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, I think we all live with
certain ideals about what it takes to make us happy. I think for many of us, a suitable mate, a
family, meaningful work, and material comfort are on that list…and especially
biscuits and gravy. But, there are also
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.
Well, the point I wish to draw out is
that we all have ideals of what we think will make us happy we and indeed, we
will strive for them. Most assuredly, we
will spend our lives in pursuit of them and oddly there can be a dark side to pursuing
happiness. Some of us will pursue our
happiness at the expense of the happiness of others. Some of us will waste our lives in bitterness
at not achieving what we believe will make us happy. There’s even a darker side; some of us will
do everything we can to keep ourselves from being happy.
A core belief in Western Culture is
that God created us to be happy.
Therefore we will pursue it, one could say, as a matter of
instinct. 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 so that we may be truly
happy. Sometimes we make God fit the
plan by saying God has blessed my efforts to make myself happy
without having for a day considered what God might want for my life. The
challenge we face is whether to pursue the happiness God created us for or to
pursue our “me” oriented ideals of happiness.
The Beatitudes
are eight pronouncements by Jesus concerning what he says is the blessed or
happy life, a life upon which God’s favor rests. Considering who Jesus is as the Son of God
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 in his life is
ultimately the reason why this cosmos was created, maybe he knows a little bit
about what will make us happy. If that’s
the case, then maybe we should consider that happiness begins with
discipleship.
To set the
context for the Beatitudes, in Matthew’s Gospel they are Jesus’ first words of
instruction to his disciples. 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.” 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, which is utter
dependence on and obedience to his Father.
For his disciples to learn his way of life, indeed to ultimately partake
of his life through the Holy Spirit, we have to begin with leaving our
lives behind, our goals, our dreams to share in Jesus’ mission of bringing near
the kingdom of God which ultimately ends up being sharing in his life of faith
in and obedience to the Father. To be a
disciple goes beyond a simple matter of personal beliefs. It is to leave one’s life behind, to participate
in Jesus’ life and his ministry of bringing in the kingdom today empowered in
the Holy Spirit.
Back to the
beatitudes, they all begin with “blessed are.”
Blessed in a sense 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. Thy 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 being shaped by depending on his faith in his
Father, shaped in his trust and obedience.
Somewhere deep within them the voice of Jesus said, “I am your life.
Follow me. In me is
salvation. In me is the cure for this
diseased world.” Salvation is that he
has given us access to God the Father to share in their relationship as
co-children of God in the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is a new reality, indeed, new
creation.
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 his
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,
the blessed life, the God-favoured life for which we are created. Yet, it won’t be a life free from suffering
or struggling. These blessings concern
being poor in Spirit, mourning, hungering and thirsting for righteousness,
being merciful and pure in heart, and to become peace makers…and we will be
persecuted on account of him. These are
all things that just don’t jive with the ways of this world. But the life he 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. Trust your lives to Jesus and be his disciple
and may we together explore the blessedness, the happiness, that is only in
Christ. Amen.
