Hungering and Thirsting After Righteousness
Sermon originally preached by Rev. Kristen Yates at
the Mission Cincinnati on 6/20/21
Well, good morning friends. It is so good to be with you today and to be able to share the Word of God with you this morning. So, today I would like to start off by sharing part of a story found in In Fyodor Dosto(y)evsky’s renown novel, The Brothers Karamazov. It is a story called, “Lady of Little Faith.”
So, in this tale, a wealthy woman named Madam Holokav comes to see an elder and spiritual guide in the town monastery, who is named Father Zosima. She comes to thank him for healing her daughter Lise who has been experiencing night sweats, and she also engages him in spiritual conversation. This conversation becomes focused on the topic of active love and it enfolds like this. Madam Holokav says. “I sometimes dream of giving up all, all I have, of leaving Lise and going to become a sister of mercy. I close my eyes, I think and dream, and in such moments, I feel an invincible strength in myself. No wounds, no festering sores could frighten me. I would bind them and cleanse them with my own hands, I would nurse the suffering, I am ready to kiss those sores…”
Now, in response to Madam Holokav’s musings, Father Zizoma says that it is indeed a good thing for her to have such dreams; that they could very well lead her to doing much good in the world.
And indeed they could. However, Madam Holokav, actually has enough self-knowledge to admit that while this scenario seems good, it is unlikely to happen. She says to Father Zisoma, “Yes, but could I survive such a life for long? . . . That’s the main question . . ... I close my eyes and ask myself: could you stand it for long on such a path? And if the sick man whose sores you are cleansing does not respond immediately with gratitude but, on the contrary, begins tormenting you with his whims, not appreciating and not noticing your philanthropic ministry, if he begins to shout at you, to make rude demands, even to complain to some sort of superiors (as often happens with people who are in pain) – what then? Will you go on loving, or not? And, imagine, the answer already came to me with a shudder: if there’s anything that would immediately cool my ‘active’ love for mankind, that one thing is ingratitude. In short, I work for pay and demand my pay at once, that is, praise and a good return of love for my love. Otherwise, I’m unable to love anyone!”
So though Madam Holokav acknowledges a desire to show mercy and love to the sick and the needy in this world, she very clearly recognizes that she has a deeper desire for returned love and gratitude for her sacrifice. In fact, if her acts of mercy do not yield such goods, she is not really interested in pursuing such dreams, and she has the honesty to voice that to Father Zisoma.
Well, the conversation continues. And Father Zisoma actually praises Madam Holokav for her self-knowledge and the distress she feels from her conflicting desires. He essentially says that this is the first step to moving in the right direction in her life. And then later on in the conversation, he says this gem: “Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over. But active love is labor and fortitude. . ..” And then, Father Zisoma ends with an encouragement, acknowledging the Lords’s own hand in guiding Madam Holokav towards this kind of love.
Well friends, there is certainly much to unpack here in this story, but for the moment I want you to simply sit with this conversation. Keep it at the back of your mind and ponder it deep in your hearts. Could this conversation be a window into your own hearts and lives?
I think it could be. Well friends, let’s pray.
Lord God, thank you for your Kingdom and thank you for inviting us into this Kingdom. As we continue our journey through the Beatitudes this morning, would you reveal our desires to us, awaken new and Kingdom-oriented desires in us, and give us wisdom and strength to be able to reveal this Kingdom in the world through our active love and pursuit of righteousness. In the name of your son Jesus, Amen.
Friends, as we get started with unpacking our Scripture for today, I want to start off with a series of questions for you to ponder. So here they are: So, when you think about your wants, needs and desires, what are those things that you most desire in life? Or in other words, what do you most hunger and thirst for in this life? What are those things that form your priorities, drive you into action, or even perhaps keep you in a state of inaction? Do you even really know what these things are or are they more subconscious?
Now I would like you to consider this. In today’s highlighted Beatitude, Jesus tells us that “Blessed are the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the ones who most deeply desire righteousness above all for they will be full.
Now in making this claim, Jesus was not just making a statement of reality. He was also issuing an invitation to those of us who call ourselves His disciples. In fact, so important was this invitation that it stood at the center of all the Beatitudes, bridging the first three with the last three and making it possible (should it actually be sought after) for his disciples to grow into Kingdom people who could live their lives with an ever growing purity of heart, mercy, and a desire to make peace.
Okay, while that sounds great, what exactly is righteousness? For while righteousness is a concept spoken about throughout the Scriptures, I suspect that a lot of us don’t actually fully know what it is, and if we are going to pursue it, we need to know what it is.
Well, when, we look to the Scriptures, we get a full picture of what it is, and it has three aspects to it. The first aspect is legal righteousness: that is being put right with the Lord even though we continue to fall short. This simply means having our relationship with Him restored as result of what Jesus has accomplished through his death and resurrection and the faith we have put in Jesus.
The second aspect is moral righteousness, which refers to rightness of our behavior and character, our desire to please God, and not just by acting piously, but living from an internal rightness of heart and mind.
And the third aspect is social righteousness: that is seeking all of humanity’s liberation from oppression, caring for the earth, and approaching all relationships with an aim towards shalom or harmony. This last aspect, which I think we too often miss in our more individualized American Christianity, is actually a common understanding of righteousness throughout the Scriptures, especially in the Old Testament. And this kind of righteousness is often coupled with justice, for after all, where there is no justice, there can be no relational harmony.
So, we have three aspects of righteousness and when they are combined, it simply boils down to this: righteousness is right relationship everywhere between everyone and everything at all times. It is complete relational harmony, and this kind of harmony was the state of the world at the time of Creation and will be the state of all things in the New Creation.
Thus, as such, righteousness is obviously not a reality that we can fully experience now in our broken world – in fact, as we know the whole Bible story and thus the story of humanity as a whole is about our descent into greater brokenness, fragmentation, and alienation from God and each other, and then of course God’s plan to rescue us. So no, we cannot experience righteousness fully at this time. However, we can hunger and thirst for it and thus strive to make it as much of a reality as is possible by loving God and loving others with all of our hearts. We can pursue the active love that was the focus of conversation between Madam Holokav and Father Zosima.
No, doubt, however seeking to foster right relationships everywhere between everyone and everything at all times is a tall order, but it is one we can strive towards through the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as Father Zosima encouraged Madam Holokav, acknowledging the Lord’s hands on her dreams and wrestlings, we can also be encouraged for as Christians, we too have the Holy Spirit to slowly but surely guide us so that we can pursue righteousness in this life. This is profoundly good news.
And yet, we must return to the questions I posed before. Do we really hunger and thirst for righteousness? Do we really strive after it?
Well, of course I do believe that we sometimes feel inspired to do so, but I also believe that in many cases we simply do not make it our priority. Why is this? Well, while I think the answer is unique to each one of us, there are a few common reasons that work against many of us when it comes to the pursuit of righteousness, so I would like to take a few minutes now to explore these reasons.
First of all, I believe we do not strive for righteousness because we simply have not been taught the fullness of what righteousness is. Our churches have often reduced it to simply the legal or moral aspects of righteousness, and while those are very important, simply being “saved, “a good person”, or overly pious is not the entirely of God’s call on our lives. God has so much more for us!
Moreover, we cannot truly be upright in action or character if we ignore the social aspect of righteousness. Just think about the Pharisees who crossed every t and dotted every i when it came to their religious observance but who were not able to show mercy to others and even opposed the healing of others if the timing was off. In truth, the Pharisees were not truly pursuing righteousness but were demonstrating self-righteousness, a holier-than-thou attitude where they took pride in themselves and looked down on those who fell short. And this did not lead to the relational harmony that God desires for the world. And unfortunately, we too easily can become like the Pharisees.
Secondly, we do not pursue righteousness because we do not have a full grasp of how we participate in unrighteousness and injustice in our world. As professor Bruce Walke says, wickedness is the disadvantaging of others for the advantage of ourselves. Unfortunately, our world is deeply broken and interconnected, and even when we do not actively pursue injustice in this world, there are many ways that we unintentionally and passively participate in wickedness, receiving benefits from unjust systems.
Thirdly, we do not pursue righteousness because I believe that like Madam Holokav, we actually have deeper desires at play in our hearts, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. And at the end of the day, these desires are greater than our desire for righteousness and are what move us to action or keep us in a state of inaction. So, for example, we might say that we want to work for racial reconciliation, but our stronger desire for personal peace prevents us from engaging in the difficult conversations and actions needed to move towards this goal.
Fourthly, too often we define righteousness and justice in our own terms rather than on God’s terms. In fact, Romans 10 tells us of humanity’s proclivity to be ignorant of the righteousness of God and to establish our own rather than submitting to God’s. Well, this has many consequences, and one of those is the pursuit of cheap alternatives or shortcuts to true righteousness.
So for example, instead of hungering for the really good food of true righteousness, we hunger for what our preaching team jokingly called the “hotpockets of righteousness”: the cancel culture, the slactivism, or the virtue signalling where we send out a tweet here or facebook post there, which allows us to feel, “hey I am a good person who cares” but without forcing us to do the real, hard work of pursuing righteousness and Biblical justice which emerges out a love for Jesus and a vision of His Kingdom.
Like junk food, “hotpocket righteousness” is easily obtained and does bring some semblance of satisfaction, but without the deep nourishment that true righteousness brings. And in fact, in some cases, such lazy righteousness actually works against true righteousness. For example, more often that not, cancel culture aims at calling out injustice without promoting understanding, justice, reconciliation, and restoration of the person being cancelled. Thus, while fairly easy to implement, it fails the test of working towards right relationships everywhere with everyone and everything at all times. Listen to what Rich Villodas has to say about this. He says,
“In our day, the work of justice and reconciliation has been substituted by short-lived anger that is easily distracted, tears that start and end with tweets, and the fiery rants that avoid any clear sense of action. A culture of moral outrage often results in greater antagonism being created because the end result is not shalom (“peace”) but self-serving cartharsis.” Ouch! But I think he is right.
Finally, we don’t pursue righteousness, because we don’t see the fruit we are hoping for and thus we give up. But here is the reality, friends. In today’s Beatitude, we are not promised immediate satisfaction for striving after righteousness. Being completely satisfied will happen, but not until Jesus returns and re-establishes all righteousness across the heavens and the earth. Thus, we will continue to hunger and thirst until that day, and actually a better translation of today’s Beatitude is “blessed are those who are hungering and thirsting for righteousness”. The original Greek words of this Scripture are present active participles, indicating that we will continue to hunger and thirst in this lifetime. Again, we won’t be satisfied now, but one day, we will. And in the meantime, we can be filled with the love and power of the Holy Spirit, which gives us comfort and fortitude we need to continue on in our pursuit of righteousness.
Okay friends, so how are we going to do this? Now that I have spent some time exploring some of the reasons we do not pursue righteousness, I want to ask how can we can move forward in pursuing righteousness.
Well, first off, I believe pursuing righteousness will mean returning to the questions I have asked us to consider several times today, and doing so on a regular basis. It is important for us to do regular heart checks by asking ourselves, “are we in fact really thirsting and hungering after righteousness at this moment in our lives?” Or are there other competing desires taking precedence in our lives? Whatever the answers may be, it is good for us to be both honest with ourselves and with the Lord.
For only as we are honest, can we have hope in moving forward. For the reality is that we cannot do this in our own strength and we often don’t even want to do so. If anything, this invitation to hunger and thirst for righteousness should remind us again and again of our need for the Gospel - our need to receive Jesus’ own righteousness as a good gift from a merciful and forgiving God so that we can be in right relationship with Him again, and our need to receive his empowerment by the Holy Spirit so we have the same vision for the world that God has and are empowered to be people God has created us to be.
For it is only as we receive Jesus’ righteousness and the Holy Spirit’s empowerment, we will then be able to take incremental steps over our lifetimes towards a world where righteousness reigns. Steps towards reconciling and restoring relationships in all spheres of life. Steps towards advocating on behalf of all those the prophets of old spoke about: the widows, the orphans, the poor, the strangers, the foreigners, and the oppressed. Steps towards caring for the earth. And steps towards unveiling unjust systems and changing our lifestyles and these systems so that they reflect the relational harmony and flourishing of the Kingdom of God.
Now, you may recall that just a few minutes ago, I said that professor Bruce Walke said that wickedness is the disadvantaging of others in order to advantage ourselves. Well, the flipside of the coin is true as well, and Walke makes this clear. Righteousness is the disadvantaging of ourselves in order to advantage others.
Thus, our hungering and thirsting after righteousness, our works of reconciliation, advocacy, and personal and society change, will inevitably entail taking up our crosses in life: doing the hard work of loving real and messy people rather than holding onto some abstract, unembodied, love of humanity and the world. Being courageous and making sacrifices when it comes to our desires, our possessions, and our time. Making others’ experiences of injustice our own problem. And willing to deal with inconveniences, opposition and yes, sometimes even a degree of emotional turmoil and danger.
No, hungering and thirsting for righteousness will not be easy, but it will be worth it, and one day we will be fully satisfied. In the meantime, Jesus will be present with us and will care for us. We can hold onto the promise that Jesus makes later on in Matthew 6:33 that says that if we seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, all things will be added until us. God will care for us and our needs.
So, friends, can we do that? Can we seek the Kingdom of God? Can we thirst and hunger for righteousness? I believe we can, with God’s help. Now may the God of all righteousness work deeply in our hearts and minds so that we may be a light in this dark world and may be a sign of that time in the future when all righteousness will prevail in the heavens and on the earth. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.