Perhaps you, like I, ran around doing errands the past couple of days. And may I just make the comment that it has been a zoo out there in Greensboro these past couple of days. Between yet one more unwelcome winter storm warning, Friday the 13th, and Valentine’s Day, it’s been wild and crazy out there. And, of course, there’s no place (well, except maybe Wendover Avenue) where that craziness gets more played out than in the grocery store.

There I was… calmly going down the frozen food aisle, looking at (of all things) vegetables. Ahead of me was a middle-aged gentleman also perusing the selection of frozen vegetables. As I paused to check out the Green Giant frozen peas, a store employee came by, sweeping the aisle. He neared the man in front of me, muttered a quick, “Excuse me,” ducked to the shopper’s right to continue his sweeping, and the middle-aged shopper, standing approximately in front of the Bird’s Eye frozen corn shelf, became positively unglued. I think maybe the store employee had temporarily blocked the shopper’s access to the Bird’s Eye frozen corn, or maybe even inadvertently bumped his arm.

At any rate, our shopper was not at all happy about having his access to the frozen corn temporarily denied. He launched into an attack on all grocery stores in Greensboro, noting that no employee in any grocery store in town cared one whit about customers, that writing a letter of complaint wouldn’t make any difference at all, and that he wished he never had to visit any grocery store, ever, ever again.

It was an amazing scene. I froze where I was (no pun intended) and listened as the shopper continued to devalue and defile grocery stores (this one in particular) as he made his way down toward the frozen pizza. I had read a Dave Barry column about the phenomenon of Road Rage and its close cousin, Shopping Cart Rage, so I was careful to steer a very wide course around this irate shopper.

I’ve rarely seen anyone so out of control and so angry about an absolutely inconsequential matter. It was funny, but I also found it quite scary. What must it be like to live a life that is so clearly out of focus and out of control? What must it be like to get so angry about something so inconsequential? What have we gotten ourselves into when we live in a world were people no longer automatically make allowances for each other, where civility is becoming a lost art, and where people matter only in so far as they please us, or worse yet, where they don’t get in our way?

I had this overwhelmingly urge to march up to this man and say, “Sir, I think – no – I know - you need Jesus.” But of course I didn’t do that. But I thought it. And I still think it. What the world needs, and what folks like the irate shopper needs, is a good dose of the good news that Jesus brings. And that, amazingly enough, brings us to today’s lessons from scripture.

All of our lessons from scripture today share a theme in common, and that is, “Get your priorities straight.” Each lesson, in its own way, extols people to “Put God first, and you will be blessed.” The lesson from the Old Testament, the psalm for today, and our gospel reading from Luke – each uses a contrast of blessings and woes – of good news and bad news – to describe what life is like when we put God first, and what life is like when we don’t.

Let’s look at the bad news first. In the reading from the prophet Jeremiah, we hear, “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from God. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes.” The psalmist puts the bad news this way: “It is not so with the wicked; they are like chaff which the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand upright when judgment comes, nor the sinner in the council of the wicked.

And Jesus says, in his sermon on the plain to the great crowd of disciples: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

All this bad news can be summed up very quickly. The message is simply, “Don’t be self-centered.” When we make ourselves the authors of our own salvation, when we put our own need and desires first, when we put our faith in our selves rather than in God, we are going to get into trouble. Big trouble. We see that in our society everywhere we go. Back at the grocery store, we see that in magazines whose sole theme is “Make yourselves happy – you deserve it.” We see that in our workplaces, where the needs of company profit are put before the needs of the workers. We see that in our American society, which believes absolutely in the maxim of the good life – of the American dream of self-reliance and economic prosperity. We believe as Americans in the “rags to riches” story – that all one needs is will and power and grit and one can achieve the American dream. Happiness is our inalienable right, we state.

But hear what the biblical message is, because it is nearly the opposite of what the message of our society is: selfishness, self-reliance, and self-centeredness are the opposite of what God calls us to. We will never be happy trusting in our own selves, or in others. We will never be happy trusting in our own capabilities and gifts. We’re not fundamentally made that way and yet most of us spend lifetimes trying to save ourselves and make ourselves happy.

The bottom line is, happiness will never come from our own striving after it, from our own making, of from our own willing it to be so. We’ve defined happiness the wrong way. Happiness (or blessedness as the scriptures calls it) is not a reward we get for being a good person, doing the right things, living the right kind of life. Blessedness comes from putting God first.

And I think we’re here this morning because we know this to be so. Our flawed human nature wants to seek blessedness in being self-directed and self-centered. God’s call for us is to be God-centered and God-directed. To be happy or blessed, in biblical terms, means entrusting one’s life to God.

Now here’s the disappointing catch. There’s absolutely no guarantee that in doing so we will not be discouraged, disappointed or disillusioned. There’s absolutely no guarantee that in entrusting our lives to God we won’t still experience tremendous suffering, pain, and loss. There’s absolutely no guarantee that our lives on earth won’t be a mess and a disaster. And that’s where the last reading for today comes in – the lesson from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.

The people in Corinth, as new believers, were still wavering between the worldview of self-direction and self-protection and God’s view of things. Paul urges them to trust in what they have been taught, which is that Christ was resurrected from the dead and because they too have been baptized they too will be resurrected.

There’s more to life than meets the eye, says Paul. Trust in that. While there is pain and suffering and disappointment in this life, we have been promised eternal life by virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection. That’s the topsy-turvy view of life in God’s kingdom – the kingdom which Jesus held before his followers and holds before us now.

Long, long ago a woman known as Julian lives in 14th century England as an anchoress. She lived in a small cell attached to a church in the city of Norwich. In the course of Julian’s life, the Black Death struck twice, and people died horrible deaths. There was war, hardships, sadness and death all around her. But as she listened to God in the solitude of her cell, the overwhelming sense she had from God was that all would be well.

Happiness will never come to us out of our own making, but it will come to us out of God’s making. Put God first, and all will be well. You will be blessed beyond belief.

Amen.