Ben's Sermon from October 28th

I don’t know about you, but about this stage of the semester I am in need of a break. About now, I feel a bit like St Paul when he says: “I am already being poured out as a libation, and my time of departure has come. I have fought the good fight.” Although I haven’t quite finished the race, which is the next line in St Paul’s letter to Timothy, I don’t think there is anything wrong with having a pit stop half way through the race to recover. A week would do it, I reckon.

But compare getting away from it all for a week with getting away from it all for an entire lifetime. As we reach the mid point of this hectic semester, I want to share with you the words of a monk who lives in the Egyptian desert. See what you think; but I warn you, these words might seem totally bizarre to your ears. You might well ask yourselves, what do I have in common with such a monk? Listen to the wisdom he shows, though, telling us a truth that Jesus told in the Gospel: “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled; and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

“All you need” to live, the monk said, “is a piece of bread, and enough covering for the body. The less you have, the less you have to distract you from God. Do you understand?” There’s no way I can fully understand, but let’s listen on! The monk continued, “just look around this room. When I am here I think that the chair is in the wrong place, I must move it. Or maybe that the lamp is out of oil, I must fill it... But in the desert there is just sand. You don’t think of anything else; there is nothing to disturb you. It should be the same in a monk’s cell. The less there is the easier it is to talk to God.”

The less there is the easier it is to talk to God. This is a monk who worries about having one chair in his cell, because of the distractions it will cause. This is a monk who prefers the darkness and solitude of the desert to the dilemmas of whether or not to put oil in his lamp. He lives a life of utter simplicity, and still he is concerned that he might not be making enough room in his life for God. Wow!

We live in a world filled with stuff. From the moment I get up in the morning, I am thinking of the stuff I have to do, of which order to do it in, worrying whether I’ll get it all done. And that’s when I am not thinking about the stuff I have: wondering where the chairs in my office look best, and that’s chairs in the plural! In Evelyn Waugh’s novel, ‘A Handful of Dust,’ the main character spends the time when the minister is preaching thinking what color to paint his bathroom. I hope you aren’t doing the same right now!

Our lives are busy, but we can’t help making them busier. We think about things that don’t really matter. I doubt any of you feels good about being too busy. I doubt any of you would be like the Pharisee in Jesus’s story who was pleased with all he did, so that he prayed to God: “I thank you that I am not like other people.” But the message of the story is that, even as he prayed this, he wasn’t really thinking about God but about himself. He was filling his head with his good deeds and not with God. He has missed the point of being religious. It’s not about what you do, or what you have, it’s about who you are. And who you are without God is nothing.

“Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled; and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” says Jesus, speaking right to the heart of the problem that many of us face. Jesus is calling us to be aware that the stuff of our lives, our studies, our grades, our possessions, even being good, does not make us who we are; I am not constituted by what I do or buy; I am not what I eat.

Instead of our work or our possessions defining us, who I am as a person, who you are as a person, who we are together here in Church, is given to us by God. God gives us our life. Put negatively, the truth is without God we have nothing, we are nothing. Put positively, if we have God, we actually have everything we could ever want. Our Egyptian monk had learned this. You who are here today, worrying about midterms or you grades or how to fit that other activity in, might need to relearn it. Ask yourselves, “Who am I?” Am I closer to my true self when I am away from it all, or when I am in the busy-ness of life?

Today, I want you to be clear that I am not asking you to live simpler lives; after all, I shouldn’t preach what I can’t practice myself. So I am not asking you to give up what you do or what is important to you.

So that’s what I am not saying. What I am asking is that you remember who you most truly are – a child of God. Without God you are nothing. So be humble about yourself; be willing to fail; be willing to stand before God and your friends and say, “I am not quite as perfect as I seem.” Because, in being humble, you’ll find within you the God who’s given you everything you have. It is God who has given you the ability to be who you are, even if you are upset with God that you don’t have more. It is God who, when you are humble, will be exalted, because then God can truly work in you.