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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Cultivating Contentment

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture: Philippians 4:11-13 from the Common English Bible 

¹¹I’m not saying this because I need anything, for I have learned how to be content in any circumstance. ¹²I know the experience of being in need and of having more than enough; I have learned the secret to being content in any and every circumstance, whether full or hungry or whether having plenty or being poor. ¹³I can endure all these things through the power of the one who gives me strength.

I want to tell you about the exceptional Salwen family who have a new book out this year. The father and daughter have written the book together but the entire family of four have been involved in a life transformation that was started three years ago by the daughter Hannah who was, at that time, fourteen years old.

Hannah and her father Kevin were driving in their city of Atlanta when Hannah began to express some of the sensitivities of the prophets in the Bible who were concerned about the lack of justice and lack of opportunity for the most vulnerable persons in our world.

Before I share these details, let me warn you that some of you will find Hannah’s story unsettling and even subversive, perhaps as subversive as Jesus was.

As she and her father were driving, she saw a homeless man sitting on a downtown corner and a very expensive car stopped beside them at a traffic light.  These two scenes prompted her to raise the question, with her father, why in our country we have that large gap between vulnerable people and other people who may have more than need. This is a Jesus like question. She continued to raise this question with her family and her question led her family to make some radical changes that have now led them to be on several national TV interviews. This question began to affect many others when the book, The Power of Half by Hannah and her father, appeared a few months ago.

It is an unsettling book for some because it tells of the Salwen family’s radical decision to sell their 7,000 square foot home in suburban Atlanta and move to another home half the size and half the cost.  Together they decided to donate many hundreds of thousands of dollars to The Hunger Project that will help move 30,000 people in the West African country of Ghana from poverty to self sufficiency. It is not a hand out, it is a hand up.

This may not be the sort of family you think would take these radical steps. Kevin, the father, was a writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal for 18 years.  He started his own business ten years ago and now is a successful entrepreneur. Joan, the mother, had a successful career working 20 years for the Accenture Company.  Then she got a masters degree and became a public school teacher. Kevin grew up Jewish and Joan grew up Methodist, and while Kevin had been a member of the Board of Directors of Habitat for Humanity and had helped build several Habitat Homes, as some of you have done, he had never been part of a project so ambitious and so possibly threatening to our culture of “more and bigger is always better.”

He writes about the impact of fourteen year old Hannah’s attitude of philanthropy and social justice on himself and their family. In fact he tells about the couple who finally bought their 7,000 square foot home and then that couple decided to give $100,000 to the Hunger Project’s work toward self sufficiency as well!

We will have copies of the book available for you later. It is a powerful story, and now seventeen year old philanthropist Hannah Salwen, who is a high school junior at the Atlanta Girls School, and her father speak about what they have done, when her schedule permits.

Here is a family who have been thinking together about the questions we are looking at for this five week period, What is enough? What does it mean to have enough--- or more than enough? How can we make a difference with what we have? How can we live below our means when so many around us are trapped by the temptation to live above our means?

How can we live more simply so that others can simply live?

These are very biblical questions. They are deeply spiritual questions, questions that becoming followers of Jesus Christ, not admirers, but followers, causes us to raise. They are questions we are asking ourselves as we think about the theme of ENOUGH and of what it means to discover joy through simplicity and generosity.

We have just sold out of the 60 or so books by Adam Hamilton and we have ordered many additional copies, but so many Methodist congregations are using this right now that the books are on back order! Adam writes in this chapter about all the TV ads about Restless Leg Syndrome and raises the question of whether most of us don’t have a more serious problem, restless heart syndrome, a discontented spirit that gets us into trouble.

He wisely asks this question first: What are some things that our faith causes us to be discontented about? There are some things that followers of Jesus Christ SHOULD be discontented about! What are some of those? 

• We should be discontent in our country when there is not “liberty and justice for all.” We say those words in our pledge of allegiance, but we still need to work on seeing that they are true.
• We should be discontent when we see a lack of equal opportunity for all persons, equal opportunity.
• We should be discontent when we see bullying or bigotry or discrimination against anyone who is characterized as “different” or “outcast” or “the other” because of ethnicity or religion or gender identity. We need to point out that bigotry, even when it is practiced in the name of religion.
• We should be discontent when we see schools that are failing students, especially some of the most vulnerable of students. The new film Waiting for Superman will be a resource for that discontent and for using our discontent to advocate for change.

On the other hand, Reverend Hamilton points out that so many of us are discontent about some of the stuff we have not been able to accumulate yet. We are always planning for our next purchase while we are already living beyond our means, and it is that worship of consumerism and affluenza that gets us into trouble personally and as a nation.

You were given a Key Tag when you came to worship this morning with the theme of contentment. What does it take to feel content with life; how much stuff does it take?

When we begin to ask that, we come up with this other subversive Biblical character, the apostle Paul.  In Philippians, Paul wrote some of the most important words in the Bible in the three little verses that follow from probably one of the last letters that he ever wrote.

I HAVE LEARNED HOW TO BE CONTENT IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.

I KNOW THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING IN NEED AND OF HAVING MORE THAN ENOUGH. ..AND I CAN ENDURE ALL THESE THINGS THROUGH THE POWER OF THE ONE WHO GIVES ME STRENGTH.

Do you remember where Paul was when he wrote those words? He was in prison, probably in Rome, during the last few months and weeks of his life, before he was beheaded for his faith. Some of you saw that prison when we took thirty of our members to Italy four years ago. Some of you have been to that very prison where Paul would have been lowered into a dank and dark underground space.

I have learned in whatever circumstance I am, to be content, because my security, my peace of mind, my being content, does not depend on the place I am or the amount that I have or do not have. My security and contentment depend on my relationship with God.

Where do you find your source of security and contentment?

The psalmist in Psalm 62 says it in this beautiful song composed and rearranged by musician John Michael Talbot.

ONLY IN GOD IS MY SOUL AT REST

IN GOD IS MY SALVATION

GOD ONLY IS MY ROCK

MY STRENGTH AND MY SALVATION

MY STRONGHOLD, MY SAVIOR

I WILL NOT BE AFRAID AT ALL

MY STRONGHOLD, MY SAVIOR

I SHALL NOT BE MOVED

 

ONLY IN GOD IS MY SOUL AT REST

IN GOD IS MY SALVATION.

And in the next Psalm, Psalm 63, which Cindy Bates listed a few weeks ago in the bulletin as one of her favorite scripture texts, we see -

God, you are my God. I seek you. My soul thirsts for you…because your steadfast love is better than life. My lips will praise you and I will bless you as long as I live. Now my soul is satisfied (content) as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips.

Only in God and in our relationship with God will our souls be content, no matter how much we have or don’t have, no matter what we own or where we live or how our health is today or tomorrow, only in God will we be content.

The textbook we are using for this month, by Rev. Hamilton, suggests four questions or four keys to cultivating contentment.

First, we say to ourselves when we are in a tough spot, It could be worse. I heard someone in our congregation say that to me just this week. One of the effects in their family, from the economic downturn, is that her husband is traveling every week over a very large sales territory so that he is only home on weekends to be available for her and their two sons. It is a tough time, but she also remembered that they, as a family, have been through tougher times. Once he lived in a different city for a while and was only home every other weekend.

By the way, some of you in our congregation are experiencing THAT very challenge right now, when a spouse is living in a different city so that they can have or keep a job!

We can say to ourselves that it could be worse or, the way I like, even better, is to say, it could be otherwise. That is the way that American poet, Jane Kenyon, talks about it in her poem entitled Otherwise.

(Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise”

Grey Wolf Press, p 215

 

I got out of bed

On two strong legs

It might have been

Otherwise. I ate

Cereal, sweet

Milk, ripe, flawless

Peach. It might

Have been otherwise

I took the dog uphill

To the birch wood.

All morning I did

The work I love.

 

At noon I lay down

With my mate. It might

Have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

At a table with silver

Candlesticks. It might

Have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

In a room with paintings

On the walls, and

Planned another day

Just like this day.

But one day, I know

It will be otherwise.

The second question to ask ourselves as we think about what will make us content, make us happy and fulfilled, is: How long will this make us happy?

So often we buy something we have been looking forward to and perhaps it makes us feel good for a while, or perhaps we are let down just as soon as we have made the purchase. We have, most of us, been seduced into thinking that being happy comes from acquiring and owning the right stuff, and then, perhaps there is an event in our lives that shows us how shallow that feeling is, an event like an illness or an accident or a fire.

Here is the video of some people who had to decide in a tragedy, what was MOST important and what was most lasting when they faced a crisis.

How long will this make me happy?

The third question suggested in the “Enough” book is: How am I developing a grateful heart? And here again St. Paul can be our model because he encourages us in his first ever letter to the congregation in Thessalonica.

HOLD FAST TO WHAT IS GOOD, REJOICE ALWAYS, PRAY WITHOUT CEASING

GIVE THANKS IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES!!!

Is he nuts?

This is important. Paul does not tell us to give thanks FOR all circumstances; he says to give thanks IN all circumstances. Do we do that? Can we find ways to give thanks to God even when we are in pain or in trouble or having financial challenges or family challenges? The woman whom I spoke about, whose husband is only here on weekends, took that attitude.

The first Americans in 1621 took that attitude when only half of them had survived the first winter in Plymouth. They had buried children and wives and husbands. The rest of them barely made it alive, but in the fall of that year, they chose not to complain to God but to give thanks by holding a three day feast on that first American Thanksgiving celebration.

How are we doing at developing a grateful heart?

The fourth question in the curriculum is: Where does your soul find true satisfaction? Where? Is it in what we have accumulated?

Judy and I are Mary Chapin Carpenter fans. She is not only a good rock and roller; she has composed some profoundly spiritual songs.  Some of these are on her recent album and others are on her Christmas album which we heard in worship last December. One of the original songs on her new album is entitled simply, Mrs. Hemingway. She writes from the point of view of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, who traveled with him to Paris where they barely got by financially.  They lived a life of poverty, living in a cold apartment with almost no money. But it was one of the happiest times in her life, she says in the song.

How easy was it to be hungry, she writes, and yet how lucky, how happy we were!!

Can you identify with that, can you think of times like that, perhaps right now when you might not have had much materially, but you were very happy and, here is that word again-CONTENT.

Where does your soul, where has your soul found true satisfaction?

I like the way that this chapter in the Enough book ends. All of us will live life in one tent or another.

We will live in a Dis-con-TENT—or we will live in a dwelling of con-TENT-ment. We decide.

Which TENT do you want to live in?

This offertory music by folk singer Peter Himmelman, All These Impermanent Things, is a reminder.