Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director
Summary:
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza describes life as a pyramid in which hurt is passed down from the most evil people to others, and explains how taking our concerns to God in prayer stops us from passing the hurt on.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. A lot of times when people get hurt by others, they wonder, “Why?” They focus on how to stop it there and then, and this often prevents them from seeing the bigger picture. Most of the time, they don’t realize that it’s part of the system in this life. This whole life is one giant pyramid of hurt, and here is what I mean by that: Let’s say that someone evil out there kills someone, because he just can’t help it. He is so terribly unhappy inside to the point that it is the only things which is left for him to feel good for a few days. Now, the state has to catch him, judge him, and imprison him for a long time, and it will cost the state at least about 2 million dollars to do all of that. I am not exaggerating it. Now, because the state has 2 million dollars less, they have to raise taxes. Once they raise the taxes, it hurts a businessman who is just trying to create a business and live his life normally, but the taxes and all the complicated rules waste a lot of his efforts. So, to make up for that lost effort, the businessman has learned that he can push his employees to work harder, if he is just rude and strict with them. So, he is rude to one of the employees one day, and now the employee feels bad and worthless, and after work, he goes out to drink to get rid of his pain. He goes home, he is drunk and yells at his wife, and this happened regularly recently. She can’t take it anymore, so she divorces him. Now, the child has to be taken care of with extra efforts in two separate places. So, they have to spend more for the same child. Because they have to spend more, they become stingier in other things. Now, a friend sees that she has become stingy and never pays when they stay together, so the friends feels kind of used and doesn’t see the point in staying in a friendship where she is always the one who contributes. Now, she decides not to meet her often anymore. Now, she feels lonelier. Because she feels lonely, to alleviate that, she watches more movies. She gains weight. Eventually she has to go to the doctor earlier, because of unhealthy living. So, now the health insurance company has to pay her expenses. But, the health insurance company now has to raise the premiums for everyone else to cover her expenses, or they have to reduce what the insurance covers. So, now they start thinking of ways to cover less without the clients noticing, writing things in complicated contracts with fine prints, and then once someone needs a health treatment, he might later realize that he is not actually covered for that treatment in the same way that he thought he was covered before. Now, he feels angry. Now, he has a choice. He can break the window of the health insurance company, out of anger, or he can let go. If he doesn’t let go, this cycle of passing on the hurt from one person to another will continue forever, and it continues like that until someone who knows how to leg go comes along. And that cycle of hurt only stops at that person who fully lets go, and absorbs the hurt himself or herself, and doesn’t pass it on. I simplified this example to say it faster, but the reality is that this example can go in some many different ways, but the main idea is that whenever a person hurts a second person, then that second person feels the need to hurt a third person, and at each stage, people absorbed a little, and try to pass on most of the pain to someone else, and at the end there, the person who absorbs the hurt without passing it on to someone else becomes a believer. And because it’s psychologically impossible to get hurt without passing it on to others, the only way to do it is to pass it on to God, and that’s done through prayer. So, once you pray, you simply enable yourself psychologically to not pass your hurt to other people, but express it in words towards God, and God is there to listen when you express your concerns, and once the prayer is over, you are now capable of not passing your paint to other people. Otherwise, the anger accumulates, and you are forced to pass it on willingly or unwillingly. Anyway, what I described is only one line of passing the hurt from the most evil person to the least evil person who then expressed it to God who heals it. But, in reality it’s not just one line, it’s more like a pyramid. At the bottom, we have a large number of the least happy people who feel hurt, and they want to take some happiness from the people just above them by hurting them, and then they do that for the people just above them, and at each level, there is less and less people, and it’s like a pyramid of hurt, a pyramid of pain. And the hurt is transported from the bottom of the pyramid, absorbed a little at each level, and transported towards the top, and then the believers at the top of the pyramid transport that hurt as an expression of prayer to God. And the messenger is simply the person who is at the top of that pyramid. He is the person who is the best in the world who knows how to let go. But he is not the guy who got hurt the most.
He is simply the guy who got hurt the most compared to how little he was able to get hurt, because he chose to pass on to others as little of the hurt as possible compared to what others transported to him. And that’s only possible with honest prayer. Another way to express this is that the messenger is chosen from the person who has the biggest difference between how much he chose to get in life and how much he could get in life, and the ultimate example of this is Jesus. This difference is the biggest in him, from all the humans ever. In the bible, Jesus is offered the whole world by Satan just to worship him once, and Jesus refuses by saying that the scripture says, “We should worship God alone.” And Jesus refused a real offer. It was not a bluff by Satan. As we know in the Quran, Satan is given dominion over Earth, so he had the power to give it to Jesus, and Satan was willing to give it to Jesus, because it would prove God wrong, and both Jesus and Satan knew that if Jesus accepted the offer, they would both do it. But, instead Jesus chose to get nothing. So, the difference between what he could get in this life and what he chose to get in this life is as big as all the wealth of the world – the ultimate difference, and because Jesus has the biggest difference between how much he could get in this life, and how much he chose to get in this life, that’s why God chose him. The Messiah, as you know, means “the chosen”. And by the way this difference between what a person has the ability to get in life and what he chose to get in life is a result of their internal happiness, because only a truly happy person can tolerate to get less than what he could actually get and still be happy. An unhappy person can not let go of the hurt. But a happy person can let go of the hurt. And our happiness belongs to God. He is the one who can make us laugh or cry. So, it’s a waste of time to try to change our happiness through material things. Instead, we should simply let God rule our lives, and happiness is there.