Text: Psalm 112
Other texts: Isaiah 58:1-12
A couple of weeks ago social observer David Brooks wrote about happiness. Happiness has been in the news a lot these days. It is trendy to talk about happiness. This is new. Though happiness may have been a goal for people, it was not considered polite to talk about it. Maybe people thought that happiness was not a worthy pursuit. Too self-centered sounding, maybe. Or maybe happiness was supposed to be a side effect of something else: accomplishment, say, or wealth, or a good marriage.
But it turns out that people are not very happy and they are not very happy about not being happy. They are supposed to be happy, but they are not. What’s up with that? It is disappointing. And we do like to talk about what’s disappointing.
Another thing: times are tough. But we have lost the sense that if times were better we’d be happier. Being better off has not made us happy. Our values have betrayed us. We do like to talk about betrayal, too.
Brooks writes about this. He says, “many Americans have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prized the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to things that matter most. … When it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own.” And he says they don’t know to whom to turn.
But help is on the way from science, who is now willing to talk about happiness. “Brain science,” he says, “helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.”
I love brain science. And Brooks’s article is wonderful and funny and insightful. But I think he should read Psalm 112. Whose subject is how to be happy. A lot of the Bible is about happiness, which is, as I said last week, another word for blessed. We are suppose to be happy. And the Bible is not quiet about how to live a happy life. And it is not vague.
There are two sorts of ways the Bible talks about happiness. One is the crabby way. “If you don’t do things this way, you’ll be sorry.” You will not be happy, you’ll feel estranged from God, bad things will happen, you’ll be confused and feel empty. There is a little bit of that in today’s first reading from Isaiah. (And the prophets seem to like this mode in general). You, Isaiah tells his audience, are greedy, quarreling hypocrites. No wonder things are not working out. No wonder you are not happy.
The other way the Bible talks about happiness I’ll call the Praise the Lord! way. That’s the way of today’s psalm. “Praise the Lord!” is how it starts. And then it goes on to tell everyone how to be happy. The source of happiness is God. And the way to be happy is to do what God says. This should not be surprising if we think, as it says in Genesis, that God was pleased with creation and called it good. Implicit in this is that God knows what is good for us, that God hopes that we will be happy, and that God is unhappy when we are. If we think that God is happy when we are miserable and takes pleasure in our suffering, we probably are thinking of the wrong god.
The psalm is divided into three parts. But before I talk about them, you should know that this particular psalm, Psalm 112, like nine other psalms, is an acrostic. That means each line begins—in Hebrew—with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. You can get the idea in English in this translation:
Alleluia! (A, right?)
Blessed (this line begins with “B”) are those who live in deep awe of God.
Con-tentment and delight in God’s commandments are theirs, and their
De-scendants will be mighty in the land.
And so forth. You get the idea.
Acrostic forms are good ways to remember things. They are a mnemonic, a memory aid. That this psalm is an acrostic means two things. It means first that the ideas in the psalm were important enough that people were expected to learn them. And it means second that everyone in the community shared these same words, word for word. In that sense it is like a prayer we all know—like the Lord’s prayer—or like the blessing after worship, or a well-known hymn.
The psalm has three parts: 1. Blessings for you. 2. Blessings for others. 3. How to live. And also an appendix: too bad for the wicked. (The lectionary suggests we might leave out that appendix, but I don’t think we can do that). All of this is in the context of the first line: God knows how you can be happy; pay attention to what God says.
Here are the ways you will be blessed if you do that. Your family will be strong and you children will be delightful. You will be surrounded by good things. You will find yourself close to God and will never be abandoned. Your life will feel firm under your feet, it will feel solid.
Here are the ways others will be blessed. You will be a light for others, who will be led by your example to be happy themselves. They will be the recipients of your generosity, and they will know they can trust you to be just and fair. They will know you to be honorable.
Here is what you need to do. You need to be generous. You need to be just. You need to give to those who need it. And to care for others and be compassionate. You need to not listen to gossip and slander. You need to be brave.
Here is what the wicked (or the foolish, another way of putting it) will do. They will be angry and upset. Partly that’s because you will be happy and they won’t. And mostly that’s because you’ll be doing things that God says will make you happy, while they will be trying to figure out how to be happy without doing those things. And it won’t work.
That is what the passage in Isaiah is really about. About people trying to live in ways that are not generous, compassionate, and so forth. Trying to fool God, really, or fool the nature of the world. To think that thinking about yourself first is the way to be happy. Then discovering that the world does not work that way.
Why aren’t we happy, the people ask? Because you are fighting me, God says, fighting the way things work. Because in particular you are trying to avoid sharing your bread with the hungry, housing the homeless, protecting the vulnerable. But if you do, Isaiah says, your light will rise in the darkness and your gloom will be dispelled. God will guide you, and satisfy your needs, and make you strong. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. You will be happy.
Matthew in his Gospel speaks of the law and prophets and the kingdom of heaven. This is the psalm all over again, but different language. Those who attend to the teaching of the law and the prophets are those who take delight in God’s commandments. The kingdom of heaven is by definition a place of profound happiness. Those who do as God instructs, who take delight in God’s commandments, have the greatest happiness. Those who do not will be the least happy.
If the Bible is a user’s manual—as I suggested last week—then it is pretty clear about this. The things that the world teaches us to do to be happy turn out to be bogus. They make promises, but they are liars. David Brooks and Isaiah and Matthew agree. Even brain science agrees. If it is happiness that you want, being generous, brave, and obedient to God works better than anything else.
Praise the Lord!
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