Avoiding the Blahs

The message given in the Sunday night worship service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on Sunday, September 26, 2021.  The Bible verses used are Matthew 19:19-26.

Do you ever feel like your life is just kind of--blah?  

I mean, you’re doing your best to live a good life.  You feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.  You’re trying to be a good person.  You try to treat people right, to help them when you can.  You try to be there for your family and friends.  And yet, somehow--it just does not seem like it’s enough.  It’s not that anything’s going wrong, really.  You look at your life, and you feel like everything’s going okay.  It’s just that--it seems like there’s something missing.  You don’t know what it is, but--you feel it.  

And you don’t know what to do about it.  So, you pray.  And--nothing really seems to be happening.  You don’t really feel like God is hearing your prayers.  Again, it’s not that anything’s really going wrong.  But you know, deep down, that everything is not as it should be.  There’s something missing, and you don’t know what it is or how to find it.

I think that’s what was going on with the man in our reading from Matthew tonight.  A man comes up to Jesus and asks what he needs to do in order to inherit eternal life.  

Now, to the people around Jesus, that would’ve seemed like an odd question.  The Jewish teachers told everyone what they had to do to get eternal life.  Everyone, at least everyone who claimed to be a faithful Jew, knew what the requirements were.  You were supposed to follow the rules.  Follow all the Jewish law to the letter and you’d get to heaven.  Jesus knew that.  The people around Jesus knew that.  

And surely this man had to know it, too.  So Jesus knows there has to be something more behind his question, but he’s not going to say what it is.  Instead, he’s going to let the man tell him.  So, he gives the answer that any good and faithful Jew would give:  follow the commandments.

And the man gives another odd question.  He asks “Which ones?”         

That’s an odd question because the Jewish teachers would’ve said, “All of them, of course.”  And again, everyone who claimed to be a faithful Jew would’ve known that.  You were not allowed to pick and choose which parts of the law you were going to follow.  You were supposed to follow all of the law.           

And Jesus still knows there’s something more behind these questions, something this guy is hesitant to ask.  But Jesus is not going to say it for him.  Instead, Jesus simply responds with a list of some of the commandments.  Now, Jesus was not saying these were the only ones people were supposed to follow, or that the ones he did not list were not important.  He was using these as examples.  He was saying, in effect, “You know which ones.  Everyone knows them.”  Jesus was still trying to get the man to tell him what he really wants to know.           

Finally, the man tells him.  He says, in effect, I’ve kept all the commandments.  I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.  But it just does not feel like it’s enough.  I feel like there’s something more, and I don’t have any idea what it is.  So please, Jesus tell me.  What more is there?  What am I missing here?           

Now we get to the heart of it.  The man has done what he’s been told to do all his life.  And yet, somehow, knows that it’s not enough.  He knows there has to be more to it than just keeping the rules.  He knows he’s missing something.  But what?

The man felt like you and I sometimes feel.  Like his life was just--blah.  He’d been following all the rules, doing all the things he was supposed to do, but it just did not feel like it was getting him anyplace.  He did not feel like he was any closer to God by doing that.  It’s not that he felt bad, really.  He just, well, did not really feel anything.

A lot of us have been there, at one time or another.  Not really feeling bad, but not really feeling good, either.  Sometimes, not really feeling anything.  It’s like we’re just kind of going through life on cruise control.  We’re living good lives, but we’re also living quiet lives.  We’re living safe lives.  We’re not sure that anything about our lives is really making an impact on anything or anyone.  We wonder if our good, safe, quiet life has any purpose, any meaning.  Sometimes we feel like we’re just kind of there, like we’re just going through the motions of life.

That’s what this man was telling Jesus he felt like.  He wanted Jesus to tell him something he could do to give his life some meaning, to give it some purpose, to help him feel closer to God.  

We have no idea what he expected Jesus to say.  Maybe he thought Jesus would tell him to go on some sort of a long fast.  Maybe he thought Jesus would tell him to make a major pilgrimage or something.  Maybe he did not have any particular expectation.  One thing I think we can be confident of is that he did not expect Jesus to say what he said.  Jesus told the man to go and sell all of his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then come back and follow him.           

That’s a really big thing Jesus was asking this man to do.  Could you do it?  I don’t know that I could.  I know I certainly have not.  Neither has anyone else I know.  Don’t get me wrong, there are people in our parish who give very generously.  But I don’t know anyone who has sold absolutely all of their possessions to follow Jesus.

And I don’t know that Jesus requires us to.  This is the only time the gospels record Jesus ever saying anything like this.  There were lots of other people Jesus met, including his own disciples, who did not sell off all their possessions, and Jesus does not seem to have told them they should.  This seems to have been something specifically required of this one man, rather than something that we’re all supposed to do.

But why would that be?  Why would Jesus require this one man to sell all his possessions, if he did not require that of anyone else?  Yes, we’re told the man had great wealth, and we assume Jesus knew that.  But Jesus had times when he talked to other people of great wealth, and he did not tell them to sell all their possessions.  So why did Jesus tell this man to do that?

I think what Jesus was telling this man, and what Jesus tells each of us, is that it’s not good enough to just follow the rules.  I mean, it’s not bad to follow the rules.  But it’s not enough.  It can lead us to just live a good, safe, quiet life, and the goal of a Christian is not and should not be to live a good, safe, quiet life.  Deep down, this man knew that.  And deep down, we know it, too.  That’s why our lives feel blah sometimes.  It’s not that we’re doing anything wrong, necessarily.  It’s that we’ve put our lives on cruise control, and that’s never a good thing for a Christian to do.  

The goal of a Christian should be to live a life that’s dedicated to Christ, and that kind of life can never be on cruise control.  A life that’s dedicated to Christ cannot help but have an impact on others..  A life that’s dedicated to Christ will have an impact on others even when we don’t specifically intend it to.  A life that’s dedicated to Christ will have an impact on others even when we don’t realize it.  There’s no way we can avoid having that impact when our lives are dedicated to Christ.           

That’s why Jesus said what he did to this man.  Jesus could’ve told him to tithe, but if he was following the rules as he says, then he was already tithing.  Jesus could’ve told him to just increase his giving, and he probably would’ve done so gladly.  The thing is that something like that would not have gotten this man’s life out of cruise control.  They’re good things to do, don’t get me wrong.  But they are not things that would’ve gotten this man out of his good, safe, quiet life.  There’s nothing about increasing his giving that would’ve changed this man’s life.  This man needed more than just another set of rules to follow.  He needed to feel God’s Holy Spirit in his heart and in his life.  He needed to put his full faith and trust in Jesus.

We need to feel God’s Holy Spirit in our hearts and in our lives.  We need to put our full faith and trust in Jesus.  That may not mean that we need to sell all our possessions.  But it does mean we need to change something.  If we really want to follow Christ, if we really want to make an impact on others for Christ, it’s not enough to just take small, safe, quiet steps.  We cannot just do a little more of the things we’re doing now.  If we really want to follow Christ, we need to take the cruise control off.  We need to somehow, in some way, do something that will open us up to feeling God’s Holy Spirit with us.           

What that means is different for each of us.  It does not necessarily mean that each of us has to sell all our possessions.  What it does mean is that something has to change.

And that’s scary.  It’s scary to change our lives, especially when, as I said, it feels like there’s nothing particularly wrong with our lives right now.  It was scary for the rich man to change.  He could not do it.  We’re told that he walked away sad.

And that’s the thing.  It is scary to change--but deep down, we know we need to.  We know that if we don’t, that feeling that something’s missing won’t go away.  We won’t have God’s Holy Spirit in our lives the way we should.  And we’ll be sad, too, knowing that something’s missing in our lives but not doing anything about it.  

            Let’s not be content with our good, safe, quiet lives.  Let’s not live on cruise control anymore.  Let’s ask Jesus what we need to do to inherit eternal life.  And then, let’s do it.  It could be scary.  But when we go the way Jesus leads us, we’re always going in the right direction.  And that blah feeling will go away, because we’ll have God’s Holy Spirit in our lives.