Happier Are Those Who Are Shaped By Challenge
Note: There is no sermonette this week. Enjoy the longer summary!
Summary: In the movie Inside Out, Joy believes Sadness will ruin everything for Riley, the human they reside within. Joy is trying to help Riley navigate the difficulty of moving and leaving her friends behind. Joy believes Sadness just keeps getting in the way. This is often how we feel about sadness, suffering, and challenges. In a world that tells us we need more pleasure, more comfort, more safety, and more control, we tend to deny, avoid, and flee hard things. Jesus teaches a different way. He tells us that it is our intentional engagement of hard things that leads to life. Somehow, happier are those who are shaped by challenge. Here are three ways to engage challenge to be happier.
Happier is the humble servant. Jesus teaches that denying oneself is the way of God’s Kingdom. Paul encourages us to have the same mind as Jesus, who humbled himself to death on a cross. In a world that teaches us to cultivate celebrity, prestige, privilege, and power God says we are to cultivate humility to find life. Humility is found by embracing not fleeing from our humanity. We accept that we have limited capacity and agency. We believe that we need others and God to be our full selves. Happier is the humble servant because they find life and their identity as part of a greater whole instead of being the greatest one. How are you developing humility? Focusing on faith, family, friends, and meaningful work is a great place to start.
Greeting suffering with openness lets it shape us, not consume us. Jesus tells us to take up our cross daily and follow him. This means we too endure the brokenness of the world. These words from Henri Nouwen are helpful, “By greeting life’s pains with something other than denial we may find something unexpected. By inviting God into our difficulties we ground life—even its sad moments—in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves.” What other options do you have because each of us will endure suffering in this life? We can deny the beauty and goodness of the world. We can allow suffering to create a spirit of fear and bitterness in us. We can try to rationalize and minimze the hurt and evil. Or we can ground our hurt in the hope and love revealed in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection and the promise of God’s future in which brokenness is evaporated by God’s love.
Confession frees us from ourselves. Jesus asks, What does it profit to gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit ourselves? Good question. I’d vote that it’s no profit at all. And yet, I find my instincts of what will bring happiness are often wrong. How often I have achieved or obtained what I thought would make me happy to only discover it did not. This is where the regular practice of confession benefits us. As we confess, we experience grace. This does not give us invincibility like a video game but frees us from guilt and condemnation so that we can continue to grow in faith, hope, and love. What might a regular practice of confession look like for you?
Passage for Reflection: Luke 9:24-25, NRSV
22 saying, “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” 23 Then he said to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. 24 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. 25 What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?
