“Blessed Are You.”

Sermon Luke 6:20-31 November 6, 2013 All Saints Day service

“Blessed Are You.”

Blessed are you! Blessed are you!

As I walk down the aisle and say to each of you, “Blessed are you! When is the last time you’ve heard that said to you? Or that you’ve said it to someone?”

It is a powerful art and an incredible opportunity to offer someone the promise of God through a blessing.

We are all capable of blessing one another each day and perhaps several times a day if we get really excited. It’s an ancient tradition blessing those who come and go from the home. It’s an Old Testament tradition for a father to bless his children just before he passes from this life to the next.

On this day of celebration of All Saints. We think of those in our congregation and in our family who have died this past year. We lift them up and we remember the blessings they brought us.

We remember the holiness within them.

We remember the goodness of their nature and their gifts.

We rejoice in the remembrance of their lives and their witness.

And we whisper in our heart, “Blessed are you!”

For in our memory we can only draw the finest moments.

We can only recall the times that brought joy and the moments that stir our hearts with good thoughts.

And so the hard times and the difficult experiences melt away.

Yes, the one we have lost was a dear saint.

Perhaps a diamond in the rough, but in the promise of God, a saint.

Our churches’ story is filled with curmudgeons turned saints.

None of us is perfect.

But all of us are perfected in Christ.

And it is often their story that inspires us to continue to be the church for the next generation.

Not only does their story inspire us, but it also convicts us to go on and to do and to live out the gospel message.

We receive a message of hope when we think about the hard work done by those who passed away this year.

And thinking of them brings us to the question we face as we read and listen to these from Jesus-as we hear about the blessed and the woes. What is the kind of living that these beatitudes are saying we should have?

Luke’s beatitudes are described as the sermon on the plain and we find the beatitudes in Matthew as well and there they are known as the Sermon on the Mount. Luke, being a physician and a cut to the chase kind of guy, is much more straight forward than Matthew as he shares the words of Jesus for us. A lot more literal and less ‘spiritualizing’ one might say. He doesn’t beat around the bush about what way of life will be blessed and the kind of life that will be a life of woe.

Jesus makes it clear that the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the sad, and the persecuted are rather special to God. God throughout the Old Testament has been proclaiming the freedom of captives and the blind receiving sight and the lame walking.

So, as we hear these proclamations again from Jesus what does it propel in us?

It is to remember those who God loves and for us to love them too.

The kingdom already belongs to those Jesus has just told us about.

And so we wonder where do we fit in the kingdom?

We fit in the kingdom through the way we live our lives.

The foundation for holy living is to have the blessed relationship with God in Jesus Christ.

Holy living begins when we open ourselves up to the opportunities to be led by God to care for those God has placed in our path. We are freed from selfishness and greed when we are willing to put ourselves at risk for the sake of another.

My son in law had a traumatic experience on his way to work this past week. As he was crossing the prairie swamp in Florida a car flew past him at a very high speed. The speed there is 65 and he is one who obeys the speed and even drives under the speed. So he was not surprised for a car to overtake him. The next thing, however, he saw was the car flipping over into the swamp and quickly engulfed in the water.

He pulled over.

Before he could think clearly he was calling 911 and diving into alligator infested waters to try to save this individual from his submerged vehicle. Officers and rescue crew were on the scene in minutes, however despite their efforts they were not able to save this person.

I share this with you this morning because I’m sure that all of us would also without hesitation jump into deep waters to seek to save a life.

The beatitudes are a foundation of faith and life in which we are to seek to live without hesitation.

We are to be willing to dive in to care for the poor and the downtrodden without judgment. Judgment is God’s job. If we’ve been bamboozled, or played, God will take care of it. But, we can know we’ve done the right thing.

We find all kinds of excuses not to live the foundational living that Jesus calls us to live.

We are busy. We really are busy-too busy. We are taking care of our own bills before we get in debt caring for someone else. We have a few dreams to fulfill before we can offer our time to help others.

Jesus gets it. Jesus gets us. Jesus gets it-he really does!

And so he turns out the woes to remind us of the risks of not living in relationship with God. If you are laughing and making fun of others now-you best look out-because you are the ones who will be suffering next.

These are some pretty harsh words coming from Jesus! Jesus is not meek and mild here-he’s telling it like it is!  

He doesn’t stop there either.

He goes on to put in some tougher rules to live by.

“Love your enemies,” he says!

“Pray for those who abuse you,” he says! Jesus should know better than to ask those who’ve been abused to pray for their abusers-but he does! How can this be possible? These prayers are possible when we are absolutely secure in the love of God for us-because nothing can separate us from God’s love.

And when we live in that security-then even the powerful can’t hurt us and we have the strength to pray for them.

Jesus finally finishes his talk, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

No matter what the risk you face-care for others with the kindness and love you expect to receive.

Which brings us back to the powerful gift of blessing others.

Parents can offer their children as they leave home each day, a blessing to send them off with God alongside.

Coworkers, neighbors, care givers, attendants, service workers, all can be recipients of blessings as we offer God’s peace to them.

You will be amazed at how much strength and nourishment comes to you as you offer and as you receive a blessing.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

Blessed are you!

Amen.

Resources: Feasting on the Word; NIB 

Bless the Children

Sermon Mark 10:13-16 October 4, 2015 Ordinary Time; World Wide Communion

Bless the Children

A tradition that has not changed through thousands of years and thousands of families is the tradition to bless the children. Fathers in the Old Testament blessed their children before the father passed from this life to the next. Mothers blessed their children as they left the home for the day’s work ahead.

The blessing over someone is to bestow good upon them, to consecrate them, to set them apart, to ask for protection and guidance, to mark them as God’s own. We witnessed the Pope passing out blessings upon all those who he met along the path of his travels. But, blessing giving isn’t limited to the Pope. All of us have been gifted with this ability to bless others. Now, blessings however, are more than saying, “Bless you”, when someone sneezes. It is also more than what we do here in the south. You know how we talk, right? Yes, that’s it. We say things about others whether they are compliments or condemnations and we end all of our statements with, “Bless his heart!” Or we end them with, “Bless her souls.” These are not the blessings we are talking about today and not what Jesus said with the child on his lap.

The blessing is a welcoming, it is an encounter with the one who willingly receives. The blessing is an openness to radical hospitality.

The willingness of Jesus to receive all those who were brought to him opened up the opportunity for the followers of Jesus to witness a social revolution. Jesus was creating a greater equality of all people, men were not the dominant ones as he lifted up the women, healed them, gave them voice, spoke of their rights. Jesus then took the children in his arms and used them as the springboard for the future by welcoming them openly and blessing them publicly.

The disciples were frustrated with Jesus and the attention he was giving to all those who had no status. They were his followers and if they were going to invest their time and their lives to him he could at least draw a crowd of elite rather than the vulnerable. Who wants to be a follower of someone who only relates to broken people? Who wants to be a follower of someone who hangs out with the marginalized, the stranger, the foreigner, and the least of all these people in the world?

Every generation since Jesus took these tiny ones in his lap has had to wrestle with who is really welcome into the kingdom of God?

We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world where fairy tales do not come true. We live in a world where people hurt each through neglect and ignorance, through intent and force. People die at the hands of each other all across the world. There is not a continent that has gone untouched by the violence of humanity. My father had a friend who left Holland the same year he did and headed to Australia. They were in search of the place where they felt they could live safe and secure. His friend moved his family to San Francisco and raised his family there. But, after awhile he became frustrated again with the violence and he decided to move his family to where he believed it was truly safe.  He moved his family to the most southern tip of New Zealand. And it was safe there. Until one day my father received a letter from his friend letting him know once again how disappointed he was because there, even in New Zealand violence existed. As broken people our very lives show the symptoms of our failures toward one another and to God.

Jesus has been showing the disciples all along that no one is worthy or more valuable than another. Jesus has been telling the disciples that they can’t fight over which one of them is greater or who gets to sit next to him in heaven. If this story was written in the 21^st century they would be asking who gets to ride shotgun with Jesus.

As Christians these days we try to find a church where we belong. We seek a church home where we can find people who will welcome us as we are in all our ways, warts and all. We put ourselves in a vulnerable spot the first time we walk through a new set of stained glass doors. And we sure hope the folks on the inside don’t send us away because we might be bothersome to Jesus.

Part of the welcome, the blessing, that comes from the open arms of Jesus, is that he lets those who enter his arms know they are at home with him in his kingdom.

It might be impossible for us to open our arms in welcome the way Jesus does, and so we close our eyes and remember that it is God who is doing the welcoming through us and everything is possible through God. Our dependence on God allows us to let go of trying to justify ourselves and we can open ourselves up to God’s mercy and grace in Jesus Christ who receives us and all others as we are.

You see the disciples were trying to be good followers of Jesus but were still trying to figure out how they belonged in God’s kingdom. They were wondering (and I believe we all do too) how does God love them, and how do they know they belong to God?

You see, the first six questions of the catechism that we use to teach the children helps answer the question, “How are we to receive and enter into the Kingdom of God?”

Here they are:

1.       Who are you? I am a child of God

2.      What does it mean to be a child of God? That I belong to God, who loves me.

3.      What makes you a child of God? Grace-God’s free gift of love that I do not deserve and cannot earn.

4.      Don’t you have to be good for God to love you? No. God loves me in spite of all I do wrong.

5.      How do you thank God for this gift of love? I promise to love and trust God with all my heart.

6.      How do you love God? By worshiping God, by loving others, and by respecting what God created.

As Jesus says to his disciples ‘Welcome the kingdom as a child welcomes it.’ Let us welcome God’s kingdom, let us welcome Jesus as he welcomed the child. Let us receive the least of these and let us be received as Jesus received. Let us find our home and find our family here in this place. Let us receive the gift of grace so freely given and let us be blessed. 

Amen.