An Ocean of Need

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.