Blessed Be

Here is my sermon from yesterday based on the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12. The audio version can be found here.

It was just about one year ago that I stood up here and read to you what Luke says was Jesus’ first sermon. You may remember it, Jesus stands up in the synagogue and reading from the prophet Isaiah, he says “the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has sent me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Today we have the beginning of Matthew’s version of Jesus’ first sermon, which is of course commonly referred to as the Sermon on the Mount, and today’s passage is, to a degree, based on the same Isaiah passage used in Luke. Jesus’ ministry began when he had previously announced “repent for the kingdom of God has come near,” and then through this sermon we are given a glimpse of what that kingdom looks like, a view that is radically different from what the world considers important.

Jesus gives us a list of people who will be blessed, which is the reason these called the Beatitudes, but these are not the people we would normally consider blessed. If we were to make a list of those in the world who we think are blessed, I don’t think that our list would include those Jesus’ includes, even if we knew we were supposed to think that way, which the original hearers did not. In hearing who was blessed, they would have expected him to name the people everyone thought were blessed, the rich and powerful for example, who have these characteristics because they are blessed by God, and because they are blessed by God they also have these characteristics. It’s a circular argument. But that, of course is not what Jesus’ say, and that is where some of the difficulty of this passage arises.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those persecuted for righteousness and blessed are those who are persecuted because they are followers of Jesus. Are those on any of your lists of those who are blessed? If we were to make a list of those who are blessed in our culture, just like in Jesus’ time, we would probably start with those who are rich and those with power, those who are popular, those seem fairly easy, and certainly the ones who gather the most attention and accolades. From there maybe we add those with an education, maybe heterosexuals, and others would include those who are white, and or males, again groups that have higher social positions, those who often are the ones who get to establish and determine societal structures and rules. Those are the ones that society blesses, but that is not whom we are told that God will necessarily bless.

In the movie version of A Chorus Line, which tells the story of 17 dancers looking to earn a part in a Broadway show. At the end, when the final cut of the dancers is going to be made, the director, played by Michael Douglas, asks the dancers to come to the line and then he calls some of the dancers by name and asks them to step forward. As they do, they begin to smile thinking that they have won the competition. Diana Morales, one of the dancers, is called forward and then sent back and as he sends her back, her face drops and she is crestfallen as she thinks she has been eliminated, but then the twist comes as all those who thought they had been chosen, all those who had heard their name called and who had stepped forward, are told “dancers in the front, thank you very much.” And they are dismissed. They thought that had been chosen only to find out they were not, and those who thought they were the worst found out, instead, that they were the best. They were the ones chosen. They were the ones elevated. Such is it for those lifted up by Jesus.

Now I think one of the problems in hearing what Jesus is trying to say here is that we don’t understand the meaning of blessing. One of the participants in a sermon discussion group I follow said this week “when my father died this fall, I didn’t feel blessed; I just hurt. I woke up on the morning of the funeral and said to my husband, ‘So this is what a broken heart feels like.’ Yet Jesus tells me I was blessed, and still am, even in my mourning, and so I have to ask myself, ‘since when did blessedness and happiness become synonymous?” I think that is part of our problem in hearing the beatitudes, we make the mistake that being blessed and being happy are the same thing. This is actually how some versions have translated the Greek word used here. But there are two problems with this translation.

The first is that happy is a rather subjective state. What makes me happy, like seeing the Yankees win, might make you miserable, and vice versa. Happiness is in the eye of the beholder. Whereas blessed is objective. Either God blesses you or God doesn’t. While we might say someone has clearly been blessed by God, our opinion has nothing to do with the actual blessing. Blessing has nothing to do with what we think about it. The second, and bigger, problem is that the opposite of blessed is not unhappy, which it might be if blessed and happy were synonymous. Instead, the opposite of blessed is cursed. This becomes very clear later in Matthew’s gospel when Jesus issues a series of woe statements, that begin “woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” There are 13 such statements in Matthew. Luke, the only other gospel to include the Beatitudes, has 14 woe statements. To compare this, Mark has two woe statements, and John contains none. So to be blessed is a gift from God and is a statement of relationship with God, it has nothing to do with happiness or unhappiness.

In addition, what separates this giving of a set of laws from the mountain top, like Moses did, is that whereas the Ten Commandments are about doing, or not doing depending on the rule, the beatitudes are about being of who we are in the world. But, the other mistake we often make when we hear the Beatitudes being read is that we begin thinking am I meek enough? am I pure enough in heart? do I thirst and hunger for righteousness? am I merciful? Am I a peacemaker? That too misses the point. While all of these are positive attributes, Jesus is lifting them up after all, but Jesus is not telling us to go out and seek to mourn or to be poor in spirit, nor is he saying to be meek. Have you ever tried to be meek? You either are or you are not.

As one commentator said, “these are not practical advice for successful living, but prophetic declarations made on the conviction of the coming-and-already present kingdom of God.” They are not commands of how we should be living, but statements about how things are already. Notice that each blessing begins in the present tense to the future tense. Blessed are those who are x, for they will y. Blessed are the meek, current, present tense, for they will inherit the earth, future tense. To which Monty Python adds, in their immortal portrayal of the sermon on the mount, “Oh, I'm glad [the meek] are getting something, they have a hell of a time.” Jesus takes the blessings found in the Old Testament, which are located in the prophetic literature, like Isaiah, and in the wisdom literature, like the Psalms, and he combines them into one. They are both wisdom and prophecy.

One final problem we encounter when we hear the beatitudes is that many of us are so familiar with what they say, and the rhythm that they are too familiar. Because we know them we begin to miss entirely what they are saying, so listen to this version from Eugene Peterson’s The Message:
"You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
"You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
"You're blessed when you're content with just who you are—no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.
"You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat.
"You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'care-full,' you find yourselves cared for.
"You're blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
"You're blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family.
"You're blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God's kingdom.
"Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don't like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble."

Did you hear something different in that reading? The Beatitudes are not about nine individual characteristics or human virtues, in fact they stand in opposition to what we traditionally hold as virtuous. I challenge any politician to adopt these as their platform. They would be destroyed in an election. Instead, they are about the blessing that God gives to us, “contrary to all appearances” in our lives. We cannot look at each statement individually, they must be seen as a collective whole. They build on each other and Matthew, through his literary genius book ends them so that we understand them as a collective piece. This is what a Christian community looks like when they are oriented toward the Kingdom of God.

The Beatitudes are about the foolishness that Paul is talking about in the passage that we heard from 1 Corinthians this morning. “For God’s foolishness,” Paul says, “is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” Consider your own call,” Paul says. Consider your call, “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” But God chose you.

Matthew says that Jesus sat down and taught the disciples, but he cannot mean the twelve, because he has only just before this selected his first four disciples. So who is Jesus teaching? We should hear Matthew saying, he is teaching us, the called disciples of Jesus the Christ. God has called us and blesses us, even us the broken and foolish, the meek, the mourning, and the poor in spirit. God blesses us. I want you to turn to the person next to you, or on both sides of you, and say “You are blessed.” No matter where you are in your life, no matter what is going on, God is there with you and wants you, even you, to participate in the Kingdom. God’s blessing is available for each and every one of us, not just the people that people think God should be blessing, but even us. May it be so. Amen.