“The Life of Blessedness”
Matthew 5:1-12
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
6/3/16
As many of you know, moving from one region to another
requires some adjustments. And one of the most significant changes has to do
with language. Cultural idioms can vary as widely as barbeque sauce. For instance,
when someone from northeast Tennessee says that they “don’t care” to do
something, they mean that they’re glad to do it. Until October 2010, when I
heard someone say, that they “don't care” to do something, it meant No
thanks! It still throws me when I hear someone happily not care their way into
responsibility.
Another example: If you’re a recent transplant to the
southeast, you may remember the moment you realized what southerners mean when
we utter three syllables about someone else. To maximize effect, the person of
reference cannot hear these words: “Bless his/her heart.” The point being: “That
person doesn’t have the sense God gave a lug nut.”
“Blessing” has become a slippery concept. Whether in condescending
idiom, a verbal pat on the head after a sneeze, or some winning team’s locker
room where God’s name is taken in vain more dangerously and tediously than it
ever has in genuine anger and pain, we have so trivialized and materialized the
idea of blessedness that the Beatitudes may ring hollow in our
over-blessed/under-blessed ears.
In Luke, Jesus offers his most famous 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 a new Torah.
But Jesus does not give commandments. He pronounces particular blessings on
those who cannot help themselves. In doing so, Jesus peels back the
eschatological curtain and scandalizes human reason. He reveals that the
kingdom of God does not arrive in glorious conquest.
Do
you want to know true blessedness?
says Jesus. Then look at “the poor in spirit…theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. [Look at] those who mourn…the meek…those who hunger
and thirst for righteousness…the merciful…the peacemakers…”
True
and eternal blessedness begins with what Frederick Buechner calls “The
Magnificent Defeat,” God’s radical and painfully gracious overcoming of the
soul-rust of pride, fear, selfishness, and anything else that occludes the
doors of humble gratitude.1 “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, with one condition: “I will
not let you go,” he says, “unless you bless me.”
The liberty of blessedness begins with the sheer stillness
of defeat, the initially unwelcome awareness that we cannot create lasting
freedom and wholeness by ourselves. The Beatitudes reveal the path of radical
Christian spirituality, the path of subversive Love, the path by which the
human heart, mind, and spirit move from the immaturity of an ego-centric
existence toward the freedom and wholeness of intimate reunion with God,
neighbor, and earth.
Brian McLaren, a former college professor turned pastor, writer,
and prophetic gadfly, spends his time now studying and interacting with the
contemporary church. He is helping all who have the ears to hear and eyes to
see that the Spirit is sobering us into new life.
McLaren views the Beatitudes as foundational to our
understanding of our God-imaged selves and of our mission as disciples of Jesus.
To illustrate how revolutionary the Beatitudes are, McLaren has written his own
version of the opposite of each beatitude. Listen to a few of his
anti-beatitudes; and beware, while some are 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 those who hunger and thirst for status, for they
will be full of themselves.
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
“What
[we] consider blessed,” says McLaren, “will be the ethos [we] desire and
imitate. [Ethos refers to our ways of thinking, and being in relationship.] [Our] ethos will determine [our] ethics…[and] our
ethics will create our future.”3
Any future that depends on a competitive, winner’s-locker
room ethos of consumerism and triumphalism is a future that will not hold. Just
ask the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, European
colonialism. Just ask slave owners and carpetbaggers alike. As long as they
equate blessedness with privilege, supremacy, and ease of life, human
institutions will be consumed by consumption and humiliated by pride. And we may
never hear Jesus calling us to poverty of spirit, meekness, and mercy. We may
never follow him into the costly and rigorous work of helping to create more peaceable
and just communities.
Hear the Good News: The Beatitudes themselves convey the
very power of resurrection for humankind. They give us the means by which to
die to self. Then they breathe new and lasting life back into us.
When working as an attorney in South Africa in the 1890’s, a
young Hindu from India named Mohandas Gandhi recognized the blessedness of
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He decided that if Christians really followed that
teaching, he wanted in. One Sunday, Gandhi went to church. He never made it. The
dark-skinned immigrant was physically thrown back into the street. One can only
imagine that afterward, the Christians inside the building proceeded to sing praises
and offer prayers to the God of Love, who is revealed in Jesus, who preached
the Sermon on the Mount.
While Gandhi did not become Christian, one would be hard-pressed
to find another human being in the last 140 years who more fully and more
graciously embodied an enriching poverty of spirit; who mourned humanity’s
brokenness; who felt an aching hunger and thirst for righteousness in all of
human life; who possessed a world-changing meekness and a simple purity of
heart; who displayed an unflinching and often disruptive commitment to peace;
and who endured persecution with such determined Love for those who persecuted
him.
It
seems to me that Gandhi recognized Jesus’ point better than most people in the
power-coddled, Constantinian Church ever did: God calls and empowers us to
become an eschatological community of diverse individuals who
come together to live intentionally toward healing and redeeming relationship
with God and with all creation.
Our purpose is to live the life of Blessedness, the life of
Resurrection – the life of humility, simplicity, and grateful service.
In living this life, we become more fully human, and more
fully the Church. And we discover that being the Church means inhabiting,
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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