Happiness

My last post was about Ecclesiastes, and the unhappiness that creeps in when we expect earth to afford us all the joys of heaven.  Here's Tim Keller on the pitfalls of treating happiness as an end in itself, and the secret to living with joy in a broken world.

Something New

Passage: Ecclesiastes 1:1-11; 2:1-11

In the opening scene of the Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place to Visit”, a petty crook named Rocky is shot by police.  He comes to in the presence of a genial, well-dressed man who introduces himself as Rocky’s guide.  Although suspicious, Rocky follows the man through a series of new surroundings: a luxurious penthouse suite; a fancy restaurant; a casino full of games Rocky wins and beautiful women who never leave his side.  It’s all his.  Rocky concludes that he has died and gone to heaven.  He can’t believe his good fortune.  But after a month of getting everything he wants, the novelty wears off.  Rocky is completely bored.  He goes to his guide, and says, “"If I gotta stay here another day, I'm gonna go nuts! I don't belong in Heaven, see? I want to go to the other place."  His guide laughs and says, “"Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea that you were in heaven? This is the other place!!"

The Book of Ecclesiastes is the musings of “the teacher” (thought by many to be King Solomon), a man of unsurpassed wisdom and insight.  Great, we say, give us the secret of life, oh wise one.  What does he start with?  Meaningless; meaningless; everything is meaningless!  During his lifetime, this teacher claims to have had access to everything the world has to offer.  He experiences everything we devote our lives to chasing after.  And he concludes, “Meh.”  The teacher writes, “I’ve tasted all the prosperity and pleasure of this world.  And I just long for something new.  There’s nothing new under the sun.”  

He expresses the pain of living in a world in which all things, no matter how good, come to an end.  And in the end, the best thing the world’s pain and pleasure can do for is is exactly the same thing: whet our appetites for something new. Another place.  The good stuff of this life goes bad when we expect it to make this place heaven.  Burdened with those expectations, every good thing has the potential to become miserable.

The teacher longs for something new.  Something unexpected that breaks the rules and hints at a new reality.  

The descendants of the teacher see this very thing, centuries later.  A man comes to earth who bends the rules of reality.  He heals sick people.  He feeds thousands.  He turns water into wine.  He raises the dead.  When this broken world tries to bury the new and retain the old, this new one rises from the grave.  Jesus Christ is the new thing that ushers in a new reality.  At the center of the new reality is the promise of renewal and eternal life.  Jesus invites everyone to join his new reality.  Life in his new reality is life free of the fear of time running out and bodies wearing out.  The promise of renewal and eternal life brings with it the possibility of living for something beyond the now.  The good things of this life can be enjoyed without the added pressure of having to make life worth living.  There’s something more, and something better – something new – still to come.  

Walking in the Truth

3 John

Favoritism is regularly prohibited in the New Testament.  How strange, then, that in his third letter John commends one member of his congregation while condemning another.  Gaius, the recipient of the letter, gets top grades from John for welcoming and accommodating traveling Christians.  Then there’s Diotrophes.  According to John, Diotrophes:

“likes to be first”;

“spreads malicious nonsense”;

“refuses to welcome other believers”.

Not very charitable of John to parade Diotrephes’ faults - not only to Gaius, but to the whole church in perpetuity. 

But look: the point isn’t that Gaius is good and Diotrephes is bad.  Or even that John likes one and dislikes the other.  John’s goal in writing each of his letters is to establish what it means to have true faith in Jesus Christ, and what it looks like to have a life transformed by faith in Christ.  

In his address to Gaius John says,

I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

For John, “walking in the truth” is most evident in love – not just for friends and family members, but also for neighbors and strangers.  In the early church, love was made concrete through the ethic of hospitality: feeding and clothing people in need; expanding one’s table to include visitors and newcomers; and providing accommodations for traveling Christians.  These were the indicators that the love of Jesus had really made its way into the heart of a believer and become the heart of a believing community.  John has to point out that some in his church have caught on, and some are still learning.  It’s his job as church leader to honestly assess how his students are progressing on the journey toward Christlikeness. 

Those of us aspiring to be followers of Jesus Christ need to evaluate our progress.  The best indication is not our knowledge of the Bible or our theological insight.  It’s how well our lives demonstrate the love of Jesus.  “Walking in the truth”, in our case as in John’s first century congregation, is this: embracing visitors and newcomers; feeding the hungry; befriending the friendless; making more space at our tables; making room for people who need a place to rest.  Not just opening our minds to the truth, but opening our lives to people who need to experience it.   

What is Truth?

Passage: 2 John

“What about that passage,” she asked, “that says ‘you all are gods’?”  I was an intern at a Christian counseling agency.  I had begun working with a client who, incidental to a crisis in a romantic relationship, was exploring the Christian faith.  She was a self-taught, “spiritual-but-not-religious” person who had spent a lot of time reading best-sellers from the new age, self-help section at Barnes & Noble.  She had ascribed to the popular – but pagan – notion that human beings are divine.  The Bible passage to which she referred is Psalm 82.  In Psalm 82, God confronts despotic human leaders.  Using hyperbole and satire, the psalm writer calls these rulers ‘gods’ – individuals who have set themselves up as gods on earth.  The writer goes on to contrast them with ‘The Most High’, the true God, noting in particular their mortality and corruption.  In truth, Psalm 82 communicates the opposite of what my client thought it did: that in fact, though we think of ourselves as gods, even the greatest among us is just a human being.  I explained this, and she responded, “Well, that’s just your interpretation.”

How do you move past that point in a conversation about the Bible?  How do you decide what truths are fundamental and non-negotiable?

This is what John addresses in his letters to the church.  In his second letter, John says,

It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us. And now, dear lady, I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another. And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.

I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world.

For John and the other disciples of Jesus, the fundamental measuring stick is this: that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.  Imbedded in this one statement is John’s longer discourse of John1:1-14: that the man Jesus is actually the one true God, who became fully human.  The truth of Jesus’ full humanity and full divinity is at the center of the Christian faith.  Every important distinctive of Christian theology and Christian practice derives from this: Jesus is God in the flesh.  “If,” says John, “any person propagates a religious idea that is inconsistent with this truth, then that person is not a Christian.”

Now John goes on to say, “Don’t associate with that person.  Don’t even let that person into your house.”  This has led many Christians to refuse entry to or conversation with  Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and proponents of other religions that don’t acknowledge Jesus as the one true God.  I’m not convinced this is the right application of the passage. It’s important to note that at the time of John’s writing, most official church gatherings were held in homes.  As such, anyone seen in a Christian home would be perceived to be a representative of the Christian faith.  At that time there was real danger in being identified too closely with someone who taught non-Christian religious views.  The caution for us today is this: be upfront and articulate about the beliefs that distinguish Christianity from other religions (especially ones that hold some beliefs in common with Christianity).  As Christian communities, be vigilant about the beliefs your church’s representatives, leaders and teachers express; be sure they’re consistent with the fundamentals of your faith.  And insofar as non-believers or new believers enter your fellowship, be unapologetic about letting them know what your church believes.  There are foundational truths, without which a faith ceases to be the Christian faith.  

Hunger and Thirst

Passage: Psalm 42

As a parent of young children, I’m regularly frustrated and confounded by my kids’ inability to identify what they need.  Take, for example, food.  Fairly routinely, halfway between breakfast and lunch, or between lunch and dinner, one or both of our kids will:

1. Instigate a fight with their sibling;
2. Ask for TV or candy;
3. Complain of stomach pains;
4. Throw some kind of tantrum; or
5. Perpetrate some act of vandalism around the house.

What’s going on?  They’re on the brink of low-blood-sugar-induced psychopathy.  But when said behaviors rear their ugly heads, and we suggest it’s time for a snack, what do the kids say?  “Leave me alone!  I’m not hungry!”

Our worst behaviors are rooted in deep hunger and thirst.  Our souls were created to subsist not primarily on food and water, but on the presence of God.  The problem is that we’re so out of touch with our soul hunger, and so disconnected with the true source of our sustenance, that we aren’t even aware of what we need.  We distract from our hunger by stimulating ourselves with junk food; beer; bad TV; bad relationships.  We rail against the idiosyncrasies of our neighbors; we complain about the government; we lash out at our loved ones.  What we really need is to have our souls fed.  We need to be replenished by the love of God.

Psalm 42 is the prayer of a soul that hungers and thirsts, and finds its sustenance in the right place.  Read it.  Listen to your soul’s hunger and thirst.  Stop feeding it the wrong stuff.  Stop taking it out in the wrong places.  Go to the one who has what you need.  Be satisfied and set right.  

News of Deliverance

Passage: Psalm 40

During my first few years in Detroit, I accidentally ended up in a helping relationship with a very needy person.  I say accidentally because I really didn’t go out looking for someone to help.  And I didn’t particularly like it helping when I was called on to do so.  It started one night when I was driving to a meeting.  It was a rainy November evening.  Halfway between home and church there was this couple – a tall skinny guy pushing a middle-aged woman down the street in a wheelchair.  After a moment of internal conflict, I pulled over the family mini-van, and asked them if they needed a ride.  They did.  I loaded the wheelchair into the back while they got situated.  It turned out they were at the halfway point of a 5-mile walk from the hospital, where they’d just left the ER, and a pharmacy in my neighborhood.  They had no other means of transportation.  I dropped them off at the pharmacy.  They asked me, while I was at it, if I could help them with some food.  I said I was late for a meeting, and would get in touch with them after it was done.  We exchanged cell numbers (a move I would, at times, come to regret).  I went to the meeting.  Afterward I called.  They needed a ride home; and they needed food.  I picked up a hot and ready pepperoni pizza.  Found them outside the pharmacy, from which they were in the process of being evicted by security (they had, on past occasions, panhandled there).  I walked up and asked if I could help.  The woman said, “See, we’re not here to cause trouble.  I just need my prescription.  This is my pastor!”  The security guard looked at me skeptically.  I confirmed that I was, indeed, their pastor (granted, I’d only been their pastor for about an hour).  We completed our business, and I brought them home.

Two years later, after numerous emergency phone calls for food, warm blankets for winter, fans for summer, changed locks after a break-in, and rides to appointments, I was talking with the woman.  And she said, “I tell all my friends about you.  You’re not like their pastors, who don’t even acknowledge them half the time because they’re embarrassed.  Remember that time we were at the store?  And I said you were my pastor, and you said, ‘Yes’?  I tell my all my friends, ‘That’s my pastor!’” 

I rethought all the times I’d let her calls go to voicemail.  All the times I’d grudgingly responded to her calls for help.  And I thought about the props I’d been getting the whole time in this woman’s motley community of friends and relations.  Good props.

Psalm 40 is a cry for help.  The author – King David, presumably – is in dire straits.  Not for the first time.  In desperation he calls out to the God whom he’s asked for help again and again.  He appeals to God because God always comes through.  Partway through the Psalm, David says this:

I have told the glad news of deliverance
    in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
    as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;
    I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
    from the great congregation.

It’s as though David is saying, “God, you have done your part in rescuing me time after time.  But look – I’ve done my part, too!  I never fail to give you your props.”  Remarkably, this is what God wants.  The God of the Bible never withholds his deliverance from his people.  All God asks is that we give him his props.  That we tell the communities of our friends and relations about a God who has made himself our God.  Who always comes through for us.  Whatever your trouble, ask God for help.  Then, when it comes, spread the “news of deliverance”.  Give God the props he deserves.  

The Higher Gifts

Passage: 1 Corinthians 12:27-13:3

Renowned author and priest Henri Nouwen invested much of his remaining time on earth in one person – a severely disabled man named Adam.  During his career Nouwen earned doctoral degrees in theology and psychology.  He served as a professor, fellow, and scholar-in-residence at several prestigious academic institutions, including Yale.  His writing included more than 40 books, and garnered him awards and international accolades.  Any observer would have said that Nouwen reached the apex of his career when he arrived at Harvard Divinity in 1983.  And yet from there he moved to L’Arche Daybreak, a community of disabled and able-bodied people living in close partnership.  For the last 10 years of his life, Nouwen was partnered with Adam.  For two hours every morning, and two hours every night, Nouwen tended Adam’s basic needs.  Four hours a day committed to the most menial tasks a person could serve.

In 1 Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul lists the gifts, or abilities, that God gives members of the church.  The gift of prophecy; the gift of interpreting the language of the angels; the gift of preaching powerfully; the gift of teaching compellingly; the gift of healing; the gift of performing other miraculous acts.  Paul lists all these.  Then Paul adds, “But earnestly desire the higher gifts.”  What higher gift could there be than healing and performing miracles? 

Paul answers that question with his famous discourse on love.  He says, “I could have every excellent and sensational ability in the world.  But if I don’t have love, none of it matters.”  What are the higher gifts?  The gifts that express love.  And how is love best expressed?  In the giving up of your life for someone else.  Acts of compassion; generosity; humility.  Feeding those not yet able to feed themselves.  Changing the bedding of those no longer able to take themselves to the bathroom.  Lingering over a cup of coffee with someone who doesn’t know where they’ll be sleeping tonight.  Precious hours spent out of the public eye, invested in one hurting, humble soul at a time.  These are the higher gifts. 

This is what Henri Nouwen, the brilliant scholar, winning author, gifted speaker and man after  God’s own heart learned.  After mastering the public and prestigious gifts, he went on to achieve the higher gifts.  The gifts of humility; of invisible and sacrificial service; of life-giving compassion; of love.  Ignore the voice of a culture which celebrates only that which is achieved in the public eye.  Earnestly desire the higher gifts.