Category: Sermon

Texts:Psalm 23
1 Timothy 6:17-19
Warn those who are blessed with this world’s goods not to look down on other people. They are not to put their hope in wealth, for it is uncertain. Instead, they are to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with all that we need for our enjoyment. Tell them they are to do good and be wealthy in good works. They are to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they’ll create a treasure for the future, and guarantee the only life that is real. — I Timothy 6:17-19, The Inclusive New Testament
By the time the average North American child graduates from high school, she will have seen upwards of 700,000 commercials on TV.  If you add into that mix, billboards, radio, newspaper and magazine ads, you can safely assume one million generally convincing pitches to “Buy! Buy! Buy!”  Neil Postman, the late professor of media at NYU and author of “Amusing ourselves to Death,  calls the cumulative effect of these pitches to buy a not-so-subtle form of brainwashing that “tell us that all our problems are solvable through the purchase of some chemical, food, drug or machine” p. 130. Once we have been taught that salvation comes through our purchasing power, then when our purchasing power ebbs, as it has for so many of us lately, the struggle becomes truly gut-wrenching.  Whether or not you like it, we live in a culture that tells us to buy stuff, whether we can afford it or not.
I want to explore this intersection we have with our world over the next few weeks.  I want to do so because a pledge committee is getting ready to collect pledges from all of so that we can put together a budget.  Because we want a budget that is responsible to our commitments, and because pulling teeth to get there, which we’ve been doing for too long, is too painful, this next month will be about how we can all do our part.
That’s an important part of this.  And I would be dishonest if I did not acknowledge that.  But I believe that contentedness in budgeting comes from contentedness in our whole lives.  And I think that we are not that contented in our whole lives; I think that we are honestly troubled by conflicting desires.   And I believe that deep down, we want, whether we have a little money or a lot, to deal with it in a way that really pleases us.  I could say that we want to be faithful with our money, but I’m afraid that doesn’t say much.  What we want, to be blunt about it, is for our actions,  relative to our money, to be pleasing to God — to make a difference in the general creative advance of God.
II.
I tremble as I write this.  I am distressingly aware that some of you truly do not have wiggle room in your budgets.  And I do not want to suggest in any way that a simpler life means  to make do with less wiggle room in your budgets.   I tremble as I write this.  For while  there is no more often mentioned issue in the New Testament than the issue of our relationship with money, there is also no subject in our modern life which is more scattered with shoals upon which to founder.
It is for this reason that I choose to read the selection from the Epistle of Timothy that I did.  Whoever this Timothy is, he is aware that leaders of the fledgling Christian communities to which he writes and ministers, will have to tread carefully.  Nevertheless, he exhorts future leaders of the church, “Warn them, for the rewards of Christian fullness, or we could say, salvation, are tied up with this question — how shall we deal with our wealth?”
I tremble because I do not want to be shrill in sounding the warning.  In fact, I want to be constructive this morning.  I assume that all of us, in our own ways, given our own, very different circumstances, struggle with money.  Further I will assume that no matter our circumstance, that Postman is correct — we are brain-washed into needing more, whether we can afford it or not — and that Timothy’s warning rings a bell, because somewhere, somehow, we know that we’ve had enough.  Nevertheless, the warning and the constructive proposal, while they may be distinguished, cannot reasonably be separated.  If we are to find peace in our financial lives, we will have to explore the struggle in them too.
I have been in some conversation with members of our pledge committee about this fact.  And about how it makes us squirm. And about not being negative.  So let me  say it clearly and carefully again — it is impossible to speak of being led to the calm waters without exploring the turbulent waters in which we now find ourselves.
Our larger situation is like the proverbial frog unconcerned by the water in which he swims being slowly heated till it kills him. Our species may notice a change like that, be we are generally blind to incremental change — and our psyche deals with the turbulent water, much like the cold blooded frog does — continually and incrementally acquiescing — until its too late and financial panic sets in.  The past two years have snapped our eyes open to the situation, and instilled fear into almost all of our transactions.
III.
Perhaps there was a time when the heat was not on the water; a time when human culture encouraged simplicity and generosity.  If so, it was a long, long time ago.  In the book of Isaiah, written about 600 years before the birth of Christ, Isaiah warned his people that unlimited growth would kill us.  We have been turning up the heat slowly antd steadily, hardly questioning the Isaiah’s concerns about growth.  Today it is economic orthodoxy.  Growth creates health , alleviates poverty, and waylays consumer fears.
Not everyone buys the orthodox line.  Herman Daley, who was once the president of the World Bank, is no longer because he continually challenged his colleagues to regard growth as ultimately dangerous to the world.  At some point quantitative growth must give way to qualitative development as the path of progress.  Herman Daley is a voice shouting in the wilderness that we are at the point, and have been for some time.  But he writes, “the World Bank [and the rest of the economic orthodoxy] cannot acknowledge limits to growth because growth is seen as the solution to poverty.”  Daley notes that there is historical truth in that view connecting growth with the alleviation of poverty.  But he argues, that idea no longer applies, despite the refusal of of so many to believe it.
But I’m talking here about our own fears in the midst of this economic downturn.    So let me connect these macro-economic issues, to family sized issues: our budgets and ultimately our sense of joy and satisfaction in life.
IV.
Classical economists like Keynes and Mill, have provided us with a helpful connection between our personal wants and the state of the economy.  They have made a distinction between absolute wants and relative wants.  Absolute wants are those wants that we experience independently of the condition of others.  We experience absolute wants because we have bodies that require food and water and shelter.  Absolute wants can be sated. We can have enough.
Relative wants are those wants which are relative to the world around us.  As John Maynard Keynes put it, “The higher the general level, the higher still are relative wants.”  Our relative wants are the wants appealed to by advertising agencies.  But the important point here is that our relative wants lead to an internal struggle since these wants are relative to their availability — meaning that some can have them met, and some simply cannot.   Our relative wants are driven by an economic model that says bigger is better, more is more and higher is farther. We can never quite have enough.  To the extent that our common welfare depends on relative desires, the common good will not be realized. The self-canceling effect of relative wants, dictates against our finding joy and contentedness.
The corrollary to that self-canceling effect of relative wants, is that absolute wants call us to see this world, and life within it as God’s creation and as good.  Our participation in it is guided therefore by a generous spirit.  When Jesus was asked by the Pharisees what to do with their money, he responded “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” thereby urging us to join together our tithing, or giving to the church, with our contribution to the general good of all of creation.  These two things contain the whole of the law of satisfaction.
Let me conclude by suggesting that there are a few concrete ways to turn away from the self-canceling effects of relative wants to the real joy of generosity.
First — We can construct our budgets in an explicit act of rebellion away from the economic orthodoxy of growth and relative demand by considering our tithing first.  By tithing, I mean serious, pledged commitments to others.  Tithing does not mean is a concept we do not talk much about, but suffice it here to say that it does not mean giving away everything you have until it hurts.  It is instead a state of mind about how your income will serve God.
Second — We can find ways to reduce our footprint — to live below our means — to deny the cultural word that suggests we can have all we want, and actively seek ways simplify.  Like any new skill — seeking to reduce our dependence on relative wants takes time and daily practise.
Perhaps as a corollary to this second principle we should add that credit cards can be our enemy in this effort — Let us, everytime we use them, use them wisely.  That means working at reducing our reliance upon them and using cash and debit cards wherever possible.
And finally — We must cultivate habits of saving.  Saving will even out our ups and downs.  And contribute to our stated intention of reducing our reliance upon credit, which in turn supports our goal of living within our means.
We can live simply.  And as we dive into that practise, using these simple goals, we discover the great gift of simplicity –to be just where we know we ought to be.
Tis the  gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free, tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.  And when we find ourselves in the place just right — twill be in the valley of love and delight.  Amen.

Texts:  John 11:32-44
Bhagavad Gita 11:31-33
Tell me who are You in such a fierce form? My salutations to You, O best of gods, be merciful! I wish to understand You, the primal Being, because I do not know Your mission.
The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy. Even without your participation all the warriors standing arrayed in the opposing armies shall cease to exist.
Therefore, get up and attain glory. Conquer your enemies and enjoy a prosperous kingdom. All these (warriors) have already been destroyed by Me. You are only an instrument, O Arjuna.
Years ago, when I first read the Bhagavad Gita, I remember feeling vaguely confused by it.  I only recently realized  that my dislike of the experience of reading the Bhagavad Gita, stemmed from my failure to think on my own about it — and to uncritically buy up the retail interpretation of the story.
The story in question is about an epic battle and the conversation that the commander of the army has with Krishna, his divine advisor.  On the eve of the battle, Arjuna, the mortal Captain, expresses worries about leading the fight in which so many will most certainly die.  He will be in combat against friends and even family.  Nevertheless,  Krishna informs him that he must do his duty and go to battle, without regard to who he fights, or who or how many get killed.  There are larger issues at stake here than his own troubled conscience or even well-being.
There is something about loyalty to a cause beyond oneself that got me by the tenterhooks when I read it as a twenty-two year old.   I was an idealist and the religious language draped around the call to do one’s duty made it difficult to think other options.  But I was also a pacifist; the call to duty, could never be a call to war.  Duty always referred to higher aims.  And so my experience of the Hindu scriptures quickly ended in confusion.
I realize now that it may not have made much sense becuase I did not understand that the Bhagavad Gita is a part of a larger epic story.  A story, I have learned ending in a scene of  total desolation.  The countryside is ruined, smoke from the burning funeral pyres clouding out the sun and stinging the eyes, and the cries of keening widows tearing apart what heart there is left.
II.
All of this is on my mind as I am reading a book by the Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, who grew up in India and with this story.  He reflects how, as a high school student he asked his Sanskrit teacher if it would be permissible for him to say that the divine Krishna got away with an incomplete and unconvincing argument against Arjuna.  His teacher said in reply: “Maybe you could say that, but you must say it with adequate respect.”  He writes that only many years later did he take the liberty of defending Arjuna’s position.  We know, in this post 9/11 world, just what it means to question the truth of a duty from the perspective of the common good.  Those who wanted to explore a different course in the pursuit of justice for the attackers involved in the 9/11 suicide flights were denounced straight-away.
Sen wrote in that essay which he did eventually find the courage to write:

The Bhagavad Gita [and Krishna’s philosophy] was spectacularly praised in the early nineteenth century by Wilhelm von Humboldt as “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” In a poem in [the]  Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot summarizes Krishna’s view in the form of an admonishment: “And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward. Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.”

How often it is that when duty to one’s clan or country is invoked, all finer senses of responsibility to fare well together are abandoned.
I mention all of this because our reading from the gospel holds a similar tension.  There are those who want to take the raising part of the story of Jesus and Martha and Lazarus as the whole point of the story and simply say, in effect — fare forward.  The banner of resurrection is raised and all finer senses of responsibility to life now and to joy in it, are abandoned.
But if we pay attention to the context of the story,   we might see that the gospel writer uses resurrection in a different way — not as a call to fare forward, no matter the injustices because in the end all that matters happens at resurrection time, but as a call to fare well, and to see Jesus’ activity as being about a continual discovery of life.  In other words, the word resurrection is loaded from the other end:  it simply defines the experience of life as we fare well, as we adventure into the common task of living together well.
III.
The story begins with Martha.   Her friendship with Jesus leads her to a place of trust in him, a trust that contrasts with some of the others gathered there who know Jesus, but have not placed their trust in him. Her trust is coupled with a loyalty that is significant because Jesus does unconventional things.  She does not, however, deny him when others snigger at him behind his back.
So in the full story, we are immediately presented with a difference between friendship as an idea that anyone may claim to know about, and the friend, who is in fact the one upon whom you trust when the chips are down. Right off, we sense the deeper level of the story has to do more with this distinction than the one between life and death that will come later.  If we see this, then we see that the distinction Jesus uses between life and death does not refer to physiological functioning, but instead to a distinction between love as an idea that anyone may claim to know about, and love as a relationship that elevates life from wretchedness to beauty.
Martha’s pouring out of her grief on Jesus reminds us that we are talking about three dear friends. That we’re talking about love as the claim upon us to do right by the other — to seek ways to fare well together, and not simply to use love as a tool to fare forward, damn the consequences.
IV.
I will not ever profess to know what happens to us when we die.  The cosmos is too utterly large for that question to be adequately answered.  And I do not think that scriptures answer it either.  The Gospel does attest that Jesus continually reminded people that his God is not a god of the dead, but of the living; that a God of love, as he understood God to be, was about the kind of love that works to create communities of flourishing for all.  And so Jesus invites his hearers to see their duty in a new light — to turn around — to be born again — to repent — the language is various — but to put aside the notion that religion is about later and to be in love now — to be connected now with life — to see our duty now in terms faring well, and not just faring forward.
All Saints Day may be about naming the dead of our small circle — but let us never forget why we name the names of the dead. We name the dead because by doing it we place our mortal lives in context of the great whole of which we and our kin and loved ones are but a small part.  Our mortality, when duty-bound to fare forward no matter the sacrifice — becomes a burden that eventually cracks us and turns us into unloving, ungrateful wretches.  But when we can accept it, as part of the great and mysterious expanse that God encompasses and holds,  we transcend our pains and our losses, our joys and our success and find ourselves in love again with life.
Let me finish this morning with a story that illustrates what I mean about faring well, even as mortals who know beyond a shred of doubt that we too will someday join that great cloud of witnesses.
Last week, I showed the children a flower vase that had been made from a spent shell found in Sarajevo after the conflict in the Balkans.  I came across this story, as I was researching that vase.  It happened about a decade ago, in Sarajevo.
A reporter was covering the then conflict when he saw a small girl shot by a sniper.
He rushed to a man who had picked up the child, and helped them both into his car.
Racing to the hospital, the man holding the bleeding child said: Hurry, my friend, my child is still alive.
A moment or two later: Hurry, my friend, my child is still breathing.
A moment later: Hurry my friend, my child is still warm.
Finally: Hurry. O God, my child is getting cold.
When they got to the hospital, the little girl was pronounced dead. As the two men were washing the blood off their hands, the man turned to the reporter and said: This is a terrible task for me.  I must go and tell her father that his child is dead.  He will be heartbroken.
The reporter was amazed.  He looked at the grieving man and said: I thought she was your child.
The man looked back and said: No, but aren’t they all our children?
We may, as we name the beloved saints of our community rest content — we have done our duty.
But let us instead reverse the order of those words — and name the saints of the beloved community — they are ours, but only as part of something so much greater.  We do not simply barge through life, confident that Jesus’ duty is to restore it all at some point when it comes crashing to an end.  May we instead gracefully voyage through life and find our glory by naming them all as our children.  Fare well, then and let us go in love.  Amen.

Readings: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” — Matthew 5:7
“Let your acts be seen by Your servants and Your glory by their children. And may the sweetness of the Master our God be upon us and the work of our hands firmly found for us, and the work of our hands firmly found!”  Psalm 90:17
“The God whom Jesus revealed as no longer our rival, no longer threatening and vengeful, but unconditionally loving and forgiving, who needed no satisfaction by blood — this God of infinite mercy was metamorphosed by the church into the image of a wrathful God whose demand for blood atonement leads to God’s requiring of his own Son a death on behalf of us all. The nonviolent God of Jesus comes to be depicted as a God of unequaled violence, since God not only allegedly demands the blood of the victim who is closest and most precious to him, but also holds the whole of humanity accountable for a death that God both anticipated and required. Against such an image of God, the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion. — Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
The New Testament historian and popular lecturer, Marcus Borg, once stated surprise that in all his travels he scarcely ever hears preachers preaching about the man Jesus.  He did not mean to say these preachers ignore the New Testament.  He did not mean that he never hears about Jesus.  He does.  But the Jesus he hears preached walks on water.

I’m not sure this should be a surprise. My own  experience in theological conversation with  colleagues around the country,  is that this paucity of preaching on the man Jesus, exists because all we know about what there is to know about who Jesus was, comes from scholars about whom we’ve been told by seminary professors, we should treat as heretics.  Rudolf Bultmann and Adolf von Harnack, to name the two most famous theologians in this camp, attempted to take seriously the record of Jesus as an historical and from there set limits to what can be said theologically about him.  They tried to pare away the doctrine of later centuries as it influenced the development of the gospels and expose the essence of the religion of Jesus.    In that task, they have been labeled heretics.

Preachers, not wanting to be called heretics have not risen to their defense.  One result of the failure to deal adequately with the historical question of the man Jesus,  is that with nothing else to talk about, we strike out at the popular religion of Jesus, the very apt expression of which, Walter Wink captures in our other reading today. This Jesus is the high and mighty king who condescends to come down and make the poor the objects of his mercy and his compassion.  By this popular image, Jesus’ death, because it had nothing to do with the facts of history, nothing to do with Jesus engagement with the powers,  and everything to do instead with God’s plan for salvation, has become the founding of our own violence.  This story, and our liberal critique of it, since it offers nothing else, has become our founding story.  The  story, boiled down to its essence, is that by violence we are saved.  That the work of our own hands for good, counts as nothing.
This is just all so remarkable.  The American Christian story narrates a story in opposition to the one Harnack describes:

No! his message is simpler than the church would like to think it; simpler, but for that very reason, sterner and endowed with a greater claim to universality.  A man cannot evade it by the subterfuge of saying that he can make nothing of this “Christology” the message is not for him.  Jesus directed men’s attention to great questions; he promised them God’s grace and mercy; he required them to decide whether they would have God or Mammon, an eternal or an earthly life, the soul or the body, humility or self-righteousness, love or selfishness, the truth of life or a lie.  The sphere which these questions occupy is all-embracing; the individual is called upon to listen to the glad message of mercy and the Fatherhood of God, and to make up his mind whether he will be on God’s side and the Eternal’s or on the side of the world and of time.  The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with [God] only and not with the son.  –Harnack, What is Christianity?

No surprise however, it is this very passage which has been most vehemently attacked by the church for removing the supernatural Son from the center and putting in its place the historical Jesus calling us to  listen to the glad message of salvation through mercies.
II.
We’re in a pickle.  To ignore the historical Jesus is problematic.  It opens the religion of Jesus to all sorts of abuses.  But for serious minded folk who see in Jesus more than an interesting revolutionary cynic, the other option —  to make him the pawn of a God who accomplishes salvation through violence fails on the metaphysical level.
There are three ways we can go forward.
A.) The path that won’t work is simply to abandon the religious journey.  For one, it keeps coming back — and this eternal return is suggested by Wink’s assertion that a certain kind of atheism is a true religion.  In other words, because, at its best, religion is about claiming ultimacy for the highest ideals we can think, atheism is simply a confused religious claim, and if religious, then self-refuting.
B.) Another option is to take the path of  Marcus Borg and Bishop John Shelby Spong and a great deal of other modern “liberal” preachers — and that is to try to force institutional Christianity to see and follow Jesus as a revolutionary man who happened to talk about God.  Borg suggests Jesus was a healer and man of great wisdom and courage who taught a message of inclusiveness, tolerance, and liberation. This path is attractive to me, but only so far.  For as long as religion has been identified as a force in human societies, that force has had to do with God — and these liberal thinkers do nothing to address the fundamental issue at stake — the God whom this radical, revolutionary Jesus attests, remains the God of power and might.  Their metaphysics have remains medieval.
C.) The third route, which seems to me to hold the only real promise for pure religion, is to reclaim our highest ideals from institutional language about God.  It is precisely because of this attempt to reclaim the language of God from the “institutional” language of God, that a dinner table conversation at our home recently  concluded with my daughter remarking sadly,  “You don’t believe in God, and you’re a pastor. . . ”  How correct she is.  I do not believe in the God she does.  And I hope for her sake that she will not long either.
Let me spend the last few minutes talking about this third route — and about why I think it is a viable, promising way forward for a mature faith.
III.
It was about 200 years ago that Friedrich Schleirmacher, considered by many to be the founder of liberal Christianity, wrote that religion was a purely human invention, designed to help us become more full human.  It was not insignificant though for being a human invention — it was the most important of human inventions when it worked.
If Schleiermacher is correct, it means that we have work to do.  His ideas imply, by the principle of contraries, that the troubles of our world are ours because we have not made it work.  He implies that to reflect upon and refine our high ideals is to redress our troubles.  To put this in the language I’ve been pursuing this morning, the transformation of our expressions of our highest ideals from the language of the institutional church (which, it turns out, has betrayed some of our highest ideals)  to ordinary language, constitutes the most important task that I believe any of us can participate in.  We must reclaim our high ideals from the institutions that have proven unworthy to handle them and too cowardly to speak up for them in any effective way.
I believe that we know by reflection on our own experience that Schliermacher is right about this:  it is our work, our ideals, that can lead us from our current mess.  Is it anything other than our hearts wehich are torn open again for people we do not even know when we heard about the latest earthquake in Indonesia?  Do we have to be told that the people who remain homeless in the Gulf Coast are our brothers and sisters?  Mercies spring from our hearts toward people we do not even know.  They are our mercies and they embody our highest aspirations.  Mercy is blessed with mercy because mercy is an expression of our highest ideal — by its standard we measure the gods — and their  qualities are sacred only as we judge the emotion they inspire as worthy of these highest ideals and as generative of other mercies.
The Scottich preacher and theologian John Oman tells the story of walking to a public meeting with General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation army.  As they walked they talked like everyday friends about everyday things.  Suddenly the evangelical Booth was surrounded by a band of the faithful, and, in a moment his speech, his bearing and even his appearance were changed; not so much by the admiration, but by a surging of the creative spirit.  Oman writes that he realized then that at a different age, there would have been nothing his followers might not have believed about him.  The meeting, given the glow of General Booth was electric, but beyond that,  nothing new in ideas or insight revealed themselves that night.
I tell the story because I want us to grow into a different kind of holiness: a holiness that we judge to be sacred not because of the intensity of its fervor, not because of its quantity in our lives or in persons, but by its quality and by the way it comes to us as relating an action on it as an absolute obligation.   The soul of pure religion is the human soul seeking after its own finest form, and seeking to refine that form in an ever-deepening sense of mercy.
I have no doubt that much of this sounds foreign and even heretical.  But let us keep in mind that the word heresy comes from the word to see differently — and what I’ve been talking about I see in the Bible.  I am seeing it differently than the way we’ve been trained by the popular image to see it.  But I see it in the Beatitudes we’ve been studing and I see it in today’s Psalter:  After praising God, the psalm ends with a plea — the most profound plea we can make  — “found the work of our hands, upon us, O God, yes the work of our hands.”  This cannot of course mean, just any work.  It is not the work of violence.  It cannot be the work of our destructive natures, but of our better natures, of our mercies.  Our deepest convictions are expressed in them, and the work of our hands based upon them.  And we pray to God, they be founded upon all that is good and true and beautiful.

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones says that his hit song, “Satisfaction” came to him in the middle of the night, and that he woke up and recorded the riff and the words on his bedside recorder and fell back to sleep.  He later described the tape as: “two minutes of ‘Satisfaction’ and 40 minutes of me snoring.”
I thought of his song as I was working on this beatitude.  The song popped into my head because there’s a curious point of fact about our beatitude today.  While it follows the usual format of a beatitude it ends on a different note –the note of satisfaction.  This note is so different, that that word, “satisfied” occurs no where else in the entire New Testament except in the beatitudes and its parallels.
That’s interesting.  One should always perk up a bit in any kind of literary study, when you come across a singular word, or singular idea.  The New Testament — which contain some of the earliest testimony to Jesus and to the difference Jesus made in people’s lives was never described as satisfying.  This is a different record than the one we experience now, when we judge a worship experience as deeply satisfying, unsatisfying or something in between.  Satisfaction just was not part of the evaluation of people’s experience of Jesus.  His call was instead the life-risking call for one’s whole self to his vision of peace.
What then do we make of this beatitude which claims satisfaction for a certain kind of human being? Here Keith Richard’s song is helpful.  You’ll recall, that while his song is titled “Satisfaction,” the line that goes with the riff is the one that we all know — it contains that famous double negative — “I can’t get no satisfaction.”  The lyrics of the song are both a protest at the obscuring of life’s satisfaction by rampant commercialism and materialism and a hint at the resolution of the double negative as having to do with understanding the human condition — we are not satisfied but for our sense that, in the midst of our predicament,  a good way of resolution lies at hand.   If the line were simply negative and not a double negative, we would be left with cynicism and despair.  But Richards offers a hope based on a grounded, reflective understanding of the human predicament.
When I’m drivin’ in my car
And a man comes on the radio
Who’s telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can’t get no . . .  satisfaction
This is not a song, nor is it a beatitude, about being satisfied by having our material or physical needs met.  The double negative is there because in it’s resolution we are led to see that satisfaction is a fleeting thing, a part of a process, meaning that as soon as you think you have it, you can be sure you don’t. This is about satisfaction as seeing beyond ourselves, as  seeing that more is called of us than to be spectators in the game of life, tossed to and fro by wildly swinging emotions which more and more seem to be at the beck and whim of advertisers and their things.  Instead, as all of the other beatitudes we’ve looked at, this one seeks to get us to think about our lives in process,  a process which insofar as it seeks satisfaction in the things that do not not give satisfaction is good and ethical.

Physical hunger and physical thirst are clearly understood by Jesus to be deplorable conditions about which we ought to be involved in doing something.  But Jesus here turns hunger and thirst into a metaphor for the kind of life we would do best to live.  If physical hunger and physical thirst is the result of social injustice, then to hunger and thirst for righteousness is the beginning of a way out of it.  Social conditions which lead to unjust situations will only become resolved in favor of the good will when individuals hunger and thirst to organize themselves and their communities to do so.  The point the Sermon on the Mount wants to make over and over again, is that this hunger is the” fruit of insight into the human condition.  The good life, as Socrates famously noted, is the reflective life, a life which has learned to view the the human condition as unrighteous, even while burning with desire to right the wrong.

The interesting thing about this line of reflection is that it implies that the Sermon on the Mount does not separate the personal from the social.  The goal of the human individual could be put any number of ways — but in this context we could say that it to be satisfied, or to be fulfilled.  The goal of a society is to let justice flow down like everlasting streams.  The goal of each do not make sense apart from the goal of the other.  They are inextricable.
I suppose you heard on the weekend’s news the variety of pundits commenting on our President receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.  I must say that I was taken aback by the cynicism and desperate negativity I generally heard.  Over and over again, people complained that the prize was political, that it did not mean anything, that it was all a joke, that the peace prize no longer means anything, that he was given the prize just for not being the last president.  I was embarrassed for our  country that we could not recognize the nuance in the moment and the importance of a commitment to peace through negotiation and through agreement upon principles that the majority of reasonable people around the world agree make for a good life.
When Keith Richards wrote” Satisfaction,” many critics were offended by the song.  Apparently completely missing the point that the longing for a deep and real human relationship, is different than “two minutes of satisfaction and 40 minutes of snoring,”  these critics focused on the sex, thereby avoiding thinking about the deeper issues of abiding human relationships in fast-food, fast-car world.  Perhaps the offense has really to do, as I suspect the offense over the peace prize has to do, with the long-term vision.  For those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the hungering and the thirsting is not a sign that they are somehow above the reasons for injustice or for war –but a real hungering despite those things, to seek after righteousness, which as we have seen, is the great vision of  the beloved community.   The Hebrew word which we translate “righteousness, ” means to convey the character of God’s activity which shall stand for all humanity as the norm of our conduct.   The one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, despite threats and realities, seeks to measure himself or herself by a standard which, if we were to all measure ourselves by, conditions for justice would prevail.
I suspect that the reason the Nobel Peace prize committee awarded our President this prize at this time, has to do with their sense that this is no game for him.  That the desire for justice, for dialogue with the other, even the enemy, for mutual regard and counsel,  do not for him, conflict with his sense of self — that even in the midst of war — the promise of an olive branch holds more glory than a victorious battle.  The committee recognizes in awarding the prize that we’re not talking about illusions here — we’re not talking about peace as a pretense.  We’re talking about peace as the hard work of, as the committee put it, for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Despite the political principal of unintended consequences, there is a certain wisdom over which we should take the time to ponder, in the Nobel Committee’s offering of the award to this President.  And that may simply be the wisdom, again, of Jesus, who warned us that the keeping up of the desire  for righteousness is so difficult that it requires a person’s total commitment.  It will take no less than the love of God, with your whole heart, and all your soul, and all your strength.”  And that in his failings at making peace, lie our failings too, and that his prospects for success, depend upon the commitment of our whole heart and soul and strength.  The making of peace is not a for one person to somehow at some moment achieve on his or her own.  But it is a continual, renewal of one’s total self to the reality of the present, and the dream for the future.
In the journey, lies the fulfillment of the promise of satisfaction.  Amen.