Where Are Our Values?
Matthew 5:1-12
January 30, 1993
Most of us have had the experience of going to a doctor’s office for the first time. and being handed a clipboard with a hundred questions that range from. “How did your grandfather die?” to “What childhood diseases did you have?” to “What are you allergic to?”
Nowadays, I’m told some doctors use a startlingly different type of questionnaire for new patients. It is called a ” Values History Form,” and it attempts to probe our beliefs. It has such questions as ” What do you fear most?- “What will be important to you when you are dying? ” What do you personally feel makes life worth living?”
The need for this information has become more and more critical as health care issues have changed. and medical technology has advanced. I would predict that a “Patient Belief Checklist ” will become standard for most doctors in the next five years.
My concern today is not as much for the medical profession as it is for the church. And with this trend in mind, I began to speculate that we might use the same kind of belief checklist when people are in a parish. It could be helpful if each of us could pinpoint our core values, those theological and spiritual beliefs that color our attitudes and shape who we turn out to be. If we were to do this, we might be able to measure our spiritual growth and determine what’s important. and not important to us as parishioners.
I am convinced that those core values, which are often not talked about and not even recognized, are what bring you here on Sunday mornings and are what shape your life. Jesus put it this way: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. It needs to be pointed out that the word treasure doesn’t necessarily mean money. Treasure refers to values. And so Jesus is saying. “Tell me your inner core values, and I will tell you where your heart is. “Or once again. to translate heart. I would use the word choices. Where your core values are, there will be your choices, which shape your life.
Taking this one step further, each of us has a hierarchy of values. a kind of core value. And those are what influence our choices, and, as Bishop Pike used to say. “Once we begin to make choices, those choices begin to choose us. ” Where your treasure is-where your values are, there will be your heart, your choices, your important inner core, your life. Why is it important to know all this? Why should we be clear about our real values? It’s my feeling that then and only then can we know where we are headed. Robertson Davies once wrote, ”Beneath what the mind chooses to admit to itself, lie convictions that shape our lives.” So what are your values? How can we measure our beliefs? How can we articulate what is important?
Several years ago, after reading this passage in scripture that we read in church, I had an insight into what the meaning and setting were for the Beatitudes. It suddenly hit me that they were the way Jesus went public with his value system. Here were his dreams, his desires for himself and for his followers. Here was the condition for being blessed. Here’s the way one ought to be. Here is what influenced his choices.
One way to articulate your core values is to look up your desires. Your fantasies, your choices. What we want is often what we want to be. And what we want to be influences what we ask for. So let’s start our thinking about values by asking ourselves what it is we want for ourselves and what we would ask for if given the opportunity. Or to put it in the Gospel terms, what would we have to have to feel blessed?
Again and again in stories and myths, a fairy Godmother would come up to a person and say, ” I will grant you three wishes that your heart may desire.” And the person would say, ” I want to be rich, win the lottery. be famous. be on the screen, or to be loved. to be kissed by a princess. Whatever the person chooses will reflect his or her value system. Now, admittedly, the point of most of these stories was to illustrate that we humans often do not know what is good for us, and if we are granted our wishes and desires. They turn out to be not what we really wanted. Our values need to be reworked, or, as Gertrude Stein once said. “When you get there, there isn’t any there there.
I recently read a story that spoke to the point. It seems that the son of a Welsh mining family had not wanted to go into the shaft as had his brothers. Instead. he joined the British Navy and spent many years touring the world. Once. when he was on leave. he brought to his father a shriveled monkey paw he had picked up in Egypt.
The story was that if one held the paw and made three wishes, they would automatically come true. However, he had also been warned not to use it. Everyone who had owned it before had experienced great tragedy. He was about to toss it in the fire when his father stopped him. “Let me try it out first,” he said. His father took hold of the paw and said, ” I wish more than anything else in the world that I had a 200-pound note at this moment. No sooner had the words left his lips than there was a knock on the door. When the door was opened, there stood a representative of the mining company who announced, “Your son has just been killed in an explosion underground. And it is the company policy to give a two-hundred-pound note to cover the burial expenses. Here it is, I am sorry.
On hearing this. the father flung the monkey’s paw away and began to weep, “Oh no, oh no, bring me my son. I did not want the money at his expense.” Again, as soon as he had said the words, there was a knock at the door, and there stood four miner friends carrying the mutilated corpse of the son who had just been killed. When the Father saw them, he said, “Take him away. I cannot bear the sight of my flesh and blood who has been killed.” And so the friends turned away and went to bury him privately. All three of his wishes had come true, yet none of them the way he had wanted.
It reminds me of those awesome words from the cross when Jesus prayed. “Father. forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It is true that we humans do not often know what is good for us. We can’t articulate our values, and therefore, we often chase after things that ultimately may not be important or may even be downright harmful.
The other day, I made two lists. One was a list called what I wanted.. In that list, I put things like safety, security, strength, health, happiness, contentment, loving, and loved–all things that any good American longs for. The other list was what I did not want to be. On that list, I put things like poor, grieving, persecuted, hungry, and discomforted. Therefore, I found my values not to be Jesus’ values-
And so I find the Beatitudes very disturbing. It’s not good enough to simply say it’s part of the Son, the Mount, or Jesus’ core values. They contradict much of what I want for myself. but here, in the quiet of a Sunday. possibly I might start my value search by admitting that what I long for. my values, my secret desires, may not be God’s values.
But listen, it’s never too late to change. It’s never too late to adopt new values, make new choices. Remember, it’s never too late to be blessed
* And I ask you, is that not a piece of good news?
Amen