Scripture: 2Corinthians 7:5-13
I realize that sermons are not always memorable events. I am aware that sometimes people don’t remember everything I said in a sermon, or anything I said in a sermon, don’t remember the main point, don’t remember even what it was about. I am rarely offended by this, and one of the reasons I don’t offend easily when people fail to remember sermons is that I often don’t remember my own sermons. Ask me on Tuesday what I preached about last Sunday, and I may or may not have a clue. So of course I have only the vaguest and spottiest memory of what I may have said in sermons months or years ago. And sometimes when I do have a kind of dim memory of saying something in a sermon, I can’t be sure of when, or where, or to whom I might have said it, or whether maybe I didn’t say it at all but only dreamed that I said it.
I say all this because I have one of those dim memories that relates to the sermon topic this morning. I sort of remember spending some portion of a sermon once talking about happiness. The sermon, I think, was not about happiness, but for some reason I digressed at some length about happiness. And I think what I said was not all that positive. Not that I came out against happiness exactly, although that’s possible, but I think I at least acknowledged that we probably all wanted to be happy and even more want people we love to be happy and certainly wouldn’t wish unhappiness for anyone. So I doubt that I outright denounced happiness. More likely I might have suggested that it is overrated, or raised some questions about whether it’s really something we ought to be in pursuit of. In any case, the words I think I remember saying were at least skeptical in nature as regards happiness.
I’m thinking I need to rethink this, not necessarily come to a different conclusion, but rethink it, and for better or worse I decided to think out loud about it with you. I said last week that my overall theme for preaching during Lent would be temptations and that I didn’t look on temptation as having to do with the need to resist things that are obviously awful but that it has more to do just with the places of tension or struggle in our lives, and happiness has always been something I’ve struggled with—the actual feelings of happiness or unhappiness, but also how I’m supposed to deal with those feelings, what kind of importance I’m supposed to attach to them, how I understand them, what happiness is, where it comes from, all those kinds of questions. I’ve been encouraged in my thinking about all this by Mo Nichols, again my planning partner for the week, who passed along some helpful reading material, and by…the Dalai Lama, who has a book about happiness that you may have seen prominently displayed at bookstores. All this has led me to think that if I want to look at temptations as they appear in my own life, I need to re-explore my thoughts and feelings in this area. So…Happiness.
Let me first try to tell you some of why happiness troubles me. I guess I should first assure you that at a basic commonsense level I do think happiness is a good thing and I want people to be happy, including myself, and I don’t want people to be unhappy, including myself. I’m not a masochist. I don’t think that denying happiness to oneself is in and of itself virtuous. I don’t think being unhappy automatically brings you closer to God or makes you a better person. Having said those things, I still have some concerns.
I am troubled by how happiness, at least in our culture, how happiness has come to have a kind of totalitarian quality to it. Partly by that I mean that it is not usually seen so much as a gentle and gracious gift, a fragile and temporary gift to be treasured when it is present. It is seen more often as an obligation, something we are to devote ourselves to, something to be achieved, something we can achieve, and ought to achieve, something we are assumed to be striving for. It is often seen furthermore not as a goal but as the goal of our living. It is totalitarian in that sense, all important, all consuming. It is totalitarian too in the sense that it—happiness, the quest for happiness, the desire for happiness, the need for happiness—is used in so many ways to control us. Happiness less often sweetens our lives, more often controls them, sometimes in a rather heavy handed fashion.
An obvious for instance is the whole consumer-advertising culture that afflicts us with its philosophy of happiness. That culture, of course, not only sells us products and services. It sells us images and notions of a happiness that can come from acquiring whatever there is to be acquired. Now of course we know better than to buy in, excuse the phrase, to this mindset. We know that whatever is being sold will typically bring us much less than what is promised, because so often what is being sold is not just a product that may prove to be useful or give us some pleasure, but that it will supply one of the crucial missing ingredients in our lives, in other words that it has the potential to bring us deep or lasting pleasure, or maybe even happiness. We know that this happiness is all part of a sales pitch, yet we can hardly avoid it. It is forced on us because it is everywhere, and we are forced to resist it, unless we want to isolate ourselves from civilization. The consumer culture teases us with images of happiness that we are hard-pressed to avoid or to counter, and it can be wearying.
I remember reading a kind of Christian op-ed piece some time ago where the writer was saying that of all the Christian holidays or seasons she liked Lent the best because it is the most counter-cultural. No one buys new clothes or presents for Lent, decorates their houses for Lent, sends Hallmark cards to friends for Lent. We are not encouraged to buy anything. In fact, in the traditional approach to Lent we are encouraged to give things up, hopefully with the effect of becoming more aware of what we can do without. The spirit of Lent is an anti-consumption spirit.
And, in the traditional approach to Lent we are encouraged to be engaged in a kind of sober reflection about our spiritual lives, perhaps to mourn over ourselves or our world, to repent, to confront unpleasant things in our world and in ourselves. I have not always appreciated this kind of gloomy approach to Lent, especially when it is a kind of pretend gloominess because that’s the way we’re supposed to be during Lent. Churches can fall into that. I have attended some churches where you would think that the main Christian virtue was dourness, and where you just knew that you weren’t supposed to let a happy thought cross your mind as long as you were there. But I’ve also attended churches where I felt that I wasn’t supposed to let a gloomy thought cross my mind—happy face churches—and I have been maybe even more oppressed by them than by the dour ones. I could put a positive spin on the gloomy, grieving serious side of Lent. We need a season that suggests that it’s ok not to be entirely happy.
This is another of my troubles with happiness. There is often an assumption that the normal and desired state of our being is happiness. There is often an expectation that we smile for the world the way we are expected to smile for the camera. There is a kind of tyranny of happiness that says that if you’re not happy there’s something wrong…and someone to blame…the world, other people, yourself. Someone or something must be depriving you of that happiness you want and deserve. Yet you and I know people who are kind and caring and creative and compassionate…and unhappy. And though you and I may wish that our friend had more joy in his or her life, to think that there is something wrong because of the unhappiness may only increase the unhappiness. What’s wrong with me that I am not happy? In any case happiness may not always be available, or be the place a person needs to be. There may be lots of places to live other than happiness that are ok.
And I am troubled by the thought that maybe happiness is a kind of an opiate, the way Karl Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses. Maybe it makes us more contented than we should be, more satisfied than we should be, more insulated from a broken and suffering world than we should be, less likely to challenge things, less likely to confront what needs to be confronted in the world or in ourselves, less complicated than we need to be. I do have a strong sense that we are not only consuming ourselves to death. We are, to use a phrase that has come to be somewhat widely used, entertaining ourselves to death.
Of course I disagree with Marx about religion being the opiate of the masses. Religion, at least as I have experienced it in my own life, and as we try to practice it here at Sojourners, is likely to generate as many questions as it does answers, is likely to unsettle me as much as to calm me, is as likely to make me discontented as contented, is as likely to cause me to grieve as to celebrate, is much more likely to cause me to be dissatisfied than satisfied. Trying to be a person of faith for me has never felt too much like trying to be happy. But maybe this is just me, I say to myself. Maybe it’s my genes or my stubbornness that prevent me from just giving in to happiness. So I test this out by asking myself if Jesus—taking Jesus as a model of faithfulness—if I imagine that Jesus was happy. My own answer is no. I’ve asked other people the question this week, mostly non-Sojourners, and I’ve gotten everything from immediate and emphatic no’s to long pauses. Jesus—happy? Either he pretty clearly wasn’t happy in any way we would think of happy, or it brings you up short because it’s just hard to relate Jesus and happiness. They don’t quite fit.
So I am troubled by happiness, legitimately troubled, I think, for the reasons I have said and more. But I wouldn’t be troubled if all there was to the notion of happiness was phoniness or superficiality. If happiness were only what people try to sell us or what we have foisted on us, if it were only those kinds of fake images that people make up, I could just dismiss it and do my best not to waste much time thinking about it. But of course there is more to it than that.
First of all there are those moments of delight that I referred to earlier as sweetening our lives. We don’t likely pursue that kind of happiness. One doesn’t go grabbing for moments of grace, but we can pray that we be able and available to receive it when it is offered to us. Surely we do want that for ourselves and others and would treasure it when it is given.
And surely we do want people we love to be happy. That is not some superficial desire. It is deep inside us, and when people we love are desperately unhappy, we want desperately for that feeling to be lifted from them. We may not have definitions of what happy is but we want life to be good for people we love, in fact for all people. What is the urge for justice but the desire that life be good for everyone?
And then there is that kind of happiness that is different from anything I’ve been talking about. In fact when I was describing the troubles I have with the notion of happiness, one could say, “But that’s not really happiness. Those are just things masquerading as happiness. Real happiness is something different.” And maybe so. Or maybe happiness is not the right word. Whatever it is, however we talk about it, it has to do, in my mind, with dwelling in the heart of God. And that means a happiness that is not achieved by escaping the brokenness of the world but by entering into it, and yet not being overcome by it. To dwell in the heart of God. That may not be something we can pursue. It may not be something we can achieve. It is to be deeply desired. And if that can be called happiness, then may all God’s children be happy. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 7, 2004