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SERMONS

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 15, 2008

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

“Happiness is the natural flower of duty,” said Phillips Brooks, perhaps the most well known preacher of his generation who happened to be an Episcopalian. Happiness is that serendipitous state of being alive, content, and present, that most of us are always looking around the corner of our lives to find. Its pursuit is universal, at least enough for Thomas Jefferson to have included its mention in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

English economist, Richard Layard, member of the House of Lords, published a book about the phenomenon of happiness a few years ago. As an economist he was intrigued by the fact that most of us would assume that as wealth increases, intrinsic happiness would naturally increase as well. Layard was surprised to find that while being wealthy is a factor in someone’s sense of fulfillment, it creates a situation of diminishing returns - as someone gains more and more money, greater means of conspicuous consumption, they come to live with a sense of having less and less.

Richard Layard also found something that most of us know intuitively - that unemployment damages a person, makes them feel impoverished, useless, and is often more significant than a death in the family; it is a kind of dying of the self. He sums up the thrust of his economics in one sentence - “People need to be needed . . . People need to be needed.” Almost any job is better than none at all.
People need a trajectory toward which to point their energy, their focus, their gifts, their hopes and dreams. Take these away, and you will find only a shell of a human being; an airplane whose instruments are scrambled.
There is a recent movie about what the path to happiness might look like - it is called “In the Pursuit of Happyness.” It is about the life of a man named Chris Gardner, who overcomes every conceivable modern social obstacle to reach his goal - which was to be a good father, the father he never had, and become a successful member of society. The movie does in two hours what took the real Chris Gardner many years to accomplish. He loses house, wife, work, and finds himself living with his son in public bathrooms, homeless shelters, and hotels, all the while trying to get a foothold into another kind of world, by believing in himself and his dreams of a better life for his son; the life he had never known.

If you have ever struggled to understand the proper role of ambition and money in the formation of character, and what we might think of as spiritual formation, then you will appreciate this movie. If you are a person who has ever pitched your life like a base ball toward some hunch, some goal, something larger than yourself on behalf of other human beings, then you will appreciate this man’s story.
What caught me was the ending of this movie about pursuing happiness. Because after following this man through every headache and heartache, after watching him lose his job, his wife, his house, his hotel room. Watching him feed his toddler son in homeless shelters. Watching the two of them sleep in public bathrooms and on buses. Watching as Gardner struggles to complete a stockbrokers internship without all of the perks, the advantages, the support that we take for granted; having nothing but his desire and hope as fuel.

Finally, finally, at the end of the movie, Chris Gardner gets his chance, wins his job and his way out of hand to mouth living. Finally, he captures in his hands that elusive bird - happiness. And this is what he says, as his heart is bursting with joy; “this part of my life, this little part, is called - Happiness.”

After all of the struggle, the commitment, the hope in the darkness, “this part of my life, this little part, is called - Happiness.”

In an interview about his life, the real Chris Gardner says that his profession, making money as a stock broker, is secondary to his story; the real “value” of his life is the journey he has made in reaching the achievement. “What I do is not who I am. It is my journey that is the important thing . . . .”

When we are honest with ourselves about our goals in life, I believe that most of us do seek the elusive bird of happiness. That is what we want, that is what we seek. Some of us seek it purely in terms of money, what money can buy, how money might perhaps buy us out of more work; especially if we find no joy in our work.

Others of us seek happiness purely in the hope that we will meet that person who will complete us, answer the question of our lives. If we could just have that certain someone, then our happiness would be assured. And sadly, others of us have given up on finding happiness, or decided that mere pleasure, or cynicism, is a viable alternative; which is a lie. And when we are made to be honest with ourselves we know it is a lie.

Jesus promises us peace and happiness in the Gospels. And Jesus tells us what Richard Layard tells us, that the wealth, the gold that moves mountains in this world, cannot move everything in the human heart. There are doors within our souls that only his key will unlock. Jesus invites us to be his hands and feet in the world, to do his work when he goes to be with the Father, which is one of the keys of unlocking the true meaning of our lives.
Jesus sends his disciples out to be his hands and feet in the world. He tells them it will be difficult sometimes. That they will struggle at times.

Jesus invites the disciples to go depending upon nothing but themselves and him. They start from scratch to remake the world. Their reward, their happiness, will follow in their wake; as Phillips Brooks said, their “happiness will be the flower of their duty.”

We are modern disciples called to the same task. “Go out and be my hands and feet,” Jesus says. I believe that we will find our journey’s as disciples are much like the journey of Chris Gardner. We will struggle; perhaps be misunderstood by a cynical and doubtful world. We will have to have courage, and more than we have ever known. We will have to keep our flame alive when all around us is rain and thunder. We will have to have faith, and be faithful, knowing that we walk with Christ’s feet and work with Christ’s hands. We will have to do our duty - for His sake.

And then, like some exotic and beautiful bird landing in our hands, God will touch our lives with the gold of his presence, his happiness.
When our need to be needed is answered with God’s need of us, then, then we will know that peace of God which passes all understanding.