Your Best Life Now

The kind of meaning that satisfies you emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Meaning that leaves you shaking your head and feeling like no matter how hard you just worked on this thing, you feel privileged that you got to do it.

It was the way I felt when I helped build a habitat for humanity home. It was back-breaking for someone like me with very little construction background. Yet, when the house was complete. When the new owners took the keys all I could remember thinking was, “the reward far outweighed the effort put in.” What was the reward? Only the satisfaction of seeing a single mom with her two kids open the door to their brand new home and new life.

What brings true meaning to your life?

If I were to ask you, “Is there something more meaningful than the happiness that success gives?” Whatever success looks like to you.

Now, most people will say “yes” because they know the right answer is “of, course success is not the key to real meaning in life”

The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have a beautiful saying, “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

And our muscles, what we do, indicate we still think success is the key to meaning in life. We are working more than ever before.

Statistics Slide

In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week. According to the International Labor Organization, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”

I’m not telling you to work less hours. You may have very little choice in the matter. And, you are more than entitled to spend all of your waking hours plugging away.

But what these numbers show us is that as a country, we primarily derive meaning from the successes we can obtain from our work. So we work more. Yet, more work leads to more stress and a lower quality of life. And that feeling of real meaning that gives satisfaction is never really obtained because there is always the next raise, the next project and the rat race continues.

Others have said we need to swap the equation that happiness is the key to meaning. Get happy then you will have meaning and then you will be successful.

So now, people are using happiness like a Trojan horse to achieve success. I know this because the current trend in leadership books is books on leading from your “happy place.” Amazon shows at least 3,000 results in Self-Help books alone in the last 90 days related to the topic of Happiness. Shawn Achor’s talk on TEDex called “the happy secret to better work has 19, 554, 498 views. If all the views of this one Ted talk represented the people on a newly formed country they would be the 59th largest country in the world out of 233. Having a population higher than Romania and just a little lower than Australia.

Has the pursuit of happiness brought meaning to life? The hard answer is “no.”

Statistics Graph

Despite America having a strong economy, 2.9 GDP this last quarter, lower unemployment, better trade with our foreign competitors, Suicide related deaths remain the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. There are an average of 129 suicides every day in our country and 70% of those roughly 90 of them will be men in their 40s-50s.

And Heart Disease related deaths, the number 1 killer of people in the United States, is often times associated with either old age or chronic stress. Researchers are trying to discover if strews is the cause or if stress leads to doing things that cause heart disease. In other words, stress sets off a chain reaction of events like drinking too much, smoking, a hurry up and go lifestyle, over-eating, poor eating, lack of sleep that causes the heart rate to rise, blood pressure to go up and creates the perfect storm for a stroke or heart attack.

Yet, we are doing all of this in pursuit of happiness that will lead to success or success that leads to happiness. The numbers don’t lie, we are not happier, we are not healthier as a society and real meaning remains allusive.

One of my favorite offerings or actually a counter offering to the Happiness self-help books is this one by Oscar the Grouch. “When opportunity comes knocking. I pretend I am not home.”

Have you ever heard that when you are at your happiest you are the most willing to take risks? This can be a good thing for creative and innovative thinking. However, it can also create a kind of “superman” thinking that leads to incredibly foolish risk taking on the other side of tremendous happiness. I have seen people and you probably know people who are constantly caught up in this cycle of trying to get happiness, getting happy, doing something stupid, feeling tons of regret, wondering why happiness seems like a temporary visitor and not a long-term guest. Answer, happiness is leading to risk taking behavior in the wrong direction.

I want to propose that real meaning in life is not caused by happiness or success but by effective altruism. I wish I could take credit for coming up with this concept or its name but I can’t. I first saw effective altruism in the Bible when Abraham went to rescue his estranged nephew Lot in Genesis 14. And, i first heard Peter Singer use this term in 2013.

Effective altruism simple means thoughtfully doing something or supporting a something that bring about the greatest positive impact, based upon your values.

Effective altruism - when we are doing our best for others, we are living our best possible life.

Interestingly enough, the Harvard Business School, has release a paper where they are able to demonstrate through scientific data that effective altruism “causes increased happiness, and that happy people are giving people and that these two relationships may operate in a circular fashion.”

Through fMRI technology, we now know that effective altruism activates the same parts of the brain that are stimulated by rich food and martial hanky-panky. Here is what this means, science shows that our bodies are hard wired to derive maximum pleasure from altruism.

Helping others is not just a charitable thing, it may just be the secret to living a life that is not only happier, more successful but also healthier, wealthier, more productive, and meaningful. I have said this so much to you here at Beth El Shalom you can guess what I am going to say next, “Science is always just catching up to the Bible.”

We are living our best possible life when we are doing our best for others.

I believe the Bible was given not as a book of “do’s” and “dont’s.” It is so much better than that. I believe the Word of God was given to us so that we could create the best possible world and live the best, most meaningful, happy lives imaginable. Long before fMRI scans, long before “effective altruism” was coined as term we had Deuteronomy that said.

Deuteronomy 14:22-23

Deuteronomy 14:22–23 TLV

“You will surely set aside a tenth of all the yield of your seed that comes from the field year by year. You are to eat the tithe of your grain, your new wine, your oil, and the firstborn of your herd and flock, before Adonai your God in the place He chooses to make His Name dwell, so that you may learn to fear Adonai your God always.

On the surface this looks like the opposite of altruism. This looks like you are supposed to save your tithe, to spend it on a big festive meal in Jerusalem for religious education purposes. This does not look like effective altruism but effective savings for vacationing.

The next couple of passages seem to enforce this notion:

Deuteronomy 14:24-26

Deuteronomy 14:24–26 TLV

Now suppose the way is too long for you, for you cannot carry the tithe because the place Adonai your God chooses to set His Name is too far from you. When Adonai your God blesses you, then you are to exchange the tithe for silver, bind up the silver in your hand, and go to the place that Adonai your God chooses. You may spend the money for whatever your soul desires—cattle, sheep, wine, strong drink, or whatever your soul asks of you. Then you will eat there before Adonai your God and rejoice—you and your household.

The context of this passage is one of Israel’s three pilgrimage festivals: passover, shavuot and sukkot. They would go to the Tabernacle or the Temple that is the “place” where God caused his name to dwell. These were spiritual journals and not carnal parties.

Yet, this passage seems to encourage personal indulgence not an other focus. Only perhaps that you might invest in the local Jerusalem market place economy through your purchases. By the first century this is no doubt what people were thinking and that is why Yeshua drove out the money tables.

But the passage does have more to say, and this is where the effective altruism comes in because before you could leave on this festival to use your tithe it says:

Deuteronomy 14:27 But you are not to neglect the Levite within your gates, for he has no portion or inheritance with you.

Deuteronomy 14:27 TLV

But you are not to neglect the Levite within your gates, for he has no portion or inheritance with you.

Levites were not owners of land, they were stewards of the Tabernacle and teachers of the Law of God. Other tribes were given the gift of land tracks, farms, vineyards, ranching grounds but the Levites had none of this. They could not pass on tracks of land, ranches, vineyards to their children. They could only pass on them an ongoing stewardship. Levites lived in every city in Israel. They were spread out among their brothers.

The word “neglect” here is a decent word choice for the Hebrew word “Azav.” So long as we understand “neglect” as a verb the implies a very real choice to fail to care for something properly. Not in the sense of I “neglected” to pay my light bill because I got busy and did not have it set up on auto draft. This is neglect in the sense of I neglected to pay my light bill because I wanted to use that money to go to an Astros game.

It might be better to turn the Hebrew verb into strongest possible sense, “You are not to apostatize(Heb. Azav) by choosing to not care for the levite properly who lives near you.” Or if I was to state the command in the positive, which I like to do, “you are to practice effective altruism to the Levite in your neighborhood.”

This is much closer to how they would have heard this sentence. It would have put the breaks on the “tithe-party for me and my family mentality in Jerusalem.” They would have to consider how to get the Levite and his family to Jerusalem, how to bring them into this festive celebration.

I also want you to notice the lack of adjective surrounding the Levite. It does not say the “good Levite” nor the “kind levite” nor the “charming levite” nor “compassionate levite” nor “charismatic levite” nor “relatable levite.”

I like how God’s form of effective altruism is blind to adjectival labels. It just seeks to do the most good for the one who can’t do it for himself. So every farmer, vineyard owner, Israel was mostly agrarian, in a city would create a system of sustainability.

Believe it or not this effective altruism was a major social innovation. In the ANE world, the governments taxed the people to pay the priesthoods. Religion was state-owned. In Israel, God asked the people to voluntarily be altruistic with their tithe to the priesthood who belonged to God and not the state. This freed the priesthood from the power of the political purse and pushed them to pursue social innovation and social entrepreneurship.

Social innovations create new social practices that aim to meet social needs in a better way than the existing solutions and are successful in changing the institutions that created the problem in the first place.

Social entrepreneurship draws upon business techniques and private sector approaches to find solutions to social, cultural, environmental and spiritual problems.

Everyone had a stake in this. And when effective altruism was working Israel could function at its best. Look at the results in the next passage relating to the third year tithe.

Deuteronomy 14:28-29

Deuteronomy 14:28–29 TLV

At the end of every three years, you are to bring out all the tithe of your produce in that year and store it within your gates. Then the Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance with you, along with the outsider, the orphan and the widow within your gates, will come and eat and be satisfied, so that Adonai your God may bless you in all the work of your hand that you do.

They experience satisfaction. Let me explain this word. Satisfaction a little abstract until you put it in a sentence like he smiled with satisfaction watching his son hit the ball for the first time | she grinned with satisfaction when she and her sister made up with each other.

In Hebrew, the word picture is even richer. Most people read this text like a prosperity preacher. They think it says, “If I help poor people, God makes me rich.” So helping poor people becomes the Trojan horse for getting into God’s prosperity for your life. That is not a good read of the Hebrew or the Bible period.

This is a ruthlessly wrong motive for altruism: give to get. God want us to be altruistic, makes promises about doing it but it is ever put forward as a Trojan horse. Here is another way of looking at the Hebrew of this verse:

They will come and eat and be satisfied, so that Adonai your God will make all of the work of your hands a blessing to you.

Just as Not eating certain foods would be a sign of Israel’s election and holiness so enabling others to eat and be satisfied would give them a life of ultimate meaning, significance and happiness. Just as not eating prioritized holiness over happiness, enabling others to eat prioritized others belonging over your personal happiness.

Effective altruism is not the “I give to get” mentality. Effective altruism is the key to real meaning in life not just for yourself but for others, it satisfied them. It is the opposite of neglect. Many people wrongly believe that the opposite of neglect is to “pay-attention.” Psychologist have new begun to say that is not the case. The opposite of neglect is not “paying-attention.” The opposite of neglect, not caring for someone is the willful choice to bring harmony to a person’s life.

The opposite of neglect is being a shalom maker. Yeshua said as much when highlighted shalom in Matthew 5:9,

Matthew 5:9 TLV

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

“Blessed are the shalom-makers for the will be called children of God.” Maybe a more paraphrastic translation bring it all together, “Blessed are the ones who help others to experience wholeness and happiness because they are doing just what their Father in heaven does for people, hence they are His children.”

Shalom-making is effective altruism because it gives thoughtfully and specifically to the ones who by nature of Israel’s laws would loose the most: Levites, Orphans, Widows and Outsiders. This has been rightly labeled as the Quartet of needy in Israel. Because without the institution of tithing, these four large categories of people could be left destitute and desolate by the laws that benefited everyone else. In this sense, the effective altruism in tithing functioned as a kind of anti-discrimination fund that protected the most vulnerable and those that had the least opportunities within that society.

The Net Result of this effective altruism is a society that practices effective altruism to all kinds of different people. I know that Sigmund Freud famously said, “I have discovered very little good in humans. From what I know, most of them are rascals.” But these people right here does not look like a rascal. - insert four pictures

Did you know that must meditating on effective altruism, acts of loving-kindness, trains you to see people better and more lovingly. There was an experiment done in Nepal amongst kids ages 4-5 years old. They wanted to test their social loving-kindness skills. The best way to test “stickers” (show sticker slide). Before they did 8 weeks of mindfulness and loving-kindness meditations with them the kids were the most prone to give sticker to their best friends and then maybe non-friend, stranger and sick child. After eight weeks, 20 minutes a day of meditations on mindfulness and loving-kindness meditations look at how the results changed. They started to give stickers equally to friends, non-friends, unknown kids and sick kids alike.

The science shows that just 20 minutes a day of meditation on effective altruism changes the brain structure and creates greater capacity for altruism and love towards others. And this results in creating shalom, harmony for the lives of other people even different people.

This is what we see from our text in Philippians. When Rabbi Paul wrote the Philippians his little note of gratitude saying, “Philippians 4:14-15, 18, 19

Philippians 4:14–15 TLV

Philippians 4:18 TLV

But I have received everything and have more than enough. I am amply supplied, having received from Epaphroditus what you sent—a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.

Philippians 4:19 TLV

My God will fulfill every need of yours according to the riches of His glory in Messiah Yeshua.

Nevertheless, you have done well to share in my trouble. Now you Philippians also know that in the beginning of the Good News, when I left Macedonia, not a single community partnered with me in giving and receiving—except you alone.” And, “…what you sent—a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God. My God will fulfill every need of yours according to the riches of His glory in Messiah Yeshua.”

He was speaking as a one who was being cared for like a levite. Rabbi Paul often saw his ministry as a priesthood style ministry (see Romans 15:16).

Romans 15:16 TLV

to be a servant of Messiah Yeshua to the Gentiles, in priestly service to the Good News of God—so that the offering up of the Gentiles might be pleasing, made holy by the Ruach ha-Kodesh.

There were good reasons for people to not practice altruism towards Paul. Paul was a criminal by Roman standards, living under house arrest. He was declared a heretic by the synagogue and cast out of every synagogue he went into. He has a reputation as a trouble-maker, as a disturber of the peace and that was amongst non-followers of Yeshua. Amongst followers of Yeshua he was a former murderer, persecutor, prosecutor, antagonist who keeps stirring up the pot for messianic Jews in Jerusalem and in Asia Minor.

Many people did not. When he was thrown into a Roman prison it seemed that many of the believers “neglected” him with the notable exception of the Philippians. They did not turn aside from him but despite the rumor mill and the risk of being in a relationship with him they took care of him to such a point that he said “his every need was taken care of.” And just like the passage in Deuteronomy Rabbi Paul says it not just the avoidance of evil that sets us apart but it is the doing of good, effective altruism towards others that marks us as distinct and sets us up for God’s blessing. He seems to be in jubilation when he says this.

We could just stop the message here and say amen. But at the risk of being vulnerable, I want to share with you the on-campus families of Beth El Shalom and our online family what your effective altruism has done for this levite, thought I am like Paul, a levite by profession not by heritage or race.

I understand his jubilation. My family is the recipient of your effective altruism. This last year I had the privilege of learning what Teddy Roosevelt meant in his now made famous speech by Brene Brown:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Brown, Brené . Rising Strong (p. xx). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I know what it means to have dared greatly and to have risked vulnerability and got my but kicked in the area. I learned that vulnerability does take courage and that often times it just leaves you beat up and beat down on the arena floor. But, at least, I am in the fight and not up in the cheap seats. I risked at all last Yom Kippur, did not know what the outcome would be, and it was worst than I could have ever imagined. I am glad I was in the arena and vulnerable. I am not speaking from regret or seeking forgiveness. I am proud.

But Amid the critics, the rumor mill, the gossip maelstrom, e-mail campaigns, you, the families that make up Beth El Shalom decided to not neglect us, not just me, but my family.

You have not neglected us from the first moment that Eduardo showed up at my door unannounced after Sukkoth to encourage us, or when Penny and Evan reached out to me ands said don’t give-up let’s meet for worship in our living room for our first Shabbat. To all the families still coming to this very day. With dust, sweat and blood on our faces you got in the area with us.

You need to know this, that every month this congregation every months has exceeded the month before financially and still continues to grow. This is because of two amazing factors the faithfulness of you our core families on this campus and our faithful online community that is with us via YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

But it is more than that. I want to tell you how your enabling us to eat has satisfied our lives. You see my children were really the ones who got hit the worst by all of this. Not just the hurt watching their father hurt but the very real times that kids of leaders at my former place of work would come and harass my children and say all kinds of insidious things about me or Lauren that their parents told them. Most all of it slanted or just plain untrue but all of it heartbreaking. Statements like “Your dad is like the Devil.” Or “Your dad has demons and needs them cast out. And in one instance, “He is a liar and a coward.”

My oldest got it the worst as people worked out their anger, frustration with me on her. She put on a brave face and we knew she was suffering but we did not understand how much. Until late at night on January 29th. The hardest night of her life and my life, that led to the next day her being hospitalized for 8 days. Doctors were throwing around scary terms with us like “schizophrenia” and “bi-polarism” and “manic depressive disorder” brought on by acute stress and trauma from the what happened to our family after Yom Kippur at my old place of work.

As parents we were unwound and broken. And for eight of the hardest days of our lives, Lauren and I were limited to just one hour a day with our daughter, we had to re-assess everything we understood about helping our children, about mental health about the serious negative effects this was having on all of us, at the core of our being.

This community Beth El Shalom cared for us. None of you had any idea what was taking place, I suppose some of you suspected as much. We wanted to protect our daughter’s privacy during this time and though people could tell something was wrong we were private and would not breathe a word because I would rather face people’s assumptions then cause any more damage or trauma to my daughter.

Her faith in God was crushed. Religion had become a harmful trigger setting off dangerous reactions in her. As a Father who has experienced how faith can heal a soul and could change a life, now I was in a void of unknowing. What do we do. I know many of you noticed for weeks her absence but you did not go about prying nor did you start a rumor mill.

This congregation remained faithful and kept making shalom for us. You shared in our suffering with us and stood locked armed with us. You had no idea the fight we were in, no idea the arena we were in, how bad we were getting our buts kicked but you did not neglect to care for us.

My daughter’s faith in God was caused her ability to trust religious people completely diminished. More Religion was not the answer for her. She needed to not be neglected, she need some shalom-making. We were scrambling as parents trying to figure out what to do to help our daughter find herself again, find her way, find her hope, a compass, a sense of belonging.

So I remembered when I was teen and at a dark point in my life a friend took me rock climbing every weekend. I remember how climbing those walls somehow made me feel like I could climb over the problems in my life.

I took my daughter rock climbing. A girl who her whole life was scared of heights, I took her to climb, I did not take her to a church or to a bible study or an exorcist which is just horrible. I took her to a climbing wall. I put harness on her, got a belay, tied a figure eight knot and somehow there was bond of trust between us that she looked at me and looked at that wall and said, “I’ll try.” She climbed her first wall all the way to the top, simply I believe, because she was scared to fall. Then she climbed her first tall wall and fell and realized that she could trust the man who tied the knot, who was on the ground supporting her weight. Then she started to learn that she could overcome hard walls by pushing through, by solving the riddle of where to put your hands and feet and leverage weight.

For every wall she climbed, she was making leaps and strides in her own personal life. Developing coping skills faster than her therapist and psychiatrist could imagine, faster than I could have ever dreamed.

All the while, from January to right now, as we have been pouring into her life, this congregation remained did not neglect us but went about shalom-making. Faithful in every area from volunteering to tithing, from prayer to encouragement, you were making shalom in our lives and that gave us the strength to make shalom for our daughter.

Yes, we are on the path of recovery and I understand my daughter doubts about God and about people. I am not made about it and I know in order for her to belong, she needs to belong as herself not as someone trying to fit-in.

Big steps she has made, big walls she has climbed. I was so proud of her when she volunteered to “cant” the Torah for her mother. You may be surprised at what I was proud of, it was not necessarily the canting of the Torah it was that she saw her mother was stressed out and needed help carrying her load and she like everyone here at Beth El Shalom decided to be effectively altruistic despite her deep doubts.

Because, I believe we are living our best possible life when we are doing our best for others. I saw Orah living her best life helping her mother. But, then I realized as I looked back over these last couple of months. That I was not the only one belaying someone on the wall, I was not the only one holding the rope to planet earth, my daughter was belaying me. We were climbing together physically and spiritually. Urging, pushing, and encouraging one another. We were both in this arena together. Getting our butts kicked sometimes but in the arena together and not alone, you Beth El Shalom were with us.

Because you we are an effectively altruistic community we have been healing, growing and you have been makers-of-shalom, you are children of your heavenly father.

I know that it is easy to think of tithing as a burden more than a joy or just necessary “overhead” but I hope by giving you a glimpse into my private life, risking some vulnerability, I am hoping that you can see how in not neglecting the rabbi in your gates you have enabled us to find shalom, to find healing, to chart a path for recovery.

Though doctors were throwing around those scary terms with us like “schizophrenia” and “bi-polarism” and “manic depressive disorder” in the end she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. And, we are now finding our path for her, making shalom for her and you have helped us to belong, helped us to heal, made shalom for us.

And, you also have inspired me to do something but I will need the help of some smart people in this room.

I would like to start a fund that will be partially fueled by the monthly tithe of Beth El Shalom and partially supported by outside donors. It’s goal will be to provide financial help to pastors and their children and teens who are the victims of religious trauma and abuse. Because it happens way too much, to too many people and know one wants to talk about it in a curative or preventative way.

I do. I want to begin the conversation and help this who are suffering. I want to be a shalom-maker for those who have suffered from religious abuse and trauma.

Since January, I have tried to understand what has happened to my daughter. To find causes and meaning. What I have discovered is troubling. The effects of toxic religion and religious people should bother us because of its effects.

Ed Stetzer, who was the co-host of BreakPoint, tells the story of a pastor who shared his struggles with depression with his congregation’s leaders. Their response was to remove him from the pulpit. I think of Matthew Warren, Rick Warren’s son who committed suicide. I think of the Pastor of Sugar Land Baptist Church, Phil Lineberger, in 2015 who took his life. Just four months before he took his life he gave the eulogy for his friend and fellow pastor, John Petty, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Kerrville, Texas (just 42).

Here is the thing. We are not even touching on the countless number of people who have experienced very real trauma, harassment, manipulation, and abuse within the confines of religious organization and are scared to talk about it because of fear of being ostracized, being told they are now going to hell or will go to hell. There are just so many people wounded and I want to help them get to the help they need before it turns into crises.

Related Media

Related Sermons