“The Life of Blessedness”
Matthew 5:1-12
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
2/2/14
As many of us here know
firsthand, moving from one distinct region to another requires some
adjustments. One has to learn and
appreciate new customs, foods, and music.
Perhaps the most significant change has to do with language, in
particular how a different culture uses idiomatic speech. For instance, when someone from northeast
Tennessee says that that they “don’t care” to do something, they mean that
they’re glad to do it. Until October of
2010, when I heard someone say, that they “don't care” to do something, it
meant leave me out of it! It
still throws me a little every time I hear someone happily not caring their way into some
responsibility.
Another example: If
you’re a relatively recent transplant to the southeast, you may remember well
the moment you figured out what we southerners mean when we use three little
words in reference to someone who is not presently in earshot. And that part is important. The person to whom we refer cannot actually
hear these three words for them to have their intended effect. The three words are, “Bless his heart,” or
“Bless her heart.”
Now, this expression may
be more universal than I know, but when a
southerner blesses the heart of someone else in the presence of others,
everyone knows that open season has just been declared on that absentee heart.
“Bless his heart,” we
say earnestly. “He just doesn’t have the
sense God gave a lug nut.”
As an aside here: Should
you actually respond to that statement by pointing out that God didn’t give lug
nuts any sense, there will be an awkward pause, while embarrassed glances
bounce around the room. Then, you may
hear someone say to you directly, “Bless your heart.” And that will be entirely different from the
heart blessing you get when you have broken your leg or won an honorable
mention in the science fair.
“Blessing” has become a
slippery concept. From a condescending
idiom, to a verbal pat on the head after a sneeze, to some winning team’s
locker room where God’s name is probably taken in vain more dangerously, and
certainly more tediously, than it ever has been in genuine anger and pain,
humankind has so diluted the idea of blessedness that the beatitudes may
actually ring hollow in our over-blessed/under-blessed ears.
What's Jesus up to with this kind of
blessedness? “Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn…blessed are the meek…those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness…the merciful,” and all the rest.
In Luke, Jesus offers
this sermon on a “level place,” where every valley is lifted up, every hill is
made low, and all stand on equal footing.
In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain.
Matthew wants us to imagine Jesus as the second Moses, high and lifted
up and giving the new Torah. But Jesus
does not give commandments. He
pronounces particular blessings on those who, in our culture anyway, cry out
for help. In doing so, Jesus peels back
the eschatological curtain to reveal the kingdom of God, in all its scandalous
glory. What he says flies in the face of
what we want and expect when it comes to blessedness.
True blessedness, says
Jesus, is not found in Jerusalem, or even in the great Temple there, or over in
Rome.
It follows for us, then,
that true blessedness is also not found in Washington, or on Wall Street, or in
Hollywood, or at Los Alamos.
True and eternal
blessedness begins with what Frederick Buechner has referred to as “The
Magnificent Defeat,” God’s radical and painfully gracious overcoming of the
soul-rust of selfishness, fear, and pride, everything that seals shut the doors
of humble gratitude.
It's worth noting that
“The Magnificent Defeat” was a sermon Buechner preached on Jacob wrestling that
mysterious stranger on the banks of the Jabbok, a struggle that Jacob finally
conceded, but with a condition: “I will not let you go,” he says, “unless you
bless me.”1
True and eternal
blessedness begins with the sheer and humbled stillness of defeat, the initially
unwelcome awareness that wholeness is not something we can create for or by
ourselves. And wholeness is something
that we encounter not by getting more of anything. It is the blessed gift of release, of letting
go, of going backward in a way.
You know the old adage,
“Everything that goes up must come down.”
Well, for the spiritual life, that statement gets somewhat jumbled: In
order to rise, one must fall.
As we noted a moment
ago, the beatitudes are not commandments.
They are presented in the indicative mood, not the imperative. That does not make them any less urgent,
though. In fact, the beatitudes demand
that we direct our attention toward an elemental and universal reality. They reveal the path by which a human heart,
mind, and soul move from the immaturity of an ego-centric existence toward the
freedom and fulfillment of intimate union with God and neighbor. When Jesus says to his disciples, “Follow
me,” he invites them into this life of blessedness. It’s a good thing he gave them the beatitudes
after he called them. If they knew what
they were getting into, then like the rich young man in Matthew 19, they might
have turned and walked away. The
beatitudes, you see, represent the defining and subversive core of Christian
spirituality.
Brian McLaren is a
former college English professor turned pastor, writer, thinker, and prophetic
gadfly. He spends all his time now
studying and interacting with the contemporary church. Through his lectures and writings he is
helping all who have the awareness to comprehend that the Spirit is humbling us
into a new way of being and doing church.
McLaren views the
beatitudes as foundational to our understanding of ourselves and of our new and
renewing mission. To make the point of
just how revolutionary they are he has written his own version of the opposite
of each beatitude. Listen to these
anti-beatitudes; and be ready, while some are kind of tongue-in-cheek, others
have teeth:
Blessed are the rich
and successful, for they shall consume more than their fair share.
Blessed
are those who laugh, for they shall inherit amusement.
Blessed
are the aggressive, for they can look down on the defeated.
Blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for status, for they will be full of
themselves.
Blessed
are the bold and vengeful, for they will be feared.
Blessed
are the pleasure-seekers, for they will see envy in the eyes of their
neighbors.
Blessed
are those who launch preemptive attacks, because they will never be bored or
caught off guard.
Blessed
are those who persecute others for righteousness’ sake, for they have a great
future in talk radio, religious or secular.
And
blessed are you when people honor you and flatter you and give you all kinds of
extraordinary compensation on my account.
Rejoice
and be glad, for your reward is great right now in the religious-industrial
complex, and in the same way, they celebrated the inquisitors before you.2
This definition of
blessedness is less far-fetched than we might like to admit. Jesus’ beatitudes, then, challenge us all the
more, and they reveal all the more the changes that a life of spiritual
blessedness requires.
“What [we] consider
blessed,” says McLaren, “will be the ethos [we] desire and imitate. [Ethos
being our spirit, our ways of thinking and being in relationship.] [Our] ethos
will determine [our] ethics…[and] our ethics will create our future.”3
The future currently
being created by a competitive, winner’s-locker room ethos of consumerism and
militarism is a future that will not hold – not to the benefit of the wider
creation, and not for long for anyone.
It will consume us, and kill us.
As long as we equate blessedness with affluence, supremacy, and ease of
life, we may never hear Jesus call us to poverty of spirit, to meekness and
mercy. We may never follow him as deeply
as necessary into the costly and rigorous work of helping to create more
peaceable and just communities. And we
may forever side with the way-we’ve-always-done-it powers-that-be to
avoid the persecutions that threaten not just our lives, but the images of
strength, comfort, and rightness that we have been taught to associate with
“blessedness.”
Here’s the thing, the blessed
thing: The beatitudes are themselves the very power of resurrection for
humankind. They give us a means by which
to die to self. Then they breathe new
life back into us.
The beatitudes are
Jesus’ invitation into a kingdom future, a future that holds lasting hope for
all people.
Back when he was a
fledgling attorney in South Africa, a young Hindu from India named Mohandas
Gandhi read and recognized the blessedness of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He decided that if Christians really followed
that teaching, he wanted to be a part of it.
So one Sunday, Gandhi went to church, bu he never made it through the
door. He was physically thrown back into
the street. One can only imagine that
afterward, the Christians inside the church proceeded to sing hymns and offer
prayers to the God of Love, who is revealed in Jesus, who preached the Sermon
on the Mount.
Gandhi did not become a
Christian, obviously, but one would be hard-pressed to find another human being
in the last 100 years who more fully and more graciously embodied an enriching
poverty of spirit and who mourned humanity’s brokenness; who felt an aching
hunger and thirst for righteousness in the spheres of religion, politics and
economics; who possessed a world-changing meekness and a simple purity of heart
and life; who displayed an unflinching and often disruptive commitment to
peace; and who endured persecution with such determined love for those who
persecuted him.
I wish I could have
given you as good an example of faithfulness to the Beatitudes from within the
Christian tradition. Desmond Tutu and
Martin Luther King, Jr. come as close as anyone else I know about.
But the point is not to
find individual examples to look up to.
And the point certainly isn’t to become individuals who embody
Jesus’ teaching better
than the next guy. The point is to become an eschatological community of disparate people – a kingdom of God family – who
come together to live toward healing and redeeming union with God and with one
another.
The point is to live The
Life of Blessedness, the life of Resurrection – the life of humility,
gratitude, simplicity, and service.
In living this life, we
become more fully The Church. And in
living this life we discover that being The Church means that we inhabit,
through better and worse, and for the sake of others, the mystery of God's
eternal kingdom, which is our true home, our past, and present, and future
home.
1Frederick
Buechner, The
Magnificent Defeat, Harper Collins, 1966, pp10-18.
3Ibid.
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