The Pursuit of Happiness
“Happy the man who has a concern for the helpless.”
Psalm 41:1 (N.E.B.)
Every one of us wants to be happy. Sometimes happiness is an elusive thing – hard to come by. Not every one of us finds his or her happiness in the same way. Some of us don’t seem to know where to look for our happiness. On all sides of us – from amusement centers, from automobile sales advertisements, from travel bureaus, and social clubs there come the beguiling calls: “Here, Here, this way to your happiness.”
And each one of us responds, in keeping with our individual tastes or desires of the moment; for does not our nation’s famous Declaration of Independence declare that our three inalienable rights bestowed by our Creator are the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
One rather peculiar pointer to our happiness comes to us from the first verse of the 41st Psalm where one man shouts out a strange conviction: “Happy the man who has a concern for the helpless.”
Can we believe this – that our personal happiness lies along the route of becoming concerned for the helpless? Well, comparing that with skiing in Colorado, surf bathing at Waikiki, night-club hopping in New York or New Orleans, or Los Vegas, or having a “fun time” on the strip of Mississippi Casinos south of Memphis.
To begin with, “having a concern” doesn’t usually excite us to an expectation of happiness. “Getting concerned” about anyone in trouble means “feeling sympathy” for them and also “exercising judgment” and “expending effort” in their behalf. We are not in the habit of going after our happiness along that route.
What’s even worse, “getting concerned with the helpless” sounds like getting all mixed up with unhappy people. If we do that, how can we keep their unhappiness from rubbing off on us?
The helpless people the Psalmist has in mind are the poor, the sick, the weak, the oppressed – in short, all the powerless people who are overwhelmed by the hardships, misfortunes and cruelties of life.
Now if we took the Psalmist’s pointer to find our happiness – if we believed there was some truth in this first verse of the 41st Psalm: “Happy the man who has a concern for the helpless,” who are some of the helpless that we, in our search for happiness today might concern ourselves with?
Certainly for us at this moment, the most conspicuously helpless people are the victims of the tornados that swept through our Mid-South last weekend: the injured, the bereaved, the homeless, destitute folks of West Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. Are we pursuing our happiness of the moment by doing something to express our concern for them?
Then, of course, there are always with us helpless little children, but in our time more cruelly in jeopardy because they are caught in the squeeze of conflicting ideologies about welfare and education, race and culture, wealth and power. Do we ever think of seeking our happiness by getting concerned about the helpless and hopeless condition of little children?
Then there are the crippled, the sick, the unemployed and unemployable, the destitute and homeless, the broken in heart and in spirit – these are always, in every time and place, the helpless.
Some of the most helpless people I’ve encountered are in the ranks of those we are accustomed to think of as being the most self-sufficient. When death comes to break the family circle of the wealthy, the powerful, the fortunate people who have no prior experience with tragedy, and no habits of the heart formed by a daily walk with God, just because they are thoroughly unacquainted with grief and misfortune, how often they become in a moment the most vulnerable, the most pitiful, the most helpless people of all. Are we finding our happiness in compassionate concern for perhaps the most neglected of the helpless of our time?
It is very difficult for us to find any appeal in the Psalmist’s invitation to happiness through getting concerned for the helpless. We might accept his invitation from a sense of duty, but we don’t expect to get any enjoyment from following his suggestion.
Of course, we can see how a compassionate person who has lived his life in helping the helpless may become blessed in the memory of mankind after he is dead and gone – like a St. Francis, a Florence Nightingale, an Albert Schweitzer, but that is a “post-mortem blessedness” that doesn’t quite fulfill our expectations of happiness now.
Dee Brown’s novel, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, related many “Instances of compassion from men on both sides of the American Indian and white frontiersman confrontation – who tried desperately to achieve a degree of sanity in times when massacres and chicanery, broken treaties and starvation were commonplace.” (Paul Nicholas Pavich) In the retrospect of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee all the good guys are the ones who wear the white hats of compassion. All the bad guys are both red-men and white-men who had no concern for the helpless and acted in cruelty.
There is a sense in which life gives back what one puts into it. He who takes up the sword, perishes by the sword. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. And also, just as surely: “Blessed – happy – are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
But of course, the real reason the Psalmist says that a compassionate person, the one who has a concern for the helpless is the happy person, is the theological reason: it is all because God, the all powerful, has a concern for the helpless. It is because the Creator has created each one of us in His own image – made us, at least in this way, “Godlike” — so we experience the thrill of our highest potentialities, the sense of our ultimate fulfillment, when we act like God acts – when we are becoming something like God is.
The 1st Psalm celebrates the happiness, the blessedness, of the righteous man: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.”
The 32nd Psalm celebrates the happiness, the blessedness, of the forgiven and forgiving man” “Blessed is the man whose sin is forgiven.”
The 41st Psalm celebrates the happiness, the blessedness, of the compassionate man: “Blessed is the man who has a concern for the helpless.”
Each Beatitude from the Psalter affirms the happiness of the person who shows and shares something of the varied aspects of the Divine nature: Righteousness, Forgiveness, Compassion.
There has always been a struggle going on among people of religious impulses about the kind of religious service God wants from human beings, based on the various notions people have about the character of God.
In the earliest days of Israel’s life in Canaan the Baal worship of the Canaanite tribes appealed strongly to the people of Israel. Baal worship was a fertility cult, based on the belief that the Supreme Being was more concerned with reproduction and production than anything else. There was abundant evidence in the animal and plant kingdoms that prolific reproduction ranked high in importance in the Creator’s functions and character. So some people, early on, really believed that the way to worship God was to engage in a licentious liturgy.
Others have seen the essence of life in blood. Surely when the blood was all drained from the body of a man or an animal, the life had gone out of it. So God, the giver of life, must be worshipped through offering bloody sacrifices.
But the predominating influence in Biblical religion was that of the inspired prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New Testament who insisted that the service God wants, which is in keeping with His character, is moral and spiritual in nature.
The prophet, Amos, reacting violently to oppressive, cruel and callous inhumanity coupled with bloody sacrifices and elaborate religious feasts, cried out: “I hate, I despise your solemn assemblies, but let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”
And Isaiah, describing the quality of service God wants in His servant people declared that the Spirit of God would dwell within God’s own people inspiring them: “to bring good news to the humble, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim deliverance to the captives, and to release those in prison, and to comfort all who mourn.”
But it was Jesus who most pointedly sharpened the goal of human blessedness and happiness to a compassionate concern for the helpless, explaining that this is so because God is like the good Samaritan in the parable he told, and like the Judge on the great white throne in the last judgment who declares: “Come ye Blessed, for I was hungry, and naked, and in prison, and sick . . and you had a concern for my helplessness and ministered to me.”
So how much better for us than our praying that God will grant us what we want to fulfill our desire to be happy – how much better than our pleading for God to be on our side in our pursuit for happiness – is our asking God to incline our hearts to share God’s concerns as revealed in Holy Scripture and especially in the life and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
The state or quality of our theology is the determining factor in the quality of our life. What I believe about God, who God is and what God is concerned about, forms and fashions my life.
The saintly John Mackay, in his time, counseled us to “seek something higher than happiness – namely, Blessedness – that state of awareness of God’s presence with us and approval of our life style.”
And old John Calvin’s theology, boiled down to a brief summary in our Shorter Catechism on the subject of our inalienable right for the pursuit of happiness, comes just to this: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God (in all that we do, and so) to enjoy Him forever.”
PASTORIAL PRAYER
Eternal God, our Heavenly Father, thy son, our savior Jesus Christ, has taught his disciples to pray for the coming of thy kingdom and the doing of thy will here on earth as it is done in heaven. So we now pray, O Lord, that we may more clearly know what is thy will for us in our personal responsibilities, in our families, in our church and national affairs. And we ask, too, O Lord, for the courage, when we know thy will, to do it, especially now where our help is needed by our neighbors and fellow citizens whose lives and homes and families and destiny have been devastated by flood and tornados and acts of violent crime. Do thou have mercy on thy suffering people and stir up within us a concern to be thy agent in their rescue.
Bless our nation, O Lord. Defend our liberty and preserve our unity. Save us from violence, discord and confusion. Fashion into one people the multitudes brought here of many kindreds and tongues. Imbue with the spirit of wisdom those whom we entrust with authority in these troubled days, to the end that there may be peace at home and that we keep a place among the nations of the earth.
We pray these for this congregation. May our sainted members of the past be an encouragement to the present and a prophecy for the future. Make us and all churches true homes of the Divine Spirit, fruitful sources of great character. For all little children, for young people who seek thy inspiration, for all homes whose hopes are in the sanctuary, for this company, and all absent friends whose prayers are with us, we lift our supplications. Make us, O God, worthy of thy church, and make thy church worthy of Thy Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.