Joel D. Kline
February 15, 2004
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
“I can’t get no satisfaction.” I found that refrain from the words of a 1960s Rolling Stones hit song repeating itself in my head this week as I considered my sermon theme. Who among us does not find ourselves yearning for an illusive satisfaction, a satisfaction that somehow always seems just beyond our reach? With the hymn writer, we know what it is to experience restless living, to lose our spirit’s peace, to ache beyond all aching for a sense of satisfaction deep within our souls. Does not the powerful prayer of Harry Emerson Fosdick, concluding the hymn, “O God, in Restless Living,” draw us? “O beautify our spirits in restfulness from strife, enrich our souls in secret with abundant life.”
Perhaps, then, you might think I would entitle this sermon, How Satisfied Are You? But we are little able to develop any sense of inner satisfaction unless we first pay attention to our deepest dissatisfactions, the aches and losses, the unmet hopes and dreams, buried deep within us. We need to pay particular attention to those dissatisfactions that stem from the call of the Christian faith to reach beyond ourselves, while yearning for a new world to come. Writing in A Life Full of Surprises, a book about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Presbyterian author Lloyd Ogilvie dares to suggest that “to be a Christian means to be disturbed by divine discontent.” In other words, it may well be the very promptings of God’s Spirit that leads us to wonder, as the Rolling Stones hit song suggests, whether we can achieve any level of satisfaction in our lives. Asserts Ogilvie,
The authentic test that shows we have abandoned our lives to the management of Christ is that we have deep dissatisfaction with our personal growth, are unsettled by unhealed relationships, and are indignant toward injustice in any area of our culture. We were meant for a ministry of mercy in which we share the love we have received wherever people suffer. Christ will never allow us to stagnate at any stage or growth. Christ abhors the status quo as nature abhors a vacuum.
If we become self-satisfied, if we think we’ve already attained all there is to experience in our life with Christ, we shall sorely miss the mark. Do you know the story of Frank Laubach, so noted for his efforts to increases literacy around the world? After earning degrees from Princeton University, Union Seminary, and Columbia University, Laubach went to the Philippines as a missionary educator, helping to establish Union Seminary in Manila and serving as dean of the School of Education at the University of Manila. But in a time of reorganization, when Laubach desperately wanted to be chosen as the new president of the seminary, he lost by one vote. Disillusioned, he began to experience significant health problems, and after two years, decided it was time to move on. Laubach determined to do evangelistic work in the area surrounding Lake Lanao, a beautiful yet isolated and dangerous area on the island of Mindanao, Philippines.
Success was elusive at first, and one evening, as Frank Laubach made his daily climb with his dog up Signal Hill behind his cottage, he found himself speaking words he had not planned to speak, as if God were speaking to him. Laubach heard himself say, “My child, you have failed because you do not really love these Moros. You feel superior to them … If you can forget that you are a white American and think only how I love them, they will respond.” Answering back to the sunset, Laubach said, “God, I don’t know whether you spoke to me through my lips, but if you did, it was the truth …” And then Laubach prayed, “Drive me out of myself and come and take possession of me and think Thy thoughts in my mind.” Once again Laubach found his lips speaking words he had not planned, “If you want the Moros to be fair to your religion, be fair to theirs. Study their Koran with them.”
Had Frank Laubach continued to assume that he already knew all he needed to know, much would have been missed. Laubach went on to share his faith, pioneer a literacy movement that reached an estimated sixty million people, and introduce many to a deeper life of prayer and commitment. His book, Letters by a Modern Mystic, chronicles his learnings from God on Signet Hill, and it is that experience with God that Laubach counted as his most significant contribution in life.
When we are tempted to become smug and self-satisfied in our religiosity, we will soon turn from a vital faith. For faith is not intended to be a static experience; the life of faith ever involves the risk of change and growth. C.S. Lewis once made the assertion that we human beings “are far too easily pleased … . We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
We generally speak of God’s Holy Spirit as a comforting presence, providing ongoing assurance of God’s gracious love and forgiveness. But perhaps it is equally proper to think of the Holy Spirit as a discomforting presence, a Spirit challenging us to let go of comfortable routines and take the risk of embracing a whole new way of living—life with God at the center, life in God’s kingdom. In John’s Gospel Jesus is portrayed, on the eve of his arrest and crucifixion, as assuring the disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away” (John 16:7). And then Jesus promises to send the Spirit. In the NRSV the Greek word is translated as the Advocate. Other translations put it, the Comforter (KJV), the divine Helper (Phillips), the Counselor (NIV). But God’s Spirit is a comforter or counselor who ever opens us to greater truth, who challenges us to pay attention to the divine discontent, who will not let us rest too easily pleased with where we currently are in life. God’s Spirit may well turn upside down our comfortable patterns and our usual ways of thinking and acting.
Our Gospel lesson for the morning marks the beginning of a series of teachings referred to as the “Sermon on the Plain.” It is a shorter version of the much more familiar collection of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew’s Gospel labeled the Sermon on the Mount, a set of teachings long considered central to our life and faith in the Church of the Brethren. Matthew, writing to Jewish Christians, places the Sermon on a mountaintop, stressing that Jesus carries even greater authority than did the great lawgiver, Moses. While Moses receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, Jesus not only receives; Jesus proclaims to his followers on that mountaintop a new teaching, a radically new way of living. In contrast to Matthew, Luke has Jesus preaching this sermon after coming down from the mountain. If that connects with the Moses story at all, perhaps Luke is suggesting that, just as Moses descended from Mount Sinai before sharing the content of God’s message, so Jesus, after appointing the first disciples while on the top of the mountain, descends with them and begins teaching.
But the real issue has far less to do with where the message is proclaimed than with the content of that message. Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners, writing in The Call to Conversion asserts that the Sermon “is the declaration of the kingdom of God, the charter of a new order.”
It describes the character, priorities, values, and norms of the new age Jesus came to inaugurate. The early church took it be a basic teaching on the meaning of the kingdom; the Sermon was used to instruct new converts in the faith …
The kingdom indeed represents a radical reversal for us …. To put it mildly, the Sermon offers a way of life contrary to what we are accustomed. It overturns our assumptions of what is normal, reasonable, and responsible. To put it more bluntly, the Sermon stands our values on their heads.
Indeed, who can hear the teachings of this central sermon of Jesus, and not feel discomforted? This is particularly so with Luke’s version, which does not simply include a series of upside down blessings upon the poor, the broken, the suffering, the troubled. Even more, Luke adds a series of “woes” spoken to the rich, the comfortable, the smug.
Listen to the “woes,” as paraphrased in The Message by Eugene Peterson:
But it’s trouble ahead if you think you have it made.
What you have is all you’ll ever get.And it’s trouble ahead if you’re satisfied with yourself.
Your self will not satisfy you for long.And it’s trouble ahead if you think life’s all fun and games.
There’s suffering to be met, and you’re going to meet it.
Jesus is announcing that there is so much more to life than simply skimming along on the surface. His words of warning are spoken to all who stand in danger of missing life in God’s realm because their riches, their obsession with position and status in the society around them, their shortsightedness, their self-satisfaction—all these deafen them to the gospel message, and to the needs of their fellow human beings. Jesus is challenging us to a life of holy abandonment, letting go of self-preoccupation and walking in the very footsteps of Jesus, embracing a life of compassion, peace, self-giving love and servanthood.
Thomas Merton, prolific writer about the spiritual life, once wrote that before the Christian faith can become for us a principle of certitude and of peace, it must first lead us to questioning and struggle. Do we listen in our times of inner dissatisfaction and our moments of inner qualm, do we listen in the very midst of brokenness we are experiencing in significant relationships, for the voice of God, every bit as much as we listen in the midst of times of peace, assurance, and hope? Have we learned to discern when our dissatisfactions are in fact symptoms of a greater calling in life, the call to something more in our relationship with God and with the world around us?
Writing in his book With Open Hands Henri Nouwen reminds us:
You are a Christian only so long as you look forward to a new world, so long as you pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, … so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are a Christian only when you believe you have a role to play in the realization of this new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with a holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life.
How dissatisfied are you? And are you willing to allow the dissatisfaction within you to call you to a closer walk with Christ and to a renewed passion to live and pray and work for the good of your neighbors? Are you willing to pray the prayer,
Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free …
My heart is weak and poor till it a master find …
My power is faint and low till I have learned to serve …
My will is not my own till thou hast made it thine.
God of all knowledge and wisdom and compassion, you know our situation in life far better than do we. You see and know the fears that threaten our spirits—fears of the unknown, fears of the stranger, fears that our courage and our faith will fail, fears of facing the deepest hurts and aches and yearnings within us. O God, with the songwriter we yearn to assert, “It is well with my soul.” Even when sorrows like sea billows roll, even when our fears threaten to gain the upper hand, we want to affirm, “It is well with my soul.”
Yet we confess, O God, that peace is illusive. Not just on an international scale, where bombs destroy and violence all too frequently serves as the order of the day. Just so, Lord God, we frequently find that inner peace eludes us. And so we pray, come among us now, Holy Spirit, grant us your strength, your grace, your loving kindness, your peace. Fill us with vision, that we might live and serve in your name and walk in the footsteps of Christ Jesus our Lord.
God of justice and righteousness, we yearn for that day when justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, when steadfast love and faithfulness meet, when righteousness and peace kiss one another. O God who touches our spirits and heals our fears, open our eyes—and our hearts—to the remarkable gift of hope, to the joy that dances through our pain, to the promise that is more powerful than despair.
Hear us now as we remember those in special need of your gracious presence—those who live in terror in the midst of war and confusion, those who are experiencing brokenness in the key relationships of their lives, those who are struggling with darkness and loss. Hear our prayers, holy God, for healing …
God of us all, from the hurts and fears that long have bound us, free our hearts to praise you and to walk in pathways of faith, hope and compassionately living.
In the name of the One who extended compassion to all manner of people, Jesus the Christ, we pray. Amen.