ways, such
as gambling, affairs, pain killers, or alcohol. We are all searching for that
which makes our hearts sing, for the peace that passes all understanding, for a
joy that cannot be shaken by the changes and chances of life, but we need to
know where to look.
The
gift of grace is that it’s right in front of us – Jesus brings us into his
abundant and flourishing life. As we’re continuing to think about Baptism on
these Sundays after the Epiphany, we remember that we are Baptized into the
good life. The problem is that humans always want more and are rarely satisfied.
St. Augustine famously wrote that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in
God,” and so the good life is received as a gift when we stop and rest in God,
not when try to manufacture it ourselves, which leads to nothing but
disappointment and fatigue. We’re just so focused on self-help,
self-actualization, customization, and accomplishments that we overlook the
gift we’ve been given.
In
broad terms, the pursuit of the good life is the work of philosophy. These
days, we tend to think of philosophers as people who sit around and think big
thoughts that have little to do with everyday life. Philosophers answer the
questions that no one is asking, some would say. But this is not what
philosophy, historically, has been about. Instead of being about the ivory
tower, philosophy is really about Main Street – it is about addressing the sort
of questions that keep us awake at night, the sorts of things that make, or
break, the good life.
One
of the best books that I’ve recently read is called Jesus: The Great
Philosopher by Jonathan Pennington. In it, he argues that Jesus ought to be
seen as a great philosopher who sought to teach us about what the good life is
and how to enter it. Of course, Jesus is not merely a philosopher, he is also
Lord, but that doesn’t make him less than a philosopher. Pennington writes that
what is causing a crisis in faith and in the Church these days is that
Christianity has become merely a religion and ceased to be a philosophy. By
this, he means that the Christian faith focuses too much on things that we are
supposed to do: care for the for poor, confess our sins, read the Bible, attend
church, say prayers, put money in the offering plate, and try not to a jerk.
For one, that’s all work and no grace and we all already have enough work to
do. But, by themselves, none of those things bring us into the good life
because those are the means, not the end. If we confuse the things that
Christians do for the things that Christians are, then we’ve lost the thread.
Instead,
Pennington shows how Jesus is the great philosopher who offers us a way of
being that brings us into the good life. He compares our modern lives to the
chest of drawers in your bedroom – where you put socks in one drawer, maybe
shirts in another, and underwear in another. Yes, maybe in college we just
threw unmatched socks in whatever drawer had room in it, but most of us
segregate our clothing into different drawers. This, he says, is a metaphor for
how we treat life. We have a compartment for how we make financial decisions, a
drawer for how to form our political opinions, and one for spirituality – and,
if we’re honest, that spirituality drawer doesn’t get opened very much. This is
not what the good life is all about. The good life is not about segregation,
but rather integration. In a good life, or we might say in a flourishing life,
or a happy life, or abundant life as Jesus puts it, everything belongs and
everything fits together. And this takes an overarching philosophy, something
that can connect the various parts of our lives and knit them together into the
happiness that God intends for us.
This
philosophical framework is needed for us to read the passage we heard from
Luke, sometimes called the Beatitudes. In his book, Pennington says that this
is Jesus doing what any great philosopher and teacher would do – gathering
disciples and presenting them with the philosophy of the good life. One way of
reading the Beatitudes would certainly be to consider the specifics of each
blessing and woe, and that’ll be a sermon for another Sunday. For today though,
as we’re thinking about Baptism and the good life, I want to consider the
bigger picture of the philosophy that Jesus is presenting us with this morning.
We
call this passage the Beatitudes because that key word “blessed,” when
translated into Latin, is beatitude. You’ve probably seen bumper
stickers on cars that read #blessed. That is not what we’re talking about. That
is a version of the faith known as the Prosperity “Gospel” in which health and
wealth are seen as the rewards for faithfulness and financial support of the
usually extravagant lifestyle of the preacher. In Scripture, “blessed” means
something like “happy,” but it’s a special sort of happiness. In the thought
world of the day, this sort of happiness was reserved for the gods on Mount
Olympus. This blessedness or happiness was not possible for humans. Perhaps
royalty could get close to it, but even that was fleeting because humans are
susceptible to disease, discomfort, and death.
So
imagine the shock when Jesus says “Blessed are you who are poor; blessed are
you who are hungry; blessed are you who weep; blessed are you when people hate
you.” Imagine that the next time we’re getting ready to elect City Council
members, instead of looking to the Chamber of Commerce for potential candidates
if we checked to see who is scheduled to be released from the jail next door
sometime soon. Jesus is completely flipping the script of the social
conventions. Not only is this blessed happiness not reserved for the select
few, but it belongs to the least, the lost, and the lowly.
Jesus
also describes this blessedness as a present reality, not as hack to find our
way into the good life. It’s not that if we find reasons to cry that we will
soon find ourselves laughing. The Beatitudes are not if-then propositions, they
are descriptive more than they are prescriptive. Which means more than giving us
steps to follow, this philosophy of Jesus is showing us something deeper, and
bigger, and lovelier about the good life.
What’s
unique about Luke’s Beatitudes is the inclusion of the “woes.” The woes are
warnings to us that we might be on the wrong path. And the interesting thing
about the blessings and woes is how they locate us in relation to God. Both the
Psalm and the reading from Jeremiah help us to see this philosophy that Jesus
is laying out. Jeremiah prophesies: “Cursed are those who truest in mere
mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord” and Psalm 1, which isn’t the first
Psalm by accident, it’s intended to set the tone for the whole of the Psalter,
says “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor
lingered in the way of sinners, nor sat in the scornful! Their delight is in
the law of the Lord.” In different
ways, these passages are saying the same thing – the good life is given to us
by God and when we try to make it for ourselves, we end up in bad places.
That’s
the thing about those whom Jesus declares that they are blessed – they are utterly
dependent on God because they have no where else to turn to; they are hungry,
poor, weeping, and hated. It is that dependence on God that creates the state
of bliss because God provides abundantly for those who have ears to hear and
hearts to receive the Good News that God is the one who creates, restores, and
empowers us. When we realize that we are not the masters of our domains, that
we are not the protagonists in the story of our own lives but rather are
characters in God’s divine drama, then we are ready to inherit the good life
that God lavishes upon us. But it has to be received as a gift.
Those
who are warned with woes are those who are self-righteous, self-sufficient,
self-referential, and self-assured. It can be a hard truth to learn, that success
isn’t measured on a résumé, bank account, or job title, that the race to the
top is a race away from God because God is most often found at the bottom, that
the idea of “climbing the ladder” in career, in wealth, in prestige is not only
an idol but a lie. And so Jesus offers these woes to us who are rich, full,
laughing, and well-respected. To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong
with being well-fed, or laughter, or having a good reputation, or even wealth.
The problem is the attitude that accompanies those things. When we expect to
find happiness in things of our own making, we will always come up short and
left wanting.
In
the reading from First Corinthians, we heard St. Paul write about the
importance of the Resurrection – “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then
Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our
proclamation has been in vain and our faith has been in vain… But in fact
Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”
St. Paul here is not referring only to the death of our mortal bodies, but
rather the death to ourselves and our egos that happens in Baptism. As he
writes in Romans, in Baptism we die to sin and ourselves in order that we can
rise in Christ and be alive in him. This is the good life: living our lives in
Christ. Receiving life as a gift. Living lives that are resonant with God. Living
not for or to ourselves, but rather finding our place within Christ’s body.
Very
briefly – you might wonder how we do this? It takes a deep awareness of God’s
grace; so being open and honest about our flaws, our imperfections, our needs
and knowing that God graciously forgives and redeems us is important. It takes
a sense of humility in remembering that God is God and we are not, that what
matters is God’s story, not our own, in remembering the words of Jesus, that “it
is more blessed to given than to receive.” One way that I’ve found helpful in
this is to use the Jesus Prayer throughout the day: “Lord Jesus Christ, have
mercy on me.” Use that prayer while you’re brushing your teeth or sitting in
traffic. And say the Lord’s Prayer at least once a day, two or three times is
even better. This grounds us in the wonderful and beautiful words of grace that
await us all: that because of Jesus’ love for us, when we meet him face to face
he will welcome into the fullness of this blessed happiness. The good life is
received knowing that because God has already blessed us in Jesus, we can therefore
live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and was raised for us and
inherit his kingdom of abundant life. And, as a bonus, you don’t even have to
pay for a weekend at the Ritz to get it.
