Blessed are those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness
Matt 5:6 March 27, 2011
Intro:
Last week I was sitting at my desk in my office and heard this loud whining sound, it would rise in pitch and then die away, then start up again. It is a familiar sound, http://www.amazon.com/Auto-Car-Tire-Spinning-Snow/dp/B0010I4PCU, one most of us have heard with a sinking feeling in our gut. I leaned back and looked out my window, and saw Pastor Garret getting out of the van which was sitting at a strange angle, the front right side wedged into a foot and a half pile of snow at the edge of our neighbour’s driveway where they had shoveled. I grabbed my coat and gloves, headed out and confirmed the source of the sound as the front van tire spinning freely on a patch of ice. It took a few minutes, a couple of shovels, some pushing, and a little traction aid I carry in the back of my truck, but we got him unstuck relatively easily.
If only it were that easy to get a stuck soul moving again. You might know what I’m talking about. It is the valley after the mountain-top experience, the “return to reality” after some deep experience of God that got us fired up and excited about our faith, overwhelmed with the love of Jesus and the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Maybe for you it was the experience of a miracle, either outside of you or inside of you, where you knew with all your being that God was real and He was with you and you were alive and invigorated. Or maybe it was a profound truth in a song or a sermon or a book, which awakened something within you, brought you into a place of life and freedom in a new and deeper way. Maybe it was when you saw the smile and heard the laugh from someone you had gone to serve, and you knew that no matter how hard it might have been for you to do, it was worth it and God was pleased. Maybe it was even the first time you came to faith, your doubts and questions melting away in the new reality of God’s incredible love for you as you responded in faith and experienced the “new birth” Jesus described to Nicodemus in John 3.
And maybe that excitement, passion, commitment has waned. Maybe you feel like you are just going through the motions of life, existing rather than living, even living your faith out of habit rather than out of a sense of life. Maybe you feel a little stuck.
Matthew 5:6
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” This morning I am going to try to make us feel a little unsettled. I’m going to talk about hope and longing and change, about whether or not we really believe that God can come in the midst of all that is wrong and actually bring change. I’m going to try to help us touch the place of longing, and open it up in the light of Jesus’ beatitude, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst”.
See, I believe that within every person there is a deep longing, a yearning of spirit, for something full of beauty and purity, something full of peace and purpose, a place where justice is a reality and where evil is defeated. It is why so many movies have a “happy ending”, so many TV shows wrap up the problem or issue or solve the case in 22 or 44 minutes, why books resolve the plot and songs resolve the chord, why art connects with something inside of us, even why we long for the sun to shine after a long winter. Because we were made with this deep longing within us.
But this is a dangerous thing of which to speak. See, life has disappointed us. Many of us have taken a risk – to love, to share, to be open, to admit this longing within us – and have gotten smacked down, betrayed, wounded, and so we have tried to run away. Tried to shut this part of our lives down, lock it in a back room, insulate ourselves from the pull it has on us. We’ve pulled back from relationships, kept God at the surface, and then busied ourselves with all kinds of things so that we don’t have to stop and think and feel and be. Because when we stop all the noise and the busyness, we hear the cry of a longing heart we tried to lock away safely in the back room, which is hungry and thirsty for something deeper, more significant, more real, than the life we are now experiencing. And sometimes we are afraid to hear that cry, because it might call us to risk again, and so we run away.
Acedia:
This ignoring of the call of our souls is one of the seven deadly sins, although you wouldn’t recognize it as such when I just give you the name. The idea and the destructive power has been stripped in the word we usually use, and come to mean something so mild that we don’t even see it as much of a danger, so there has been a move to using the ancient Latin word instead, and I’m going to do that this morning. The Latin word for this deadly sin is “acedia”; the word you and I are familiar with is “sloth”.
The problem with the word “sloth” is that for us it means little more than laziness, and calls to our minds the picture of someone sitting in a recliner in front of a TV with a bowl of chips balanced on a large belly and surrounded by a scattering of empty beer (or soda) cans. And while we shake our head at such a picture and tsk tsk it, we are not quick to recognize this as one of the seven deadly sins. Because it isn’t. In fact, acedia is as much an affliction of the workaholic as the sluggard. So I’m going to use the word acedia, and borrow the words of Ken Russell to describe it:
Acedia, specifically, is a gray morning’s inclination not to intensify the original yes to God, community, or spouse. That yes seems to threaten individuals with a negation of all their potentiality and to promise a lifetime of misery. They choose, therefore, to swim no further. What they really opt for is some measure of control over their own comfort in front of the incalculable risk of relatedness. Not wanting to push any further upstream and not wanting to lose face by turning back altogether, the victims of acedia tread water, as it were, and either console their anxieties with sleep or attempt to dissipate them in one distraction after another.
They are not going forward on their own, and they do not want to be pushed forward as part of a group. The destructive power of those who succumb to acedia springs, therefore, from their determination to take whatever means necessary to protect their painless existence. Their choice of self while wearing the guise of commitment to another poisons the atmosphere.
Acedia tempts us to a sad and restless shifting between a definite, final yes and a definite, final no…
Those who do not resist the acedia sheltering in every commitment keep their original yes from carrying them any further. They attempt a lukewarm compromise that maintains appearances but surrenders substance. They sleepwalk through the routines of their days but pull back to the minimum and run no risk. Acedia, in fact, is a retreat to mediocrity after commitment. (Russell, Kenneth C. “Acedia – The Dark Side of Commitment”. Review for Religious, September-October 1988. pp. 730-737).
So, to what extent does that description apply to you and I? This is the question we must ask of all sin, perhaps a little confrontational but sin is to be confronted, mourned, and then repented of and forgiven and replaced with things of life. There is much in Russell’s words, and I’ll have Ellen email the entire article with this week’s personal reflection questions so you can explore it further, but let me boil it down. Are you and I “intensifying the original yes to God, community, and spouse”? Are you and I spiritually “treading water”? Are we “moving forward”? Are we in a “sad and restless shifting between a definite, final yes and a definite, final no”? Are we living a “lukewarm compromise that maintains appearances but surrenders substance”?
Although not listed explicitly, the sin of acedia well fits the description of the church in Laodicea in Rev. 3:15-22: “15 “I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were one or the other! 16 But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth! 17 You say, ‘I am rich. I have everything I want. I don’t need a thing!’ And you don’t realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. 18 So I advise you to buy gold from me—gold that has been purified by fire. Then you will be rich. Also buy white garments from me so you will not be shamed by your nakedness, and ointment for your eyes so you will be able to see. 19 I correct and discipline everyone I love. So be diligent and turn from your indifference.
20 “Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends. 21 Those who are victorious will sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my Father on his throne.
22 “Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches.”
I don’t assume that this description applies to you, but maybe it does. Rather than rushing forward into the life and promise of Jesus in the beatitude, I’m going to pause for a moment to give you space to have a private conversation with the Holy Spirit around those questions. (a few moments of silence, then ended by http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/index.php?ct=store.details&pid=V00730)
The Call to Life:
“to reignite a sense of hope, of being created, in the first place, and created in the second place for a purpose”
The way of the Kingdom of God is not one of running away, attempting to silence that built-in longing for God, and giving in to the temptation of acedia to neglect our spiritual nurture and of retreating into mediocrity and distraction, but of embracing this longing. This is the description of the Kingdom of God in Jesus’ words, “6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
Jesus’ words are potent – “hunger” and “thirst”. The deep, natural, powerful physical signs that there is life, and it needs to be nourished, it needs to be fed, and it needs water to survive. These forces are powerful, I don’t know if you’ve ever been truly hungry and truly thirsty physically, if you can recall a time when your body was desperate for food and water beyond our regular feeling of hunger or thirst which is quickly and easily satisfied. Regardless, Jesus’ words make sense to us, we get it. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst…”.
We know Jesus is not speaking of physical hunger and physical thirst, though the poverty of the people of Jesus’ day would have related to those things as well so we can’t just completely spiritualize Jesus’ words and assume they mean nothing to the hungry and thirsty in our world today. But Jesus says “hunger and thirst for” something. And the word that follows can have two different meanings depending on its context – either “righteousness” (the idea of personal right-standing with God), or of “justice” (the idea of that which is wrong being made right by God). Both are possible, the NLT translates “justice” and the NIV (and most others) translate “righteousness”. I lean slightly toward the idea of justice because I like the outward focus of it and (following Hagner in the Word Biblical Commentary) see ideas of justice for the marginalized of society in the beatitudes that come before. Both ideas are possible, and they are certainly related – personal righteousness is demonstrated by a deep desire for justice. And I mention this sort-of academic bit because maybe the deep inner cry of your soul, which we’ve been taking about this morning, is not just a personal interior journey but is actually for something larger than ourselves and is for transformation and justice in our society. Maybe what we deeply long for is not just a personal sense of rightness with God but to see how that brings change in the lives of others around us. And perhaps the magnitude of the problems and our perception of how little we can impact those is one of the factors that sucked us into acedia in the first place.
And so it comes back to Jesus’ words, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice/righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” The potency of the ideas of hunger and thirst lead to being “satisfied”, or “filled”. This is a big promise. This makes it worth the risk again, makes it worth re-engaging, makes it worth unlocking the door and facing the longing of our hearts even if we’ve tried and been disappointed in the past. The promise of Jesus is that we “will be satisfied”, when we “hunger and thirst” for the correct thing – for God Himself.
Do we believe that? That God will actually come, that we can change, that we can be healed and at peace and with a power to see very real change in the world around us? I do. That is why I’m still a pastor, and still in the same church after more than 20 years, because I still believe that God has great things in store for us. His Spirit still fills us. He still calls and empowers and heals and forgives and breathes life and makes us righteous and brings justice. I’m longing for more.
Practically speaking, the way forward is nothing new or revolutionary. It is the way of obedience, of making Jesus Lord of our lives, of affirming our original “yes” to God and pushing forward in obedience, of daily spending time in prayer and Scripture, of committing to be in church every week, and of walking day by day with the Holy Spirit, of putting others ahead of ourselves and serving.. It’s not complicated or flashy, but it is true.
Conclusion:
The story is told of a young student who went to his spiritual teacher and asked the question, "Master, how can I truly find God?" The teacher asked the student to accompany him to the river which ran by the village and invited him to go into the water. When they got to the middle of the stream, the teacher said, "Please immerse yourself in the water." The student did as he was instructed, whereupon the teacher put his hands on the young man's head and held him under the water. Presently the student began to struggle. The master held him under still. A moment passed and the student was thrashing and beating the water and air with his arms. Still, the master held him under the water. Finally, the student was released and shot up from the water, lungs aching and gasping for air. The teacher waited for a few moments and then said, "When you desire God as truly as you desired to breathe the air you just breathed -- then you shall find God." (sourced from http://www.biblecenter.com/sermons/spiritualthirst.htm).
