The Beatitudes
II Corinthians 4:7-9 (TEV)
Yet we who have this spiritual treasure are like common clay pots…
We are often troubled, but not crushed; sometimes in doubt, but never in despair; there are many enemies, but we are never without a friend; and though badly hurt at times, we are not destroyed.

I have a favorite story about a strange cycle of happiness. I found it in Robert Fulghum’s classic, All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten. (Villard Books, 1988) pp. 15-18)
This is how he tells it.

1. The Neighbor Leaves the House:
One morning this week I saw my next-door neighbor leave his house. He was in his young professional, Greek god full power mode, slim-tailored business suit with luggage for the day: briefcase, laptop, CrossFit gym bag for after work, $100 Yeti daytrip designer lunch bag, and the garbage to take out.

He locks the door, turns and calls “Good morning,” to me across the driveway, takes three steps and then screams, “AaaaaaGGGGGHHHH!!!”

Spider Web! He has walked full force into a massive spider web, fighting off the sticky goo, swatting every which way, all the time wondering, “Where is the spider now?”

So, he flings the bags in all directions, going into a high kicking, flapping, dance, sort of like a combination sandhill crane mating ritual/kick boxing routine.

He swats at his golden, perfectly product styled hair and runs back to the door. Breaks the key in the lock. Runs to the back door, repeating the “AAAAAAGGGGGHHHaaah!” that drifts off with a sort of Doppler Effect as he rounds the house.

The guy thinks this spider is about the size of a lobster and has big poisonous lips and fangs. He’ll probably jump in the shower just to make sure no trace of the spider or its web is left with him.

2. From the spider’s perspective
Now here’s a different view of the scene, that of the spider. It’s a perfect late summer/early fall morning for a spider spinning a web. Just the right level of humidity. Our spider has been up since dawn, checking all the connections, throwing out a few new lines, thinking of all the nice little gnats she’ll have for breakfast.

She is feeling good.

All of a sudden chaos breaks loose – it’s an earthquake, tornado, and hurricane thrown together in a blender. Her web is torn loose and wrapped around a moving, slightly gooey haystack. This huge hunk of raw, running meat is making a sound the spider has never heard before, “AAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!” It’s too big to wrap up and eat later. It’s moving too much to hold down. “What do I do?” the spider wonders. “Do I jump, hang on and hope, dig in?”

Our spider has caught a human being. The big question for the spider is where is this human going and what will it do when it gets there?

3. What will the spider do?
If she survives, the spider will really have something to talk about – the one that got away that was THIS BIG. “And you should have seen the JAWS on that thing!”

Now spiders are amazing creatures. Spiders, by rough estimate, have been around 350 million years. There are roughly sixty to seventy thousand per neighborhood acre. Spiders are survivors, and no matter how many webs you and I have run into, they keep coming back.

There is an archetypal universal truth of happiness to be learned from the persistence of spiders. It is embodied in a song I know, and you know, and your children and your parents know. When you heard it this morning, I’m sure you didn’t even have to learn the motions.

The itsy-bitsy spider, went up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.
And the itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.

What is it with this song? Why do we all know it? Why do we keep passing it along to each new generation, especially when it is so pro spider?

It’s because life is like the story of the song. Every new day there’s a new drainpipe to climb and a new web to weave. And all of us have been knocked down a drainpipe, or two or ten or more.

How many of us at one time have had our hearts broken, have been disillusioned in a life’s dream, or have made some horrible judgments that led to some very bad behaviors? That would be all of us.

What do we do? We climb that drainpipe again, ideally, a little wiser. This time we check the clouds, or look for better ways to hang on the drainpipe. We might even have a plan B just in case we get knocked down yet another time. But we all do it again. We climb back up the drainpipes of life over and over again.

Thus – Happiness is…
We are beginning our new worship theme, “Happiness is…” And I believe that one of the truths of happiness is in this story.

We’re like the itsy-bitsy spider, climbing that drainpipe again, creating a new web of life and finding meaning in the process. We have a certain temptation in this life to believe that happiness can only come to us when everything is wonderful, our lives are settled, our children are happy, and the heat and humidity have finally left Gainesville.

This story is a reminder that happiness is a dynamic tension, a mix between calm and distress.
We heard a reading of the Beatitudes this morning. We’ve come to understand the meaning of the word Beatitude to be blessed, and most of our translations of the bible have the beatitudes beginning, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…, or Blessed are the meek, or Blessed are the merciful…”

The Latin word is “beatitudo” from “beatus” which means happy or fortunate, and tudo, which is a suffix that turns it into an abstract noun. So the people who translated the Jerusalem Bible in the 1960’s, as well as those who translated the American Bible Society’s “Today’s English Version” around the same time must have decided to shake things up a bit and call this condition “happy,” something a little more interesting and engaging than “blessed.”

I think that the purpose of faith is to challenge us to go deeper than the popular notion that happiness is a for example a fuzzy kitten, and instead get down to the bones of happiness.

Each of the states of happiness described in the beatitudes is a paradox, “Happy are those who are poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” When opposites are happening, a certain kind of happiness connects them.

I have known enough of heart break, both in my own life and also in the lives of those I love, to realize there’s nothing fun in it. Yet I think that most of us are thankful we did not continue as we were with those who broke our hearts. We would say that the change and struggles of those times have led us forward to new awareness and enriched relationships.

This is the kind of happiness that is triggered by the holy being present, where, if the language works for you, God appears. There’s a wonderful quote from the Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, who says “The Holy One appears when one thing ends and another begins. A baby is born. A child becomes an adult. An old person dies. One enters a room. One leaves a room. One sets out on a journey…” Kushner says, “God is there.”

It appears to me that these are times of dynamic tension, of opposites, of a certain level of pain and stress. It is here where a level of happiness comes that lasts.

Like the spider spinning her web, we ascend, Kushner says, “through even higher spirals of awareness and chambers of light.”

Retirement for me holds this kind of happiness when it lives the tension. There is the constant letting go of what went before. I am never free of being a minister or free of having been the minister of this church. My experiences of this ministry live in my consciousness. They pervade my dreams. For me, and for my retired friends, we never let go of how our professions shaped us. It’s hard not to be those people anymore.

I have told some of you this story before. We had an agreement with the church that we would stay away for a year after our retirement to let everyone get settled in with the new minister. There was a new person greeting on my first Sunday back. I introduced myself and he said, “Reimer, Reimer. Didn’t you used to be somebody here?” Oh my, I used to be somebody here!

At the same time, I believe it is as developmentally important to finish that chapter of life that is career and move on into retirement as it is to leave home in that earlier chapter of life. I love my freedom now with a passion. And the freedom of this chapter has happiness and power and meaning basically as it exists in tension with what went before in my life.

This age, like any age is filled with the tension of loss and hope, sorrow and sheer joy.

Let’s take this moment in our church’s life as an example. We all, myself included, feel the unease that goes with a minister’s departure and the unknown of the future. The time of seeking a new minister has an inherent sense of loss of what was and a certain worry about what might be. It involves a lot of work for our leadership, ministers, staff, and church officers, and a lot of trust and hope for those of us who support them. This church is so dear to us that the thought of something going wrong in the process of a search gnaws at all of us a bit. I say “all of us” because now I’m sitting down there with you wondering how this will go.

The UCG web has at some level been disturbed, and we’re climbing back up the drainpipe again.
At the same time, those of you who are rather new in this church have heard the stories from long time members of the power of those times between ministers in the past, how the search for Sandy and me, for Kristi Button, for Andy Bachmann, for Vince Amlin, for Shelly Wilson, and for Talia Raymond were all powerful moments in this church’s history. We’re happy to talk about the strength of those moments brought us.

And you have heard how this congregation pulled together to become a sanctuary church. You heard of the three-year process of becoming an Open and Affirming church in 1992, welcoming all people including all the varieties of sexual identity.

You have heard how a congregation a little more than half this size pulled together and built this beautiful sanctuary and office wing, and did the same thing again with the Sunday School wing and the West Wing.

While you’re probably as tired of hearing these tales as my generation was of hearing how our parents walked miles to school, uphill both ways and through snowstorms during the depression, the reality is that we find great meaning in those moments of dynamic tension and struggle.

Happiness is, as the song says, different things to different people.

This is a particularly precious time of year in my life. On this very week in 1973, I flew to Gainesville from New Milford, Connecticut where I was the associate pastor at the Congregational church for my second interview to become the minister at UCG. I had been here with Sandy in July for a preliminary interview, and we had a fantastic experience. But that July Sandy was 7 months pregnant with our second child, and we told the search committee we couldn’t really even talk any more about this job change until the baby was born.

Chris was born on September 16. We discovered that UCG was still interested in us and wanted us to come for another interview. Just after childbirth, Sandy couldn’t fly down for the interview. The last thing she said to me was, “If they offer you the job, whatever you do, don’t give them an answer until you come home and talk to me.” I promised.

I came here on October 15. It was that day in Florida when the heat truly subsides, which I’m imagining will happen this coming week, perhaps magically on Wednesday, October 15. Everyone here had their windows open and their air conditioners turned off for the first time since the previous May. It was like New England’s first day of spring, only in reverse. The search committee and I had an engaging conversation. The church had 75 members, no building and had not yet survived a year financially without assistance from the denomination, and the denomination said it wasn’t going to give them any more money.

The search committee offered me the job.
What do you think I did?
I said yes, on the spot.

When I came home to 3-year-old Matt, 4-week-old Chris, and Sandy who was still in post-partum recovery from child birth, I walked into a family web that I had just unraveled. It was not that Sandy didn’t love this church. It was that she needed to be part of the conversation.

She was upset with me beyond words, and I was the most pathetic guy on earth.

The next morning, I asked the person who supervised my pastoral counselling if he would counsel Sandy and me. I didn’t even know if Sandy would show up. But then I saw her walking up the church parking lot holding the baby. Matt was in his play group. Sandy walked over to me, gave me the baby, and sat down with her arms crossed. The counselor immediately supported her frustration with me 100%. It was the first step in climbing back up the drainpipe of our marriage.

We spent time with him, then and again, and again, processing the moment. I learned a lot.
The result was that we did find a way to rebuild our web and have grown, found happiness, fallen, and risen up again and again. This is the happiness and presence of the holy I share with you again today. It’s the happiness of the beatitudes. It is here I have known with you the message of the apostle Paul again.

“Yet we who have this spiritual treasure are like common clay pots… We are often troubled, but not crushed; sometimes in doubt, but never in despair; there are many enemies, but we are never without a friend; and though badly hurt at times, we are not destroyed.”

Happiness is a cycle of rising, falling, crashing, rebuilding, and finding the meaning of our lives in this ever-renewing journey.

I close with these words by the poet, Jane Taylor.

Come hither
bring the next epiphany
tho’ it may be shrouded
in the darkest night of soul
‘tis too exquisite
not to know
the wisdom folded
within.

Prayer
We pause in this moment in the presence of the holy, deep within us, in our heart of hearts, surrounding us in golden light, and calling us always forward, in our highest hopes.
In this moment we pray for the kind of happiness that comes in all the ups and downs of building new webs of life, of losing those webs, of starting over again, and again.
May the wounds of our losses find healing in your light O God.
May all that is yet unlived in our lives blossom into a future graced with love.
Amen

Worship Theme: Happiness Is…

Larry Reimer
The United Church of Gainesville
October 13, 2019