[Showed an LG ad for a wireless TV]
It’s all so clear now - the path to happiness and freedom lies in finding a bigger, skinnier TV. It’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t realize it until now…..
Did you see those poor sad people, trapped within their four walls, and then they got the new telly and they’re free! Suddenly it’s pillowfights and jumping through sprinklers and diving off cliffs…..
Except of course, it’s not. Because in reality they’re not doing any of those things! They’re sat on the sofa watching a bigger, skinnier television. And probably working overtime in their little cubicles to help pay for it.
Beware the siren voices of materialism! They promise they can deliver happiness but it’s really all smoke and mirrors.
So if a better telly isn’t the answer, then what is?
There have been lots of surveys done on happiness over the past few decades, and their findings are remarkably consistent. The happiest people tend to be the ones who surround themselves with family and friends, don't care about keeping up with the Joneses, lose themselves in daily activities they enjoy and, most importantly, have a faith or a philosophy that gives their life meaning.
So we do have an idea of where happiness lies for people in our part of the world. But that doesn’t seem to be helping us achieve it.
A survey commissioned for the BBC shows that overall, Britons are less happy now than in the 1950s - despite the fact that we are three times better off. And another survey a few years back placed Britain 32nd in a survey of world happiness. The peoples of Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, India, China, Latvia and Estonia are all happier with their lives than we are.
Not much happiness in sight. And maybe part of our problem is that we’ve turned being happy into the goal of our lives when in reality happiness is something that tends to emerge when you’re pursuing something else.
The Biblical writers knew that. They didn’t say much about happiness, but they did talk a lot about joy and blessedness which are experiences with much deeper roots.
Psalm 128 occupies that kind of space.
“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways” says the writer in verse 1 and I want us to look at that this morning because in that little phrase I think we’re hearing the secret of a deeper kind of happiness.,
So what does that word “blessed” actually mean?
Well a lot depends on which branch of the church you belong. I’m a bit of a pragmatist in these things and I don’t believe that when a minister or priest says a blessing over something or someone it automatically confers some kind of mystical power on the recipient.
I bless couples in wedding services all the time. And some will end up separating. I bless children in baptism. And some may well turn out to be bad eggs. I say a blessing over you folk every week as you leave the church…. And I think I’ll leave it there!
There’s no magic in it.
I read about a vicar working in the city of London who’d unearthed an old tradition where, on the first Sunday after Christmas, the local artisans would come to have the tools of their trade blessed. Farmers would bring their ploughs, blacksmiths their hammers and so on. So he organised a service for the blessing of the city traders’ mobile phones and 80 people turned up for this blessing!
I’d really like to know how that works! The trader’s on the phone doing a deal which is going to make him rich, a whole lot of other people poor, and a sizeable number of folk unemployed – and God’s going to bless this transaction because some cleric’s muttered an incantation over his i-Phone? I don’t think so.
I’m not sure blessing works that way.
It seems to me that blessedness is another way of speaking about the contentment and security and peace we enjoy when we are walking in God’s way. It’s as simple as that.
If we live God’s way, we’ll experience his blessing.
If the couple getting married really mean the vows they take before God, they’ll know stability and love all the days of their lives. They’ll be blessed.
If the child being baptised is brought up well by their family and their church, they’ll learn and keep the faith. They’ll be blessed.
If the congregation who gather Sunday by Sunday go back out into the world determined to walk with God, they’ll find his blessing as they go.
There’s no magic in it. If we set ourselves to walk in God’s way, we’ll know the contentment and security and peace that the Bible calls blessedness.
And if we choose to depart from that way, we’ll put ourselves in the way of danger.
I had an object lesson in that a few years ago when walked the Aonach Eagach in Glencoe .
It’s the hardest ridgewalk in the mainland UK, and though there’s more challenging stuff on Skye there are a few very exposed scrambles.But I was climing with my friend Stevie Thomson, a very experienced hillwalker. And I knew that as long as I kept following Stevie I was going to be ok.
As it turned out we had a fantastic day – I was kept safe in the danger because I had someone leading me in the way. And for me that’s a good picture of what it means to be blessed.
But why is blessing linked with fear in the verse we’re thinking about?
“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways”.
Isn’t fear a negative emotion? Why not love instead?
Well let’s remember that sometimes a little fear is good for us.
I saw read a news report a while back about a man of 66 in Ontario who was mauled to death by his own Siberian Tiger. He was feeding it in its pen as usual when it went for him. In the earlier days he’d wear protective clothing when he’d enter the cage, but he’d become so familiar with the animal that he’d stopped taking that precaution. A little fear might have saved his life.
And that’s the kind of fear the Psalmist is talking about here. A proper respect; a reverence towards God, recognising him for who he is: the one to whom we will all one day have to give an account of ourselves and how we’ve used the life he’s blessed us with. And there’ll be no hiding or prevaricating on that day.
In CS Lewis’s Narnia books, the lion Aslan is widely understood to be a Christ-figure. In the second book – the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – the children who’ve entered the magical world of Narnia hear rumours that this great lion is finally on the move. Soon they’ll be meeting him for the first time, and the prospect is something that fills them with fear.
“Is he safe?” asks Lucy – the youngest of the children.
“Of course he’s not safe” says her Narnian friend. “But he’s good”.
Not safe, but good. Worthy of respect and reverence. Someone not to be trifled with, but heeded. That’s our God.
Going back to the Aonach Eagach, if I hadn’t had respect for Stevie, things could have gone badly wrong. If I thought I knew best and struck off to the right when he was sure we needed to go left, it wouldn’t have been long before I was in trouble.
I respected him because in a lifetime of climbing he’d bagged almost all of the Munros, he’d climbed tower ridge which is a 1000 metre sheer cliff face on Ben Nevis, and he’d walked the Aonach Eagach half a dozen times including a winter traverse. He knew what he was doing and I was glad to defer to his experience. Who knew those hills better than Stevie Thomson?
And who knows life better than God? Do we? Can we safely dispense with the accumulated wisdom of 2 millennia that’s been gathered up in this book we read Sunday by Sunday? Will we defer to God when it comes to the path we choose for our lives, or will we insist on going our own sweet way?
Are you starting to see why the Word teaches that the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom?
We started out this morning thinking about happiness, and human experience suggests that when individuals and societies make happiness their goal, they tend to miss it.
That’s not just my view, that’s the established view of some of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers:
The novelist Aldous Huxley says that “Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities”.
Viktor Frankl, the novelist and holocaust survivor, says the same: “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue... as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself."
For the Christian, the course greater than ourselves is the path of faith and obedience which God calls us to walk. And if we seek him first along that way, all these other things, happiness included, will find us.
“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways”.
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