Blessed are those who thirst for righteousness

Matthew 5:1-12

“Only Jesus satisfies. Money and possessions do not satisfy. Power and pleasure do not satisfy. Only Jesus satisfies.”

That’s what he said and I couldn’t contain myself. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“What do you mean you don’t think that’s true?”

“Well, for example, money, power and pleasure can be extremely satisfying.”

“Are you sure you are a preacher? You sure don’t sound like one.”

This is one of those conversations I get involved in from time to time simply because I am a bit of a contrarian. It is rare that people speak what is true, so looking at the other side of what is said often helps to bring the truth a bit closer.

“Yes, I am a preacher,” I told him, “but I can think of many things I have experienced in my life that have provided satisfaction. Let me tell you about what I have experienced and what I have seen.

Take a look at money. Not having enough money is very dissatisfying. Worrying about bills that have to be paid is very distressing. I’ve had a number of cars in my life and most of them were not new. I didn’t have enough money to buy a new car so I would buy a used car I thought would be reliable. I remember the sick feeling I’d get when the car would begin acting up and I began to worry about finding enough money to pay the bill for what sounded like an expensive repair. What would I do if I couldn’t pay for the car to be repaired and had to do without a car?

At one time I was in a church that had some wealthy members. One family had a teenage son who was in the church youth group and one day I heard he had totaled their car. This was on a Tuesday and on Sunday they came to church in a new car for which they had paid cash. Having enough money so you don’t have to worry about not having a car to drive is very satisfying.

Let me give you another example. When marriages end in divorce, the three most stated reasons for the divorce are in-law problems, sex and money. The husband wants to spend money for things his wife thinks are frivolous and the wife wants to spend money for things the husband thinks are luxuries they can’t afford. They both spend money on what they want and then when the bills come, argue about whose fault it is that they are now in debt.

But now they both get promotions and they are earning three or four times what they were earning and life smooths out. Their marriage becomes easier and smoother because they no longer have those financial restraints. Having enough money can be very satisfying.

Having enough money to take nice vacations is very satisfying. Taking a vacation on a sailboat is quite nice. Sailing around the Greek Islands in the Mediterranean, coming into a bay in the afternoon and anchoring, sitting on the deck eating a delicious meal and having a drink as the sun sets with a gentle breeze drifting across the water, schools of fish shimmering past when being chased by some larger fish, birds calling and feeding on the fish. That is a very satisfying experience.

Power can be very satisfying. When I was in seminary, Mike Ford was one of my classmates. He started seminary as the son of a Congressman and in very short order became the son of the Vice-president of the US and then President when Richard Nixon resigned. His life changed a bit and wherever he went, a couple Secret Service Agents followed him.

One August, he was talking with the Dean of the seminary and the Dean happened to mention that an Englishman, Andrew Lincoln, was due to come to the school to begin teaching in September, but did not think he would be able to make it because each day when he went to the US Consulate in London to get his visa, he was told to come back another day.

A day or two later, Professor Lincoln went to the Consulate and was met by the Consul head who told him, “I don’t know who you know, Mr. Lincoln, but he must be very important. Here is your visa. Bon voyage.”

Here in Morocco I see line after line of people waiting in front of consulates to get a visa. I myself wait in line after line to get a car registered. There is one way that the countries of the world are all alike and that is that we all have to wait for some bureaucrat to fill out our papers or grant a visa. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to be able to go and mention a name and get those papers right away? Don’t you think power can be satisfying?

Just pick up the phone and call the right person and say, “I need a visa for a friend so he can go with me to Spain,” and it’s done. That’s satisfying.

Pleasure is very satisfying. A delicious meal with just the right drink to accompany it and a dessert that melts in your mouth is a very satisfying experience. I spent an evening in Costa Rica while on a business trip. I had a wonderful body massage, ate a delicious meal and then sat in a heated pool with a drink in my hand, looking around at the palm trees and mountains with a gentle mist coming down from the sky. If Annie had been there, it would have been perfect. But that was still satisfying.

Wealth, power and pleasure can be extremely satisfying. The world has a lot to offer. The world can be a very pleasant place in which to live. Preachers do a disservice by dismissing wealth, power and pleasure so easily. They need to be more clear in what they mean when they make a distinction between what the world can offer and what God offers.”

My companion was left speechless. This was not so much because I had such an overpowering argument but because this conversation is something I made up and I chose to have the last word.

OK, so now it’s time to look at the beatitude for today and the relevance of this little dialog will become more obvious.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

There are two questions that need to be asked to understand this beatitude. What is righteousness? and what does it mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness?

Righteousness is right-relatedness, being in a right relationship with someone or something. If you are hiking to the top of a mountain peak and you make a mistake and lose the path, you need to come back to a right relationship with the path, find it and resume making progress toward your goal of getting to the mountain peak.

If you are married and having trouble and thinking about separating, you need to go for counseling and return to a right relationship with the person you married.

God created us and because of his love, gave us instructions and even Jesus as a living example of how we should live our lives. When we live our lives the way he wants us to, we are in a right relationship with him.

John Stott writes that righteousness can be looked at in three ways: legal righteousness, moral righteousness and social righteousness.

Legal righteousness is justification. Righteousness is right-relatedness and in this case it is being in a right relationship with God. When we enter God’s kingdom in faith and receive his gift of salvation, a legal transaction takes place. The penalty of death we deserve because of our sinfulness is taken from us and put on Jesus. Because of this, when God looks at us, he sees us not as sinners but as his perfect creation. We are brought, by this legal transaction, by Jesus taking upon himself our death, into a right relationship with God. We are made righteous. But Jesus was speaking to those who were already following him, so it is not clear that Jesus had this aspect of righteousness in mind when he spoke this beatitude.

Moral righteousness is sanctification. This is the process in which we cooperate with the Holy Spirit to become transformed to be the righteous person God sees us as being through Jesus. Over time we become, bit by bit, more like Jesus, more like the person God created us to be. Thirsting for this kind of righteousness is more than conforming outwardly to a set of rules, as did the Pharisees. This thirst for righteousness is a longing for behavior that will be pleasing to God. But it is longing for behavior that is reflected in the inner as well as outer person. It is not enough to do the right thing, We must do the right thing with clear motives and intentions. Moral righteousness is becoming more like Jesus in our outer and inner life. Just as we clean up our behavior observable to the world, we also clean up the inner recesses of our being.

Social righteousness is expressed by part of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, what we call “The Lord’s Prayer”. “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Social righteousness is a longing for the world around us to reflect kingdom values: liberation from oppression, justice in the courts, integrity in business dealings, promotion of civil rights and honor and respect in family affairs.

That’s what righteousness is. What does it mean to hunger and thirst for something?
Anyone who has walked through the desert (and I am not one of those – although I know many in our congregation have done that) knows what it means to thirst. I remember watching a WWII movie in which a handful of British soldiers were able to capture a large group of German soldiers during the fighting in North Africa. The fighting took place in the desert and the British were surrounded by Germans but found refuge in a small compound that had a well. The well was dry but the Germans didn’t know that. The British soldiers took the little water they had and pretended to bathe in it. This so demoralized the German soldiers who day after day lay in the sand under the hot sun with little or no water left that they surrendered. They were so thirsty that nothing else mattered. Surrender to the enemy that they vastly outnumbered was a secondary concern.

When we thirst for something, we have a longing for that thing that overpowers everything else. Nothing else matters except that we get that thing we long for. We have a hunger, a thirst that will not be satisfied unless we get what we thirst for. It is not enough to have a little of what we hunger and thirst for. We will not be satisfied until we are filled with what we hunger and thirst for.

When we compare the satisfaction the world can offer through money, power and pleasure and the satisfaction God offers us through a right relationship with himself, we have to be careful to make the right case.

You can tell someone they really ought to come to church. “We have great singing, the pastor is the most brilliant, insightful, creative preacher (oops, I got carried away there), the congregation is friendly and caring. You will really like it.”

But they can say: “Sleeping in on Sunday morning and waking up to have a leisurely breakfast reading the daily paper and perhaps catching a bit of the news on TV and then playing a bit of golf or tennis is quite a nice way to spend a day. I really like that.”

Both are satisfying and I would imagine there have been times when you’ve been tempted some Sunday morning to have that leisurely breakfast.

I began this sermon with a conversation defending the satisfaction the world can offer us. I objected to the simplicity of what my imaginary friend was saying and tried to pull him closer to the truth. But now I want to give three reasons why what the world offers cannot really satisfy, three reasons why church works better than a leisurely Sunday morning.

The first is this, while the pleasure, power and money of the world can be satisfying, it cannot sustain satisfaction during difficult times.

The wealthy and powerful face the same sense of helplessness as the poor when their child dies. A debilitating disease affects both rich and poor, powerful and weak. What difference does it make how much money you have when money cannot buy back a life that has been lost? What difference does it make what important people you know when a disease you cannot control is taking over? When you sit in the doctor’s office and hear her say you have six months to live, what satisfaction do money, power and pleasure bring? When a friend or family member betrays you, what difference does it make if you have money and power?

One of the stories I remember reading in first or second grade, when I was six or seven years old, was about some monkeys who were playing in a tree. They had a great time, swinging in the branches, eating bananas. But then it would rain and they would sit there shivering in the wet and cold and say, “We need to build a shelter.” But then the sun came out and they would play, forgetting entirely about the shelter until the next time it rained.

This is the way it is with the world’s pleasures, money and power. They satisfy as long as things are going well. When difficulty comes along and we are cold and shivering in the rain, their deficiencies are revealed but when the sun comes out and the difficulties fade away, the satisfaction comes back.

You can’t count on what the world has to offer to satisfy you. It is too dependent on life going smoothly without disruptions.

The second problem with what the world has to offer is that what it offers will sooner or later disappear.

Up to the age of 12 I lived in central Pennsylvania in a rural area. We had a very nice house on 30 acres of land (12.14 hectares) that went up the side of a small mountain. My father had a good job earning a very good salary in a family company. My parents were well respected and active in civic associations in the small town near where we lived.

One day in the early 60s, they were standing by the window of their bedroom looking out at the ridge in back of our house and my mother said to my father, “Well at least we’ll never have to worry about money.”

Within a year my father’s family had split in two over a fight for ownership of the family business and we moved to New Jersey. My father invested in a new business, lost most of the money he received from his share of his father’s business, and then went through almost twenty years of financial hardship.

My parent’s relationship suffered in these years. Without the money, power and pleasure they had in central Pennsylvania their marriage disintegrated and life ceased to be one they would have called satisfying. My mother, in particular, suffered. When life became difficult and money and power fell away, she had nothing to support her.

Jesus began his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew with the Beatitudes. Later on in Chapter 6 he said this:
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.  21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Why not store up treasures on earth? Why not seek money, power and pleasure? Because earthly treasures are bad? No! Because they won’t last!

Proverbs 23:5
Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone,
for they will surely sprout wings
and fly off to the sky like an eagle.

It is not that riches might be lost but that they will always be lost. Whatever you are holding in your hand that the world offers, it will disappear. Soon or at the end of your life.

I John 2:17
The world and its desires pass away, but the one who does the will of God lives forever.

Money, power and pleasure are not satisfying when suffering comes on the scene and it becomes clear that they cannot help us cope with the suffering. Money, power and pleasure are not ultimately satisfying because there will come a time for each of us, whether during our lifetime or at the end of our life on earth, when any money or power we have and pleasure we seek will be lost to us.

The third problem with what the world offers is that hungering and thirsting after something that cannot ultimately satisfy increases the hunger and thirst rather than satisfying it. What this does is to transform hunger and thirst into a lust. Let me explain:

Money, power and pleasure are not evil. God gave those things to us and we are all meant to deal responsibly with these things. They are good because God created them. The problem comes when we begin to pursue them as we are meant to pursue God.

Frederick Buechner defines lust as, “the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.” Thirsting or lusting for money, power or pleasure will always, will always end up to be unsatisfying. Let’s say that you are successful and begin to be wealthy and powerful. When you hunger and thirst for money and power, can you ever have enough? Once you have it you have to worry about how to hold on to it. Where can it be safely stored? What do you do at the end of your life when you realize you will die? What can you do with all that you have accumulated? The Pharaoh’s of Egypt had it buried with them but wherever they went, they left their riches and power behind. As you grow in wealth and power, the satisfaction you were seeking doesn’t show up so the solution seems to be to get more power and more money in the hopes that that will satisfy.

The satisfaction the world offers through money, power and pleasure is deficient because it doesn’t satisfy when hard times come, because these things will sooner or later disappear and because the pursuit of these things results in increasing dissatisfaction, not satisfaction.

In contrast, when we hunger and thirst for Jesus and his righteousness, we receive satisfaction that endures because only Jesus and his righteousness will last and endure. As we continue to hunger and thirst, we continue to receive more and more of what does satisfy and what we receive is not fickle. It is not inconsistent. It is even more present in difficulty than when things are going smoothly. It will not fade away. We will not leave it behind.

How can you become hungry and thirsty for righteousness?

If you were living in Spain or France or any of the countries that just a month ago converted to the Euro and you had a trunk full of pesetas or francs, what do you think would be the wise thing to do? Because you realize that those coins and bills will soon become nothing more than scraps of metal and bits of paper, you take them to the bank and exchange them for Euros. It’s not that the pesetas and francs are evil or bad. They simply won’t help you in the future.

I think part of hungering and thirsting for righteousness can be a rational decision. What you see around you will not last so why not invest yourself in what will last? Hunger and thirst for what will endure. Hunger and thirst for what will ultimately satisfy and so produce satisfaction in the here and now as well.

Take time to look around and reflect. It is as simple as seeing what works and what doesn’t. The historical record of people’s lives reveals the wisdom of seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. On a purely practical level, do what works.

For what do you hunger and thirst? When you daydream, what do you daydream about? When you fantasize, about what do you fantasize? What do you want more than anything else in life? Make some wise decisions. Invest now for a certain future. Replace your dreams of material wealth with dreams of God’s kingdom coming into the lives of those around you.

Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.