A sermon based upon Matthew 5: 6; 15: 22-28
By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
1st Sunday of Lent, March 9th, 2014
"Blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matthew
5:6)
Frederick Buechner was 10 years old when
his father killed himself with car exhaust fumes. At the
insistence of his mother, Buechner and his brother rarely talked about their father and tried to keep
his father struggle with alcohol and his suicide a family secret.
But keeping everything a
secret came to haunt him. Not only did he learn to keep silent about his
father, he also came to forget most everything about his father, and when he
became a father himself, he suddenly realized that he did not even know how to
love his own children.
Out of such a family
tragedy, however, Buechner started to developed a ‘hunger’ for more than a life
of keeping secrets. It was out of those
moments of spiritual and emotional darkness, Buechner came to hunger and thirst
for the light and to know the deep things of God. He even became a prolific writer about the
spiritual life, learning to “Tell Secrets” (Telling
Secrets was the title of one of his many books) and learning how to find his
way through the “Hungering Dark” (Another
of his book titles). (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-02-10/entertainment/9101120763_1_frederick-buechner-secrets-father).
It is not incidental, that
the greatest spiritual journey begins with hunger and thirst. Consider the beginning of Jesus’ own ministry
and the unforgettable image of the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness
where he would develop a great hunger and thirst for more than what the devil
could offer (Matt 4.1). St. Augustine
felt that same kind of hunger in his heart, and he wrote in his own Confessions, "You
have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in
you." (Book 1, Confessions of Saint Augustine).
WHAT
ARE YOU HUNGRY FOR?
Right before Christmas, I was going
through Public Television’s schedule of programs for the beginning of the New
Year to see if there was anything I wanted to record. As would be expected, there were multiple
programs scheduled about dieting, eating right, getting yourself in better
physical shape and learning to make better life choices in the year ahead. But the one program that got my immediate attention
was based on a brand new book by popular medical doctor and new age
spiritualist, Deepak Chopra. It got my attention because it wasn’t a diet
book that started with recommendations about what you should or shouldn’t eat, but
it started with one question: “What are you hungry for”? Are you hungry for Food? Love?
Self-Esteem? Peace? According to Chopra, if you want you to get
your bad eating habits under control, you need to first answer why you overeat---“because”,
he says, “many are using food as a
substitute for real fulfillment.” In
other words, if you find your hearts ‘true desire’, then you will be lead in
the right direction, away from the desires that ‘lead in the wrong direction’.
(http://www.chopra.com/ccl/new-book-from-deepak-what-are-you-hungry-for).
Whether or not you fully agree with
Chopra’s New Age diet approach, he’s certainly on to something when he suggests
that only by solving our hunger for what we rightfully need will give us the ‘satisfaction’
and ‘fulfillment our bodies and souls crave.
Interestingly, in this moment in history, when America’s and their
children are facing an epidemic of adult and childhood “obesity”, and the
threat of paying out millions more in medical expense and taxes, it’s not only
New Age spiritualists who are writing books in this direction, but it’s also
mainstream evangelical preachers like Rick Warren and his new book, “The Daniel
Plan”. Dealing with his own struggle
with “Food” and “Weight”, the popular preacher’s approach is advertised as a groundbreaking,
healthy lifestyle program where people get better, not alone, but together. “With
love as the motivation, this ‘plan’ is based on a story of abundance, not
deprivation.” It’s a plan based on
Faith, Food, Fitness, Focus and Friends.
Relying on both God’s power and the support and encouragement of
friends, this is said to be a ‘plan’ that can help you “be transformed from the
inside out” (http://www.danielplan.com/).
I’m neither suggesting nor knocking
either of these brand new ‘Diet Plans’.
But I do take note of them because they are improvements over approaches
that merely count calories. They are
better because they attempt to look at the ‘whole person’ and are asking some
of the most important questions about life, faith, focus and friendship. For until you discover what your heart and
soul is really hungry for, and what you are made to hunger for---that is, until
you find what will bring your heart, soul, and mind contentment, as well as,
what will bring nourishment, strength and pleasure to your body----until you
begin to answer these ‘greater’ questions, you will not find the physical
‘filling’ nor the sense of spiritual and emotional fulfillment and health you
need.
I don’t have to tell you that there are
plenty of reasons people suggest as to why America is facing such a dangerous
epidemic of obesity these days. There
are just as many who will suggest ‘answers’ to what should be done about
it. Some of the solutions for this ending
epidemic range from the outrageous ideas of “taxing” of ‘sodas’ which bring unnecessary
weight gain, to raising the price or even taxing other unhealthy food choices,
and then using that revenue to subsidize healthier food and lifestyle choices. Whatever solution will be attempted in the
future, I think a very important part of the equation must also be to consider
the spiritual, emotional, and ethical choices that people have been making in
the past, and need to make in the future.
http://www.dukehealth.org/health_library/news/soda-taxes-weight-loss-benefit-linked-to-household-income.). My
parents taught me, and many of you learned that as well, that there is
something sacred and spiritual about eating a healthy meal together, and I suspect
that the breakdown of the family and the eroding of spiritual values in our
culture does play into our national obesity problem. When people
feel lonely, or live like they are alone, and when they eat alone, without
higher values, hopes, dreams and purposes, many will try to ‘fill’ their souls
with the ‘right’ thing by feeding their stomachs with too many other
things.
WHAT
SHOULD WE BE HUNGRY FOR?
So, in this day in our culture, maybe we
can begin to hear the importance of this beatitude even better than before,
when Jesus says, Blessed are those who
hunger… and thirst…. after righteousness, for they…. will be filled”. But
there is something else we need to understand about ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’. For Jesus is not only generally asking ‘what are we hungry for’, but he is also telling
us what we are supposed to be hungry
for---that is, to ‘hunger and thirst
after righteousness”. But
what is this? Can we even begin to
comprehend what Jesus meant by ‘righteousness’
when we live in a culture where the question of ‘what is right for me’ has been
made the ultimate ‘righteousness’? How
can we learn to hunger and thirst for the “righteousness” Jesus requires, when
there are so many variations of what it
might or should mean? Can Jesus, or
Christian faith, or a preacher like me, even dare to define what
‘righteousness’ should mean for all or for any of us?
Several years ago, when I was a pastor
in East Germany, just after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the people in my
congregation were suddenly being exposed to many changes in their way of life. One of them was shopping for groceries. When I first arrived in the East, around
1990, there were only a couple of small stores where you could buy groceries. For example, if you were buying meat, you’d
buy whatever they had in one of two bowls.
If you were going to buy cereal, you’d buy either corn flakes or bran
flakes. If you wanted jelly there was
strawberry or blackberry. Everything was like that. You either had to take what they had that
day, or you had a simple choice. When the first ‘western’ supermarket opened in
our town, I’ll never forget how one of the members of the church came to me
asking, “Why do Americans and other
people in the west think you need to have 30 different kinds of cereals, or 20
different kinds of jellies, or 15 different cuts of meat? She said she walked down the aisles of the
store and became completely dizzy and confused.
How do you get anything done shopping in such an environment? And in
many ways, she expressed perfect our own situation of living with such much ‘freedom’. Even
though freedom and choice is a wonderful blessing, it becomes a terrible curse
when it is unbridled and undisciplined. Are we not very often confused, not just
about what we should eat or wear, but what we should do with our lives? How do
you define what is right about anything, when there are so many alternatives and
choices to what I might say is ‘right’?
Another part of the challenge in
defining what is righteous is that righteousness is a word we have lost in our
vocabulary. As Erick Kolbell has rightly said, “Righteousness is one of the ‘Sunday words’
we heard as a child, but seldom use the other 6 days of the week. It’s like wearing a suit and tie, or a word stored
away, like ‘good china’. We talk about
being a ‘hero’, about success or greatness, or getting rich, but who cares
about righteousness? But perhaps the greatest challenge of defining
‘righteousness’ is selfishness. We might
even call it ‘self-righteousness’. E. Stanley
Jones, a great Methodist missionary, once told a story about a little girl, whose
mother asked her to do a certain thing. She
answered: “I don’t want to do that?”
O.K., the mother continued, then do this ‘other thing’. The little girl answered, “I don’t want to do
that either”. Exasperated, the mother then
asked, “All right then, “What is it you do want to do?” The little girl thought for moment and
said: “I don’t want to do what I want to
do either!” (From John Redhead, Uncommon Common Sense, 65).
To say that ‘self-righteousness’ is our
greatest hindrance to defining what righteousness means, probably comes as no surprise,
but what if I suggested that it is our ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ selfishness
that I mean. Many of us, especially in
the church, have defined Jesus’ call to ‘righteousness’ only to mean that we
must ‘get’ or “be right with God’ which means something like having a daily devotion
of a “personal piety” which hungers to ‘be good’. But the problem with this kind of
righteousness is not that it is wrong, but that it is not enough. It omits the just-as-important quality of
righteousness which Jesus made clear, that requires us to ‘do good’, not just “be good”.
Jesus concluded the sermon on the mount by underscoring the kind of righteousness
God requires, “Many will say Lord,
Lord,…. But only the one who does the will of my Father, will enter into
the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 7.21). It
is the hunger to “do” God’s will, rather than our own will which Jesus blesses.
To put this in the most practical terms,
biblical righteousness means ‘living right’, and to live rightly is to be defined
daily by being in a right relationship with God and others. As
Jesus says, it has as much to do with ‘doing right’ and ‘doing good’ as “being
good”. Understanding this could keep all of us from getting
wrongly fixated upon ‘being right’. How can we even ‘be right’ or ‘be good’ since
Scriptures clearly teach that ‘there is
none who is righteous” and “there is
no one good but God” because our “goodness” and our “righteousness” are
nothing but ‘filthy rags’? Has God not already pointed us in the right direction
already, since the only true righteousness we are capable of is the kind that seeks
to “do good” for others, rather than ‘being good’ for our own sakes?
BLESSED
HUNGER: WHEN WILL YOU GET
HUNGRY?
Finally, we come to ask the most
important question about righteousness. It is the kind of question that will help us
to fully and finally to answer what righteousness means for us, for now, for
this moment, and in our own world and for our own lives. Because
before you or I can fully or finally formulate any definition of what God means
by righteousness, we must determine whether or not we are ‘hungry’ and ‘thirsty’
for the kind of righteousness God requires. As Jesus rightly says, the ‘blessing’ begins
in the hunger itself, not just when we are in the final state of being filled. Thus,
before you can be or do righteously, you must become hungry for the kind of righteousness
God requires.
An ancient story goes that the Buddha
was down at the river’s edge when a young man approached him and asked him what
he needed to do to attain a state of enlightenment or spiritual understanding? Without saying a word, Buddha took the man by
the hand, thrust his head under the water, and held it there until just before
he was ready to pass out. He then lifted
the man out of the water, and said to him, “In those last few moments, what
were you thinking about?” “I was
thinking about air,” the man said, still gasping for breath. “Anything else?” the Buddha asked. “No,” the man answered, “I was just thinking
about air; my life depended on it.” Precisely. When you can turn you attention only to the
eternal truth, as if you life depended on it, “ Buddha told him, “you will be
on the path to enlightenment and spiritual understanding.”
The most important question a counselor
ever asked someone seeking advice is simply:
What do you want? What is your
greatest desire, right now? If we are
honest with ourselves, the answer of our ‘desire’ is a moving target, isn’t it?
When we are sick, we want health. When we are poor, we want wealth. When we are lonely, we want love. When we are troubled, we want peace, and when
we are hungry and thirsty, we will want food and drink. But what Buddha was answering, and what Jesus
was blessing, was a different kind of target, altogether. The greatest spiritual traditions of this
world are different, but they are united when it comes to most important
assumption: Our lives are guided by the greatest desire or hunger we have. “When you know what your greatest desire,
then you will know what your god looks like” (Richard Niebuhr). Do you know
what your God looks like?
Back in the 1980’s, the stock market was
on a bull rampage and many young gunners were fresh out of business school and
were riding that wave for huge six-figure incomes. One of them was a man by the name of Dennis
Levine. But on his way to the top in
one of the most prestigious financial firms, he was caught for ‘insider trading’;
that is by trading stocks based on ‘inside information’ which allowed him to
know whether a stock would rise before it became public knowledge. Levine was busted for it, and the price he
paid was a steep one. He lost his broker’s
license, his reputation, and two years of his life to a federal penitentiary. When he was released, he was asked by a
reporter why he took such a risk. This
thirty-five year old man, who had already earned 300,000 dollars answered, “I’ll
tell you why. I did it because I wanted
to get at the REAL money.” But, the real
money was not simply Levine’s desire, it was his god, his idol, his AIR. This was what he was hungry and thirsty
for. “Then, the devil took him on a
very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their
splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down
and worship me” (Matt. 4.8-9). The devil
offered it, and Levine went after it as if his ‘life depended on it’. And of course, it did (This
story is from “What Jesus Meant”, Erik Kolbell, p.76).
So what does your life depend on? That’s how you start to figure out what
righteousness is supposed to mean. Let
me give you another example of hunger from REAL life? All of us have seen those terrible, horrible
pictures of starving, hungry children. We
often carry images of ‘hungry children’ in our heads to remind us what is wrong
about our world, which makes it very difficult for any of us to ever think of
‘hunger’ as anything good. But another
picture to put in our heads is the kind of hunger we have when we come to the
table someone has just prepared for us, when the food on the table is still
steaming and warm, our favorite people are around us, and we are ready to dig
in and eat because we feel like we are ‘starving’. That’s certainly a good kind of ‘hunger’,
isn’t it? It’s the kind of “blessed hunger”
we all want to feel because we know that it is an emptiness that is about to be
filled.
Most of us know the meaning of “UPPER
CASE” “lower case” letters. We use the “shift key” to make that distinction
on our computers, tablets, and cell phones. With
this in mind, Raymond Gibson has said that the most wonderful feeling of
fullness comes when we are ‘emptied of our strivings for what could be called “our
lower-case” gods (the many things that we desire and want) to be filled with the
greater, ‘upper case’ strivings (for what we should seek and desire). God wants us to live lives that end with
satisfaction and fullness, instead of ending up empty, shallow or hollow. A hunger,
thirst and desire for righteousness, that is, living our lives “for God” and “for
others” keeps life from becoming empty, void, hollow and invalid. It is this this “blessed hunger” that leads to
fulfillment, which is what Jesus meant when he said, “I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John
10.10).
Today,
most of us live our lives in a state of ‘abundance’ but that does not mean that
we have lives that are full of meaning. Is anybody hungry for that? It’s almost 12:00 noon, and all I know right
now is that I’m starved. How about you? Amen.
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