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The Rev. Frank Logue How to Find This coming Wednesday, we are going to begin a 6-week look at The Question of God, a PBS series based on a Harvard University course of the same name. In the book based on the course, the author, Armand Nicholi, writes,
The idea is that we want to be happy. But our idea of happiness is skewed. What we seek in trying to make ourselves happy actually leads to discontent. Against this, C.S. Lewis argues that we can have neither happiness nor peace apart from God for there is no such thing as happiness or peace without God. Now this is a nice passage and one of those pious things that if you say it fast enough in a sermon, you can get people to say amen and then walk out of church with no earthly idea how that effects the coming week. So I want to slow down a bit and test this out. Is it true that we can’t have happiness or peace without God? Because if it is just nice churchy talk but won’t help out your day to day life, then we’re just wasting our time. Let’s set aside the question of God for now and look at what life is like without God. First, you have to say that some people don’t believe in God and seem to lead successful, meaningful lives. We don’t know all about what is going on in someone else’s inner life, so we can’t say so conclusively, but we have to admit that folks who put faith front and center in their lives look outwardly a lot like everyone else. People who go to church face stress in their lives. Believers face problems too. We know this. But if I’m reading C.S. Lewis correctly he seems to think that apart from God, we humans tend to live our lives in pursuit of more. More money. More power. More fame. More stuff. He who dies with the most toys wins. Whatever the thing is we want more of it. Maybe the ideal then is more like “He who has the most toys has won already and doesn’t have to wait to die to have heaven.” If I had a bigger house I’d be happy. If I had a nicer car I’d be happy. If I had a better husband or wife I’d be happy. If I had better teachers I’d be happy. If I had a better job I’d be happy. We want the upgrade. We want our lives supersized. We want more. Now that’s a generalization, but it’s not a completely unfair one. If we didn’t want more and better things, if we didn’t think they would make us happy, then advertisements would work differently. But ads tell us we need more and better stuff to make us happy because it’s what our culture wants to believe. But is it true? Of course not. You know this without me telling you. You want the stuff, but inside you know stuff alone won’t make you happy. But better to be unhappy on my new boat than unhappy on the couch at home, right? And how unhappy could I be if I had that boat, oh, and the trailer of course, and the truck to tow it. To which C.S. Lewis says, “And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” Our reading from the Book of James puts it this way, “Where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.” We envy what other folks have. If no one had a boat or a bigger house or a nicer truck, we might not envy, but we do. We don’t envy their payments. We don’t envy their second job. But we envy the stuff. And selfish ambition, trying to look out for getting ahead without concern for others, that leads to wickedness. James goes on to write that lots of problems come from cravings at war within us. You covet something and so you engage in conflicts and disputes. James solution to this is in verse 18. In our reading for this morning it was translated, “And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” The New Living Translation does a better job of preserving the meaning of the Greek while getting the verse in an order that works better in English in saying,
So if you want the harvest of goodness, if you want life to go well, you have to plant seeds of peace. For James this runs counter to the natural human tendency for more and better. This goes against the very pursuit of what the other guy has. If you want happiness you can’t start with nurturing the envy and selfish ambition inside yourself. And if you want peace, in your life and in the world, then you will have to plant the seeds of peace inside yourself. If you don’t have peace within yourself, then you can’t find peace anywhere else. If you can’t find happiness within yourself, then you won’t find it anywhere else. But once you can find peace and happiness within yourself you’ll start to find them everywhere you look. This sounds like self-help pop psychology, but the pop psychologist sells this line because it works. The only sure thing you get from the pursuit of more and better stuff is not a larger and better life. The only sure thing you get from the pursuit of more and better stuff is more and bigger debts. All of this we know apart from God and we can show that common sense, conventional wisdom, pop psychology and even the well thought out concepts of the best and brightest people working in psychology all fit with the idea that happiness and peace start within, not without. But this is a sermon and we are in church, so I hope you won’t mind if I add God to the equation. This is what Dr. Armand Nicholi does in his Harvard course from which we get the study we are about to begin on Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. He compares how the two men’s world views work themselves out in their writings, but also in the lives they lived for as he says, “We do well to keep in mind that human beings do not always live what they profess nor profess what they live.” And when Dr. Nicholi looks to the lives of Freud and Lewis he finds that while Freud would write, “I work out of sheer necessity; fundamentally everything has lost its meaning for me…I find no joy in life” while Nicholi notes that Lewis, “changed from an introvert who, like Freud, was highly critical and distrustful of others, to a person who reached out and appeared to value every human being.” By all accounts C.S. Lewis made the move James encourages us all to make in not just being concerned with our happiness, but also with the needs and concerns of others. This is to look beyond envy and selfish ambition. This is to move beyond pursuing what you want, or even think you need to finding a way to be happy with what you have. For Lewis this did not happen apart from God and he is quite convinced that it could never have happened apart from God. Lewis writes quite clearly in the passage that I began with to say, “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” For the great writer, pursuing happiness and peace apart from God is to try to continually redefine happiness and peace. I would be happy if… I would have peace in my life if… But instead of this endless pursuit, what if we stopped and acknowledged that if the whole Christian story is true, then there is a loving creator who wants what is best for us. That loving creator wants happiness and peace for us and the way to find that happiness and peace is in coming to terms with ourselves. Finding peace within means figuring out that we really are OK. We really are worthy of being loved. The message of the world is “you would be lovely if…” While the message of God is you are lovely just as you are and because I love you so much I want something even better for you. This is what Jesus said. This is how Jesus acted. And throughout human history there have been score of Christians who have gotten this wrong and hurt others. But there have also been millions of examples, of people who got this message of God’s love deep within their bones and found it transformative. C.S. Lewis found that nothing transformed a life more than love. James agreed writing earlier in the book to call the command of God to love your neighbor as yourself the royal command. The amazing thing is that as Lewis would write that if you realize love is an act of will and you will yourself to do something for someone that is interested in their good rather than your own you don’t come to resent it, but you come to like the person more. The Psychiatrist and Harvard professor Nicholi backs this up with scientific data he says which shows that when we help someone we don’t like, even inadvertently we tend to dislike him or her less and when we harm someone we come to dislike them more. Act on love and you will feel more love. Act on hate and you will feel more hate. Act as if looking out for what is best for someone else is good for you and it will be good for you. God made the world to work around the principle of love and the love that starts it all is loving yourself. Notice that God doesn’t say love others. God says to love them as you love yourself. So there is no room for self-loathing because that is self defeating. Instead the goal is to build yourself up. Realize that you are worthy of love and then you’ll come to see that others are worthy of that love to. Start acting like they are worthy of love and they’ll come to seem it more and more. We are not the victim of our feelings. By changing our actions our feelings can come to change. Not sure you love your Mom and Dad anymore? Act like you love them. Treat them lovingly and some of that will change. The same applies to your husband or wife. If you act like you don’t love them, then feelings will follow. But if you act on the love you want to have, love can be nurtured and grow. From a Christian standpoint we see this is because this is the way God made the world to work. God created the world out of love, animated the world with love and wants us to live into that love. Hold on tight to your own needs. Turn inward only concerned for yourself and what you don’t have and aren’t getting out of life and you will just be nurturing bitterness, envy, cravings James would say. But turn inward and see yourself as God sees you and you will find that you can have peace now, without the bigger house, the better truck, the nicer boat or the more loving spouse. You can find peace and happiness by coming to see that God’s love for you is real and you really are worth loving. Then from that place of being basically happy, you can sow seeds of peace in your life with loving actions toward those around you. It is the pursuit of more, more, more. But it is the pursuit of more love. More love for God. More love for your neighbor and more love for yourself. Amen.
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