The Hunger Pangs Of Success
Sermon
The Feasts Of The Kingdom
Sermons On Holy Communion And Other Sacred Meals
In the 1990s we lived in highly successful times. We had the longest sustained bull market in history, awaiting the huge correction predicted by weary bears and market realists. Month after month, millions of dollars poured into mutual funds and stock portfolios as baby-boomers, who had never experienced a serious market correction or economic recession, stored up more and more for retirement. Even the economically troubled Asian economies failed to arrest the powerful surge toward more and more American wealth and success.
New York City was Boomtown USA largely because of the burgeoning financial markets. Office buildings partially vacant after the '87 crash were filled at premium prices, with new ones going up. Apartment rentals were astronomical, once again putting the squeeze on the middle class to make Manhattan the domain of the very rich or the very poor. The building boom continued and where it will stop, nobody knows.
And the theatres and restaurants love it -- especially the restaurants. The New York Times reported unprecedented business in the city's finest and most expensive eateries. As year-end bonus money made its way into the bank accounts of Wall Street types, the spending was lavish. The very best of foods was enjoyed in great quantities. And the wines? Well, it was not the medium-priced wines that sold, but the most expensive! Wines at $300, $400, $500 a bottle made their way to the banqueting tables of the very successful in such great quantities, wine stewards had to search the world for additional supplies.
And after the great feasts of obvious opulence and lasting luxury, there were the cigars and port. And not just any cigars and port, but the very best, the most aged and expensive money could buy. It was the scene of wealth, prosperity, and success at its very best. Tom Wolfe's "masters of the universe," described in Bonfires of the Vanities, were at it again. They had it all. They were the masters of success. There did not seem to be many pangs of hunger in this crowd.
I.
But the crowd in Jesus' day was a different matter.
It is true the Romans were having their equivalent of a bull market. They were indeed "masters of the universe." They had established their imperial boundaries south to Egypt, East to Persia, North to Pontus, and West to Gaul and Britain. Their powerful, well-trained armies made safe the impressive network of roads Rome had built. Rome's navies had made the sea lanes relatively free of pirates to ensure prosperous trade. Roman architectural accomplishments of stadiums, aqueducts, palaces, government buildings, and shrines reflected the glory and grandeur that was Rome. Success was everywhere. There were no pangs of hunger at Caesar's table. They were stuffed with success.
But of course, Jesus and his people were a different matter. The priests and landowners were doing all right, of course, since they had learned to accommodate Rome and sustain their fortunes, if not their liberty. A few in the miniscule middle classes held their anger in check as they kept their head above financial and political water.
But the peasants -- the wretched peasant poor, the subsisting, suffering ninety percent of the population of Jesus' fellow Jews -- these poor, famished peasants were quite a different matter. In their aching bellies the pangs for success throbbed with an intensity born of centuries of suffering. In the distended bellies of their little ones, in the drained countenances of laboring mothers, in the lined faces of work-weary men -- the longing for success and victory flowed in a subterranean stream of intense hatred and craving hope.
Add to that the memories -- the humiliating memories. For the last couple of centuries prior to the Romans, their own leaders had betrayed them with corruption and oppression. Before that it was the Greeks, the Persians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. They were God's people after all, or so they had been told. When would they have their day in the sun? When would theirs be the kingdom and the power and the glory? Their whole body politic longed for victory, prayed for vindication, and craved success. Who could blame them if within their deepest self there raged a ferocity of desire, and if within their heart of hearts, a fanatic craving for victory awaited liberation?
So when, nearly 2,000 years ago at Passover, Jesus scanned the gleaming white limestone of Jerusalem in the midday sun, he looked longingly at the city he wished to win for God and his people. And the writhing, aching, malnourished bodies of Jewish peasants looked longingly with him.
As he surveyed the thousands of pilgrims there for the High Holy Days, they surveyed him as the possible long-awaited Messiah, the prayed-for, hoped-for Davidic liberator. The powerless peasants by the thousands, the beleaguered middle-classes, the secretly hopeful rich -- all felt the writhing, pulsating pangs for success in their inner beings.
So the throngs began their long-suppressed shouts to acclaim him King. The muted hopes of the centuries began to find their voice and join the chorus. Palm branches were taken from the trees for a flag fanfare. Cloaks were thrown on the ground as a "red carpet" for the approaching royal King. And the voices gathered in massive chorus to shout as he approached the Holy City:
Open to me the gates of
righteousness, that I may
enter through them and give
thanks to the Lord.
Amen. Amen.
This is the gate of the Lord; the
righteous shall enter through it.
Amen! Amen!
Save us, we beseech thee, O Lord!
O Lord, we beseech thee,
give us success!
Amen! Amen!
Blessed is he who enters in the name
of the Lord!
We bless you from the house of the Lord.
The Lord is God, and he has given
us light.
Bind the festal procession with branches,
up to the horns of the altar!
Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes
in the name of the Lord
Hosanna! Son of David!
Amen! Amen!
II.
Centuries later in Amherst, Massachusetts, a sensitive, reclusive literary genius would be perceiving what Jesus was perceiving that day amid the potential power and glory.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires the sorest need.
("Success Is Counted Sweetest," The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, p. 35)
Feeling the same deep, God-given truth flow through her as flowed through Jesus, Emily Dickinson continued:
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory.
As he defeated -- dying --
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
(op. cit., p. 35)
The disciples, of course, were in their glory in the triumphal parade. Three long, hard years of campaigning up and down dusty Palestine seemed now to be paying off. Three long years of giving up the comforts and securities of home and family. Three long years of giving up income, living on campaign contributions, while their competitors went on to build up their fortunes (meager as they were). Three long years of a different town, a different bed, and different food on the rubber chicken circuit every night. Three long years of success and accolade, counter-balanced with ridicule and rejection. Three long years coming at last to cherished victory and overwhelming success.
Yes, open for us the gates of righteousness that we might take this city and nation by storm and make at last this country our own. This is the day the Lord has made. We are rejoicing at last in the promised victory. Save us now! Grant us victory! Give us success! On to victory. We will be the "masters of the universe."
Much madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the majority
In This, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --
And handled with a Chain --
("Much Madness Is Divinest Sense," Emily Dickinson op. cit., p. 209)
Yes, with a chain and a cross too! In that subterranean stream of divinest sense tapped by poets and prophets, Emily Dickinson saw what Jesus saw and knew in his heart of hearts. He saw, he knew, the majority of the shouting thousands in the crowd were wrong.
He saw it and he knew it as he rode down the steep side of the Mount of Olives, on past the Garden of Gethsemane, across the Brook Kidron, on up the slope to the Eastern gate of the Temple Mount area wherein the Messiah was to appear. He saw it and knew it as he looked into the eyes of the cheering thousands -- the eyes filled not only with longing, but with revenge; eyes filled not only with hope, but with the age-old lust to get even. He could feel it in the voices grown hoarse and coarse with shouting -- the bloodthirsty, blood-curdling cries for holy war, for herem, for holocaust. Obliterate the enemy, kill every man, woman, and child. Let the enemy's blood flow in our rivers to the sea.
In their own way, in their own bloodless way, Tom Wolfe's "masters of the universe" in his Bonfires of the Vanities did just that. Sitting as they did at the junction of rivers of massive fortunes ebbing and flowing, turning and twisting at their control, they had it all. It was all theirs -- money, power, women, prestige, influence, prosperity, security, almost immortality itself. Except in Sherman McCoy it all came apart, came tumbling down, dissipated in affairs and confrontations, in mistakes and reversals, collapsing in the weight of opulence without conscience, and colliding with reality in the blindness of pride and arrogance.
Yes, it is true Jesus seemed to make a move to be "master of the universe." Yes, it is true, he did throw out the moneychangers who represented the multimillion-dollar business of selling animals for sacrifice and changing foreign currency into Temple shekels. Yes, it is true his disciples were there by the thousands, many of them armed, no doubt, to lead an uprising and coup much like Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers a couple of centuries earlier.
But instead of taking the city by storm, he wept over it. Instead of seizing the moment and taking the tide at its full, he lost his fortunes. Instead of fulfilling the promise to feed the stomachs of the thousands of peasant poor with bread, he was haunted by the deeper truth that man does not live by bread alone. Instead of seizing power and glory for himself and his people, he seemed to throw it aside to his enemies. Instead of coming into the glory and power and fullness of his Kingdom, he rides on to an ignoble and humiliating death of utter weakness and despicable mockery.
O Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, would that even now, you the city, whose name means, "vision of peace" -- would that even now you knew the things that make for peace, but they are hidden from your eyes, so lamented Jesus.
It's a terrible truth, one we choke on and gag on every year at this time -- the truth that he who exalts himself will be humbled; the truth that he who is first will be last, and the last first; the truth that the first in the Kingdom of God is the one who serves rather than the one who domineers; the truth that those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for the sake of God will find it; the truth -- the strange truth -- that the hunger pangs of success are quieted in self-denial rather than self-exaltation. For what shall it profit a person if he or she gains the whole world and loses his or her very soul, his or her very self?
It is that strange, strange, set of truths Jesus saw that tumultuous, triumphant day in Jerusalem. Jerusalem and Judea indeed, the whole world itself, cannot satisfy the hunger pangs for the soul's success. Man's achievement never can do it. It is God's gift. It is God's gift of grace through faith.
So he came into the city in glory amid the waving palms and shouting thousands on a "red robe carpet" of threadbare peasant cloaks, thrown jubilantly, expectantly from suffering peasants famished for success. Into the city with shouts of Hosanna. And out of the city to the shouts of crucify, crucify. Into the city amid waving palm branches. Out of the city flogged with the cat of nine tails. Into the city with proffers of victory banquets and rarest of wines; out of the city to derisive spit and vile cursing. Into the city on the beast of the peaceful King; out of the city on the cross of the condemned criminal.
O Jesus, Jesus. Jesus didn't you get it wrong? Didn't you miss the flood tide when it came? Didn't you miss your chance for fame and glory? Didn't you fail in your bid for your place in the eternal sun?
No, says the great apostle, Paul. He did not try to gain immortality by violence. Instead, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, so now God had highly exalted him so that all who believe in him might have eternal life and the deep, deep satisfaction of food for our famished souls.
Why do you spend your money for
that which is not bread,
and your labor for that
which does not satisfy?
So asked the prophet Isaiah long ago.
Incline you ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live ...
says the Lord. -- 55:2-3
And paradox of paradox, irony of ironies, the exalted Jesus now says to all one and one-half billion of his followers all over the world, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall not thirst ... I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread he will live forever ..." (John 6:35, 51). And satisfy the hunger pangs of success.
Prayer
O Eternal God, whose power sustains the universe and whose vital Spirit pulsates in all living things, we praise you for all the splendor of spring and for all the glory of life bursting forth from winter rest. Even now as our northern earth tilts itself toward your life-giving sun, even so would we tilt ourselves, with any winter coldness of heart, toward you, our Eternal Sun. We praise and adore you, O God, and in this sacred time and place seek your holy presence.
On this holy day when we celebrate Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we think of our own longings for victory and triumph in our own lives. In business or profession, in family or career, we seek the satisfactions not only of success, but the rewards of the inner contentment of the soul. Help us always to direct our lives in ways that will be both honorable and fulfilling.
And for those of us who have failed, for those of us who have had reverses and setbacks, for those of us discouraged and suffering from depression -- for those of us defeated now, bring a new sense of hope and a new resolve to move forward in the pilgrimage you have planned for us.
We pray for those with special needs -- for those doing battle with disease, for those in fractured relationships, for those alienated and estranged, for those mourning loved ones. Grant them your strength and blessing according to their need. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
New York City was Boomtown USA largely because of the burgeoning financial markets. Office buildings partially vacant after the '87 crash were filled at premium prices, with new ones going up. Apartment rentals were astronomical, once again putting the squeeze on the middle class to make Manhattan the domain of the very rich or the very poor. The building boom continued and where it will stop, nobody knows.
And the theatres and restaurants love it -- especially the restaurants. The New York Times reported unprecedented business in the city's finest and most expensive eateries. As year-end bonus money made its way into the bank accounts of Wall Street types, the spending was lavish. The very best of foods was enjoyed in great quantities. And the wines? Well, it was not the medium-priced wines that sold, but the most expensive! Wines at $300, $400, $500 a bottle made their way to the banqueting tables of the very successful in such great quantities, wine stewards had to search the world for additional supplies.
And after the great feasts of obvious opulence and lasting luxury, there were the cigars and port. And not just any cigars and port, but the very best, the most aged and expensive money could buy. It was the scene of wealth, prosperity, and success at its very best. Tom Wolfe's "masters of the universe," described in Bonfires of the Vanities, were at it again. They had it all. They were the masters of success. There did not seem to be many pangs of hunger in this crowd.
I.
But the crowd in Jesus' day was a different matter.
It is true the Romans were having their equivalent of a bull market. They were indeed "masters of the universe." They had established their imperial boundaries south to Egypt, East to Persia, North to Pontus, and West to Gaul and Britain. Their powerful, well-trained armies made safe the impressive network of roads Rome had built. Rome's navies had made the sea lanes relatively free of pirates to ensure prosperous trade. Roman architectural accomplishments of stadiums, aqueducts, palaces, government buildings, and shrines reflected the glory and grandeur that was Rome. Success was everywhere. There were no pangs of hunger at Caesar's table. They were stuffed with success.
But of course, Jesus and his people were a different matter. The priests and landowners were doing all right, of course, since they had learned to accommodate Rome and sustain their fortunes, if not their liberty. A few in the miniscule middle classes held their anger in check as they kept their head above financial and political water.
But the peasants -- the wretched peasant poor, the subsisting, suffering ninety percent of the population of Jesus' fellow Jews -- these poor, famished peasants were quite a different matter. In their aching bellies the pangs for success throbbed with an intensity born of centuries of suffering. In the distended bellies of their little ones, in the drained countenances of laboring mothers, in the lined faces of work-weary men -- the longing for success and victory flowed in a subterranean stream of intense hatred and craving hope.
Add to that the memories -- the humiliating memories. For the last couple of centuries prior to the Romans, their own leaders had betrayed them with corruption and oppression. Before that it was the Greeks, the Persians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. They were God's people after all, or so they had been told. When would they have their day in the sun? When would theirs be the kingdom and the power and the glory? Their whole body politic longed for victory, prayed for vindication, and craved success. Who could blame them if within their deepest self there raged a ferocity of desire, and if within their heart of hearts, a fanatic craving for victory awaited liberation?
So when, nearly 2,000 years ago at Passover, Jesus scanned the gleaming white limestone of Jerusalem in the midday sun, he looked longingly at the city he wished to win for God and his people. And the writhing, aching, malnourished bodies of Jewish peasants looked longingly with him.
As he surveyed the thousands of pilgrims there for the High Holy Days, they surveyed him as the possible long-awaited Messiah, the prayed-for, hoped-for Davidic liberator. The powerless peasants by the thousands, the beleaguered middle-classes, the secretly hopeful rich -- all felt the writhing, pulsating pangs for success in their inner beings.
So the throngs began their long-suppressed shouts to acclaim him King. The muted hopes of the centuries began to find their voice and join the chorus. Palm branches were taken from the trees for a flag fanfare. Cloaks were thrown on the ground as a "red carpet" for the approaching royal King. And the voices gathered in massive chorus to shout as he approached the Holy City:
Open to me the gates of
righteousness, that I may
enter through them and give
thanks to the Lord.
Amen. Amen.
This is the gate of the Lord; the
righteous shall enter through it.
Amen! Amen!
Save us, we beseech thee, O Lord!
O Lord, we beseech thee,
give us success!
Amen! Amen!
Blessed is he who enters in the name
of the Lord!
We bless you from the house of the Lord.
The Lord is God, and he has given
us light.
Bind the festal procession with branches,
up to the horns of the altar!
Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes
in the name of the Lord
Hosanna! Son of David!
Amen! Amen!
II.
Centuries later in Amherst, Massachusetts, a sensitive, reclusive literary genius would be perceiving what Jesus was perceiving that day amid the potential power and glory.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires the sorest need.
("Success Is Counted Sweetest," The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, p. 35)
Feeling the same deep, God-given truth flow through her as flowed through Jesus, Emily Dickinson continued:
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory.
As he defeated -- dying --
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
(op. cit., p. 35)
The disciples, of course, were in their glory in the triumphal parade. Three long, hard years of campaigning up and down dusty Palestine seemed now to be paying off. Three long years of giving up the comforts and securities of home and family. Three long years of giving up income, living on campaign contributions, while their competitors went on to build up their fortunes (meager as they were). Three long years of a different town, a different bed, and different food on the rubber chicken circuit every night. Three long years of success and accolade, counter-balanced with ridicule and rejection. Three long years coming at last to cherished victory and overwhelming success.
Yes, open for us the gates of righteousness that we might take this city and nation by storm and make at last this country our own. This is the day the Lord has made. We are rejoicing at last in the promised victory. Save us now! Grant us victory! Give us success! On to victory. We will be the "masters of the universe."
Much madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the majority
In This, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --
And handled with a Chain --
("Much Madness Is Divinest Sense," Emily Dickinson op. cit., p. 209)
Yes, with a chain and a cross too! In that subterranean stream of divinest sense tapped by poets and prophets, Emily Dickinson saw what Jesus saw and knew in his heart of hearts. He saw, he knew, the majority of the shouting thousands in the crowd were wrong.
He saw it and he knew it as he rode down the steep side of the Mount of Olives, on past the Garden of Gethsemane, across the Brook Kidron, on up the slope to the Eastern gate of the Temple Mount area wherein the Messiah was to appear. He saw it and knew it as he looked into the eyes of the cheering thousands -- the eyes filled not only with longing, but with revenge; eyes filled not only with hope, but with the age-old lust to get even. He could feel it in the voices grown hoarse and coarse with shouting -- the bloodthirsty, blood-curdling cries for holy war, for herem, for holocaust. Obliterate the enemy, kill every man, woman, and child. Let the enemy's blood flow in our rivers to the sea.
In their own way, in their own bloodless way, Tom Wolfe's "masters of the universe" in his Bonfires of the Vanities did just that. Sitting as they did at the junction of rivers of massive fortunes ebbing and flowing, turning and twisting at their control, they had it all. It was all theirs -- money, power, women, prestige, influence, prosperity, security, almost immortality itself. Except in Sherman McCoy it all came apart, came tumbling down, dissipated in affairs and confrontations, in mistakes and reversals, collapsing in the weight of opulence without conscience, and colliding with reality in the blindness of pride and arrogance.
Yes, it is true Jesus seemed to make a move to be "master of the universe." Yes, it is true, he did throw out the moneychangers who represented the multimillion-dollar business of selling animals for sacrifice and changing foreign currency into Temple shekels. Yes, it is true his disciples were there by the thousands, many of them armed, no doubt, to lead an uprising and coup much like Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers a couple of centuries earlier.
But instead of taking the city by storm, he wept over it. Instead of seizing the moment and taking the tide at its full, he lost his fortunes. Instead of fulfilling the promise to feed the stomachs of the thousands of peasant poor with bread, he was haunted by the deeper truth that man does not live by bread alone. Instead of seizing power and glory for himself and his people, he seemed to throw it aside to his enemies. Instead of coming into the glory and power and fullness of his Kingdom, he rides on to an ignoble and humiliating death of utter weakness and despicable mockery.
O Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, would that even now, you the city, whose name means, "vision of peace" -- would that even now you knew the things that make for peace, but they are hidden from your eyes, so lamented Jesus.
It's a terrible truth, one we choke on and gag on every year at this time -- the truth that he who exalts himself will be humbled; the truth that he who is first will be last, and the last first; the truth that the first in the Kingdom of God is the one who serves rather than the one who domineers; the truth that those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for the sake of God will find it; the truth -- the strange truth -- that the hunger pangs of success are quieted in self-denial rather than self-exaltation. For what shall it profit a person if he or she gains the whole world and loses his or her very soul, his or her very self?
It is that strange, strange, set of truths Jesus saw that tumultuous, triumphant day in Jerusalem. Jerusalem and Judea indeed, the whole world itself, cannot satisfy the hunger pangs for the soul's success. Man's achievement never can do it. It is God's gift. It is God's gift of grace through faith.
So he came into the city in glory amid the waving palms and shouting thousands on a "red robe carpet" of threadbare peasant cloaks, thrown jubilantly, expectantly from suffering peasants famished for success. Into the city with shouts of Hosanna. And out of the city to the shouts of crucify, crucify. Into the city amid waving palm branches. Out of the city flogged with the cat of nine tails. Into the city with proffers of victory banquets and rarest of wines; out of the city to derisive spit and vile cursing. Into the city on the beast of the peaceful King; out of the city on the cross of the condemned criminal.
O Jesus, Jesus. Jesus didn't you get it wrong? Didn't you miss the flood tide when it came? Didn't you miss your chance for fame and glory? Didn't you fail in your bid for your place in the eternal sun?
No, says the great apostle, Paul. He did not try to gain immortality by violence. Instead, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, so now God had highly exalted him so that all who believe in him might have eternal life and the deep, deep satisfaction of food for our famished souls.
Why do you spend your money for
that which is not bread,
and your labor for that
which does not satisfy?
So asked the prophet Isaiah long ago.
Incline you ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live ...
says the Lord. -- 55:2-3
And paradox of paradox, irony of ironies, the exalted Jesus now says to all one and one-half billion of his followers all over the world, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall not thirst ... I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread he will live forever ..." (John 6:35, 51). And satisfy the hunger pangs of success.
Prayer
O Eternal God, whose power sustains the universe and whose vital Spirit pulsates in all living things, we praise you for all the splendor of spring and for all the glory of life bursting forth from winter rest. Even now as our northern earth tilts itself toward your life-giving sun, even so would we tilt ourselves, with any winter coldness of heart, toward you, our Eternal Sun. We praise and adore you, O God, and in this sacred time and place seek your holy presence.
On this holy day when we celebrate Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we think of our own longings for victory and triumph in our own lives. In business or profession, in family or career, we seek the satisfactions not only of success, but the rewards of the inner contentment of the soul. Help us always to direct our lives in ways that will be both honorable and fulfilling.
And for those of us who have failed, for those of us who have had reverses and setbacks, for those of us discouraged and suffering from depression -- for those of us defeated now, bring a new sense of hope and a new resolve to move forward in the pilgrimage you have planned for us.
We pray for those with special needs -- for those doing battle with disease, for those in fractured relationships, for those alienated and estranged, for those mourning loved ones. Grant them your strength and blessing according to their need. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
