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How to Be Miserable, Part One

Sermon by Rev. Doug Pratt — February 17, 2008
 

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, ²and he began to teach them, saying:
 
         ³“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
                  for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
         ⁴Blessed are those who mourn,
                  for they will be comforted.
         ⁵Blessed are the meek,
                  for they will inherit the earth.”
 
Matthew 5:1-5 (NIV)

Introduction
The “Pursuit of Happiness”: it’s what America is all about. The right to it is enshrined in our earliest documents. And it’s part of our deepest instincts as human beings. If you were to conduct a random poll of 100 adult Americans and asked them, “What do you most want out of life?” the most common response would be: “I just want to be happy.” We all do. We feel it’s our “inalienable right.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Some of our finest Christian thinkers and writers through the ages have understood this. Blaise Pascal, the Renaissance philosopher, wrote:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. They will never take the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

An interesting thought: that even, in their twisted logic, depressed people who commit suicide do so because they think they’ll be happier dead than alive. Though that is ultimately disastrous, it confirms that everyone is motivated continually to seek happiness.

It’s not a question, then, of whether we will engage in “the pursuit of happiness,” but rather of where and how we will do so. That is most critical to our well-being. British Christian author C.S. Lewis deepened our insight into the pursuit of happiness and joy with these words:

There lurks in most modern minds the notion that seeking our own good and hoping for enjoyment of life is a bad thing. But this is not a part of the Christian faith. When we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of those rewards in the Bible, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with minor pleasures of drink and illicit sex and petty ambition, while He is offering us Infinite Joy. We are like ignorant children who prefer making mud pies in a filthy slum because we can’t imagine the far greater joy of a holiday in a tropical paradise. We are far too easily pleased.

This is the first of a two-part series of messages, in which we’re going to be learning about God’s prescription for finding true happiness, lasting joy, the kind that satisfies us all the way down to the core of our beings. We’ll be studying the well-known words of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5. These have become known as the “Beatitudes”—from the Latin word “Beatus,” usually translated as “blessed” or “happy.” This kind of happiness is not the brief, fleeting, momentary mood swing that we sometimes think of. The happiness or “blessing” that the Bible talks about should perhaps be called a lasting joy. It involves emotion, but much more. It’s a long-term condition of being “blessed” in the deepest sense. Spiritual and inner blessing can come in the peak spiritual moments of prayer and singing and other experiences of worshiping God, and it can also come to us in the midst of our daily living.

If you’ve noticed the title of this message (How to be Miserable), you may have concluded that I am about to sabotage what I’ve just said about happiness. But my intent is really to show you the path to great, lifelong, unshakeable happiness. Why, then, are we going to talk about “being miserable”? Because sometimes it helps us to understand abstract concepts and qualities when we try to look at them in reverse—contrasting them to their opposites.

In a thrilling mystery novel called The Big Clock, by Kenneth Fearing, a crucial plot development revolves around this very process: looking at the negative to discern the positive. Investigators discover at the scene of a murder a crumpled negative of a Polaroid photograph—the kind that you would peel off to reveal the photo in those old cameras. They took the negative to the lab, and with careful computer analysis of the negative they were able to produce a positive picture of the murder suspect. The negative reveals the positive.

And that, I believe, is also true when we study Christian virtue and character: by learning the opposite, and by considering what God does not want us to do, it becomes clearer how He does want us to live. The negative helps us grasp the positive. So let’s think about what things will make us miserable, and then we’ll understand how to do the opposite—the steps that lead to true happiness and joy and blessedness. In this message we’ll identify the first three “prescriptions” for how to be miserable (or joyful), and in part two we’ll complete this brief study.

Prescription #1
Jesus begins the Beatitudes with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” This means that we recognize our “spiritual poverty,” our need for God. The position of these words as the very first or primary step to a life of joy emphasizes that our spiritual life and our relationship with God must have precedence. For if things in our souls are right with God, if we are meeting those inner needs, then everything else will go better for us.

The reverse Prescription #1 — i.e., for how to be miserable — is, therefore: Deny or ignore your spiritual needs. This is certainly the path that many people today are choosing. From Hollywood to the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue, from the secularism of college and university campuses to the distortion of the phrase “separation of church and state” in our law courts, a large chunk of our countrymen are willfully trying to deny or ignore the spiritual dimension of life. “Who needs God?” they suggest. “We have so many things to make you happy. Just buy our products, follow our exercise and diet plans, take our pills, visit our tourist spots, live the life of luxury. And you’ll have all you need. And you can leave God out of the equation completely.”

How many hours of prime time television could you watch this week without hearing a single character acknowledge that they feel a need for God, or wonder about what happens after death, or try to cope with a guilty conscience, or draw upon Scripture and moral teachings to make an ethical decision? When you realize what a distorted, one-dimensional picture of human nature is portrayed in our secular entertainment, you can’t help but wonder: What’s wrong with these people? What has happened to them? Have they all undergone “soulectomies”? The world of media and entertainment is definitely pushing hard Prescription #1 for how to be miserable, by telling us to ignore our spiritual needs and hungers.

I was talking with my sister recently about this very thing. Heather lives in a nice middle-class suburb in Ohio. She has been praying for and trying to reach out to her next door neighbor, a young woman named Janet. She’s tried inviting Janet to go to church with her, and has offered her Christian books, and has encouraged her to attend a Christian woman’s conference. So far, Janet has been politely disinterested. The problem, my sister commented, is that Janet seems to think she’s got it all together and has no needs. A beautiful home, a nice family, her basic material needs met—what else is there? We all know—and probably have living all around us at this moment—people who have fallen into that same denial.

But there might come a moment in Janet’s life, or your neighbor’s, when suddenly and unexpectedly things aren’t perfect any longer. It’s possible that some day something like this will happen to shake Janet’s secure little world:

• her child becomes very sick, or is discovered to have a handicap
• her mother or father becomes sick, or dies suddenly
• her husband loses his job when his company is sold, and he goes through the financial crisis of a long unemployment
• she reaches her middle years or “empty nest” and struggles to find her purpose
• she develops the habit of having a few drinks and then finds it gets harder and harder to quit, and begins to wonder if she’s become an alcoholic
• she’s left suddenly single, by death or divorce
• she feels the creeping of age, and wonders what will happen to her at the moment of her death

Will any of these things happen to Janet in the next year or ten years? Nobody knows. But all of us are vulnerable—even the youngest and the richest and the smartest and the most successful. At any moment—literally—a crisis or problem or sorrow can invade our comfortable lives. And when it happens, we will feel desperate and alone if we have been denying and ignoring the spiritual life and our relationship with God.

So if you want to set yourself up to be desperately miserable some day, follow Prescription #1. Shut God tightly out of your life, and ignore your spiritual needs completely. But if you want to build a solid foundation for true and lasting happiness, listen to Jesus. Make your spiritual poverty and need your first concern, and invite Him to be with you always as your Savior and Best Friend. Those who know their inner need and open up to the Lord are truly blessed and happy.

Prescription #2
The second Beatitude is, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” When we take our inner hurts and pains and sorrows to God in the proper way—the biblical process of “mourning”—we receive His healing and comfort and renewal.

So Prescription #2 for how to be miserable will be the reverse: Ignore your emotions, or dwell only on them. Unresolved inner pain—grief at the loss of a loved one, hurt and disappointment over being mistreated, bitterness over being cheated and wronged—inner wounds like these can be toxic and deadly to us. Do you recall the news story from the 1970’s about the environmental disaster in a suburb of Buffalo called “Love Canal”? Toxic chemicals had been dumped there and polluted the water, the ground and the air. The residents were getting sick, developing cancers, and dying at an alarming rate. Eventually the only solution was to move everybody out, tear everything down and clean it all up. When we let inner grief or pain sit inside of us, without the proper clean-up process, it’s toxic to us.

The approach of some people, rather than submitting to the divine healing process of properly mourning and receiving God’s cleansing comfort, is to try to ignore their inner hurts. A bestseller several years ago by Frank McCourt, called Angela’s Ashes, told the story of his miserable and unhappy childhood growing up in poverty in Ireland. Though he had plenty of reasons to be bitter towards his alcoholic father, incompetent mother, nasty schoolteachers, etc., McCourt has refused in interviews and TV appearances to admit that he’s still bitter. But discerning readers can see his unresolved anger and pain bleeding through every page. Past hurts don’t go away by ignoring them, or even by writing your memoirs about them.

Other people have chosen to hold onto and nurse their grievances—to the extent that they dominate their lives. One of the classic literary examples was the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. One of the characters is an elderly spinster who lives in a gloomy house with all the curtains drawn. She stopped all her clocks at the moment that her fiancé jilted her on her wedding day 40 years earlier. She still wears daily her wedding dress, now yellow and worn and frayed. It’s almost an absurd example of what happens to us when we don’t let go of the pains and hurts of the past, but hold onto those grudges and nurse them.

God wants to help you properly “mourn”—that is, deal with your pain, and then “be comforted”—receiving His grace to forgive and let go and forget and move on. Time does not automatically heal everything. I believe it is God who heals—and He uses time, and other people, and prayer, and scripture, and many other tools in the healing process.

Prescription #3
The third statement of our Lord in the Beatitudes is, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The opposite, the third prescription for being miserable, is: Be proud and self-centered. To truly grasp this contrast, we need to make sure we understand the true meaning of the word “meek.” It does not mean “weak.” A meek person is not depressed, dejected, insecure, timid or lacking in confidence. That is a false caricature.

True meekness is a wonderful, winsome combination of strength and humility, of confidence and brokenness. It’s the power to do good without exalting self or diminishing others. Jesus Himself was called in scripture “meek,” and nobody who ever met Him would ever think of Him as weak; He was strong and tough in a selfless way. Try telling the money changers in the temple that the Lord was “weak”! Those men, who were defiling God’s holy place, found themselves shamed and thrown out on their derrières by the burning eyes and rippling muscles of Jesus, the way a shotputter heaves his weight far into the distance.

Meekness is, quite simply, “power under control.” A young Greek officer, preparing to return home with his victorious army from the Peloponnesian Wars, sent ahead a message to his fiancé about the gift he was bringing to her. It was a white stallion he had taken from the enemy in battle—a gorgeous horse, strong and sleek and swift as the wind. The horse, the officer said, was the most magnificent animal he had ever seen. And best of all, its power and speed were under control, and able to be guided by the slightest command of its rider. “It is a meek horse,” he summarized: and that was not an insult or criticism, but the highest compliment. In that exact way, Jesus is telling us that if we bring our strength and pride, our ego and will, under His authority—becoming “meek” and responsive to His commands—we will be able to accomplish far more in life. Why, the whole earth will be ours!

So the opposite, the mirror image, is pride and self-centeredness. Many arenas of life today—from presidential and local politics to sports to business to media to labor relations—have become consumed by a competitive take-no-prisoners spirit. Former corporate titan “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap was a poster child, as is obsessive football coach Bill Belichick and “The Boss” Donald Trump, and the various “attack” authors and talk show hosts of both the left and right (Ann Coulter and Al Franken, Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly). We may admire their arrogance and their gall; we may root for their team or agree with their political opinions; but the consequence of elevating self and ego is very destructive. We may succeed, but the personal and relational and emotional and spiritual toll is very high.

The bottom line is that if you puff yourself up, blow your own horn and boast, you may very well be humbled some day. But if you keep your ego in check, learn humility and meekness, and give the credit to God and to others who help you when you succeed, you will be lifted up and honored by others. And that brings not only a higher glory but a greater joy than bragging and self-promotion can do.

Conclusion
This concludes the first half of our study of the “Beatitudes”—the prescriptions for real joy and happiness and success (and the corresponding opposites that will lead us to be miserable). In How to Be Miserable, Part 2 we will complete this study of the words of Jesus in Matthew 5. It’s my prayer that, through hearing the words of our Lord, we will each be able to find some practical things we can do to lead us further on the path to the true, lasting and eternal joy He wants us to experience.