Can
money buy happiness? Maybe. At least that’s what one study done several
years ago concluded.[1] In that study researchers took a group of
people and surveyed them on how happy they were. Then they gave everyone a small amount of
money - up to $20. Half were told to spend the money on themselves and the
other half were to spend it on someone else. At the end of the day, the participants were
again asked to rate their happiness and the results showed that those who spent
money on others reported a much greater happiness boost than the ones who spent
money on themselves.
As
a person of faith I believe the reason for this is that when we are generous,
when we are doing something for the benefit of another we are living as we were
created to live - that is, in harmony with the flow of God’s great and generous
love. A love that surrounds us. A love that is being poured into us all the
time. And when we let it flow through us
as it is intended to do, instead of holding it in and keeping it to ourselves,
then we are in harmony with God’s love and experience a deep sense of
well-being.
Our
reading from 1 John speaks to this nature of this flow. “We know love by this, that [Jesus] laid down
his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” Love begins with God. And we’ve been loved from our beginning. We are being loved right now by the love of
God, the love that is God. Love that is
filling us even as I speak. Maybe you
can feel it, maybe not. Our perceptions
changes and feelings come and go. That
is why we have a need to know love “not [just] in word or speech,” as 1 John puts
it, “but in truth and action.” So God reveals God’s love most concretely in
truth and action by Jesus’ act of freely laying his life down for us.
And
because we know this love we are called to let that love flow by laying down
our lives for others. Now there are rare
occasions where we can be faced with the choice of literally laying down our
lives for another - I think of the French police officer, a practicing
Catholic, who last month traded his life for a hostage and was killed in that
person’s place. The reason it made the
news is because it was so sensational.
Thankfully we are not faced with such crises very often or ever in our
lifetimes. And 1 John knows this for the
writer goes on to show what a laying-down-one’s-life type of love looks like
not just in extreme moments of sacrifice, but in the daily give and take of
loving life by asking the question, “How does God's love abide in anyone who
has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses
help?” Loving others in truth and action
by laying our lives down in love means that we are to share or even give up
some of the things we think we need so that others who really are in need might
not be so.
But
perhaps I’m preaching to the choir here.
I suspect that most, if not all of us here, have already signed on to
the idea of sharing, of serving, of sacrificing on behalf of others. I certainly see it every day in countless
acts of love that are done both in and beyond our community. Yet I also see and know that many of us
struggle. Part of that struggle has to
do with what love looks like, how does one lay down their life in love in
particularly hard circumstances. I hear
questions like, “How do I love and help a friend who is ruining his life
because he’s an alcoholic?” or, “Now that I have awakened to systematic racism,
what do I do now?” Or here’s something
we all face almost every day if we drive around Charlottesville. It’s the question, “What is the most loving
thing to do when you’re sitting in your car at a red light and someone is
standing right next to you asking for money?”
That
question was actually posed at WAC (Wednesdays at COOS) last year when we had a
speaker come from The Haven, a day shelter which provides various services to
help people facing homelessness. “What
is the best thing to do when someone asks you for money?” The room went silent because we all wanted to
know. What was striking, though, was
that this homeless advocate, this “expert,” confessed that she too did not
exactly know. But she was emphatic about
one thing: that whether a person gives
or not, there is one thing we should all do and that is don’t judge. Although it was comforting to know that even
she struggled with what to do I think we all would have appreciated an answer
that would settle the issue once and for all.
But
the reality is, is that life is full of complex situations where answers may
never be clear. Still God’s love never
stops and we continue to be called to let it flow through us and to not hold
back because we are unsure or afraid of being wrong. I know whenever I feel as if I am groping in
the dark in my attempts to love or, really, when I’m facing anything unknown
there’s a prayer by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and mystic of the 20th
century, that gives me hope and peace.
It’s entitled The Road Ahead
and it goes…
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I
do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your
will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire
to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all
that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And
I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know
nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always…
Take
heart for the desire to love others and please God does indeed please God. When we are generous, when we share what we
have with others, when we spend even a few dollars on someone else we
experience a boost of happiness because we are pleasing God, we are abiding in
God, we are letting God’s love flow freely in us and through us. Today, let us continue to follow the way of
love, the way of Jesus who is our good shepherd. For as we do so we will find that just like
it was for Jesus so it is for us, that laying down our lives in love turns out
not to be the end of life, but the beginning of new life - a life more real and
authentic, a life more meaningful and true - a life that brings the greatest
happiness of all - God’s resurrection life.
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