To Be Blessed
A sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
Micah 6:1-8
Matthew 5:1-12
This is the opening of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. As most of you know, we call these statements “The Beatitudes.” Why? Well, beatitude is the Latin word for what Jesus is saying here. The Greek word is μακάριος. The Greek adjective means “fortunate, happy, in a privileged situation, well off.” Within a religious context, μακάριος means to be “blessed” by God.
The beatitudes declare an objective reality as the result of a divine act, not a subjective feeling – so they shouldn’t be translated as “happy” because that is a feeling. The opposite of “blessed” is not “unhappy,” but “cursed.” The beatitudes are written in unconditional performative language. They do not merely describe something that already is, but bring into being the reality they declare. They are not entrance requirements for outsiders, but declarations about insiders. They are gospel, not law. So these pronouncements are not statements about general human virtues. Instead they pronounce blessing on authentic discipleship within the Christian community.
In plain English, Jesus is proclaiming right is left and up is down. He is reversing the general value system by pronouncing blessing on the poor, the hungry, and those who weep. What he is doing, once again, is entirely new. It is something the people have never heard before. Jesus is presenting the coming kingdom of God and its adherents. Let’s take the beatitudes briefly one at a time.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. This phrase speaks not only of literal poverty, but because of the added words “in spirit” suggests a lack of arrogance and a sense of one’s own need. They are blessed who hold humility in their hearts, who claim their identity and security in God.
Blessed are those who mourn. Let’s be careful here. It is not because of their mourning that they will be comforted, but in their mourning. There is a deep Jewish tradition that God will satisfy the yearnings of the people. We see it over and over again in the prophets. The people are exiled and in mourning, but God is ever-present with them in their grief. It is this type of comfort to the bone that the Scripture is talking about.
Blessed are the meek. Here again Jesus is reversing the common ideas of the day. The meek will inherit the earth. This is not saying that meekness is an attitude to adopt, so much as it is saying that those who are aware of their identity as God’s people in the world, those who have renounced the violent methods of the this-worldly people in power will be part of the earth’s renewal.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Yet another prescription that we must be careful in interpreting. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is not simply to long to be personally pious or to have idealistic dreams of doing good. We all have our moments of wishing to be better people. However, Jesus is talking about people who long for the coming of God’s kingdom and who on the basis of this hopeful longing, actively do God’s will now. One of the main reasons that people who volunteer to help others say they do it is because it makes them feel good. Jesus tells us those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled, and those who actively do so today know that this is true.
Blessed are the merciful – the Greek word here, ελεήμων, refers to concrete acts of mercy rather than a quality of being merciful or a merciful attitude. I am reminded here of Victoria Ruvolo, the woman who was critically injured back in November when a teenage boy threw a 20-lb. turkey out of the car in which he was riding and it struck her windshield. As many of you know, she was released from the hospital shortly before Christmas and her major concern was for the kids that perpetrated the act against her. The mercy that she displayed in her ability to forgive was the type of mercy that I think Jesus is talking about here. And in both the speed and the quality of her recovery, it is certainly true that the God of mercy has been with her.
Our next beatitude is “blessed are the pure in heart.” Purity of heart is not an avoidance of impure or licentious thoughts, but instead a single-minded devotion to God appropriate to a monotheistic faith. Faith in the one God requires that we be devoted with all our hearts. The opposite of purity of heart is a divided heart that attempts to serve two masters. This is one that many of us struggle with for the world in which we live offers many masters – wealth, job, family, and so on. It is indeed a blessing to be able to offer up your heart unconditionally to the Lord.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Peacemakers does not imply a passive attitude – after all, who was less passive than Jesus? Rather it means positive actions for reconciliation. When I went to Chautauqua last summer, Sister Joan Chittister was the main speaker and teacher. A Benedictine nun, Sister Joan is on the front lines of the Women’s Peacemaking Initiative, an organization whose primary purpose is to promote peace through action in the Middle East, particularly between people of faith. I highly recommend her column called “From Where I Stand” which appears in the National Catholic Reporter, a periodical you can also access online at www.nationalcatholicreporter.org.
The final two beatitudes are “blessed are those who persecute you for righteousness’ sake” and “blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kind of evil against you falsely on my account.” Scholars think these last beatitudes should not be attributed to Jesus, but to Matthew, who was trying to reconcile the martyrdom and torment the early Christians were experiencing with the kingdom that Jesus professed. Still, the basis premise that to be joyful in experiencing whatever it is that life/God/circumstances hand you and carrying your faith alongside is one that remains valuable today.
As I pondered this Scripture passage, one thought kept coming back to me over and over again. That thought is how very blessed we are here at Sweet Hollow Presbyterian Church. We are blessed not only in all that we have, but in all that we are. In preparing for the Annual Meeting today and in thinking about our last year together in this community, it is so very obvious to me that we are a people who makes up the church. While we have had a wondrous year celebrating the 175th Anniversary of the church community and this historic sanctuary in which we worship today, we are far more than a group of individuals who sit in a building. For we have among us all the gifts and therefore the blessings that Jesus proclaims in the Beatitudes.
While it is true that not one among us can ascribe to them all: poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, a hunger and thirst for righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, peacemaking and persecution for righteousness’ sake, it is true that we each have at least one of these attributes and perhaps more.
It is also true that Jesus was not speaking to one person, but to a mountainside full. He was telling people what the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom which he would oversee, the Kingdom that he was proclaiming was like. And if there is one thing of which we can be sure, it is a Kingdom that is unlike any Kingdom we’ve ever known or experienced before. A Kingdom for which the word “kingdom” isn’t even really the right word. For the word “kingdom” implies that there will be a hierarchal structure that rules from the top down. Yet the description that Jesus has given us in these few verses does not seem to be one that values that type of organization at all, but instead a formation of equals who live in compassion and caring for one another.
A realm where the Micah passage is not something to strive toward, but a reality. What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. If you, if I, if we were able to follow those three prescriptive clauses, we would indeed be living out the beatitudes, wouldn’t we?
Yet as I’ve just stated, we have all these qualities inherent in our congregation today. The language of the Beatitudes is in the present tense. “Blessed are…the poor in spirit, those who mourn,” and so on. We each of us are blessed, yet we often look at our lives as though they were lacking. We want to make more money, or see our children more often, or lose more weight, or get a new car, or be in better health, or live in a warmer climate, or be less stressed.
The irony is that often our blessings are the cause of our stress. Because we live in a country with healthcare that enables us to live longer, we suffer the vicissitudes of bodies that age. The average life expectancy of a person living in Brazil is 62, in Cambodia is 56, in Afghanistan is 46 and in Zimbabwe is 37. Let’s be grateful for our aches and pains. They prove we’re alive!
We’re stressed because we own homes with multiple rooms filled with possessions, we must fix leaky roofs or buy new boilers or pay what we regard as outrageous taxes. Yet on any given night this time of year, 842,000 people in America are homeless and sleeping in a shelter. International estimates tell us 100 million people worldwide are homeless. We are so blessed to have roofs over our heads and warmth in between our four walls.
There are many more ways in which we are so blessed. We have family members who have not died as a result of malnutrition or poverty or disease or war. Yet we complain that we have to deal with them when they annoy us with their words or actions, or with their failure to call and keep in touch the way we’d like them to. Do you know in Afghanistan a common book used to teach math shows weapons of war as examples. In a graph with pictures where we in America would see 1 Apple, 2 Bananas, 3 Caps, 4 Boats, Afghan children might see 1 AK-47, 2 hand grenades, 3 bullets and so on. There is not one family in the whole country of Afghanistan who has not been affected by the 30 years of war beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1972 and continuing with the Taliban regime even up into today while some of the warlords in various areas persist in fighting for control. Every single family in the country has lost at least one family member and the ones who remain alive are permanently injured having lost a leg or an arm or an eye. Sometimes we in America do not even know how blessed we are.
If, for just this moment in time, we begin to have some inkling, what might our response be? Might it be one of gratitude? Could we maintain an “attitude of gratitude” as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. An attitude of gratitude might not only change the way we greet the day, but the way we live our lives. And it also is very much a choice.
There was a wonderful story that went around on the Internet awhile ago about a 92-year-old lady, petite, well-poised and proud, fully dressed each morning by eight o'clock, with her hair fashionably coifed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, whose husband of 70 years recently passed away, and had to be moved to a nursing home.
After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, the aide provided a visual description of her tiny room, down to the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window.
"I love it," she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.
"Mrs. Jones, you haven't seen the room .... just wait."
"That doesn't have anything to do with it," she replied. "Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn't depend on how the furniture is arranged ... it's how I arrange my mind. I’ve already decided to love it … It's a decision I make every morning when I wake up.
“I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open I'll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I've stored away ... just for this time in my life.
“Old age is like a bank account, you know ... you withdraw from what you've put in … So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in the bank account of memories. Thank you for your part in filling my Memory bank. I am still depositing.”
The Beatitudes are not written in the past or future tense, but in the present. Blessed are the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, the meek. Jesus was not telling us that if we did such and such, we would be blessed in the future. Jesus was telling us that we are blessed now. That we who hold his commandments dear – and remember, there are only two that Jesus gives us: to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and minds and strength and soul and to love our neighbor as ourselves – that we who hold his commandments dear will reap the benefits of being a part of God’s Kingdom. Here while we live on this mortal plane and later when we pass into the next one with Him.
I invite you to look at your blessings and to recognize the gifts you already have. We can always aspire to more. We can always work on the places where perhaps we are not strong. But for this moment in time, I want you to think about what you do have. I want you to think of at least three things that you are thankful for. At least three things – material or spiritual or emotional or physical – that are blessings in your life. After you’ve done that, I will re-read the beatitude section. Then I want you to re-imagine your blessings within the context of discipleship. We’ll take a blessing that you have, that you are, that you embody and then we’ll translate it into the blessings that Jesus tells us about in these Beatitudes. I want you to re-think them as gifts that you have been given by God for a reason, a purpose in the coming of God’s holy realm on earth. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Take a moment to consider your blessings…now:
Have you come up with three? Could you rattle them off quickly if I were to call on you and ask you? Don’t worry; I’m not going to pick anyone out of the crowd. I just want to know that you’ve got them firmly in your head. Now let’s re-read the beatitudes:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 6‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 7‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 8‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 9‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 10‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Now let’s take your blessing and put it within the context of the beatitude. For example, it might be as easy as, “Lord, I am blessed to be in a family that squabbles, for it allows me to exhibit the blessing of mercy” or you might think, “I am blessed with abundance. I have a lovely home and wonderful kids and a spouse I love and many possessions. I am blessed to have so much because in seeing my own abundance it makes me recognize those who have nothing. My gratitude opens my heart and makes me hunger and thirst for others to know the wealth that I have been given. It must pour out of me as active participation in justice for others.”
Another blessing: “Others question Your validity, God, but I am so blessed to know Your presence in my life in a real and active way” – this is the blessing of being poor in spirit. Or you might say to yourself, “God, I am so blessed to be going this struggle with my health right now. It is unpleasant and sometimes I am afraid, but I am blessed because I trust that You will comfort me” – the blessing of being one who mourns.
Do you see how it works? If you don’t, if you wonder about one of the blessings that you came up with, feel free to mention it to me after worship today and we’ll ponder together God’ plan for your discipleship with this gift.
I would encourage you to consider your blessings regularly. To count them before you go to sleep, to write them down in a notebook, to speak them out loud to your friends and family. As you pray your blessings, write your blessings, speak your blessings, they will multiply and together we will be able to plant great and meaningful fruit toward the coming of the kingdom. For the more aware we are of what the Lord has given us to work with, the more able we are to be God’s willing hands. The more we are able to take the blessings we have and use them as Jesus’ disciples in a way that would make Him proud. The more able we will be to live the lives that God intends for us to live. For being blessed is a wondrous and awesome thing, but as members of God’s family, as a people who claim the name Christian, those blessings also carry with them a great responsibility. A responsibility to be Christ’s hands and arms and ears and eyes and mouth and face to the world. It is a responsibility that I believe we can lovingly embrace. And even more so as we count our blessings. Try it and see! Amen.