The Simple Life (Lent 4)

Here's today's sermon (click here for audio)

We’ve talked about fasting; we’ve talked about rest; and we’ve talked about service. Today, we add a fourth discipline in our Lenten series: simplicity. And I must begin with a confession—I find simplicity very difficult to talk about; in fact, I have an almost allergic reaction to the word, especially when it is spoken by some of its most ardent proponents. It almost makes me break out in hives. I don’t like it. And that’s where we need to begin. Because, I think, I’m not alone in this reaction.  

So, why does talk of simplicity often make my skin crawl? 

Well, it’s fairly easy to talk about discipleship in terms of counter-cultural living. It’s easy to begin in our hyper-sexualized, hyper-monetized, hyper militarized world to think about the deliberate practice of living a different way, following a different god than the bloody one Jesus named Mammon. 

In our day, the self is constructed by its power to consume. You become what you can buy; what you buy makes you, you. It’s taken for granted that people are always acquisitive, always acquiring the means to acquire more things, and always looking to receive. Fasting, resting, and serving means, simply, deliberately living an opposing life. It is being a “sign of contradiction” as our Lord himself was and remains.  

In a culture that says “you have to have x to have the good life,” the disciple who fasts says, “Man does not live by stuff alone.”  

In a culture that says, “Everyday is a day to make money to get the stuff that makes you, you.” A disciple who receives and shares the gift of rest says, “Today, I’ll remember God from whom all good gifts come and I will life so that you can, too.” 

In a culture that says, “You are defined by what you buy and what you are able to buy,” a disciple that serves says, “God has given me the gift of life, the gift of new life in Christ. I am, at my core, a gift. And that means, to be the self I am, the self I am created to be, I must give myself away.” 

And now we’re getting close to why so much talk of simplicity drives me crazy. In much of our wealth and appearance obsessed culture, simplicity has become another lifestyle option that is open only to the very wealthy. Think about it. When simplicity advocates find themselves on Oprah’s TV channel selling their latest book; when you read an article about a lawyer who left their seven figure salary and bought an off-grid wind-and-solar powered farm; when you are hectored by someone for shopping at WalMart when they can afford Harry Rosen or Holt Renfrew you should, if you’re a disciple of Jesus, start to itch. Because simplicity has become another item to have, one that’s actually pretty expensive, one that if I have it, makes me, me. Simplicity in the mouths of some of its advocates has nothing whatever to do with fasting, resting, or serving.  

So, if we’re going to get to grips with the spiritual discipline of simplicity, if we’re going to get to grips with the Gospel freedom that comes from embracing it, we’re going to need to do a fair bit of unlearning first. 

And to do that, we need to go to our Psalm. 

It is perhaps the most horrible Psalm in the Psalter, and if you read down to the end, you’ll know why I use that word. Judah has gone into exile. Judah has gone to Babylon. The Jewish people long for home. They are not at home. Their captors tell them, in effect, to lighten up. Sing us a song of your homeland! They say. And the singers reply, we cannot. We are far from home. All we can do is weep. So deep is their pain that they wish the most awful vengeance upon their captors. 

Exile. Far from home. Living among our enemies, who tell us, lighten up! It’s not so bad! It’s perhaps impossible for us to imagine this reality. The most we can do, maybe, is recall the images of Syrian refugees. But it is the life of the anonymous poet who wrote Psalm 137.  

It’s also the life of the Jews to whom Jesus came preaching. Had you asked a first century Pharisee whether the exile was over because they were back in the land, they would have told you that as long as the Land of Promise is ruled by Gentiles, the exile isn’t over. Exile doesn’t end until the day of the Lord. Until Messiah comes and cleanses both the Temple and the Land. Though they were at home, they were all-too-aware that they were still, profoundly, far from it. Still in exile. 

And we have by our union with Jesus been adopted into that exiled life. We too are to be sojourners, citizens of another country, people who are NOT at home here. Remember the old Gospel song—this world is not my home; I’m just a passing through? It might not be the most theologically astute Gospel song ever written, but it captures a sense of exile that is true to the New Testament. To be a follower of Jesus is, in a deep sense, NOT to be at home here, wherever here is. 

And Lent, as a whole, is in part about engaging in those practices that help us to remember that we’re in exile. We’re not at home. We’re going somewhere else. 

And like fasting, resting, and serving, simplifying is one of those practices. It is quite deliberately and materially about letting the good things of this world go for the sake of something better. It’s not a lifestyle choice available only to the few. It is THE lifestyle of those who have been called by Jesus to exile for now, and a true home later. 

So, what does Christian simplicity’s goal? The goal is to allow our desires to be so re-oriented that the desire for God takes its right and proper place in our heart. It is to quest for the rest that is ours when we rest in God. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will not rest until they rest in thee,” is how St. Augustine put it. 

Spiritual writer Richard Foster highlights four paradoxes in Christian simplicity. 

Here’s 1. Simplicity is a gift of God. It is a gift of grace. It cannot be earned by hard work (here’s where much secular talk of simplicity goes off the rails). At the same time, it is a discipline. It is something to be worked at, lived into. It involves pausing, reflecting, refusing the chaos that is so much of our modern lives. Simplicity is part of that wonderful dynamic St. Paul spoke of when he invited the Philippian Christians to work out their own salvation because it was the work of God in them. Simplicity is both something we do in response to God’s call and something God effects in us as we respond to that call. 

The second: It’s both easy and difficult. I have met only a very few Christian believers who have embraced simplicity and I marvel at how easy their life looks—uncluttered, unhurried, unbothered. And as I work at simplicity in my own life, I know just how hard it is to get there! The athelete runs the race with ease only after and while there’s lots of long hard training. Simplifying our lives is the same.  

Third, it is BOTH inner and outer. It’s not simply about decluttering our homes (though it is about that). It is first and foremost about decluttering our hearts. About silencing in our hearts all the demands for our attention that distract us from the one thing that matters. That distract us from our heart’s inbuilt desire for God, that try, vainly, to satisfy that desire by turning it toward something other than God. “All that we call human history,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” Foster advises—rightly, I think—that as we declutter our hearts, the decluttering of our homes will largely take care of itself. For if we never get around to decluttering our outer lives, we can’t excuse that by saying we’re focusing on our hearts. The two come together.  

And the fourth paradox: it is an embrace of the goodness of God’s material world by using less of it. It’s not world denying; it’s not world rejecting; it’s not even “embracing moderation.” It’s about recognizing the misery that comes from poverty and so committing to sharing God’s abundance with others AND about recognizing the misery that comes from trying to make our lives out of what we buy and so refusing that chaotic way of life.  

Simplicity is about refusing to worship the God Jesus called mammon and learning to worship the One he named Father. And, if Foster’s paradoxes have anything to say to us, they tell us that insofar as we follow Christ into that kind of life, we will feel less and less at home in a world that says the acquiring, money hungry, self-centred life is the good life. Insofar we follow Christ into that kind of simple life, we will feel more and more like exiles. 

Now, I think, we can talk about practicalities. But before we do, I hope you see why we couldn’t begin there. Had we begun with practicalities, it might have sounded like the very kind of simplicity talk that gives me hives—another lifestyle choice that I can adopt or not as I wish. It’s not that. It’s part and parcel of the life of discipleship to which you have been called by the Lord Jesus. Worse, it might have sounded like a new set of rules that would have made the commands of God life-killing burdens instead of a life-giving relationship. 

Here are 10 practical suggestions, again from Richard Foster, that will help us think about simplifying. 

Buy things for their usefulness rather than their status.  

Reject anything that is producing an addiction in you 

Develop a habit of giving things away 

Refuse to be propagandized by the custodians of modern gadgetry 

Learn to enjoy things without owning them 

Develop a deeper appreciation for the creation 

Look with a healthy skepticism at all “buy now, pay later” schemes 

Obey Jesus’ instructions about plain, honest speech 

Reject anything that breeds the oppression of others 

Shun anything that distracts you from seeking first the Kingdom of God 

I hope you see that these are habits that we practice, and as we practice, we get better at, rather than rules to be merely obeyed or broken. They are skills to help us see that this world is not our home. That while we may indeed, unlike the Psalmist, be able to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land, we will with him not be home until we are at home in Jerusalem.