A Sermon Shared
Online
May 17, 2020
Scripture: Matthew
6:24-33
Epictetus was one of the great Stoic
philosophers of antiquity. A hard life would seem like good training for such a
job, and Epictetus had one, at least during his early years in Rome.
Epictetus was born into slavery during the
tumultuous reign of the emperor Nero. He was physically disabled, perhaps from
birth but maybe because of a severe beating he received from his master—ancient
sources disagree.
After the death of Nero, he secured his
freedom, began to teach in Rome, and things were looking up. But he had to flee
when the new emperor, Domitian, expressed his opinion of the local philosophers
by banishing them.
Epictetus went to Greece, where he
established a school and took on pupils. In fact, the writings we have that are
attributed to Epictetus are actually the notes and transcriptions of one of his
disciples, Arrian. We owe a great debt to Arrian, even if he just did all that
work for extra credit.
As the reputation of Epictetus grew, he
became a celebrity and eminent people sought him out. True to form, though, he
did not allow all the attention to turn his head: he maintained a simple and
humble life and had very few possessions.
After his passing, an admirer supposedly
paid a handsome sum for his oil lamp, an irony that would have left Epictetus either
quaking with laughter or shaking his head in dismay.
Epictetus makes for excellent reading
during hard times. He helps us keep in mind the difference between the things
we can control and the things we cannot. He reminds us that we have no power
over external events, but that we have almost limitless power over how we
respond to them.
And he offers us countless quotable
maxims: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few
wants.” “There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying
about things that are beyond the power of our will.” “First say to yourself
what you would be, then do what you have to do.”
When James Stockdale was a student at
Stanford University, he became an enthusiastic reader of Epictetus. Stockdale
went on to serve as a pilot in the United States Navy in Vietnam. He carried what
he’d learned from Epictetus with him.
When Stockdale’s plane was shot down and
he ejected over enemy territory, he realized that he would be taken prisoner of
war and held under the worst imaginable conditions. The story goes that as
Stockdale descended toward the ground in his parachute, he thought to himself:
“Epictetus, here I come.”
It turned out that Stockdale needed
every lesson that Epictetus offered him. He remained imprisoned for more than
seven years. He spent four of them in solitary confinement. He was brutally tortured,
leaving him with physical difficulties and severe pain for the rest of his
life.
Years later, as a vice-admiral and a
recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Stockdale would acknowledge the
critical role that Epictetus played in his mental and physical survival.
*
In recent months, many of us have felt
things fall away from us that had become integral parts of our sense of
well-being, our identity, our very existence. We have felt ourselves slowly
drifting down into unknown and evidently hostile territory. We have worried
about what comes next.
Take the modest pleasure of joining
friends for dinner on a Friday night. We have woken up into a world where
leaving home poses material risks, where we have to remain distant from people
we love, where the local restaurant has closed—perhaps permanently, where our
resources are limited, and where we may struggle to distinguish Friday from all
the other days of the week, given their dull sameness.
In time, this situation will pass. But we
know we will have lost some things that matter to us, if we haven’t already. It
doesn’t help that we don’t know with anything like certainty what they will be.
Anxiety and uncertainty just love working together.
And those
are the losses of the privileged. For
the poor and disadvantaged, staying safe, sheltered, and fed posed almost
insurmountable obstacles even before the pandemic. The arrival of the virus has
brought into plain view the rampant poverty that infects our country, the
brittle fragility of so much of our population, and the legions of people who subsist
on the fractured and crumbling edges of survival. We all have to get by with
less; but some of us started with nothing. What will become of them?
Such times invite us into a closer and
deeper kinship with certain ideas, including many that are central to the
teachings of Jesus. One of those comes in a familiar passage in the sixth
chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. With all due respect to the grandeur of the
King James version, permit me to render it in everyday parlance.
“Look,” Jesus says, “you have a choice.
You have to decide who and what you’re going to serve. You can serve God, or
you can serve material things, but you can’t serve both. It’s up to you.”
He goes on: “But let me tell you this. You
cannot make yourself happy by serving material things. A life defined by all
that stuff cannot give you freedom, peace, or fulfillment. To the contrary,
having shiny objects at the center of your life just breeds anxiety, because
you’ll constantly worry about losing them—and you will.”
He continues: “Freedom and contentment lie
in not worrying about tomorrow and
what you will lose. It lies in living fully today.
It lies in committing your heart to things that cannot be lost.”
“Nature tells us as much. Look at how the
birds don’t fret about food—but get fed anyway. Look at how the lilies of the
field don’t worry about clothing—but are beautiful anyway. In fact, they’re
more glorious than Solomon in his fanciest jewels and robes.”
He concludes: “It’s this simple: I love
you. And, because I love you, I need you to know that the more you invest your
soul in material things, the more you will worry. The more you worry, the less
happy you will be. All that worry won’t get you anything—and it certainly won’t
get you anything that matters. It will not add a single hour to your life.”
“So here’s the deal. Life is a series of
choices. Every single time, choose first the Kingdom of God instead of all that
other stuff. Then everything you really need
will come to you.”
Now, in order to tease out what this
passage means, and especially what it might mean for us, I need to tell you the
stories of three rich young men. The first of them comes to us later in the
Gospel of Matthew, in the nineteenth chapter. You know the story.
Jesus encounters a rich young man who isn’t
actually a bad guy—although he gets a lot of unfavorable air time in sermons.
He has tried to live honorably. He has kept the commandments. Indeed, if we
could find any fault in him it’s that he seems a bit too proud of those
accomplishments.
Perhaps consistent with that theme of
pride, the young man wants something more: he wants to be perfect. He asks Jesus how to do it. He probably thought that was a
smart and safe thing to do.
But Jesus gives him an answer that he does
not like and that might even have struck him as foolish and dangerous. Jesus
says: “Well, if you want to be perfect,
then go sell all that stuff of yours, give the money to the poor, and follow
me.”
You see what Jesus did there: he placed
before the young man the same decision
that he was talking about back in chapter six. In essence, he declares: “You
have a choice. God or material stuff. One will give you freedom and peace and
fulfillment, the other won’t. Your call.”
The young man can’t bring himself to give
up all the nice accessories of wealth—the robes, the rubies, the Rolexes, the Rolls
Royces—so he leaves. Importantly, however, the text tells us that he does so in
a state of sorrow.
Think about that for a moment: the instant the young man made the wrong
choice a deep sadness overcame him. So knew immediately that Jesus was right. The
magnetic pull of all those sparkly ornaments proved so great that he walked off
anyway.
This brings me to our second young man, also
rich, but who made a very different choice. Siddhartha Gautama was born into a
royal family near the border of Nepal and India about 2,600 years ago. Siddhartha’s
parents had extraordinarily high expectations for their child, anticipating
that he would someday become a great and powerful leader.
In a well-intentioned but wildly misguided
effort to help him fulfill his destiny, they spoiled Siddhartha dreadfully and
sheltered him from the problems of the world. As a result, he became thoroughly
acquainted with life’s pleasures but remained a stranger to its hardships.
Their plan failed, however, when
Siddhartha left the palace and came face to face with human suffering,
sickness, and death. Having seen them, he could not un-see them.
These events left Siddhartha with a difficult
decision to make—one that should by now sound familiar. He could continue to
chase after the material rewards of this world, or he could seek to understand
the causes of human suffering and help alleviate them.
He chose the latter course, shed the
elaborate trappings of privilege, reduced life to its essentials, and set out
on a quest for answers. The answers he found prompted people to follow him in
great numbers and, as you know, to call him Buddha.
Buddhism consists of a complex and
multidimensional collection of philosophies, beliefs, and texts and resists a
quick and tidy summary—indeed, trying to describe it at all runs against some of its foundational insights. But it is fair
to say that at the core of Buddhism lies an idea stunningly similar to the one
suggested by Jesus in the passages I just discussed.
Buddhism recognizes that our suffering
comes from our desires. Our forward-looking striving deprives us of the joys of
the here and now, and drives us to commit our thoughts and energies to the
finally fruitless task of accumulating things we cannot keep—objects and
accolades, prizes and praise, status and stuff.
To be clear, Siddhartha’s search for
enlightenment was not some inwardly-focused Olympic-level self-improvement
project. The whole point of his undertaking was that he had seen suffering, had
empathized with it, and had dedicated himself to addressing it. This fulfills
the very definition of “compassion,” a
word that comes from roots meaning “to suffer with”—to understand the struggle
of someone else and to exist inside of it with them.
In one of his poems, the Vietnamese
Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh gets at these ideas and their interconnectedness in
the simplest of language. He writes:
I vow to offer joy to one person in the
morning
And to help relieve the grief of one
person in the afternoon.
I vow to live simply and sanely,
Content with just a few possessions,
And to keep my body healthy.
I vow to let go of all worry and anxiety
in order to be light and free.
Or
as the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn puts it, throw away your self-absorbed mind
and “only keep the question: ‘What is the best way of helping other people?’”
Compassion lies at the heart of Buddhism,
just as it does at the heart of Christianity—at least when we do it right. Indeed,
if it does not, then we have made a different kind of choice than the one to
which the founder of our faith calls us. In that case, we have not left the
palace; we have just traded one turreted fortress for another.
This brings us to our third rich young
man. Giovani di Pietro di Bernadone was born in Assisi in the late part of the
twelfth century. His mother gave him that trippingly poetic name while dad was
away on business. Upon returning, his father—a prosperous silk merchant and a
practical man—nicknamed his son Francesco. We know him as Francis.
As a young man, Francis enjoyed a carefree
and indulgent existence. He loved fine clothes, reveled in the songs of
troubadours, spent money lavishly, and otherwise more or less constantly threw
himself a big party. But, as with the Buddha, the realities of suffering
interrupted this perpetual celebration and its attendant fantasies.
Also as with the Buddha, history and
tradition have left us with stories of various events that worked to change Francis’s
heart. On one occasion, the legend goes, Francis was busily and successfully selling
his father’s fine cloth in the marketplace. As he took in handfuls of money and
doled out armfuls of beautiful wares, a beggar approached him. Francis looked
into his eyes, and saw his despair.
Francis knew that he had to live
differently. Against the strident resistance of his family and friends, he cast
off his inheritance, took a vow of poverty, and dedicated his life to caring
for the poor. After a year, with only eleven followers surrounding him, Francis
led the tiny group to Rome and asked Pope Innocent III to recognize the
fledgling group as a new religious order devoted to a life of simplicity and
service.
St. Francis has had a profound influence
not just on individual lives and the history of the church, but on all of
Western culture. Oscar Wilde declared that one of the sad facts of history was
that no one since Christ himself had been a true Christian. We hear an echo of
the same idea in G. K. Chesterton’s quip that “The Christian ideal has not been
tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
But Wilde added: “I make one exception:
St. Francis of Assisi.” Wilde said of St. Francis: “He understood Christ, and
so became like him.”
The poet Vachel Lindsay, another
enthusiast for St. Francis, urged us to go forth and do likewise. He wrote:
Would I might wake St. Francis in you all,
Brother of birds and trees, God’s
Troubadour,
Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor
…
God make each soul the lonely leper’s
slave;
God make us saints, and brave.
One
could do worse, I suppose, than by beginning every morning by reciting that
last line aloud, and then proceeding to try to live it.
The French philosopher and novelist
Albert Camus, an atheist, saw a deep connection between his own view of how to
find value in life and that of St. Francis. In one of his journal entries, he
wrote:
September
15
In the cloister of San Francesco in
Fiesole there is a little courtyard with an arcade along each side, full of red
flowers, sun, and yellow and black bees. In one corner, there is a green water sprinkler, and
everywhere the humming of bees. A gentle steam seems to rise from the garden as
it bakes in the heat. Sitting on the ground I think about the Franciscans whose
cells I have just visited and whose sources of inspiration I can now see. I
feel clearly that if they are right then it is in the same way that I am. I
know that behind the wall on which I am leaning there is a hill sloping down
toward the town, and the offering of the whole of Florence with all its cypress
trees.
But the splendor of the world seems to
justify these men. I put all my pride in a belief that it also justifies me,
and all members of the human race, who know there is an extreme point at which
poverty always rejoins the luxury and richness of the world. If they cast
everything off, it is for a greater and not for another life. This is the only
meaning that I can accept of a term like “stripping oneself bare.” Such terms
have always had associations of physical liberty, of harmony between the hand
and the flower it touches, of a loving understanding between the earth and
those of us who have been freed from human things.
Ah, I should become a convert to this, if
it were not already my religion.
Albert
Camus spent much of his life thinking about, and seeking after, freedom. He
found it one day, sitting in a monastery courtyard, reflecting on those who
have dedicated themselves to lives of simplicity and service, pondering the
bees and the flowers—more beautiful even than Solomon in all of his glory.
The current circumstances have given
most of us an unexpected and unwelcome crash course in this way of thinking about
and experiencing the world.
We have had to cast off non-essentials. We
have had to manage our grinding anxieties. We have had to learn to live in the
present moment—the radical impermanence of the future leaving us with greater
puzzles than we can penetrate or, perhaps, even ponder.
We have had to find freedom, and peace,
and compassion in a situation that is constraining, and disorienting, and plays
to all of our worst impulses of greed and self-interest.
We do not remember signing up for any of
this.
But,
to paraphrase James Stockdale: St. Francis, here we are.
What
do we do now?
Well, most of us will probably feel like perfection
is way out of reach. As an imprisoned felon in one of Father Gregory Boyle’s
books says, “I shot perfection in the foot a long time ago.” And more than
once, at that.
Many
of us likely see ourselves as closer to the young Siddhartha and the young
Francis than to the spiritually mature, older versions. We see more of
ourselves in the rich young man than in the Son of God. We know from experience
that we all too often walk away from good choices, and sorrowfully, too.
At least this holds true for me. I’m quite
sure that I would have been that guy who bought the lamp of Epictetus, probably
at a fashionable silent charity auction, then leaving it out ostentatiously for
houseguests to admire over appetizers. I’m more likely to sit under a tree for
the shade than for enlightenment. And I’m not going to wait breathlessly for LinkedIn
to send me an email saying that my next great career move is canonization.
We understand what Jesus and Epictetus and
Buddha and St. Francis did, but we still have to ask: How does that apply to us?
What can we do?
We
can follow instructions, to the best of our ability.
We can focus on the present day and the
instant moment within it. We may not be able to keep all of the worries and
destructive thoughts out of our heads, but we can respectfully decline to feed
them. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “Leave your front door and your back door open.
Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”
We can keep asking ourselves: “What is the
best way to help other people?” We may not sell all that we have, give the
money the poor, and devote the rest of our lives to caring for the
disadvantaged.
But we can choose to live toward simplicity. We can choose to live
toward compassion. We can choose to
live toward service. We all can do all of these things. Every. Last. One. Of. Us.
A story from the Zen Buddhist tradition
tells of two masters who met atop a seaside cliff to demonstrate their skill at
archery. The first master chose a small target tied to a distant tree, took
aim, released the arrow, and hit dead center. The second master slowly and
deliberately raised his bow—but then spun around, faced the other way, and let
his arrow fly. It sailed elegantly through the air into the ocean. He lowered
his bow, smiled at the first master, and said “bullseye.”
We do not need to set our sights on
perfection to come closer to the life urged upon us by Jesus, Epictetus, the
Buddha, and St. Francis. When we make choices toward simplicity, compassion, and service, we aim at a vast ocean
of need. Every arrow we launch in that direction will hit its mark. It will be
one bullseye after another.
If we can do these things, then we will be
freer. We will be happier. We will be more at peace. We will be better servants
of God and humankind.
We
will, each in our own way, be saints and brave.
*
And, lo, Jesus said to them: “Do not lay
up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where
thieve break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where
neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.”
“For
where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Amen.
And
amen.
