Can we be happy?
"I can't get no satisfaction"
I had forgotten about this sermon, but the with the White House talking about awarding a “baby bonus” to boost the population, it came to mind. The Wall Street Journal claims that children will not bring lasting happiness. Part of the problem with such assertions is the confusion between mere happiness and joy. I often preach at weddings that happiness comes and goes, maybe several times a day. But we can have sustained joy no matter what, because that’s what God intends for us.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article called “No satisfaction: why what you have is never enough.”
The writer says, “As a country we are richer than ever. Yet surveys show we’re no happier than we were thirty years ago.... We constantly hanker after faster cars and fancier paychecks – and initially, such things boost our happiness. But the glow of satisfaction quickly fades and soon we’re yearning for something else.”
It sounds like an old cliché: “money can’t buy happiness,” but apparently it’s true.
And that’s not all. The article goes on to say that having children won’t necessarily bring happiness, either. Kids do bring joy, but also stress, financial strain, and a whole new set of fears to worry about.
So the Wall Street Journal, in its infinite wisdom, concludes maybe we’re just not built to be happy. Instead, they say, maybe the promise of happiness serves only as a genetic incentive; a trick to make us want to survive and reproduce for the good of the species.
Of course, that’s just what we might expect from the Wall Street Journal. It’s devoted to news about the acquisition of wealth, and if the acquisition of wealth can’t make us happy, then I can see where they’d say we’re just not meant to be happy.
But I would ask, if we as a species can never be happy, then what’s the point in perpetuating it?
It’s not like we’re doing the earth a whole lot of good by perpetuating our species. We’re not part of any essential food chain to keep the planet going; God’s creation would probably get along just fine without us. In fact, if the reports on public radio are true, we’re actually hurting the earth by releasing too much carbon and creating pollution with our lifestyle and fuel consumption.
So what’s the point? Why do we exist? To put it in theological terms, why would God create us just to be unhappy and hurt the rest of God’s creation?
But there’s an essential flaw in the Wall Street Journal logic. If we’re incapable of happiness, we’d never know what we’re missing. Unless we’ve experienced happiness, we could never know we’re unhappy, could we?
So, logically, somebody, somewhere, sometime must be able to experience happiness. And the truth is, we all have. The Journal article concedes it, at least implicitly. But the Journal sees happiness as a fleeting, impermanent condition that simply cannot be sustained for any length of time.
And sometimes it seems they’re right, especially when some tragedy strikes, or when we see all the bad news reported in, well, things like the Wall Street Journal.
But I just don’t buy it. I believe true, long term joy can be ours. And I believe it, in part, because of today’s gospel lesson. In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus talks about what life will be like after He finishes His earthly ministry.
It’s part of His farewell discourse – His saying “goodbye” to His friends. And because He loves them, He’s reassuring them. He reassures them first that they will not be alone after He’s gone. They will get a new counselor, a new comforter, a new advocate.
This new companion will remind them of what Jesus taught them and teach them whatever new they need to know. He’s preparing them for the Pentecost event: the gift of the Holy Spirit.
But that’s not the only gift He promises them. He also promises them His peace. And He tells them He gives them peace not as the world gives.
“Not as the world gives.” In other words, Jesus promises something unlike those things described in the Wall Street Journal. Jesus promises something personal; something from God. “The word you hear from me is from the Father who sent me.”
And then He explains something about this new gift of peace. He tells them, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
Ironically, Jesus gives them this gift on the brink of His own impending betrayal, abandonment, torture, and death. So He knows He will experience pain and sadness, loss and rejection.
And yet, He still speaks of peace, and a lack of fear, and a lack of stress.
That, I think, is the key to long term, sustained joy. It’s not just that the Wall Street Journal looks to the wrong things as a source of happiness, it really has no idea what joy means.
Joy does not mean a complete lack of pain or sadness; that’s more what we’d expect from a frontal lobotomy or a coma.
A complete freedom from pain would be a curse, not a gift. That’s why leprosy patients lose limbs and things. It’s not that they get loose and fall off. It’s that the patients lose the ability to feel pain in them, and they get injured without knowing it.
So Jesus never promises freedom from pain or sadness, or an easy going life without challenges. His followers all experienced great challenges, and we all experience great challenges no matter how fervently we embrace our faith.
But what Jesus does promise is a peace that allows us to approach these challenges without fear, and without troubled hearts.
But how can we do that? We hear Him say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” and “Do not be afraid,” but how do we control our fear?
The answer is, we don’t; not by ourselves.
I believe the two gifts Jesus promises are intertwined. The peace Jesus promises – this freedom from fear and worry – depends a lot on our acceptance of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
I used to get fussed at by a man in Wetumpka because, he said, I didn’t preach from the Book of Revelation enough.
And that’s probably true. I think it’s hard work to preach from Revelation because I believe the book represents a vision by a particular author filled with metaphors and symbols that made sense to people in that time and place, but don’t always translate well for people in our time and place.
I also believe no finite, mortal creature can possibly describe the infinite glories of eternity with the limited languages we use here on earth.
But having said all that, one thing is abundantly clear in today’s reading from the Book of Revelation: Heaven has everything to do with God’s presence.
For people in first century Jerusalem, the great temple symbolized God’s presence. But in the vision of the Revelation of John, there’s no temple at all.
“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God.”
In other words, God’s presence does not need to be mediated through any symbol like the temple, or the sun, or the moon, because the worshipers in heaven will see God’s face directly. God’s presence will sustain them, and provide all the light and illumination they will need forever.
Well, what’s true in the vision of eternal life can be true here in our lives, right here and right now.
The key to the peace of God – the peace that allows us to approach sorrow and pain, loss and rejection, without fear and without troubled hearts – comes from our accepting and acknowledging God’s presence.
But the world we live in tries to blind us to God’s presence. When we listen to all the voices that tell us more things will make us happy, or more money will make us secure, or a new job will make us fulfilled, or even our family can provide all that we need for a meaningful life,
we forget about God, and God’s teaching, and God’s presence, and inevitably our experience falls short of our expectations.
And this usually occurs when all the stresses and worries and fears and pressures that come with more things, more money, more responsibility at work, more family members start piling up on us and we think it’s all up to us.
No wonder the Wall Street Journal thinks we’re not capable of happiness.
But the truth is, we are created to be happy, because we are created to need and to love God, and to experience God’s love. That’s our reason for being here. We will experience unhappiness from time to time; that’s just emotional. But even in the midst of sorrow, we can hang on to sustained joy because of God’s love.
Ancient eastern theologians taught that God’s love in the Trinity just overflowed into creation – making all of creation an extension of love. But of all creation, we humans are the ones capable of choosing to love back. And that love starts when we remember God, and invite God’s presence into everything we do.
And it’s through the Holy Spirit we’re made capable of inviting God’s presence into our lives, helping us recognize it’s not all up to us to face the challenges of life alone. We have help. We have guidance. We have comfort.
The promise is, as we “tune into” God’s presence more and more in our lives, we’ll find ourselves and our outlooks transformed.
We’ll no longer look at things like the voices in the world insist we must.
We’ll start seeing the world more as a creation which our Creator pronounced “good.” Knowing we’re loved, we’ll start looking with the eyes of love.
And no matter what confronts us, we’ll cling to hope – hope that nothing’s too big or too hard for God, if we’re willing to submit to God’s will. We’ll start to be set apart from the world – we’ll still be in the world with all of its problems and challenges – but we’ll come more and more to depend on God’s point of view in meeting those challenges.
This transformation, this setting apart for God, is called “sanctification,” and it is one of the primary works of the Holy Spirit.
Look again at the collect for today with which we started this service:
“O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding:
Pour into our hearts such love towards you that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all we can desire....”
This is the peace that passes all understanding.