A PECULIAR HAPPINESS

March 4, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Genesis 2, selected verses
Matthew 5:1-11

“How happy are the poor in spirit..."
--Matthew 5:2
(The Jerusalem Bible)

If you frequent bookstores or even the paperback shelves in the
corner drugstore, or if you make it your business to know what American
people are reading about - or if you know what kinds of seminars and
workshops and adult education classes American people are spending their
money to attend these days, you will have made an interesting discovery.
We are very much concerned about, focused on, and spending our money for
“Recovery." "Recovery" from whatever it is that ails us, and these days

the fashionable words for that “whatever” are Codependence and Addictive
Behavior.

In a feature article in The New York Times Book Review, “Chances Are
You're Codependent Too," the author revealed that there are no fewer than
80 books available to help you deal with your codependent, addictive
behavior. Some of them are silly. Some are full of helpful insights and
wisdom. Spokespersons for the codependent movement assert that 96% of the
American people suffer codependence and addiction. We know about
alcoholism and one of the important things we have learned is how a person
suffering from the disease is often supported or enabled by people around
him and her, who mean well, but who are also involved in addictive or
codependent behavior. We are not unfamiliar with workaholism as a way to
describe a familiar and deadly addiction of the upwardly mobile and
ambitious. Some of us know a lot about a quiet little addiction that
allows us to end up in front of the vending machine at 4:15 every
afternoon, acting as if it is all a lovely coincidence - our being here and
the Snickers Bar there and two quarters just happen to be in our pocket -
choccholism! We are told we are a compulsive, addictive nation. We are
sexaholics, rageaholics, shopaholics, rushaholics, churchaholics. Harvard
Psychiatrist Robert Coles quips that we're soon going to have special
Support groups for third cousins of excessive sherry drinkers.

Where is this coming from? What is it about us that compels our
attention and our money in such a dramatic fashion? What is it about?
What does it mean? Some of it, I think, is merely trendy. But not all of
it, by no means. Most of it, I believe, has its source deep in the human
spirit. The explanation is clear, I believe. It was put concisely by the
President of Health Communications, Inc. who said, "A lot of people are
looking at why they're not happy.” [New York Times Book Review, 2/11/90,
Wendy Kaminer}

Jesus of Nazareth, one day at the beginning of the venture, took his
disciples aside, the ones who had decided to commit their lives to
following him, sat down in their midst to teach them some basic
understandings of the life they had chosen, and within ear-shot of a large
crowd of people who had been following them around Galilee he said:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God."
Blessed are those who mourn, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the
merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted.

It sounds so comforting. “Blessed.” “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is
Mine." “Blest be the Tie that Binds." Blessed - it is one of the softest
words in our religious vocabulary. And, we now know, that it isn't
particularly accurate. What Jesus was talking about is not addressed by
the meanings Blessedness has accumulated. There is nothing sanctimonious,
or grimly pious about it. The word means a "state of happiness," enjoyed
by the gods.... It is full of fervor and joy and exuberance. “How
fortunate" one translation renders it.

“Happy are the poor in spirit" is generally regarded as the best
English translation. And now these comfortable euphemisms take on a new
character. They are not about sitting in a church singing 19th century
hymns. They are about a state of happiness, a condition of the heart, a
fervent, resonant joy rooted deeply in the human spirit. Suddenly these
blessings take on the power to jar us. Startle us, even address our
deepest needs and obsessions —

“Happy are those who mourn
How happy the meek
Fortunate are those who hunger and thirst..."

A very peculiar happiness. At the beginning of the adventure, Jesus
proposes something which is startling and radical and powerful. It is as
relevant as the phenomenon of Recovery Literature. It stood in sharp
contrast to the way his contemporaries lived their lives, established
priorities and spent their money no less than it contrasts with our own.

What do you want? What do you really want? My guess is that
regardless of the length, weight, literary sophistication of your answer -
it would not, in the final analysis, be very far from “to be happy." It is
why we work hard: it is our hope and our dream...

I discovered an interesting exegesis of our search for happiness in
the January issue of Fortune - ("What Consumers Want in the 1990s"). The

article documented the end of the materialistic 80s by analyzing the new
emphasis in advertising.

“Suddenly all those highly polished, career-obsessed men and
women who worked hard, played hard and seemed bent on raising
self-absorption to an art are disappearing. In their place
Adland is giving us a picture of American life straight out
of W. C. Fields’ worst nightmare: adorable kiddies, cuddly
puppy dogs and sentiment galore.”

A mother and two kids are eating in the kitchen. It's morning. The
phone rings. It's dad, eating Raisin Bran in his hotel room in another
city. “I just thought we could have breakfast together," he says.
“Hammering at the heart strings will be the predominant theme in consumer
marketing for the 1990s," predicts the article.

Even religion and God are making a market comeback. The new slogan
for Kleenex Tissues is “God bless you."

We have come to the end of a decade in which the pursuit of happiness
was cast simply in terms of winning, earning, succeeding, buying... The
“me" mythology is over it would seem. Or at least it's more vulgar
expression. Narcissism appears as dead as the Junk Bond industry.

Futurist Arnoid Brown, to whom marketers are listening carefully, says we
are in the middle of "a groundswell of longing for some permanent,
transcendent set of values."

“Happy are the poor in spirit." It's not merely an admonition to tone
down the garish materialism of the 80s to a more sedate and socially
acceptable moderation. Jesus wants to redefine happiness, start the
discussion at the beginning. We're not talking about happiness as a Ford
Taurus instead of a BMW, or Seiko instead of Rolex. We're talking about an
assault on a way of thinking that posits happiness as something we can
earn, win, desire, strive for and achieve at all. Startle us, O God!

Crusty old Maicom Muggeridge, British journalist, a late convert back
to Christianity, has it right, even though it makes me very uncomfortable
to read his words:

“The poor are blessed. Today this amounts to blasphemy. Set

up in type it will positively melt the lead: produced in a
television studio it will cause a deadly hush. The poor blessed!
How in God's name can that be? It is a denial of cur whole way
of life; a contradiction of everything we believe in.

“With us, affluence is religion. 'Buy this in remembrance of
me.' And then he telis a story about sitting with Mother Teresa
whose life moved Muggeridge to reconsider the Gospel - in a New
York television studio while she was being interviewed by a man
in a mauve shirt with a drooping moustache and sad eyes peering
out through thick spectacle lenses...every minute or so he broke
off for a commercial. That morning they were all about packaged
foods which promised not to be fattening or very nourishing.
Mother Teresa, thinking no doubt of the human skeletons she tried

2fAsan

to clothe in a little flesh, listened with a kind of wonder, and
then, in her soft but clearly audible voice, broke in to remark

'T see that Christ is needed in television studios.' Everyone
heard her, and a strange silence descended on the studio. I half
expected an enraged figure to appear, rope in hand, as he had at
Jerusalem, to drive us all out, eyes ablaze. ‘You bastards! You
and your unnourishing bread!' He did not come, but Mother Teresa's
words continued to echo in the hearts of those who heard them."
{Jesus, the Man Who Lives, Malcolm Muggeridge, p. 112, 113]

Jesus said: "Happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom
of Heaven.'

“Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they
shall be satisfied."

Muggeridge has the right perspective, I believe, and the right degree
of intensity. These sayings, these blessings, are not sanctimonious
euphemisms, they are not intellectual puzzles, nor are they admonitions to
moderate our appetites and become a little more poor in spirit, a little
more meek and merciful. They make very little logical sense. If they are
not that or a new set of rules, the hour to hour obeying of which will save
your soul, then what in the world are they?

They are a description of human happiness and they are Gospel. They
are the Good News that Jesus Christ, God's son, is the Savior and there is
none other.

They are startling descriptions of what life is like when and where
he is the Lerd.

They point to him, the Lamb of God. They describe the life he lived.
They describe how it is when he is present.

And they measure and judge the life we live, the behavior to which we
are addicted, the dependencies we establish in order to be happy - to be
joyful - to be saved.

They are, I believe with everything in me, God's truth which always
judges our truth. Not happy are the wealthy and powerful... we know better.

Happy - are those who know that ultimately we own nothing, and that
if we are willing to give our lives to the pursuit of wealth, power,
prestige, influence - we will have given our lives to a very fragile and
most temporary kingdom.

Happy - are those who know that we are not forever young and strong
and aggressive and who therefore will not have to spend the last four
decades of the precious time we are given pretending they are something
they are not.

Happy - are those who know that there is truth and beauty and goodness
in the world beyond that which I have experienced - and who therefore are
perpetually humble and hungry.

Happy - are the meek ~ those who know that no ideology ever saved
anybody, nor will it save us - not Imperialism, not Marxism, not Leninism, nat
even Market Capitalism.

These beatitudes - blessings - are a summons to a conversion: to a new
way of thinking and being: they are an invitation to be honest about what
we actually own and to acknowledge our poverty and our mortality.

These beatitudes are for those who know that their eternal destiny is
in hands other than their own.

“Give me the man who yearns," said St. Augustine centuries ago.
“Give me one who is hungry: give me one far away in the desert who is
thirsty and sighs for the springs of the eternal. Give me that sort of men
and women. They know what I mean." (Muggeridge, op. cit.}

These blessings contain a radical and startling proposal, namely that
God's Kingdom is where happiness is. God's Kingdom is not some far away
Shangri~la above the clouds. But it is those times, those places, those
Situations in which God is God, in which Ged actually reigns, in which for
Christians, Jesus is the Christ, the Lord, with its peculiar happiness.

We believe God's Reign breaks into the world in ways we do not always
recognize anymore than his contemporaries did, or even his friends for that
matter, recognized Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. But, to be a
Christian, to be his man or woman today is to live in expectation and
anticipation and confidence, that his Kingdom, where the poor in spirit,
the mourners, the meek - are blessed. That Kingdom is always breaking in,
showing up in the life of this world...

When Vaclav Havel, the new president of Czechoslovakia, spoke to the
United States Congress a few weeks ago, it was a moment of enormous
Significance, a moment of almost Biblical proportion. Havel was a
political prisoner a few months ago. He is a writer, a poet and to the
legislators of the most powerful nation in the world he said that apart
from a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness nothing
much will change...

"Responsibility to something higher than my family, country,
company, success; responsibility to the order of being where
all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and oniy where
they will be properly judged... The salvation of this human
world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human
heart to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."

“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth," said Jesus.

To be a Christian is to be happy: not at our success, buying power,
military security or sexual prowess, but in the confidence that God's
Kingdom is coming.

Sometimes it comes dramatically - when a political revolution brings

a poet into office who then says that our hope is in meekness and mercy and
responsibility.

3/4/90

And sometimes God's Kingdom and its peculiar happiness comes when
brave men and women will not. compromise with injustice and become the
blessed persecuted

And it comes quietly... when the bread and wine of Communion are
shared with a young man who is critically il] and faith shouts that there
is nothing in creation that separates us from God's love in Jesus Christ
and, therefore, those who mourn will be comforted.

God's Kingdom, with its peculiar happiness, comes when we summon
courage to reach across barriers of hostility and love enemies, or across
barriers of cruel silence and boredom and quiet alienation and love the
persons closest and dearest to us.

it is Gaspel.

This happiness begins when we, like that blessed company 2,000 years
ago, stop talking long enough to listen to him: when we, like them, allow
him to sit in our midst and teach us... when we, in the midst of our
feverish, frantic quest to get it all - stop; stop striving and pressing
and pushing and allow a turning, a change, a conversion: when we actually
entertain the notion that in Christ God loves us and comes to us and

gives us this peculiar happiness,

It is & summons, finally, to listen to him, to love him and rely on
him. Blessed - Happy - are we when Jesus of Nazareth, this strange and
compelling man, becomes our Christ, our Lord, our Master and friend.

Blessed be He,

Anen.

3/4/90