Sermon Matthew 5:3-12
January 29, 2017 Ordinary time
Blessed are They
Children's sermon: the Bee-attitudes
sermon:
The Beatitudes are beautiful aspiring words.
They look good on a plaque or cross stitch hung in the
hallways of our homes.
They are sweet lovely platitudes that offer a sense of peace
and comfort. We view them in this way and rarely consider them in other way.
Yet, these words of Jesus are a call to discipleship. They
are a call to living for God. They are a call to live for the kingdom of
heaven.
As a whole they are God’s blessings to have the ability to
live for the pursuit of righteousness in accordance to God’s righteousness. To
live as we heard from the verses of Micah 6:8, “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”
The word beatitude comes from Latin beātitūdō, from beātus
blessed. Beatitude means happy. William Barclay one of our contemporary
theologians tells us that happy means, ‘a
joy which has a secret within itself, that joy which is serene and
untouchable, and self-contained…completely
independent of all the chances and changes of life.’
The Beatitudes are a message of hope, simplicity and compassion in a world of chaos, confusion, and misery. And yet,
when we hear them we wonder, “Who in their right mind, can achieve the lofty
goal of living into each of these?
When we hear things such as the pursuit of righteousness, and blessed
are the peacemakers, the people who pop into our mind are people like
Mother Teresa, MLKjr, Desmond Tutu. As we think of these names we convince
ourselves that we cannot measure up to these larger than life figures of our
history. We set aside those beatitudes as something that ‘those’ people do. We
cannot bring ourselves to think of them as a call to us.
Yet, each of these larger than life people did not aspire to make history. They started
simply within their own context of living doing
small things to make a difference where they were. They sought the
kingdom-the desire for equality and humaneness for all-as their dream to reach.
But, they lived practically one small step at a time until it grew as
God allowed it to.
One thing about context for us to remember is that the
gospel writer of Matthew placed these words of Jesus in what we call a
narrative context. As we read through the gospel we are made aware of the
sociopolitical climate into which Jesus was born. A climate of oppression under
the Roman Empire. And his religious context was an environment of religious
elitism and corruption. Both contexts put this Sermon on the Mount in direct
contrast to the culture in which Jesus was living. Jesus presented to his
listeners an alternative community. For the followers of Jesus, his disciples
and his crowds of listeners-he provided them with the opportunity of another
way. The Way of the future reign of God.
Jesus pronounces blessing upon those within his reach. He
recognizes that the people surrounding him are the poor, the meek, the hungry. Through his words he reinforces the
strong Jewish principles of living
for God. He brings back the words of faithful living for the people. The words
of Deuteronomy and Micah are threaded
throughout these beatitudes.
The culture that Jesus was going against was a culture that
dehumanized and dismissed people whether through political oppression or
religious dogma.
Jesus is calling the disciples to action.
I guess you call Jesus’ agenda a political one or a counter
religious for his time.
His agenda as we read these beatitudes is the pursuit of righteousness. And in his
sociopolitical context this meant being
willing to risk their lives for the sake of others- for the sake of the
stranger, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of their children, for
the sake of their loved one.
God always chooses the side of the weak, the forgotten, the
despised, the justice seekers, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.
Jesus couldn’t be more relevant today than he was when he
was walking the streets of Galilee.
Every century of our history has shown a time of
sociopolitical unrest and oppression and worse it has shown religion in its
most disturbing exclusionary ways.
Just this week we had Holocaust Remembrance Day. A day in my
context of living which is so important. I spoke to my brother this week as
well. In September I had given him copies of my father’s diaries. The diaries
recorded my father’s experience during the war. My brother asked me about an entry
about my grandfather being bedridden for three weeks. I shared the reason he
was bed ridden was because he suffered from severe Rheumatoid arthritis and the
complications of it caused him great immobility. The reason for the severity of
the complications was because this was during the time that the only thing they
had to eat was tulip bulbs. As a result of poor nutrition, he became bedridden.
The context of where and how we live is so important to how we hear these words
of Jesus and the words of Micah. My father’s family hoped for the day when
someone out there would hear the cries of the people and come to do justice and
love kindness.
Our opportunity in the
context of our lives is to grasp the richness of the blessings that Jesus
offers us.
As we live each day we have the opportunity to risk our life for the reign of God. We have
the opportunity to stand up for those who are unable to stand up for
themselves. Christ calls us to partner with him in the mission of the kingdom
of heaven. To be his hands and feet and voice.
How do we practically
risk our lives for the kingdom?
As we are blessed, so we choose to bless others.
It doesn’t take money we don’t have.
It doesn’t take time we don’t have.
It doesn’t take objects or possessions we don’t have.
What it takes is the awareness of who we are where we are.
As we drive kids to school we notice the person in the line
ahead of us and we wave and smile.
We show kindness in
every circumstance.
We help the person who dropped their groceries on the floor.
We call a neighbor when we go to the store and invite them
to go with us-because we’re going anyway-it doesn’t cost us anything.
As we develop these small risks to reach out,
God grants us more courage to do more
and to step further beyond ourselves.
We can do this! We are blessed. And blessed are they! Amen.
