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Good
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 Sermon
04/25/10
I Shall Not Want ~ by Reverend Thomas
Cary Kinder
April 25, 2010 Fourth Sunday after Easter, Good
Shepherd Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 23; John 10:7-16; Matthew 6:24-33
People
brought all kinds of problems to Mahatma Gandhi seeking his
help. The leaders of his
nation traveled the rough road to his ashram with great matters, and
the people of neighboring villages came with small matters. The story goes that one day a woman
came asking Gandhi to convince her son to stop eating sugar. Gandhi told her to come back in a
week. A week later she came
again, and Gandhi urged the boy to listen to his mother and quit
eating sugar. She asked Gandhi
why he couldn’t have done that the week before. He replied, “Because last week
I myself had not quit eating sugar.”
I
do not know if that story is true, but I do know that it has a lot of
truth in it. For one thing, I
know it is true that I should practice what I preach. So in the spirit of full
disclosure, I need to begin this sermon on detachment from material
things, on entrusting our lives entirely to the Good Shepherd, by
saying that I have not yet quit eating sugar myself. I have not attained perfect
detachment from worldly things—far from it! I am in good company, though; even
the saints have not achieved perfect, permanent detachment. Even Christ showed in the Garden of
Gethsemane that he still felt attached to this life.
Detachment
is not a state humans reach so much as a
discipline humans practice, a struggle humans engage in or not. In that regard, I do practice what
I preach. I have not quit all
my addictions or attachments, but I can speak as someone engaged in
the struggle.
The
story about Gandhi is also true in the sense that it accurately
reflects his life. One of the
people who knew him best, when asked what was so special about him,
answered “his great love.” Another was struck by the
healthiness that he radiated—health of body, mind, heart and
soul. An American journalist
once asked Gandhi, “Can you tell me the secret of your life in
three words?” He laughed
with his usual delight at a challenge and answered, “Yes. Renounce and enjoy.” (Gandhi the Man, Eknath Easwaran, p 105)
Renouncing,
detaching, letting desire go, was a life-long spiritual practice that
Gandhi considered essential to his joyfulness, as well as his ability
to be unconditionally loving, vibrantly healthy and fearlessly
nonviolent. Gandhi was a
student of the Sermon on the Mount and the Bhagavad
Gita, and he strove to live what he believed. Detachment was what Jesus was
preaching when he said “You cannot serve both God and
mammon.” Detachment was
what the Bhagavad Gita
was preaching when it said,
When you move amidst the world of
sense
From both attachment and aversion
freed,
There comes the peace in which all
sorrows end,
And you live in the wisdom of the
Self.
Gandhi
worked at this every day for fifty years. He knew that when we have
attachment even in the smallest of things, we are practicing
worshipping mammon instead of God, we are practicing holding onto
life, and when it comes time to lay down our life for another, we
will have a much harder time.
So he took every opportunity to practice breaking attachments.
This
does not sound like much fun compared to eating sugar, and the truth
is it was not easy for Gandhi.
Anyone who has tried to give up something for Lent or quit a
serious addiction, anyone who has heard the doctor say, “You
have to change your diet and give up the very foods you love
best,” knows how hard it can be to practice detachment, and how
it has to become a way of life, because addictions are so sneaky at
seducing us to backslide.
Gandhi
was an expert in detachment, so we should listen to his wisdom as we
try to free ourselves to gain a healthy, balanced life filled with
peace and joy and love. Gandhi
said,
As long as you
derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood
of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue
to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for
you. Only give up a thing when
you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has
any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which
is more greatly desired.
This
is the key to detachment. This
is the key to being able to pass through the gate of Christ to find
shelter or green pasture. It
is the key to having life and having it abundantly. It is the key to “The Lord is
my shepherd; I shall not want,” and “Surely goodness and
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in
the house of the Lord forever.”
The
key is to want this other condition that the Good Shepherd offers so
much that our material attachments no longer have any attraction for
us because we see that they interfere with the way of Christ and
realm of God that we love and desire more. The Bhagavad
Gita says,
They live in wisdom…
Whose love for the Lord of Love has
consumed
Every
selfish desire and sense-craving
Tormenting the heart. Not agitated
By grief nor hankering after
pleasure,
They live free from lust and fear
and anger.
Christ’s
Sermon on the Mount is coming at the same thing from a different
angle when it says, “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we
eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will
we wear…?’ Strive first for the realm of God and
God’s right way of being, and all these things will be given to
you as well.”
When
our love for the Lord of Love consumes every selfish desire, when our
striving for God makes us forget to worry about everything else, the
result is peace from the anguish of our material wants, and joy to
find that we have life after all, and have it abundantly.
Again,
this is not to say we have no more struggle. We can expect to have good moments
and not so good moments.
Remember the story of the monk from the great monastic
community on Mount Athos in Greece. On a visit to Russia someone asked
him what they did there at his monastery, hoping to hear about their
famous visions and miracles, but the monk answered, “We fall
and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up.”
Detachment
can mean struggle and suffering on the way to peace and joy. Saying “I shall not want,” and trusting the Good Shepherd to
provide for our needs risks having to endure times when those needs
are not as well met as our appetites and addictions would
desire.
Thomas
Keating is the great teacher of Centering Prayer, and when we see the
movie One in a few weeks,
Keating will be the last of the spiritual masters it interviews as
its climax. Keating has
written with his characteristic, good-humored bluntness, “The
idea of suffering becoming pure joy or stopping altogether is
nonsense…. The gospel nowhere says that you must relish and
savor all the anguish and suffering that come upon you. Growing…in grace does not mean
becoming inhuman or insensible.
Jesus suffered as a human being.” But Keating goes on to point out
that what made all the difference for Jesus was that he was prepared
to suffer anything for the sake of his love of God. If we love God and want God’s
peace and joy enough, any suffering caused by detachment will be well
worth the pain. (Crisis of Faith, Crisis of Love,
p52 as quoted in Daily Reader
for Contemplative Living, p106)
Keating
would say that this pain is what comes of looking for happiness in
the wrong place, in the material world instead of in God; but it is
crucial to understand that the detachment that we gain when we love
God more than the world does not lead us out of the world—it
leads us more deeply into it!
We see the world more truly when we stop seeing it through our
selfish attachments and desires.
We see how our neighbor truly is our self, and we find
ourselves led to love the hurt, the poor, our enemies, all creation,
as Christ did.
The
contemplative teacher Eknath Easwaran wrote, “When all selfish
attachments are gone, what is left is pure love.” (Blue Mountain Journal, Winter 2009, Volume 20, Number 4
page 5, second column.) The medieval German mystic, Jacob Boehme, said,
No life can
express, nor tongue so much as name, what this
enflaming, all consuming love of God is. It is brighter than the sun, it is
sweeter than anything called sweet; it is stronger than all strength;
it is more nutrimental than food, more cheering to the heart than
wine, and more pleasant than all the joy and pleasantness of the
world. Whoever obtaineth it is richer than any monarch on earth;
and he who getteth it is nobler than any
emperor can be, and more potent and absolute than all power and
authority. (ibid.)
This
is what we saw in Gandhi. Love
of God led him to practice detachment from things, and detachment led
him to have a nobility and a power greater
than the monarch of the British Empire. It led him to have a love that was
universal and unconditional, and an enjoyment of life and a sense of
humor that were celebrated by all who knew him.
But
Gandhi was not the only person ever to show these qualities. We can see people among us who have
suffered illness or loss and through their love have transformed
those sufferings into wisdom and power, peace and joy. One woman who had a recent cancer
scare put it to me this way: “Of course I was really worried
and afraid, but my spiritual practice helped me let go and calm the
fear a little, and I began asking, how can I let the Spirit work
through me along this part of my path, how can I use this as an
opportunity to serve the light?”
Eknath Easwaran
says, “If you want to see some of the greatest lovers of all
time, don’t look to Romeo or Juliet; look at Saint Francis of Assisi, or lovely Saint Teresa of Avila….
What a wonderful paradox: to know what love means, we have to turn to
men and women who we say have “renounced the world!” (ibid.)
God
created us out of Spirit and dust.
To renounce the world means that we will let the Spirit guide
our life, not the dust. The
nature of the Spirit is to pour out love, and if we dwell in that
Spirit because we love it more than anything else in life, love will
be what we do, wherever we go, whomever we meet. Even our times of suffering, our
valleys of the shadow of death, will become situations in which we
ask, how can I use this as an opportunity to
love and to serve?
This
takes tremendous courage and trust.
It takes wanting the abundant life found through
Christ’s gate so much that we are willing to let go of other
things we want and say with faith and hope and love, “The Lord
is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
What
is it that you need to let go of right now in order to say that?
Let
us practice letting go of everything for a few minutes, praying,
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” and just
savoring how good it can feel to love and trust that much. Let us pray in silence…
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