Ambition

September 21, 2003

Be present, Spirit of God, with us this morning, that this house of worship may be a place where all darkness is penetrated by your light, all our troubles calmed by your peace, all our pain transformed by your suffering, and all death transformed by the power of your risen life in Christ. Help us now to hear what we need to hear, that we might live as you would have us live, for the sake of Christ our Lord.(1) Amen.

Daniel Gilbert is a professor in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology. Believe it or not, his scientific specialty is happiness. He and his fellow researchers spend a great deal of time and grant money trying to discover what you and I probably could have told them in the first place, which is that what we think will make us happy doesn’t always make us happy. We think that we will be completely satisfied if we buy a new car or redo the kitchen and put in Corian countertops, but that actually doesn’t do the trick for very long. The reason for such short-lived satisfaction, the researchers say, is that our brains adapt much more quickly than we imagine to the new, initially pleasurable things, so all too soon they become ordinary, and we lose the pleasure of the new. We move on to the next thing that we think will make us happy, thus fueling that endless and usually disappointing pursuit of happiness.(2) All one has to do is read the follow-up stories of people who won the jackpot in the lottery to realize that having your ship come in is not always what it’s cracked up to be, though I do remember the words of Sophie Tucker, who said that she had been rich and she had been poor, and being rich was better.

I recall a conversation with a man who had worked very hard to win a close election. Indeed, he won the election, only to find himself struggling in his first months of office. “How is it going?” I asked.

“Most days I feel like the dog who caught the car.”

The illusive pursuit of happiness: how would you answer the question “What do you really want?” The disciples who followed Jesus thought they knew exactly what would make them happy. Every single one of them wanted to be considered the greatest in the group. The question of who would occupy that position became a point of contention, so much so that they had argued about it out loud along the way to Capernaum. When they arrived and Jesus asked what they had been arguing about, they were silent, embarrassed to tell him. It’s funny, isn’t it? Not too long before, these people had been fishermen and tax collectors, hardly members of the Who’s Who of Galilee. But now, they were jockeying with one another as hard as they could in order to win for themselves the title of Best in Show.

The Harvard psychologists would call this “mis-wanting”(3)—assuming that you know what will give you the greatest satisfaction in terms of fulfillment, when what you want and what will bring you genuine happiness are not necessarily the same.

Jesus sat down and called all of them to his side and said, “Whoever really wants to be first will need to become last of all and servant of all.” He asked them, “Do you see this child?” whom he had gathered in his arms. In the culture of that day, children had no status, no prominence, no power to exert. “Do you see this child? When you welcome one such little one, it is as if you have welcomed me, and not only me, but the one who sent me,” who would be, of course, Almighty God. Jesus identifies with the vulnerable. If you want to find me in this world, he says, you will not focus on your own importance. You will find ways to open your arms to the least among you. You will think of a life in terms of serving God and others.

It is striking to me that here, at what surely was the lowest point in his relationship with his followers, Jesus does not manifest the slightest bit of anger at them. What he wants for them is for them to be happy, and happiness comes from being ambitious for the right things. He redefines for them the word greatness. It has nothing to do with status or fame or wealth. He sums it all up by saying, “If you want to be great, you need to become the servant of all.” This is the paradox of greatness: If you want to be first, then you will need to be last.

Bennett Sims, an Episcopal bishop, writes in his wonderful book Servanthood, “The paradox of greatness is true not because Jesus said it. Jesus said it because it is true.” Jesus teaches the truth. He reveals what James would call wisdom from above—that is, the truth that lies at the heart of the created order. This matter of servanthood is true not just for some people some of the time; it is true for all people in all settings at all times and in all relationships.(4)

Servanthood, Jesus says. Let that be the lens through which you look at life and determine the priorities of your life. This is the path to genuine greatness, in your marriage or in your partnership, in government and leadership, in business and commerce, “Jesus reveals a way of life, not just a way of being religious.”(5)

When Bishop Sims was serving in Atlanta, he had a conversation with a CEO of one of the large corporations that is headquartered there. Bishop Sims asked the executive if he would send a couple of people on his staff to a seminar on the subject of servant leadership. The CEO responded sharply, “What makes you think a corporation has anything to learn from Sunday school?”(6) Perhaps it is a long way from corporate headquarters to the teachings of Jesus. It is certainly a long way from our culture’s general understanding about the nature of greatness and success and the way to happiness. But aren’t we here today because we know about that gap? We know there is a wide gap between the life that we live and the beautiful life that Jesus reveals and that God makes possible through him. We are here because we want to close the gap as much as we can. Few of us will have a calling to renounce the world, to withdraw from the world and follow the way of St. Francis or Mother Teresa, but all of us want to live a good and happy life in this world. We want to know how to go to our scriptures and find guidance and encouragement to move in the right direction.

The hardest thing to do in life I think is this: to know what we really want. We have goals toward which we are working, which we think and hope will bring us happiness and fulfillment, but every now and then we wonder, “Are these the right goals?” in the sense of being aligned with God’s purpose for our lives. What will make me really happy? In which direction should my ambition lie?

I believe that this morning’s scriptures offer us three ways to reflect on answers to these questions, or at least give us food for thought as we wrestle with these important life questions. There are three words, one from each of the texts, that I find very helpful in this regard. The first is the word we have already discussed, the word greatness and Jesus’ reminder to his followers that it isn’t always what you think it is. It is not about being the most prominent or the most powerful, though if one does find oneself in a place of power and responsibility, one must use that power wisely and toward the common good. This is not a Sunday school idea; this is the principle that undergirds the universe.

Greatness. What might it mean for a nation? The United States of America is by far the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.(7) Never before has it been more important than it is today for us to understand that to exert power for power’s sake, to define greatness only in terms of military might and being the greatest, is not what a great, moral people would want to do. Greatness is understood in terms of commitment to the moral mandates on which this nation was founded—liberty, justice for all, the pursuit of happiness for all, concern for the common good—and not just the good of the American people, but the well-being of the world community of which we are a part.

For a church, what does greatness mean? A friend from another city came by for a visit on Friday. He had met earlier with another friend here in Chicago, who asked him where he was going after their appointment. He said, “I am going to Fourth Presbyterian Church.” The Chicago friend said to my Atlanta friend, “Fourth Presbyterian Church is the greatest church in Chicago.” I loved hearing that, but I hope that we never let the size and location of this congregation go to our heads. What makes a church great? Look at Jesus; he will tell you. Embracing the most vulnerable, that is what makes a church great. Telling the truth even when it’s costly, showing mercy, honoring all people regardless of their status—these are the marks of a great church. “To be great,” Jesus said, “is to be servant of all.”

Greatness and then happiness. The psalmist writes, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or sit in the seat of scoffers, but their delight is in the law of the Lord.” In the Bible, happiness is not equated with getting what you want, getting your needs met as we are so interested in doing in our day. Happiness is a state of blessedness.(8) What is blessedness? It means being lined up with what you know to be the good as revealed by God. A way to think of it is in terms of contentment. The happiest people are those who know who they are and know that they belong to God.(9) It’s that matter of identity that is so important. Think about those agitated disciples. They were anything but content. Jesus wanted them to be content, not in the sense of losing all the starch in their spines, but in the sense of having priorities that are lined up with the priorities of God. I think of it in terms of being tilted right. Tilted toward God. Getting in the groove—that is contentment. When you are in that zone, you can do absolutely anything. There is nothing that gives more meaning to life than digging deep and reaching for the best that is in us. That is what the disciples ended up doing with their lives. The psalmist says that if we are grounded in the ways of God, we will be as strong as trees planted by streams of water, and we will yield fruit in our season.

I am glad those scientists are doing due diligence with their happiness research, but it doesn’t take a Harvard professor to tell us that happiness has to do with the deep things in life. You really can’t buy it. It is not a commodity. You can’t find it either through self-indulgence.(10) How can we live inside God’s will for us? By reaching for the good that we know and by not letting our own self-importance be our god, but rather offering ourselves in the service of God.
The final word I would say on this subject of happiness is that it should never be your goal in life to be happy or mine either, for it comes as a consequence of finding ourselves caught up in something greater than ourselves. One of my favorite quotations is the sentence that the great writer Willa Cather had engraved on her tombstone: “That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.” When can that happen? When ought it to happen? It ought to happen now. Not when you finish graduate school or when you lose twenty pounds or when you retire or when the kids grow up. Go ahead and figure out what you are supposed to give your life to, and there is no better time to do it than this very present moment. A grandmother once told me about her granddaughter’s ballet recital and how each child on the stage had a little X marked with chalk. Each little ballerina was supposed to come out, find her place, and do her dance. So the recital came and the children came out in their tutus and found their spots and began to dance, except for one child, who spent the entire ballet recital searching for her X. The time is now. Happiness can’t wait.

Finally, the word ambition, which has been a theme running through this entire morning. James writes of the terrible effects of “envy and selfish ambition.” That is the kind of ambition that is all about you, that is fueled by being discontented because someone else has gotten ahead of you or has more than you or because you want what he or she has. That kind of ambition will eat you alive. But neither James nor Jesus was opposed to ambition that seeks to grow and to push beyond the boundaries of the known.

I think of a CEO who leads a large corporation. He came from very little; he grew up over the small store that his father managed, and now he is in charge of a company that employs 60,000 people. “What do you want for your life?” I asked him not long ago. He said, “I want the people who work for our company to be able to live good, whole, and happy lives.” There’s ambition for you.

I think of a friend who has served as the director of a large pediatric hospital. She lost both her parents when she was a child. She is a very ambitious person. Her ambition has been that every single child that comes in the door of the hospital is cared for as if that child were her very own. Ambition for the right things, that is the most positive, generative force in the entire world.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech just before he died. I would like his words to bring this message home today:

Every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. . . . I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. . . . Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize. . . . I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. . . .

Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. That I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.

What a great ambition, to leave a committed life behind.

Let us pray:
Help us to set aside our own importance, God, and live lives that are to your glory. Not to our glory, but to your glory. Amen.(11)

Notes
1. Adapted from A New Zealand Book of Prayer.
2. Jon Gertner, “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness,” New York Times Magazine, 14 September 2003.
3. Ibid.
4. Bennett J. Sims, Servanthood, Cowley Publications, 1997, p. 9.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Brian Urquhart, “World Order and Mr. Bush,” The New York Times Review of Books, 9 October 2003, p. 8.
8. Peter J. Gomes, Strength for the Journey, HarperCollins, 2003, p. 68.
9. Ibid, p. 69.
10. Ibid, p. 70.
11. Adapted from a prayer by Carol Allen.