Where do you seek happiness?

Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.” (Psalm 16:1-2, NRSV)

Something Augustine of Hippo wrote caught my eye yesterday. I was reading in his book about understanding and teaching the Scriptures. In it, he wrote about the key to our happiness being that we place our hope for happiness in the correct place. Our chief mistake in life is that we seek happiness in the things of this world rather than in God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This caught my attention.

I’ve read this before. I’ve heard it before. I’ve even preached and taught this before, but like so many of the really important truths, I had lost sight of it. As we are all prone to do, I had let the world capture my gaze and forgotten what the Psalms and the rest of Scripture speaks of so frequently. I have no good apart from God.

This is more than the simple theological truth that God is the source of all good things. As important as that statement is — and as worthy as it is of deep reflection, this is not what caught my attention.

What matters is not simply whether God is the source of good but whether God is the good for which our entire life aims. Is our life organized around drawing closer to God, finding our joy in God, and finding peace only in God?

For the vast majority of us, the answer is “no.”

Yes, we hope to know the blessing of God. Yes, we turn to God when we fall ill or those we love are in the hospital. Yes, we hope to go to heaven and take pleasure in the life of the church.

But all these fall short of the point.

The purpose of prayer is not a transaction where we get something from God. The purpose of worship is not to feel the warm glow of candlelight on Christmas Eve. The point of all that we do is God. We pray, we worship, we sing, we do the good works, so we might be drawn into the enjoyment of God’s fellowship. To stop short of that is to miss the mark entirely.

In what do you place your hope for happiness? Is it God? Is it something else?

The big C Church

I’ve been reading City of God by Augustine recently. A couple of passages about the nature of the church have grabbed my attention and won’t let me rest.

Normally, I would write a post about these kinds of passages and try to make some point or argue for some conclusion arising from them. But for the last couple of days I’ve been trying to land on a conclusion without success. So, I’m going to share these quotations and some questions they are stirring up for me.

Here are the passages:

[W]hile the City of God is on pilgrimage in this world, she has in her midst some who are united with her in participation in the sacraments, but who will not join with her in the eternal destiny of the saints. Some of these are hidden; some are well known, for they do not hesitate to murmur against God, whose sacramental sign they bear, even in the company of his acknowledged enemies. (Book I, Chapter 35)

And later:

In this wicked world, and in these evil times, the Church through her present humiliation is preparing for future exaltation. She is being trained by the stings of fear, the tortures of sorrow, the distresses of hardship, and the dangers of temptation; and she rejoices only in expectation, when her joy is wholesome. In this situation, many reprobates are mingled in the Church with the good and both sorts are collected as it were in the dragnet of the gospel, and in this world, as in a sea, both kinds swim without separation, enclosed in nets until the shore is reached. There the evil are to be divided from the good … (Book XVIII, Chapter 49)

I love that phrase “in the dragnet of the gospel.”

Here are some questions and thoughts that arise for me from reading these words.

I experience a tension here between Augustine’s realism about the church as it is and John Wesley’s passion for a movement that strives for a robust sense of lived holiness. Perhaps this is at its heart the difference between a church and a movement. If so, I wonder how United Methodism — or whatever forms come next — learns to live with that tension.

I wonder what Augustine sees as the role of the clergy in shepherding those in the church who are known to “murmur against God”? What, I wonder, did the bishop do in the face of members of the church who did not keep their baptismal vows? Wesley did not hesitate to eject “disorderly walkers” from Methodist class meetings. What would Augustine say about that?

Finally, I’m struck by the Augustine’s language about the church here. Just as his book speaks of the church as the city of God, he writes in these passages in a sense of the church as a collective. The church is being prepared for its final exaltation and glory. The language is a contrast to the way I often think and often hear others speak about the church. We often see the church as a collection of individuals, and we usually talk about salvation in terms of this or that individual. Augustine has a different point of focus. Clearly, he is attentive to the fact that the church has individual people in it, but his vision of the church and salvation seems to come — for lack of a better phrase — from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Again, I feel a tension between our emphasis on local, contextual, and congregationalist impulses and the idea that the Church (capital C this time on purpose) is a body that as a whole is on a pilgrimage toward glory. I don’t know exactly how to describe this tension much less discuss ways to navigate it, but I wonder if we United Methodists have let our distrust of our broken polity erode our ability to perceive or speak about the Church in the way an Augustine would.

As I warned you at the start of this post, I don’t have any conclusions to argue here. I am sharing these passages from Augustine and some of the thoughts in my head because I need to get give those thoughts another place to live for a while until I can give them more attention. I don’t have the leisure right now to wrestle with them like Jacob.

I’d be interested in any thoughts or questions these words stir up for you.

The UMC at the Valley of Elah

During the later stages of the controversy over Donatism in Africa during the fourth and fifth centuries, Augustine of Hippo took a major role. It is a long and complicated story and not without controversy still today, but I wanted to share some of Augustine’s words that remain relevant to the church today. While writing in response to an opponent in the controversy, he had these words for his allies in the church.

These things, brethren, I would have you retain as the basis of your action and preaching with untiring gentleness: love men, while you destroy errors; talk of the truth without pride; strive for the truth without cruelty. Pray for those whom you refute and convince of error. — Answer to Petilian the Donatist

In my branch of the universal church, United Methodism, we need these words.

We have within our denomination two groups who are convinced of the truth. We stand arrayed like the Israelites and Philistines on the hills surrounding the Valley of Elah. In our struggle, each side believes itself to be the bearer of the banner of truth. Each side has come to this conviction with earnest, thoughtful, and prayerful effort. Neither side holds its convictions loosely, and for most on both sides those convictions are closely tied to a whole network of beliefs and convictions that are central to their entire faith. Neither could easily set aside their convictions on the issue of human sexuality without unraveling many other beliefs. The roots of their convictions are deep and tangled up with much else that defines their faith.

Both sides are tempted to see and portray the other side not just as wrong but as evil, led astray by devil and in the legions of the anti-Christ. Both are tempted to see the other as not just in error but as the enemy of God. Both are tempted to attribute to the other all manner of vices and dark motives.

Standing separate from these two groups, a third group calls for an end to the struggle. They do not appear to see how deeply rooted the convictions that drive the two contending sides are and appear to assume that they can be laid aside as easily as a person takes off a baseball cap and puts on another. They imagine a unity in the church that could only come if the contending sides both admit that what they hold as truth is not truth but mere opinion and not essential to what it means to be a Christian.

Maybe the image I have drawn here is not right, but it is how the situation appears to me. It is not a new moment in the life of the church, which has sadly always been rent asunder by disagreements, heresy, and sin. And this morning I turn to the wisdom of Augustine to help me in this moment.

I do not think either side can or will lay down their banners and return to their homes. And so I pray that we might hear and heed the words of Augustine until the Lord brings our church through this crisis. Act and preach and speak with gentleness. Love those with whom we contend. Set aside both pride and cruelty. Pray for those we believe are in error.

I am not wise enough to see how God will lead us through this. If I am in error, I pray the Lord will break me gently. If I am in the right, I pray my words and speech honor Christ.