The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Epiphany 4A
As a little kid, I had a leather-bound King James Version of the Bible with a zipper that kept it closed. I remember opening it and the smell of the thin pages hitting my nose; it was a peaceful scent. Sure, I had some children’s storybooks of Biblical figures, but I would still want to open the Bible and read as best as I could.
I would try reading the book of Genesis, but by the time I’d reach the Tower of Babel story I’d be a little overwhelmed by the Elizabethan “thee” and “thy” and vocabulary. Strangely enough for a kid, I liked stories but there was something different I wanted from the Bible. I wanted to know what I was supposed to do.
And so I turned to one of the other books of the Bible: The Gospel of Matthew. It was right there, in the New Testament, where Jesus was. I knew Jesus was a good guide – my parents told me that Jesus was the one to pay attention to. And so I’d open up my King James Bible to the Gospel of Matthew, and turn a few pages until I hit a bunch of red words. My King James Bible was one of those “red letter” Bibles where the words of Jesus are written in red to highlight its importance. When I turned to the page where the Sermon on the Mount begins, the sea of red ink proclaimed to my child brain, “This is important! Pay attention!”
My childhood moral development was strongly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said these words, and it was important to do what the Sermon on the Mount says. As a kid, I hadn’t yet learned about the nuances and exceptions that religious people can carve out of the words of Jesus. I hadn’t learned yet that the Sermon on the Mount was “impractical” – as a child, I thought that because Jesus said it, then it was important to really do it as best as you can. Turning the other cheek, being the light of the world, going into your room to pray instead of loudly proclaiming your piety before others, being aware that one cannot serve both God and wealth, not judging others – as a child, I really, truly thought that the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount were so apparent that I could not understand that people would ignore them or, as happens today, denounce the words of Jesus as woke empathy nonsense.
While I still cannot fathom how people can read the Gospel of Matthew and not be astonished by how the Sermon on the Mount calls us Christians to be wildly different than the ways of the world, I do understand that there are Christians who would ignore everything Jesus said to cling to a narrow understanding of what Jesus did. Instead of encountering the Bible’s account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, many Christians turn to theologies about Jesus. Instead of imagining themselves sitting at Jesus’ feet as he preaches this Sermon on the Mount, so many of our fellow Christians have substituted a lifeless picture of a Jesus who corresponds to their political beliefs.
How anyone could read the Beatitudes and not have their heart ripped open for the love of Christ to pour out and through and into, I do not fully comprehend.
The Beatitudes should be central for us Christians. Our forebears focused on the Ten Commandments but failed to even understand those; they looked at the Ten Commandments and saw a list of rules and regulations instead of a guide for our regular rhythm of life. Our forebears fell into the same trap that Paul warned us about, that we would make the Law into a checklist that proved our own righteousness. It took centuries of failed understanding for us to open our eyes to the insights our Jewish siblings have long understood, that the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law are guideposts and guardrails to help us find and follow God in everyday life and keep us from careening off the edge into selfish misery and contemptuous violence.
But we had the message before us the whole time. The Beatitudes have been our guideposts even though we have so often neglected them. They are literally blessings – and we have so often rejected these blessings that are our birthright in baptism.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew takes a different approach than Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. Matthew says “poor in spirit” whereas Luke says simply “the poor.” Matthew points to an inner condition – there are those who recognize their own lack and turn to God’s goodness. They are poor in spirit, broken-hearted, they understand that every bit of goodness and love comes from a loving God rather than their own effort.
The world cannot understand how this spiritual poverty is a blessing. The world – and that includes so many Christians eager to proclaim their own spiritual wisdom – the world cannot understand this blessing because the world inflicts poverty as punishment and as political policy. Our world is filled with vast riches, but some have decided that their success requires that others must fail and do without.
To be poor in spirit is a blessing, and we receive the Kingdom of Heaven. We can see glimpses of the way that God calls us to be and inhabit his Kingdom now on earth and forever in its fullness.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
To mourn is to love. Our hearts break often. We love someone and then they are gone. We love the people and animals and plants in creation, and our hearts break when we see the violence done to them. We mourn, we cry out.
The world cannot understand that this is a blessing. The world sees tears as weakness and mourning as an obstacle to be overcome to return to normal. To let your heart be broken is a failure; to the world, it is better not to love at all.
But we know the blessing of mourning. To mourn is to love even in the face of death. To mourn is to understand the broken-hearted love of Christ that opens up so fully on the cross.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Oh, how we have misunderstood this one! A better word instead of meek is gentle. Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth. We say meek and we think of passive people that stuff happens to. No, these are the gentle, the ones who embrace gentleness as a way of life. Gentleness is a behavior. To be gentle with a puppy learning to go outside to the bathroom, to be gentle with a horse as you get it used to wearing a saddle and being ridden. To be gentle with a child having big emotions, to be gentle with that prickly person at work. To be gentle is to see the dignity of the creature before you and to choose to honor that dignity as best as you can with your words and deeds.
The world prefers power over others. If I can get my way, then I will, by any means necessary. They do not receive the gifts of the whole earth as a gift – the gifts of the earth are something to be seized and taken.
But blessed are those who choose gentleness, to see the creaturely dignity before them and to receive everything as a gift.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Perhaps our language is a little off here, too. “For they will be filled” or “for they will be satisfied” – no, the Greek is a little more suggestive. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be fattened like an animal.” Plentiful grazing in peace and justice. It is a blessing to want righteousness, to want peace, to want justice because it is food that is meant for sharing. Justice for me is justice for you, too. Peace for me is peace for you, peace for all of us. Private justice is an oxymoron, and private peace is an illusion.
The world does not understand this blessing. The world trains us to see justice and peace and righteousness as private little things. To be righteous is to be morally correct in my own mind. If I’m righteous, then God will like me, and I get to pass judgment on you.
But blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – then everyone shall be fattened and filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
The blessing of mercy is not that we are merciful so we get rewarded with mercy. The blessing is that we learn that mercy unites our heart to God. God is merciful, compassionate – so when we practice mercy and compassion we learn to live like God in whose image we are made.
The world does not understand mercy – look at our justice system. Those who have connections and wealth can escape punishment, and that is not mercy to the victims. Those who have few resources don’t get mercy – and those of certain races, religions, gender, sexuality, or immigration status, they are often denied mercy in the name of some kind of justice. Real mercy would mourn at the brokenness of it all and endeavor for righteousness. Now we see that these blessings start to intertwine.
We know the blessing of mercy – mercy shown, mercy received, mercy that makes for justice and peace.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Kierkegaard says it well: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” What is that one thing for us as Christians? What did Jesus say? “To love God with all your soul, with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength – and to love your neighbor as yourself.” These are all interconnected, and how blessed would we be if we could just desire to do that one thing, love.
But the world wants us weighed down by many things. It wants our hearts infested with weeds and thoughts and cares and needs and desires and status because then we are controllable.
What a blessing it is to have purity of heart, to purify our hearts of all that is not the love of God poured into us, flowing through us, infused within us. Love sets us free.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Peace is made. It takes work. Peace in a community takes work and consistent practice – and it is a peace that takes ongoing work to ensure it is real peace, not the absence of conflict. It’s a peace with justice. Peace inside our own heart takes work – it takes a willingness to go into our own mysterious depths to discover what is there, and with merciful lovingkindness to transform it and let it be transformed.
The world understands peace as absence of surface conflict. We see this throughout the centuries –we pretend all is well and that those who bring up the lack of true peace are the ones disturbing the peace. The world benefits from fake peace just as much as it benefits from war and violence. If we do not detect our own world’s lack of peace but think we are satisfied and filled by our own possessions, then we are not making peace real.
Blessed, then, are those who work for peace; who seek to make it real wherever they go, a real peace that is justice and mercy and the Kingdom of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Now Jesus points to the enduring presence of blessing. If true peace is the presence of justice, we might think that blessedness depends upon everything being ok. No, Jesus says – such blessings of God endure even when things are falling apart; perhaps these blessings are meant for just such an occasion, when contempt and injustice and violence and greed are all breaking down the door. Just as the poor in spirit receive the Kingdom of God, so do those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. It’s a full circle. All of these blessings are gifts in the midst of the chaos of the world – consecrations and anointing’s of blessedness that call us home and strengthen us for the holy life of the Kingdom of God.
The world – and especially our fellow Christians awfully keen on claiming the mantle of martyrdom – loves a good persecution. It gives that addictive energy of righteous indignation. But righteousness has nothing to do with our own private morality, remember – righteousness for all, justice for all, peace for all, mercy for all.
And that is what makes it a blessing – it is a blessing shared, a blessing gratuitously given, a blessing freely made manifest in our midst.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
If we had not perceived Jesus’ change in rhetoric, he now makes it clear: blessed are you when these persecutions happen. And he means a plural you; he means y’all, all of us together. If we are persecuted for speaking up for our neighbors in fear and pain, we must be doing something right. If we are persecuted for feeding the hungry – as some of our siblings have been in other states, where cities and armed agents have targeted churches and volunteers for being a “nuisance” by feeding hungry people – then we must be pressing up against the deep-seated dysfunction in the world. The Kingdom of God is not easy; the Kingdom of God is a threat to those who think they benefit from all this dysfunction.
But, again, this blessing is to be shared. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are blessed to do what is right, to demonstrate mercy and justice, to make for peace and reconciliation. We are given a blessing to go and do these very things, and in so doing we receive abundant blessings to share in the life of the Kingdom of God.
God bestows these blessings on us. Jesus teaches us this way of blessing in his Sermon on the Mount. Do we believe in these blessings? Are we willing to live out this blessed life not only for our own sake but for the world’s sake? Or was little Joseph wrong about the Beatitudes being important for our life as followers of Jesus Christ? Was he mistaken about these words of Jesus? Are these Beatitudes a bunch of words no better than a sea of ink wasted on a page? Amen.