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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