In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. One of the great errors in the founding principle, not just of America, but of Western culture at large, is this notion of the pursuit of happiness, by its very nature. It’s not only an error, but it is a deception. Anyone who sets out in the pursuit of their own happiness is seeking really to satisfy themselves, satisfy their own desires, their own ego.
And when we look at the lives of those people who achieve these things, the world tells us, will bring us happiness, whether it be great wealth, celebrity, any kind of worldly status, what we see is a very different kind of fruit in their lives. Sadly, we see broken marriages, many, many broken marriages, a string of them often. We see families broken apart, we see alcohol and drug addiction, we see spiritual and psychological collapse and so on and so on. And the consequences of this deception extend beyond just the individual.
We have social and political systems that promise to work towards establishing a worldly utopia, a material utopia. Convince people that the conditions and experiences in this world can bring happiness. And very often people fall for this because in reality, the material conditions of our lives are capable of bringing us unhappiness. So when there is severe poverty within the families, there can be great fear and stress, there can be a great struggle.
But our material conditions cannot in themselves bring us happiness. The promise of happiness from the material world is a lie, it is a deception. So we must ask ourselves, is happiness even possible? Is it possible to be happy in this world?
And of course it is. And not just a fleeting momentary happiness, but true peace, true joy, because God created us to know joy, God wants us to experience His joy. But the demons work to convince us to direct our attention and our longing instead of to Him, to the world and to the flesh and to the self. Everything in the world has a purpose, everything.
And everything was created to glorify God, everything. So when these trees shimmer in the breeze, when the plants come into flower, when the birds sink, all of this is to the glory of God, the whole of creation glorifies God. And we, we were created to the glory of God, to glorify God. It’s in lives that glorify God that we fulfill our purpose.
And it’s only in fulfilling this purpose that we can experience eternal joy. So naturally perhaps we must ask ourselves, how do I glorify God? How can I possibly live a life that glorifies God in this way? Especially those of us who say, well I’m not in a monastery, I have children, a wife, I have responsibilities in the world, I have a job.
This is not something that we are left to work out for ourselves. In fact, if we do try to work out how to glorify God and live a purposeful life from our own reasoning, we will simply get it wrong. And the evidence is all around us in the world. Now in the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to St.
John, Jesus makes it clear how our lives can glorify God. He’s described there praying, praying to God the Father. And he says that his approaching passion, which he goes to willingly, he foresees it, he goes to it willingly. This passion, this suffering and this death is the glory of God.
It is to the glory of God. Now the world will immediately react and reject the possibility of this. So what does it really mean? What does it mean for us in our lives?
Well, Jesus is making it clear that his suffering is not just something that he goes to endure, but through it we see his love, his obedience, we see Christ’s self-sacrifice on our behalf. In his suffering, we see his love and his faith in a world beyond this world, in a life beyond this life. If God is to be glorified in our lives, then we must bear the same fruit. We must we must look beyond the immediate circumstances of our lives, the immediate circumstances in which we find ourselves on a day-to-day basis.
And we must be filled with love for other people. And of course the opposite is true. When we’re consumed with the things of the world, when we chase after the world’s transitory joys, when we live only to satisfy ourselves, then we deny the glory of God. And when we see these impulses, when we see ourselves falling into these temptations, we must remember that we are refusing the glory of God in our lives in those moments.
We see this reality, of course, embodied, lived out in the saints, and especially in the martyrs who forsook even their physical lives for their love of God, for their obedience to God, for their faith in all that God promises. Now Jesus goes on to say that he glorifies the Father by completing the work that he has come into the world to perform. And this work is the sanctification of human nature. And of course that is ascension, human nature, our nature was taken to the very throne of God.
He completes his work, he overcomes death, he overcomes the devil. But we must now follow him. We must struggle to repent, we must struggle to resist our evil impulses, our selfish desires. Every small act of repentance that we are capable of performing glorifies God.
Every small struggle for the sake of God glorifies God. Every act of obedience to Christ’s commands glorifies God in us. Every time we forgive anyone who hurts us, every time we try to choose love and not to judge, not to become angry, not to become jealous, then we glorify God. We know that saying so well, God is glorified in his saints.
And the peace, the the fearlessness and the joy that we see in them is the natural condition for which we were all created. This is the natural condition of our humanity restored in Christ. And so we must struggle, we must we must silence those voices that call us to the world’s pleasures. And we must ignore those demonic voices that tell us that we can find happiness if we buy this, if we own that, if we allow the world into our lives in so many ways, such convinces of anything of the world can bring us peace, can can put our soul to rest.
It is a demonic deception, it is a lie. We must meet the needs of our neighbours as though this were the only world. We must look to their needs, their material needs constantly, everyone, but for ourselves, let our hearts only desire self-sacrifice, mercy to be to be last in all things. Let us struggle that we may, we may taste the joy of God’s kingdom, a joy that nothing in this world can give to us or steal from us.