Scripture: Proverbs 10: 23-32; James 3: 13-18
Sermon: The Pursuit of ….Righteousness
Topics: airplanes, strangers, conversation, wisdom
Preached: April 27, 2008
Rev. Mike Abma
Proverbs 10: 23-32
Doing wrong is like sport to a fool,
but wise conduct is pleasure to a person of understanding.
24 What the wicked dread will come upon them,
but the desire of the righteous will be granted.
25 When the tempest passes, the wicked are no more,
but the righteous are established for ever.
26 Like vinegar to the teeth, and smoke to the eyes,
so are the lazy to their employers.
27 The fear of the Lord prolongs life,
but the years of the wicked will be short.
28 The hope of the righteous ends in gladness,
but the expectation of the wicked comes to nothing.
29 The way of the Lord is a stronghold for the upright,
but destruction for evildoers.
30 The righteous will never be removed,
but the wicked will not remain in the land.
31 The mouth of the righteous brings forth wisdom,
but the perverse tongue will be cut off.
32 The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable,
but the mouth of the wicked what is perverse.
James 3: 13-18
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. 14But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. 15Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. 16For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. 17But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. 18And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
There is a certain danger in reading and preaching from the book of Proverbs. The danger is that we become cynical of what it says. The danger is that we dismiss it as too simplistic, too out of touch, not connected closely enough with the nitty-gritty of the real world. The reason we’re tempted to think this is that the book of Proverbs often paints the world in only high-contrast black and white:
There are the righteous, who are blessed,
and the wicked who, are cursed.
There are the wise, who find pleasure and prosperity,
and the foolish, who find calamity and poverty.
Over and over and over again, the book of Proverbs prods the reader
down the path of righteousness and warns of the perils of wickedness.
After a while, Proverbs can begin to sound like a nagging parent:
Eat your broccoli,
Save your money,
Do your homework,
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a person….. well, you know the rest.
The difficulty is that we live in a world of gray.
The borders between what is right and what is wrong,
what is wise and what is foolish,
are not always that clear. In fact, they can be downright fuzzy at times.
That is why I, at times, am tempted to dismiss the homey truths of this book,
and look elsewhere for sermon material.
MEETING TONY
Then I landed in a seat beside Tony for 8 hours.
Tony sat beside me on our recent 8 hour flight between Madrid and Philadelphia.
I came to learn that Tony has an Italian father and a Pennsylvania Dutch mother.
He is about 5 and a half feet tall, very stocky, bald head with a reddish goatee. Truthfully, he looks like a member of the local Hell’s Angels gang.
When I sat beside Tony, his first question to me was: “Are you American?”
I answered that I live in Michigan, but that I’m Canadian.
Tony: “No @*!$*& way! (a rather long string of expletives) I can’t believe it. I’m cursed.”
By the way, about every other word Tony said was some vulgarity or another.
It turned out that Tony had just spent the last 16 weeks working in Europe for an elaborate multi-media horse show out of Quebec, Canada, called Cavalia. Apparently he had had some big arguments with the management the day before. I never quite figured out whether Tony had quit or whether he was fired. All I know is that 24 hours after the big blow up, he was on a plane back home. When I sat down beside him, he was a bitter man who never wanted to meet another Canadian again. By the end of the flight he changed – he never wanted to meet another French-speaking Canadian again.
I learned that Tony was a professional Roadie. He had been a roadie for the last 20 years. His specialty was lighting – setting up, running, then taking down all these complicated lights for big shows. He had worked for seemingly every big show there was: Queen, Madonna, Ozzie Osbourne, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and a bunch of bands I’ve never heard of. One of his best gigs, he said, was working for the Wordwide Wrestling Federation.
After hearing about his life Tony asked, “So what about you, what do you do?”
“I’m a minster,” I said.
“No f…ing way,” said Tony, “So am I!”
It came out later that Tony was an ordained minister only because he went online and got a mail-order ordination for $19.95. But Tony did claim to be a Christian. He said faith was important to him. He said that he knew he should go to church more frequently. Tony said that if he seemed to curse and swear a lot, it was because I had caught Tony at a low point in his life.
You can learn a lot about a person in an 8 hour flight.
It felt a little bit like I was in a confessional booth with Tony — minus the booth.
Tony confessed to living a partying life on the road: lots of drinking, lots of women, lots of money made and spent. He said he owned a home in Philadelphia, a vacation home in Arizona, and a boat in Maryland. He said that all he wanted in life to be happy.
He simply couldn’t figure out why he was so miserable.
But he had a new solution for finding happiness, he told me.
He was going to try find an independently wealthy older women, get married, settle down, and then all of his problems in life would be solved.
WHAT I TRIED TO SAY TO TONY
Tony and I had a long talk together. In reflecting on what I said to Tony, I must admit that I probably sounded a bit like the book of Proverbs, or at least a bit like my mother. Basically, I tried to tell Tony that maybe he shouldn’t be pursuing happiness. I told him that we tend to make the same mistake over and over and over again. We think something we buy or have or do will make us happy, but it never does. I told him that as Christians, as followers of Christ, we are actually called to pursue something else – righteousness. We’re supposed to seek something else, namely the Kingdom of Heaven. With Tony, I didn’t use those words. Instead I used the word faithfulness. We are called to lead faithful lives – faithful to God, and faithful to the other people in our life. I told him that in spite of what the American Declaration of Independence says, Happiness isn’t supposed to be something we pursue or aim directly for. Rather, it is more of a by-product, a gracious gift, that comes with living faithful lives. In a way I was trying to paraphrase verse 28 of Proverbs 10:
The hope of the righteous ends in gladness
But the expectation of the wicked comes to nothing.
When Shirlene and I lead these Reformed Engaged Encounter Weekends for couples engaged to be married, we say the same sort of thing. I think many engaged couples dream of getting married and living happily ever after. Whether they realize it or not, they expect their partner to make them happy.
We try to tell them that this is not how it works.
If we expect and even demand happiness from our partner, we are bound to be disappointed.
Instead we challenge them to change their perspective.
We challenge them to see unity as the goal of their marriage instead of happiness.
We challenge them to work on that unity by being faithful to the vows they say on their wedding day.
We remind them that this is why vows are said in the first place:
not for the easy days, but the tough ones.
Not for the days we are happy, but for the days we are miserable.
Be faithful to your vows in the ordinary nitty-gritty of life, we tell them,
and happiness will come.
PURSUING RIGHTEOUSNESS — NOT ALWAYS THE WAY OF SAFETY
Like any path, there pitfalls on both the left and right side of the road or righteousness.
On the ride side of the path of righteous,
there is the extreme of always taking the way of caution.
There is a danger that we begin to believe that living the Proverbs means being trapped in some Jane Austen novel where the cautious, morally upright, reserved characters will eventually win the day.
Will Willimon tells the story of his friend shopping for a motorcycle.
This friend was in a Harley Davidson story.
The salesman was very excited to tell him all about the new Harleys.
“This machine will go 0-90 in 20 seconds.
It’ll hug the road at 95 mph.
It’ll outrun anything on wheels.
By the way, what do you do for a living,” the salesman asked.
“I’m a minister.”
“And it’s also very, very safe” the salesman hastily added.
The truth is, the path of righteousness is not always the safest path.
Sometimes pursuing righteousness means having the courage to love someone, to help someone, to go out on a limb for someone. If the parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us anything, it teaches us that the priest and the Levite took the easy road, the safe road. It was the Samaritan who took the risk of stopping and helping. It was the Samaritan who generously gave out of his own pocket to help this stranger. The way of righteousness isn’t always the easy way, the safe way. Often it is the tougher path of trusting God. This is something we have to be reminded of again and again in our security and safety obsessed world. The truth is, we simply do not know what or who will be on our road of life. That is why it is always good to start each day with a hey, hey, hey, Good Morning heavenly Father! (we’ll be singing this in a few minutes).
PURSUING RIGHTEOUSNESS — NOT RECKLESS OR RUTHLESS
But then there is the other extreme on the left side of the path of righteousness.
This is the attitude that “the ends justify the means.”
This is the attitude that sometimes we need to be reckless or ruthless to get our way.
There are T-shirts and bumper stickers out there that say: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” It is almost as if these bumper stickers are saying that if you want to be somebody, if you want to make a name for yourself, go out there and raise a little “h….”
But here is the real irony of that bumper sticker.
The original source of this quote is a 1976 essay by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The essay was about the virtuous, quiet, hard-working women of the Puritan American colonies between 1668 – 1738.
Ulrich, in fact, made a career of studying and writing about the ordinary, unheralded women and men of Colonial America who by their quiet but hard-working and faithful lives made a huge impact on the communities they were living in. These people were often the difference between life and death for these struggling colonies.
This fits with what James says in his letter.
Things like trying to make a name for ourselves, trying to make history, these would fall into the category of selfish-ambition. But it is the shalom-makers, the quiet, hard-working, faithful ones, the ones who live according to the book of Proverbs, who produce a harvest of righteousness.
CONCLUSION
I said goodbye to Tony at the Philadelphia airport.
On saying goodbye, I realized how much closer we were than we first met.
Yes, it is true that in so many ways each of us had lived such different lives.
But the truth is, Tony and I also shared many things.
One thing we both shared was the need for Christ in our lives.
On our own, neither of us can live the righteousness we are called to live.
Both of us needed a righteousness beyond ourselves – the righteousness of Christ,
who plants his Spirit in our hearts,
his goodness in our lives,
and who will ultimately make all things new.
That is why, even though so different in so many ways, we departed as brothers – brothers in Christ.
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