The following is the text of a sermon I gave at St. James Lutheran Church in Toledo on Sunday, No vember 16, 2008 - Ron Fournier.
The problem of finding life’s meaning and happiness is basic to our nature. Probably one of the earliest thinkers to address happiness was Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who was a student of Plato and who lived from 384-322 BC. Aristotle said in his book on ethics that the end goal of man is the highest good … something final. This highest or supreme good described by Aristotle is a happiness that he described by the Greek word “eudaimonia” which means to have a true spirit or a good daemon, that is a divine direction for one’s life. For Aristotle this form of happiness comes from the contemplation on the “highest object” or the “highest good”, however nowhere does Aristotle say what this highest good to be contemplated is. God’s revelation was not fully revealed to the Greeks at the time of Aristotle but you can see where his heart was and what he as a pagan was striving to describe was ultimately fulfilled by Christ several hundred years later.
Immanuel Kant the famous 18th century German philosopher summed this up as well when he said that the three questions that confront man are, “what can I know? What can I do? And what can I hope for?” Man searches throughout his life to find the answers to these questions and hopes to find in the answers the happiness that he so desires.
Even the founding fathers of our country recognized the importance of happiness since in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence we are told that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Note though that they never say we will be happy or like Aristotle what this happiness may be or where it can be found, but we have the liberty to go for it.
However, man cannot achieve a true sense of what the ultimate goal or meaning of life is without addressing the question regarding wherein his true happiness is found. It was left to St. Augustine in the 4th century and then later by St. Thomas Aquinas the great theologian of the 13th century to tell us in his Summa Theologicae that this highest good or the ultimate object of contemplation is God. The highest good wherein man can find his ultimate happiness is only found in God and the Gospel message of His Son Jesus Christ. When this is recognized, that our true happiness is found only in God, then we can make sense of and understand all of life’s challenges such as how we are to use our freedom, why there is evil, what is sin, and why there is suffering.
In order to make sense of our lives we first need to understand the source of our lives. In other words we need to find out what man is and then we can address what man is to do. Our understanding of what man is may be found in God’s revelation to man as revealed to us in the Bible. Through the Genesis accounts of creation we find that mankind is the last and the highest of God’s creations. God created man ex nihilo or out of nothing and man’s existence is totally dependent on God’s will. Only from the Bible can man understand his origins and God’s plan for man’s salvation through His Son Jesus Christ.
Man is also given a freedom that the heavenly bodies and all the other creatures do not have, the ability to change course or direction. This freedom to change course is a gift that God gave us because of His love for us. This freedom given to man is also called free will. In this way man is said to be created in the image and likeness of God. God provided man with the ability to think, a spirit, and a free will and from this man is given his humanity and his freedom to act as he so chooses.
It is through man’s intellect and free will that man has the ability to understand the world in which he lives and more importantly man can decide how he wants to live. By giving freedom or free will God gave man the capacity to be good. Man therefore has the inherent capacity to know right from wrong in any given situation since man owes his existence to the highest standard of goodness which is God.
The challenge for man is then how best to use his free will which is really what the idea of morality is all about. Man can choose to be good or man can choose to be bad and do evil things.
There is also an inherent tendency in man to do evil things and this is a result of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were seduced by Satan and fell to the temptations of the world as represented by the fruit they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were led through their pride to try to become gods and to know all things. Man’s nature is now flawed as a result of Adam and Eve’s original sin. Man is no longer a perfect image of God and this original sin and its effects are with man from the moment of conception. Baptism as man’s initiation to the Christian faith removes the stain of original sin but not this tendency on man’s part to sin.
Adam and Eve’s original sin therefore introduced a disorder into man’s nature which sets man’s free will and intellect in direct opposition to the irregular desires and the passions of his flesh. Paul tells us in Romans 8:5-6 that we have a basic choice to make, “for those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit, To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” By turning away from the true happiness that is only found in God man can choose to seek his happiness in himself and the things that are of the created world, that is power, pleasure, and possessions. Man then uses his free will disordered by original sin in ways that go against God’s plan.
This is the essence of sin wherein man turns away from God and attempts to shape the world according to his flawed will and intellect. This pride elevates man to a status not intended by God. Recall the warning God gives about this prideful state of man in Isaiah 29:16, “You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, ‘he did not make me’, or the thing formed say of the one who formed it, ‘he has no understanding?”
Left to himself as a result of his fallen nature man’s corrupted free will can introduce evil into the goodness of God’s creation. Evil then becomes a defect that spoils the created goodness of the universe. God therefore does not create evil but He does allow evil, which we see is the result of man’s abuse of his free will.
Man’s freedom though can provide us with amazing things and numerous opportunities but it is also responsible for some of the greatest horrors that are imaginable. God gave man freedom and with freedom comes not only joy but risk, suffering, and grief. As said in Wisdom 1:13, God “did not make death, and He does not delight in the death of the living.” Only by keeping his focus on the ultimate happiness and goodness that is found in God can man tap into the wisdom and goodness that comes from God and know how to use his free will in order to become and do the good as intended by God.
When man abuses his free will and commits evil and sins through his prideful ways he dehumanizes himself. When man is dehumanized he can no longer seek the goodness that God intended. Man travels down another path and God’s Word is no longer a light to his path. A dehumanized man no longer has the capacity to see that the highest good and the source of his ultimate happiness lies in God. When man is dehumanized by evil and sin he suffers and the rest of mankind also suffers. Man’s sins not only affect himself but they disrupt the goodness in God’s created order affecting others as well and sin can even be institutionalized into the policies and actions of our corporations and government.
However, it is by suffering as a result of sin, whether physical, emotional, moral, or spiritual, that brings us back down from our prideful state of sin to confront the problem of the meaning of our life and to question ourselves about our moral and religious values, and to ask ourselves what is happiness. Suffering is our reaction to pain and the result of the evil and sin caused by man and paradoxically it is by suffering that man can begin to realize wherein his happiness may be found.
At first many would argue that the existence of suffering makes no sense and that suffering even argues against God’s goodness and perhaps His very existence. However, suffering is not caused by God but as Paul tells us in Romans 5:12 “sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin,” so sin and suffering is a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve and man’s disordered and wrongful use of his free will. Man’s sins and the evil he commits therefore causes physical and spiritual harm to his body and soul.
Nevertheless, suffering provides man with another difficulty that he has to contend with. Suffering will either destroy all hope and lead one into a state of despair or it will serve as a whack on the side of the head that awakens within our hearts those Gospel values exemplified in Christ that give us the courage and the strength to grow in our faith and pickup our cross and follow in His footsteps.
Understanding these origins of suffering in Fallen man is therefore fundamental to understanding happiness. We see that suffering can be seen as the opposite of happiness and that the very idea of happiness often cannot make sense until one suffers. Happiness can only be understood and therefore makes sense when we unite our sufferings with the suffering Christ on the Cross. Christ was the perfect sacrifice and as said by Matthew in 26:28 He suffered and shed His blood for all of mankind “which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Paul tells us in Romans 6:23 that the “wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
By uniting our sufferings with Christ we are justified by grace through faith and our sins and the evil we have caused are forgiven and forgotten, we are reconciled through faith to communion with God thus fulfilling the promise of our baptism by receiving the gift of eternal life. Christ’s sacrifice and the sufferings He bore for us on the Cross serve as an example for man and challenge us to follow in His footsteps and unite our sufferings with Him. This requires a true conversion of our hearts and our minds to Christ who as Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 2:5 and Hebrews 5:9 is the “one mediator between God and men” and who by His sacrifice “became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.” Through His Passion Christ has united Himself to all of mankind and it is through the mystery of our communion with Him that man finds his ultimate and true happiness in God.
Our true happiness is therefore found in what I would call a loving vision of God. Paul tells us of this in 1 Corinthian 13:12 when he says, “for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully.” This vision of God as our source of happiness is also expressed by Christ in His Sermon on the Mount in the sixth beatitude in Matthew 5:8 where He says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The essence of our happiness is therefore this biblical call of man to clean the window to his soul letting the light of God shine in so that one can make the right choices and seek the highest good, which is God. This is what leads and draws man to the Kingdom of God and eternal life. This loving vision of God will take us to our final end, that supreme goal toward which our whole life and all our actions tend.
This loving vision of God is what is also meant in Deuteronomy 6:5 where we are told that “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” God’s gift of faith and reason along with the Bible work together to show man how to live his life in conformity with God’s eternal plan so that his final end may be the true happiness that is only found in God.
By finding our happiness in this Loving vision of God we begin to experience the Kingdom of God right now and we are embraced by the true love that flows between the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the same unconditional love that the Father shows to us who are His adopted Sons. For Paul tells us in Romans 8:15-18 that we have “received the spirit of sonship… that we are children of God… and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him… that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
When we understand that God is the source of our happiness then with the gift of His unconditional love we will know how to love our families and our neighbors, we can go out into the world to serve our communities and those that are in need, and show all of them this same unconditional love that we see and have from the Father. They will see Christ reflected clearly in the mirror of our hearts, the joy on our faces, for we will then have the virtue of charity or a love that far surpasses that of just our faith or our hope.
With this unconditional love we receive from the Father our faith is then one of action, anything is possible, and we can reach out to our fellow man who may be poor in spirit, we can comfort those who mourn, lift up those who are suffering, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, be merciful to others, and work for peace, justice, and the common good. By seeking our happiness in the Loving Vision of God we are able to understand what we are to do with our free will.
So we should remember that when we seek our happiness in the loving vision of God we begin to realize that God is the hub of the wheel of life and the closer we come to God, the closer we all come to each other.
( Ronald L. Fournier © 2008 )
agreed