Sunday, August 9, 2020

Give Me the Simple Life

 

Give Me the Simple Life

Luke 2:1-5

            From September 15, 1965 to April 27, 1971 you could turn on your TV and watch Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert combine the typical sitcom husband-wife battle with a city/country disagreement.  The show was called Green Acres, and pitted Albert (a New York City lawyer fed up with the big city rat race) against Gabor (his socialite-loving wife).  The majority of the humor in the show came from Gabor who could not—would not—adapt to life on a farm.

            Six seasons is a pretty good run for a sitcom, although I have to admit it never caught on with me.  Part of the problem I have with most sitcoms is that the jokes never change; the characters never develop.  I can laugh at the same situation just so long before I want to move on to something else.

            A 1945 song, Give Me the Simple Life expressed the same sentiments.  The problem with these—and other songs, TV shows, movies based on this concept—is that the people we see/hear performing them are all pretty rich and living in (for the most part) big cities or their suburbs.  They may talk about living simply, but few if any of them would actually do it.

            My wife and I are both only children.  She grew up on a farm in East Texas; I grew up in New York City.  Today we live in a house we could never afford if it was in an urban setting. Instead we live well outside the suburbs.  We jokingly tell people that being brought up as the only child in our family conditioned us to need plenty of personal space.  The truth is, we like our privacy.  Still, it would be difficult for us to claim that we’re living simply.

            We know Jesus was born into a simple way of life.  His father was a carpenter, a blue-collar worker.  His mother was a housewife.  They lived in a small village.  His friends were the children of fishermen, farmers, and other working-class families.  He never lived in splendor and wealth, never earned or inherited a fortune, never lived the high life.  As an adult he became an itinerant preacher, supported by friends, traveling from place to place on foot, often—we can imagine—sleeping rough and eating what he could find.

            In Philippians Paul describes Jesus as the King of glory, surrounded by the splendor of heaven, which he gave up to become human and assume the role of a servant.  In the early years of the Christian religion many of Jesus’ followers chose to live the simple life, moving to the desert and becoming hermits, or giving up the world for life in monasteries or convents.  Many still make that choice today.

            What are we to do?  Should we give up everything to live simply as did Jesus and these desert fathers and mothers?  Should we renounce all we have to lead a monastic life?

            God does not call all of us to sell our possessions to follow Jesus, as the rich young ruler was asked to do.  Instead, I believe God calls most of us to live in the world and to dedicate all that we are and all that we have to God’s service.  We are called to adopt an inner simplicity.

            Ernest Hemingway said, “The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”  This sounds to me like a good life-plan.  The more fervently we seek to know God and commit our lives to Christ the more we will learn what’s important.  We’ll find ourselves letting go of what we no longer need—and that may not always be things.  It could be thoughts, ideas, habits, states of mind that we lay aside in order to develop a simpler lifestyle within.

            Dag Hammarskjold once wrote, “If only I may grow:  firmer, simpler—quieter, warmer.”

            May that be our prayer today.

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