First impressions, we are told, mean a lot. I have been truly blessed already in just the few days that I have been with you here at Church of the Good Shepherd. I can tell you that I have been welcomed, and I have been uplifted by your spirit of joy and faith. I want to begin today with telling you all how grateful I feel to be among you and to be welcomed into your midst.
First words mean a lot. Think of famous first lines in
literature. Jane Austen began Pride and Prejudice with this insight: “It
is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning began her most famous poem, Sonnet
43, with these words of adoration, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 begins, “Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate….”
Just as I believe that Austen, and Barrett Browning, and
Shakespeare all chose their opening words carefully, so it is, I think, with
scripture. Genesis fittingly begins with the words, “In the beginning God
created the heavens and the Earth….” Mark, probably the first gospel written in
the Christian scriptures, echoes Genesis when it opens with the proclamation,
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The Gospel of
John is even more obvious in its reverberation of creation: “In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The first words that jumped out at me today in our readings came
from our Psalm, Psalm 1. Its first two verses are these:
Happy are they
who have not walked in the counsel of
the wicked,
nor lingered in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the seat of the scornful!
Their delight is in the law of the
Lord,
and they meditate on his law day and
night.”
Think of it: the very first word of the Psalter is “Happy.”
Now some versions of the Bible use a different word: “Blessed.” That’s an amazing thing. Happiness
here is explained to us as something deeper than mere giddiness, but a sense of
being rooted in community with God and all creation. And those who are happy in
this way know their blessings, no matter what else may come.
This is an insight that all too often gets drowned out in the lives
of many of us. We are programmed to think about satisfaction—or more
importantly, the lack of it. We are told to buy, buy, buy. We are persuaded
that products will make us more beautiful, thinner, fuller—as if those three
things could coexist at the same place and time. But will those things make us
truly happy? Will they make us truly blessed?
Psychologist Martin Seligman has claimed that there are three
components of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning, and the last two
are the most important in living a happy life—while pleasure is fleeting, being
engaged with others and feeling a sense of positive purpose in one’s life is
more enduring, and leads to a general determination that life is worthwhile.
Happiness does not rest in things. Happiness rests in living life well, in
communion.
Most of us do not live our lives feeling happy all the time, or
even most of the time. There are so many things that are beyond our control.
There are too many things that tug at our attention and draw us into feeling
lost.
Yet Psalm 1 points to something that IS in our control. Happy
are those who delight in the law of the Lord, who meditate upon it day and
night. This then requires a further determination of the law and what its
ultimate ends are. Here, we are fortunately given the answer in Mark 12:29-30.
When asked what the pinnacle of God’s law was, Jesus answered: “The first is this: ’You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your
strength.” The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
This is the basis for true connectedness and purpose, that which
will make us truly happy. This is the summation of the law, Jesus tells us AND
shows us, over and over again. The law of God is meant to connect us with
others and give our lives a sense of purpose. Contrary to what gets portrayed
on the news where Christians are concerned, the law of God is meant to bring us
together and make us joy-filled people! This is the beginning of wisdom.
What all four of the readings for today have in common is a
continuation of a discussion over the last few weeks about wisdom. Proverbs are
wisdom sayings. Psalm 1 is a wisdom psalm. The Epistle of James might seem to be the exception here, but
it’s not. James is about action-- and reminded us a couple of weeks ago that
“faith without works is dead.” Fifty-four times, the Book of James includes an
imperative statement—a command or exhortation to do this thing or another. (Who here has guessed that I was once an English teacher?) Biblical scholar Elizabeth Johnson explains that this may be why the letter of
James is often unpopular: no one likes being told what to do!
But James’s real subject is wisdom, and in scripture, especially,
wisdom is not about just being smart. It’s about living a good life—a life
devoted to God and neighbor, which all too often is depicted as NOT being smart
in our society.
Now I’ll be honest: as I was studying the readings for today,
there was another thing that stood out to me. Several of these passages include
stuff I don’t want to hear.
I don’t want to hear about how a “good woman is hard to find,”
especially when that “good wife” is someone depicted as a woman who works her
fingers to the bone so that her husband can go sit around with the elders all
day and be admired. That’s how some people have interpreted that section of
Proverbs, instead of understanding the good woman as THE personification of
wisdom—a gift from God which draws us into closer relationship with God and
each other, and will indeed then help us all live a better life.
And then I look at the passage from Mark. You know, the author of Mark is always hard on the disciples,
constantly making them seem not just foolish but what the Irish would call
“thick”—the opposite of wise. In today’s gospel, for the second time, they are
painted as being too thick to understand what the gospel writer, with his gift
of time and hindsight clearly understands—that Jesus will be handed over and
killed and raised again.
Then they are depicted arguing over status right after Jesus
tries to tell them what lies in store. They seem to engage in foolish posturing
and competition just at the time when they should be engaged in seeking the
heart of wisdom. They are silent just when they should be asking questions.
But here’s where God’s wisdom seems foolish to the eyes of the
world. Jesus tells them the first shall be last and the last will be first. He
puts his arms around a little child and holds it up as the most valuable thing
in the world, at a time when small children were nothing but a drain on the
survival of the household until they got old enough to work. And even though
our Savior is probably rolling his eyes, he still keeps loving those
thick-headed disciples, which certainly is good news of grace and hope for all
of us, who so very, very often get it all wrong—especially when we try to be
clever in the ways of the world.
Yet we worship a God whose wisdom is often seen as foolishness
in the eyes of that very same world. A God who tells us to love people the
world sees as broken, and love them fully.
We follow a savior who took a hard message and made its delivery
even more unpalatable to the movers and shakers of his time by hanging out with
notorious outcasts of all stripes—blind men and lepers, grieving widows, dirty
peasants who stink of fish guts, and—my personal favorite:
uppity women who refuse to stay in their nice little boxes, and who run around telling tales of miraculous doings that seem
not just foolish but crazy, then and now.
THESE people made up Jesus’s family of choice! These are our
ancestors in the faith!
In her latest book, Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber remarks:
“Never once did Jesus scan the room for the best example of holy living and
send that person out to tell others about him. He always sent out stumblers and
sinners. I find that comforting.”
Jesus came not to make us complacent but to shake us up, and he
is always using unlikely people to do it. Even people like you, and me.
The summary of the law, the key to happiness, the heart of
wisdom, is love: love of God, and love of each other. When we do this, we bless
God, and bless each other. But we also bless ourselves, and remind ourselves of
what roots us in the heart of real truth, and real happiness. The key is
not to sit in "the seat of scoffers," to all-too-coolly hold
ourselves aloof from real connection and real risk in loving, but to embrace
love of others—even in their messiness and imperfections-- and damn the risk of
failure. This kind of love never fails, but is, to quote Shakespeare again
in Sonnet 116, "an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests, and is never
shaken."
That's the wisdom—and LOVE-- God offers us and at the same time
calls us to embody. Happy are those who delight in the law of love, which is
the end of all our days, and the promise of all our longings. Alleluia!
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