Rev. Dr. Joel D. Biermann
Romans 5:1-5
June 11, 2017 Trinity Sunday
For most of my tenure as a parish pastor my family and I lived in a parsonage provided by the congregation. On the whole, I was quite content with the arrangement. When something went wrong with the house, it was never my problem. I loved that. Having that weight removed from my mind was completely worth some of little trade-offs, if there were any. I actually rather liked living across the parking lot from the sanctuary. A two-minute commute via my feet was great, and I had no problem handing out a key for the church doors whenever asked. If the parsonage was a fishbowl, it didn’t bother me. I didn’t even mind the small collection of congregational relics that occupied one corner of the basement: you know stuff that wasn’t in current use, but was “too nice” simply to discard. Included in that assortment of old treasures was an obsolete steel typing table. I remember it well because plastered across the front of it was another relic from the mid-twentieth century: a bold and bright vinyl bumper-sticker, placed there no doubt by some over-worked and underpaid secretary, declaring a great Christian cliché from a couple generations ago: “Work for the Lord—the pay’s not much, but retirement benefits are out of this world.”
Quite aside from the obviously annoying aspects of the cliché, such as the fact that like most cliché’s it’s trite and superficial, there is actually a deeper theological problem with the old bumper sticker—one that has not gone the way of typing desks and inane Christian humor. Unfortunately, the theological idea at work in the notion of the old bumper sticker continues to be very much at work in the church in the early 21st century. The phrase reveals something significant about Christians and their way of thinking. The notion of bad pay but great retirement assumes what is taken for granted among Christians: that when you live your life for God, you will one day, some day, enjoy fabulous benefits and blessings; but in the meantime…well, there’s not much to be gained by living life God’s way, and in fact, there is much to be lost. People often see Christianity as offering only deferred rewards and benefits—something valuable after you die, but not much good while you live. Christianity is viewed as a religion that is more for later than it is for now.
Of course, there is certainly an element of truth in the idea that Christianity is a future-oriented faith. We live looking or the day of resurrection. The central truth of our faith is that Christ came to make people right with God; he came to restore his creation. He came to put you back into a vital relationship with your Creator that will never end. He came to give you the assurance that in him you have eternal life and a place in his everlasting Kingdom on the Last Day. That’s what Jesus came to do, certainly. That’s what he did for you, and it will all be fulfilled just as promised when Jesus comes again to raise his people and to restore all of his creation. This is the first and most important truth that undergirds our Christian confession.
The great joy and blessing of the promise of the resurrection at the return of Christ should not, however, be the only happiness that you know as a Christian. There is more to Christianity than a promise that will be fulfilled on the last day. God does not just make promises for a distant someday. He is, on the contrary, a God also of the present and the now. The Chinese have a character or symbol that appears often in their artwork. It’s formed by writing or drawing the character for happiness, and then joining and overlapping it with the same character again, creating a new character called, naturally, double-happiness. Not surprisingly, double-happiness shows up a lot at weddings. It serves as a statement and a blessing. The idea is a rich and real happiness, not one that is superficial and easily disturbed, but one that is robust and unshakeable. Double-happiness is what God has in mind for his people. Yes, he wants you happy, that is fully complete and joy-filled, at the end when you join him in his eternal glory. But, he also wants you to be happy—joy-filled and driven by an abiding confidence right now as you live life in this world. Both parts are important to God. His plan for you is double-happiness.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not a commercial for the glory-seekers and good-life hucksters who masquerade as Christian teachers and preachers. The sort of happiness God desires for you in this life is not a life that overflows with good stuff in a non-stop parade of blessings intended to make you smile. Your best life now, is not the objective of Christianity. No, the point is simply that your eternal life in Christ does not begin at death or even at the resurrection from the dead. Your eternal life, a life marked by genuine joy and contentment—in other words, the greatest kind of happiness—begins when you are baptized. You’re living it, now. Today, you live in eternal life following God’s plan, knowing God’s grace, trusting God’s promises, and delighting in God’s joy. Happiness to come, happiness today. Double-happiness: it’s God’s plan for your life. It begins now.
You know this. You know that you are supposed to be filled with joy and buoyed by happiness even now in this life and in your day-to-day routine. But reality seems to negate it. No matter what God promises, suffering and difficulties persist. You still feel pain. You still endure hardships. Happiness seems impossible. Maye that’s why so many Christians give up on the present and relegate their faith to a future-only relevance. It holds a promise for someday, but for today, it seems to make very little difference. Faith is kept around and cultivated only to the extent necessary to keep it functioning at a base level, much like paying the premium on your insurance policy. You need to keep it current—for some day. But, for today, it’s of no real use.
Since their Christian faith seems to have so little value for life right now, too many who claim the name of Christ look elsewhere for meaning and happiness in life. They look to the world. They figure that since their Christian faith is only good for someday, it is the world that will help them find some glimmer of happiness and pleasure, today. Indeed, many church-goers actually assume that God is at odds with their own present happiness. It is though that God does not want people to be happy or have joy in the present. It’s almost taken for granted that if you are going to find any real pleasure or happiness in life, today, then at least one of God’s fun-killing commandments will have to be violated—or certainly bent a little. People don’t believe that they will actually find genuine joy and real happiness by yielding fully to God’s will for their lives today. They think that if they were to go all-out and let God take over every single part of their lives, then they would surely forfeit any chance they might have had of being able to salvage a little fun and enjoyment in an otherwise suffering and pain-ridden world. To be happy and to have fun, they believe that they must keep God and his kill-joy rules and laws at arm’s length.
The result of this thinking is people who consider themselves to be good followers of Christ, and who trust whole-heartedly in him for their eternity after death, but who live in the meantime as if it is up to them to do their best to find some happiness in whatever form the world has to offer. These people are constantly trying to figure out how much of the world’s answers to what provides happiness they can enjoy without putting their eternity-insurance-policy into jeopardy. And so people go to church simply to avoid the possibility of hell, but have little or no interest in actually following God and his will for their daily living. These people have bought the lie that God or at least his church, only wants to infringe on their happiness and only says “no” to every joy in life. God, they think, does not want his people to have any fun. There are people who believe that all-out followers of God must live lives that are altogether boring, severe, austere and devoid of any real happiness.
This, of course, is completely false. Nothing could be further from the truth. God is not a boring or deathly serious God. He delights in his creation, and he wants his creatures to delight in his creation as well. God did not create you to live a dull and dreary existence. He doesn’t want his people, he certainly doesn’t want you, to be glum and long-faced groveling in suffering and woe, and utterly despairing of hope and joy in this life. That is not God’s plan. To follow God’s will with all of your life is not to sacrifice all happiness now for the sake of a distant, promised happiness, later. God created you to know deep and certain joy and genuine happiness later and now. Eternal life begins now. To live in his will is to know double happiness. The reality is the opposite of what people outside and even inside the church assume: the reality is that outside of Christ and his will, there is no real happiness in this life; there is only futility and superficiality. But within God’s plan there is perfect joy and genuine happiness.
This is not to say that there are not still sorrows and pain and difficulties to be endured. There is no magic that will bring you an endless procession of material blessings just because you pray or believe or give the right way. No, the happiness that comes when you follow Christ is the wonderful freedom of knowing that the God who created you, redeemed you, and is now fully restoring you, the one and only Triune God, is your God and he is completely in control of everything. That’s the source of perfect joy. That’s the source of real happiness. When you yield your life to him, you find, the meaning, fulfillment, and happiness that people spend their lives trying but failing to find. When you live in God’s will, then even the sufferings and sorrows of life are transformed—you see them now as tools that God uses to accomplish his purposes in your life and to bring you more perfectly in sync with him. Don’t settle for an abridged or deffered Christianity that’s only good after you die. Live in all-out Christianity that takes the coming glory and joy of Christ’s Second Coming and pulls it forward into the reality of the here and now. Live in that kind of Christianity and you’ll have more than double happiness, you’ll know happiness that is multiplied exponentially and that explodes into every moment of your life, today.
Living as Christ’s disciple does come with a remarkable retirement plan. But God also pays incredible wages of peace, joy, contentment, and happiness every single day in this present life. Happiness later and happiness right now—double happiness. That’s what God, your God, the only true God, gives to you. Amen.