Epiphany 4
Is your life complicated? That’s probably a question I don’t need to ask because everyone I know lives a complicated life. The reality is that we live in a very complex world and it seems to grow more and more complex day by day. So regardless of what your work is, whether you work in an office, a hospital, a library, teach at a school or university, work in local government or are a student, whatever your daily work is, it’s probably full of complexity.
Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re white collar, blue collar or no collar at all, every form of work has it’s paperwork; it’s rules and regulations, as well as its relational difficulties with co-workers, bosses, clients, employees, customers, students or teachers. And if all those things aren’t enough stress producing pressures, our family lives also tend to be complicated.
Most couples are made up of two working persons and so arranging for two jobs, two careers and the demands of those work responsibilities make it extremely complicated when you try to reconcile them with the demands of running a house and the obligations the couple or single person might have to children, elderly parents or animals. Everything about our families, from transportation to who gets the babysitter or takes the dog to the vet or does the shopping or picks up the cleaning, gets very complicated which is probably why we all have a need for Church to be simple. Why we all have in our minds an idealistic picture of that little “brown church in the vale”.
But almost no one goes to “the little brown church in the vale” anymore. Most people, if they go to church at all go to larger and more complicated churches where people have different priorities, different spiritual needs as well as different tastes and preferences. So if you add to all that the complexities of buildings and budgets and personalities, you realize how complicated modern church life is.
If we’re willing to recognize that the personal level of our lives: our work, our family and our church are all fairly complicated, it gets even worse if we dare to look at our society. We all know there are a lot of very smart people in Washington and yet they can’t seem to figure out how to save social security or improve our public school systems or make our health delivery systems more accessible and it’s not because they aren’t smart enough to do it. Most of the time it has more to do with their own particular self-interests, while at other times it’s the complexities of the problems with which they’re faced. For the issues they’re struggling with is how we, as society, balance our generational obligations. In other words, how do we balance the obligation we have to the older generation for their care and at the same time seek to be faithful to the children who are coming along which will ultimately determine both the kind of society we have, as well as what kind of national debt we pass on to our children.
In short, these are not simple problems. And right here in our own communities in Santa Ana, Anaheim, Tustin, Irvine, Costa Mesa, Fullerton and South Orange County there are issues of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, racial tensions as well as unique local problems which further complicate our lives. What I want to suggest this morning is that all this complexity in which we live is a form of darkness. Now I don’t mean to imply that all complexity is somehow wicked. I don’t mean that at all! But all of the complexities we face do put us in a situation where we frequently can’t see very clearly which way to turn.
Life seems to have tentacles going out in so many different directions. Whenever we wiggle just a little way over here we often find that we may have negatively affected someone or something over there. So it’s tough, in fact sometimes it’s really impossible, to see all the outcomes, all the effects, all the implications of a decision or an act or a direction we might take in our individual lives. That’s what I mean by a darkness. That sense that we can’t always see very clearly what lies ahead in our future when we’re trying to make a decision.
This season of Epiphany, which comes between Christmas and Lent, is that time in the year when the church has traditionally looked to the teachings of Jesus as a light which has come into our world. In a way what we’re saying in this season is that Jesus Christ, is in effect, like a bright flash of light in the darkness of our lives. A stark bolt of lightening, which illuminates everything even in the midst of all that darkness. So this morning I’d like to have us think for a few moments about the present complexities of our own lives and how Christ, that bolt of lightening actually offers us an opportunity to place the blessing of simplicity at the center of our lives.
If you went to Sunday School as a child you probably had to memorize the Beatitudes. We all know them. Those wonderful little proverbs we heard once again this morning which invite us into a life of simplicity. But the problem is, the Beatitudes aren’t just clever little phrases which we can easily apply to our lives. They’re way too full of paradox which is why I think it’s so hard for us to see them as invitation to a way of life that has simplicity at it’s core. Personally, I’ve always struggled with them because they seem so incredibly irrelevant to the complexity of my contemporary life.
Just listen: Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. If there’s a paradoxical Beatitude it’s gotta be this one. Have you every thought about all the apparent contradictions in that one little sentence? Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. How in the world are we supposed to equate the poverty of our soul with Heaven? Doesn’t that seem incongruous? And to make it even stranger, here’s Jesus, the one we call our Lord and Savior, the Messiah advocating poverty of the spirit. Wouldn’t you expect a religious leader to have recommended richness of soul and spirit? But the wonderful paradoxical nature of this Beatitude can only be seen clearly if we’re willing to think of its reverse.
Do you know anyone who is rich in spirit? Do you know anyone who is so sure that they have the theological doctrines, liturgies, Bible studies, as well as their view of God and their prayer life completely squared away so that you could honestly say that they’re just full up and rich in the spirit? And if you do know anyone like that, do you really like them? You see, in a way, what Jesus is saying is blessed are those who know that they don’t know it all! Blessed are those who understand that they don’t know God well enough! Blessed are those who know and acknowledge with humility that they still have a long, long way to go in life. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Or take the Beatitude which says: Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. At one level we all know that grief is a universal experience. It’s something that everyone, if they live any time at all, experiences not just in the loss of loved ones but also over a multiplicity of lesser losses which confront us with a host of smaller griefs. Losses of friends as they move away to pursue careers. Losses of homes and friendships as we move on pursuing our life and vocation. Losses of children as they grow up and move away. Over and over, they hit our lives much like the waves hit our beaches. And they accumulate in our lives like the shells that are tossed up on the beach.
Blessed are they that mourn: Who love simply and grieve purely. Who love simply and weep passionately. Who love simply and acknowledge the pain of loss. Blessed are those who are willing to walk through the valley of the shadow of death for it’s only those, the ones who are willing to walk through the darkness, who’ll come around to the sunshine again. The simplicity there lies in trusting the feelings that God has given us.
Or what about the Beatitude which goes: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Do you know any self-help book about how to get rich and inherit the earth that recommends meekness? I sure don’t! Generally, meekness is associated in our minds with mousiness which is why we’re not very likely to say blessed are the mousey. But I think that here what Jesus may have been saying is: Blessed are those who don’t take themselves too seriously.
One of the most complicating things that we can do in life is to think that we’re indispensable because it will always come as a horrible shock and cause incredible havoc in our lives if we allow ourselves to think that we’re the only one who can perform a certain task or love a certain person or accomplish something of value in the world. Our lives are so much better and in some deep sense the world IS OURS when we can admit that the whole world is God’s. That it rides on God’s shoulders and not ours. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who know they’re not the most important people in the world and shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.
And that brings us to Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. We don’t usually think of forgiveness as something that parallels simplicity because most of the time the act of forgiving is touchy and complicated. But if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s also true that our lives become infinitely more complicated when we hold grudges and seek revenge. One of the most complicating things we can do to our lives is to hold a grudge or seek redress when we get hurt.
Several weeks ago in his column in the New York Times David Brooks pointed out that our nation would benefit greatly from a return to civility which would require our embrace of a sense of modesty especially in our national political life. He ended his column by quoting that extraordinary theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who many years ago observed:
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness”
Blessed are the merciful for they shall know the simplicity of forgiveness.
And finally, Blessed are the pure in heart. Is there anyone here this morning whose heart is pure? I know mine isn’t. I get up every morning wanting about a hundred different things most of which are mutually contradictory. It’s amazing the things we want simultaneously. Imagine what it would be like to have a heart so pure that one desire was dominant and overshadowed everything else. Like the desire to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. What a wonderful simplicity and purity of heart: a purity of desire, a purity of wishing, a purity of striving to want that one thing more than anything else and to let all the rest of the things that we think we might want and need fall comfortably where they might.
Jesus didn’t invent this call to develop simplicity at our center. Centuries before there was a prophet by the name of Micah who lived in a time when people had largely forgotten God and had reduced religion to ritualistic efforts to placate God by a complex system of sacrifice. Micah uttered those words we heard in our Old Testament lesson this morning words that have echoed powerfully across the centuries:
“What does the Lord require of thee but to do justice,
to love kindness and to walk humbly with God”
Micah wasn’t suggesting, and I’m not suggesting, that if we follow that advice our lives will ever be simple because they won’t. Most of us are called into the complexity of the world where we’ll live our lives and where our souls will be nurtured or starved to death.
But it is possible, perhaps paradoxically possible, to have a certain simplicity in the middle of the incredible complexity of our 21st century lives. A simplicity which can make all the difference in the world. And that’s precisely the simplicity that’s offered to us in those wonderful proverbs of Christ that we call the Beatitudes. For in the darkness of our complicated lives it’s still possible for that bolt of lightening to strike and that blinding flash of light to illuminate the darkness of our individual lives so that we can acknowledge Christ’s simple invitation to create a haven of simplicity at our center. May that lightening strike us all again during this Epiphany season.....Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment