Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One always needs to be careful when talking about “happiness” and what makes for it, because we have so many definitions of that term. I’m sure I’ve said before that whatever the world defines as happiness, Christians have to remember that Jesus’ promise is for what he calls makarios, which is alternately translated as blessed, and which we may know best from the beatitudes. When Jesus says “happy are the poor”, he doesn’t necessarily mean they are “jolly and cheerful.” It is a deeper sort of joy. One might say that we are not promised, but serenity.

Even setting aside the complex interactions between our competing definitions, it has become almost commonplace to say that money cannot make a person happy. However, at the risk of smashing a sacred cow of well-meaning, popular spirituality, absolute penury (unless one is gifted with a saintly disposition) is probably the recipe for unhappiness. You’ll sometimes hear folks say that they know or have known people suffering from crushing poverty who were nevertheless happy. Sometimes this happens, sometimes not, though I worry that this sort of statement can both fetishize poverty and serve as an easy excuse not to do anything practical to help alleviate its effects on people.

All that said, even granting that having enough money so as not to starve or live on the streets or go without medication is likely to make for a happier life in at least the most basic sense of the word “happy” I think it’s undeniable that beyond a certain level of wealth, well-being (spiritual and emotional) plateaus and then, eventually begins to fall. There have been studies along these lines. They’re not perfect. They’re all about self-reported happiness, so (again) there are probably as many definitions of happiness there as there are survey respondents, but they give us an insight, I think.

I quoted one of these studies a few years ago at a Rotary Club meeting in a question I asked a school psychologist, who seemed to me to be suggesting that the job of education was to prepare students to have good careers making good money “so they could be happy.” I don’t agree that that’s the point of education to begin with, but I recognize I’m saying that from a rather privileged vantage point. Anyway, I referred to a study that found that self-reported happiness “peaked” for people when their salaries hit somewhere between $60,000 and $70,000 per year. As soon as those words left my mouth, there was and audible laugh across the room whose meaning was undeniable. This person could not fathom how somebody could be happy making “only” that much. I thought about going up to him at the next meeting with a big grin on my face and my W-2 in my hand, but I decided that would not be very kind.

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher. Granted, I don’t hate my toil, as apparently the writer of Ecclesiastes hated his; in fact, most of the time I rather enjoy my work. Even so, the Preacher makes a point which we could all stand to hear- viz., a life whose chief goal is the accumulation of wealth is a life wasted. It’s vanity, a puff of wind, nothingness.

Likewise, in this morning’s Gospel Jesus tells a parable of a man who had done well for himself and secured enough wealth to live comfortably indefinitely. Just as the man sits back to enjoy the fruit of his labors he has a bit of bad luck. Not to put to fine a point on it, he kicks the bucket then and there. All work and no play doesn’t just make Jack a dull boy. In this instance, it made Jack a rather dumb boy.

Back to wealth and happiness, it’s easy to make assumptions that may not be fair, so take this with a grain of salt–there is a public figure who owns literal rocket ships, whose wedding shut down the city of Venice for three days straight, and whose super-yacht has its own secondary yacht for its helicopter. Yes, a man with a yacht with a yacht with a helicopter. Is he happy? I worry my bad habit of getting whatever I think I need with 48-hour free shipping is harming rather than helping this poor man.

How do we define ourselves? How does society define each of us? Well, what’s the first question we ask upon meeting a stranger? Usually it’s “what do you do?” and the implicit predicate to that question is “for money.” It’s not a bad question to ask, necessarily, but it’s symptomatic of what our culture values above all else, namely work and compensation. It’s how we define ourselves because it’s what we spend the vast majority of our time doing.

But endless striving to the end of wealth accumulation is not the key to happiness. I hope this is not a surprise to anybody. We just heard the preacher of Ecclesiastes and Jesus himself say as much.

So how do we address this as individuals and as a community? At the end of this morning’s Gospel, Jesus says “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” But what does it mean to be rich toward God?

I don’t think that it just means giving of our wealth to charity and to the church, though that is certainly part of it. I think it’s also about spending our time in pursuits which are godly. It’s about not being so caught up in work that we fail to support our families with our loving presence. It’s taking time out of our day to pray. It might even be recognizing when that lucrative career is getting in the way of our other obligations so much that we’ve got to make a change, and maybe make a little less money.

I don’t mean to be grim or trite, but I can’t imagine many people on their deathbed thinking back and saying “thank God I spent all that extra time in the office and made a bundle.” When we get to that point, we’re more likely to be grateful for the relationships we nurtured and the difference, however small, we might have made in the lives of our fellow pilgrims. In other words, we’ll never regret the time we spent being rich toward God, because while everything else is vanity, a puff of wind, a passing thing, it is our love and generosity which will endure into the ages of ages.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Despite loving reading, I often avoid reading collections of writers’ correspondence, and sometimes I avoid looking too much into their biographies, lest I be prejudiced when it comes to their novels and stories. That said, occasionally I do come upon a letter which illuminates a literary figure, and I have an all-time favorite. It was written by W.H. Auden to his priest, the Rector of St. Mark’s in the Bowery in New York. The letter opens thusly:

Dear Father Allen,

Have you gone stark raving mad?

Having been a Rector for over a decade-and-a-half I have received some correspondence which might be deemed confrontational, but never anything quite that forceful.

Auden was writing sometime in the early 1970s, a time of liturgical experimentation, prompted in large part by both the desire to conform the worship of the church more closely to ancient texts which had been rediscovered within the preceding century and the desire to translate the words and ideas of church services into a more contemporary English. The Roman Catholics were first to the party, as they had the furthest to go since in the West the Mass had been said exclusively in Latin up until the 1960s, but our own “flavor” of Christianity was close behind.

Auden was reacting to what are known as “trial use” liturgies, meant to test forms and language during the process of Prayer Book revision–in this case, the process which eventually replaced the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with our current, 1979 edition. Needless to say, Auden was against this, admittedly for aesthetic rather than theological reasons. The best line in the letter reads as follows: “I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick to Cranmer and King James!” (Cranmer was the primary author of the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, those of 1549 and 1552, and, of course by “King James” he means the Authorized Version of the Bible.) Even old Auden eventually moderated on this point; he was instrumental in the translation of the Psalms which we still use, and–in my humble opinion–helped them maintain a degree of sonority despite being in a more “accessible” idiom.

It will not surprise those who know me, that my feeling hew rather closer to Auden’s than to the proponents (or perpetrators) of “liturgical renewal.” In my private daily prayers I do personally “stick to Cranmer and King James”, using either the 1928 or 1662 prayer book and invariably reading from the Authorized Version. You may be grateful, perhaps, that I at least recognize that while the rubrics of our current book allow for this in public prayer, I should not impose my idiosyncratic liturgical preferences on you for most of the year. Trinity being the only Episcopal parish covering several counties, I think it’s most important to keep to the middle of the road.

There is one element of our worship that I remain forever grateful that the more radical of the Twentieth Century liturgiologists didn’t get their way on. You may have noticed this before. Open up your prayerbooks to page 364. Notice that we have competing versions of the Lord’s Prayer. I suspect that some of the more “advanced” of the reformers would have preferred to only have the one on the right (the one we never use), just as they are known to have attempted to exclude the traditional idiom (what we now call “Rite I”) entirely from our current book.

Show of hands of anybody here who has actually experienced the version of the Lord’s Prayer on the right side of the page actually used. We would trot it out at seminary, because our liturgics professor was a bit of an iconoclast, and I occasionally see it used at diocesan or national church functions, probably because whoever put the service together is trying to make a point (what that point is I couldn’t tell you).

At one of the recent monthly meetings we have of our deanery clergy up in Toledo, I asked if anybody had experienced this version used “in the wild” (by which I mean, on a Sunday morning in a parish church) and only one of the roughly dozen of us raised his hand. I know of a committed layman (and lest you think this is an “old person problem”, he is younger than I) who moved, and the interim Rector of the parish he began attending instituted the use of the “contemporary” version of the Lord’s Prayer at all of that church’s services, and so difficult was it to get his head and heart around this that he ended up attending a different Episcopal Church (he was fortunate enough to be in a place with more options than we have here). I can’t say I entirely blame him.

There may be only one prayer which all Christians everywhere know by heart. In the West, it is one of the three things, along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments, that we teach all children first (I do this with kids when they prepare to make their First Communion). Yes, we all say it in our own languages. Yes, even among Anglophones there are slight variations. Roman Catholics tend to omit the prayer’s doxology when recited in the Mass. Presbyterians say “debts” instead of “trespasses”. Some, like us put a conjunction before “the power” and say “forever and ever” instead of just “forever.” Yes, the version we use is a blend of the different versions found in the Gospels. Yes, it may not even actually be the most accurate translation. If we were to be extra-scrupulous about that, I’d argue, we’d have to meet halfway between the Anglican and the Presbyterian version: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive our debtors. All that said, we’re saying more or less the same thing, and it binds us together across the gulfs created by the unhappy divisions within the church militant here on earth.

I’ve had frequent occasions in my pastoral ministry to visit folks suffering the later stages of dementia–men and women who have lost all ability to participate in a conversation or recall even the most basic facts about the world and even about themselves. Those who’ve gone through this with loved ones know how great a sadness this can be. But over and over again, even near furthest extreme of that horrible disease’s progression I can say “Our Father” and that man or woman will invariably join in with all the right words, praying from the heart. If that’s not enough to leave well enough alone with at least that one prayer, then I don’t know what is.

And, you know what? This prayer which Jesus gave us is all we need to pray aright. We acknowledge God’s holiness, his righteousness, his perfection. We recognize that our world is not as it should be, and that God will eventually put it to rights. We remember that we don’t need fancy cars, and big investment portfolios, and caviar and champagne for dinner–just some sustenance (physical and spiritual) to get us through today. We know we need forgiveness and that we’ve got to extend grace to those who have wronged us. And we beg God to protect us from that evil which may trip us up on the pilgrim road of life. We may want more than those things, but that’s all we need. And, as Jesus reminds us in the parable of the neighbor at midnight, if we just ask for those things, God will give us his Spirit to accomplish even more in our souls.

So, lest you were worried when I pointed it out a few minutes ago, we’re not going to get cute and switch up the version of the Lord’s Prayer this week. But we will be joining with them, too, and with those praying in thousands of different languages, even with those who say “debts” instead of trespasses. We’ll be joining with over two billion sisters and brothers, in praying for the few things which are needful in this life as we prepare for the next. And that, my friends, is a miracle in itself.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My in-laws came to visit last week, and they were excited to give us a recommendation for a television show they’d been watching. Annie and I have neither the time nor the inclination to watch television (which they know, though it’s always sweet when they think they can convince us otherwise), and one of the benefits of this is that they can tell us what they liked about it without fear of “spoiling us” on the plot twists. Anyway, the program they had been watching is called “The Bear” and, as I understand it, it’s about an accomplished chef who inherits his family’s Chicago “Italian Beef” sandwich shop and attempts to transform in into a fine dining restaurant. One of the episodes they were telling us about was a “flashback” in which the protagonist’s mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is depicted trying to put together a family holiday meal. The kitchen is chaotic, family drama interrupts the delicate cooking procedure, everything must be perfect, and the mother remains on the edge of “losing it” throughout the entirety of the episode. At the end she pulls it off. The meal is executed perfectly and the table is set. At thus point, the mother calmly walks outside and a moment later, she drives her car through the front of the house.

I worry my in-laws might have been sharing the plot because it reminded them of observing me cook Christmas dinner every year. I don’t think I’ve ever visibly lost my cool, and I’ve certainly not threatened life and limb or intentionally damaged property. That said, all concerned have mostly learned that I do not require assistance in cooking any meal–that as nice as the offer is, it is in fact the opposite of helpful in practice–and least of all do I need additional bodies in our small kitchen while cooking a complicated meal where everything simply must happen at a particular moment for the whole thing to come together. Anyway, like Martha of Bethany, my attempts at hospitality have probably, ironically made me less hospitable in practice.

I think the tricky part of this story is that we can take it to an extreme and fail to see that Martha had the right intentions, just the wrong way of going about it. And note well, Jesus does not berate her for trying to provide hospitality in her way, but rather for her criticism of her sister, who was being hospitable in a different way. The point of the story, I think, is not that we should all be slugabeds. Rather, I think it is meant to remind us that service and companionship are two sides of the same coin, and neither should be taken to an extreme.

So Martha isn’t entirely wrong to be working hard to make her Lord and Master and houseguest comfortable and well-fed. That was not only her social obligation (hospitality in ancient cultures being far more codified and demanding than today), but for at least part of her, before she got carried away, it would have also been her joy. She just went overboard and, worse, started resenting Mary. You need to feed your guest, but maybe Jesus didn’t need or want a Michelin-starred seven course dining experience.

And then we have Mary. Just as with Martha, there is more to Mary than the caricature. She wasn’t just shirking obligations in an attempt to be relaxed. Jesus is not elevating the slothful over the conscientious. Quite to the contrary, Mary is being conscientious in entertaining her host rather than fretting obsessively about the outward show of hospitality. She is acing as the truly hospitable hostess by being with Jesus. She recognizes that her own obligation, and in fact, the sine-qua-non of her relationship with Jesus, is found not entirely in doing stuff for him but must include simply being with him.

When it comes to our relationship with God, it is entirely possible to lose one’s soul in a program of highly useful activity. As a priest, I can attest to this. I can spend all day accomplishing tasks which I believe benefit Christ’s Church. If I don’t take some time to simply converse with God, though, and render my thanks and express my deepest joys and fears, then all that stuff I do for the Church doesn’t get me a step closer to God. The same can be said for any of us. In our culture, which elevates action over contemplation much more than the culture of Jesus’ day, it can be more difficult, but no less critical, to stop and pray, to be still before the Lord our God, who made us and loves us and wants a relationship with us.

The result of taking such intentional pauses in our work for the Kingdom to be present before God, is that the work we do ultimately benefits. I mentioned earlier that Martha had likely gone overboard in her attempt to be hospitable, ironically making her less hospitable. When we take Mary’s approach, the result is not that we remain in inactivity forever, but that we are given new directions in our mission. When we stop working for a bit and pray, God will help us know how to do His work better. Perhaps God has some task for us which we’ll never know unless we stop frantically doing something else that we think we’re supposed to be doing but aren’t.

Taking an hour out on Sunday morning to be present before God in worship is a great help in this regard, but it is not enough. Only through daily, intentional, quality time with God (in prayer and in meditating on Holy Scripture) can our relationship with Him grow to its full potential. Only when we take time every day to sit with Mary at the feet of our Lord can we learn how to serve Him in our work for the Kingdom, how to be a bit more circumspect in our activity than was Martha. So, settle down, breathe, pray, and He’ll tell you how you can serve Him more effectively.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.