There is an Appalachian Old Time tune
called “Sourwood Mountain.” The lyrics
as I know them paint a picture of a man stating what he thinks will make him
happy.
“All I want in
this creation, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
Is a pretty little
wife and a big plantation, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
Chickens are
crowing on Sourwood Mountain, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
So many pretty
gals you can’t a-count ‘em, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
All I want to make
me happy, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
Is two little
youngun’s a-calling me Pappy, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
I love my wife and
I love my babies, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.
I love my biscuits
a-sopping in gravy, hi-dee-ho-dee-diddle all day.”
The song definitely highlights that
men are not all that hard to please…a wife, kids, big plantation, and…biscuits
and gravy.
But seriously, we all live with
certain ideals about what it takes to make us happy. For many of us, a suitable mate, a family,
meaningful work, and material comfort are on that list…and especially biscuits
and gravy. There are others of us who
can be happy without a mate and without family, who can find meaning in any
kind of work, and are content with living quite simply. Happiness is in the eye of the beholder.
The point I wish to draw out is that
we all have these ideals and indeed, we will strive for them. Most assuredly, we will spend our lives in
pursuit of them. Some of us will attain
them. Others of us will waste our lives
in bitterness at not achieving the ideals we believe will make us happy. To be even more blunt, some of us will do
everything we can to keep ourselves from being happy.
The problem that we have with our
ideals of happiness and our pursuit of them is that they too often do not
include the pursuit of what God wants for us.
Sometimes we make God fit our equation by saying God has blessed my
efforts to make myself happy without having for a day considered what
God might actually want for us. God
created us to be happy. Therefore we
will pursue it, one could say, as a matter of instinct. But, the challenge we face is whether to
pursue the happiness God has for us or to pursue our own ideals of happiness.
The Beatitudes are eight
pronouncements by Jesus concerning what he says is the blessed or happy life, the
life upon which God’s favour rests. His
list is surprising. He says nothing of
living quite comfortably in a nation that is a Modern liberal democratic state
with education, health care, safety, and wealth in abundance. Being lucky enough to be born and live here rather
than in Afghanistan or Sudan or the Congo is not what Jesus calls blessed. Reading the Beatitudes at Presidential
inaugurations is hugely inappropriate if you are using them as the emblem of
what it is to be a hard working American. It is another matter if you are reading them prophetically
to remind the American President that everything he stands for is not what
Jesus calls the blessed life.
Consider who Jesus is. He is God the Son become human, the Lord of
the Cosmos, and the one through whom and for whom all things were created and
by whom everything is sustained and held together perhaps we should take him a
bit more seriously than we do on this matter of happiness. If living humbly and gratefully in union with
him by being joined to him by the Holy Spirit to be beloved children of God the
Father is why this universe was created with us in it, maybe he knows a little
bit about what will make us happy in this messed up world. Maybe, happiness begins with actually being
Jesus’ disciples.
To set the context for the Beatitudes,
in Matthew’s Gospel they are Jesus’ first words of instruction to his disciples
while crowds of the disenfranchised people who lived in the regions of Zebulon
and Naphtali were swarming to him. Those
two tribal regions in Israel had gone generation after generation of being
conquered and run by the rich and powerful kings and emporers of other nations
because they are the agricultural breadbasket and fish supply for Israel. So, Jesus sees this huge crowd coming to him
and realizing things are going to be quite busy from there on out, he calls his
disciples together to give them the “Coles Notes” of discipleship. The core values of what it is to be one of
his followers, one of his disciples.
A disciple is a student, a student who
seeks to study the way of life and teachings of a particular teacher in order
to make it his or her own way of life.
The first thing to know about Jesus' way of life and being his disciple
is that it concerns righteousness, which means living in a right relationship
with God, one another, and God’s creation.
Jesus’ righteousness, his way of being rightly related begins with
faith, utter dependence on and obedience to his Father. For his disciples to learn this way of life,
indeed to ultimately partake of Jesus’ life, we have to begin with leaving our
lives behind, our goals, our dreams, our ideals of happiness to share in Jesus’
mission of bringing near the kingdom of God which flows from sharing in Jesus’
life of faith in and obedience to the Father.
To be a disciple goes beyond a simple matter of personal, private
beliefs. It is to leave one’s life behind
to follow Jesus and discover the blessing of participating in Jesus’ very life
and ministry of bringing in the kingdom today empowered in the Holy
Spirit.
Back to the beatitudes, they all begin
with “blessed are.” Blessed means happy,
but not this “me” oriented sort of happiness that our ideals of happiness
entail. Happiness is sharing in Jesus’
relationship with his Father by means of the Holy Spirit. The first twelve disciples were not simply
working out their own little, individual faith journeys. They were leaving everything behind to follow
Jesus and participate in his faith journey as he worked out what it
meant to be the Christ. Their personal
faith was shaped by depending on Jesus' faith in God the Father.
When Jesus called them somewhere deep within
them they heard the voice of Jesus say, “I am your life. Follow me.
In me is salvation, the cure for this diseased world.” Salvation is that he has given us access to
God the Father to share in their relationship as God’s children just like him through
the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
This is a new reality, indeed, new creation. Following Jesus filled with and led by his
Spirit is a taste and assurance of the New Creation coming when Jesus returns.
These eight
pronouncements of happiness come, as I said, as Jesus’ first teachings to his
disciples. Take note that they concern
happiness. If we have said yes to Jesus’
invitation to be his disciples, we should take great comfort in knowing that
the first thing he wants us to know is that in him we will find the happiness
for which we are created. Yet, it won’t
be a life free from suffering or struggling for these blessings concern being
poor in Spirit, mourning, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being
merciful, being pure in heart, and to become peace makers…and we will be
persecuted because of him. These are all
things that just don’t jive with the ways of this world and its definitions of
happiness. But the life Jesus gives to
us in himself by the Holy Spirit, the life of his Kingdom coming, is a life of
living within the very blessedness of God’s own happiness, his delight, his joy
in his beloved children. So, come. Let us trust our lives to Jesus and be his
disciples and may we together explore the blessedness, the happiness, that is
only in Jesus. Amen.
