Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Saints, Revisited (11/5/17)


Jesus MAFA, The Sermon on the Mount

On Sunday, November 5th, we celebrated All Saints' Day. This has always been one of my favorite events on the liturgical calendar, but in recent years, this time of the year has become less joyful for me. 
Saints, Revisited (11/5/17)


Sermon
          Good morning. This is a funny time of year for me. It used to be one of my favorite times of the year. My grandmother’s birthday was November 2nd. She was born 110 years ago. That always was, and still is, a happy day. I cherish her memory and I don’t carry any sadness about her death. She was 97 when she died and she was ready to go. It’d be unfair to ask her to still be among the living.
          Of course, my birthday is this Thursday. I’m an only child, so that’s always a big day on the calendar. This year I get to celebrate my birthday with a Deacons’ meeting and a Session meeting! How great is that? Said no one. Ever.
          But wedged in between those happy days is the anniversary of my father’s death, which was four years ago this past Friday. And of course, these events—my grandmother’s birthday and the anniversary of my dad’s death—both occur right after All Saints’ Day. So, my attention is focused even more closely on what I’ve lost over the last few years, rather than the blessings around me.
          Today we celebrate all those saints of the church who have passed away from this mortal world. The Scriptures we heard this morning all offer words of comfort. In Psalm 34 we are told that “those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.” In Revelation we get a vision of what God’s kingdom is like for those who love the Lord: “They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Jan van Eyck, The Arrival of the Mystical Lamb
And as always, Jesus speaks the greatest words of comfort: Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the persecuted, blessed are you! That’s quite a list. Am I missing anybody? Oh, yeah! The meek; blessed are the meek! They’re so easy to overlook. They really ought to stand up for themselves. Oh, wait, that’s not gonna work, is it?
          I think the beatitudes are one of those pieces of Scripture that we’ve heard so many times that we don’t truly hear it; we don’t realize what a radical claim Jesus is making. The blessings in the beatitudes follow a traditional form that can be found in a number of different sources, including both the Hebrew Scriptures and also in pagan literature. However, in their more traditional forms, these statements declare the blessing of those who are already in fortunate situations, and they hail those situations as the result of divine actions.[1] Those older forms might say something like: Blessed are the rich, for the gods of fortune have smiled upon them. Or maybe, blessed are the powerful, for the gods have granted them the might and the right to rule over others.
          The traditional statements of blessing celebrate the rich and the powerful, but Jesus will have none of that. Instead, Jesus offers a vision of the “coming-and-already-present kingdom of God.”[2] Instead of exalting the existing social order of the Roman world, Jesus turns everything on its head. I can almost imagine the responses in the crowd as they listened to Jesus preaching this sermon. Blessed are the poor? Really, Jesus? Are you serious? Blessed are the meek? What world are you living in, Jesus? That would be like me standing here this morning and saying, blessed are the people in California whose homes burned in wild fires. Blessed are the people in Houston whose homes were destroyed by floods. Blessed are the people of Puerto Rico whose homes were destroyed by the hurricanes. Really? Blessed are the homeless? Losing a home to fire or a flood doesn’t sound like much of a blessing to me. Nor does poverty.
          In Jesus’ time, the land of Israel was productive and prosperous, but that prosperity wasn’t shared evenly:
The enormous tax burden fell most heavily on those who could least support it. It was not uncommon for a poor farmer or a day laborer to sell members of his family into slavery to pay his debts. [It] was easy for the affluent to be unconcerned about the agony of the poor.[3]
In the Roman Empire, the rich and the powerful preyed upon the poor and the meek. There was little room for advancement if you were a poor farmer or laborer. The best you could hope for was to stay out of debt and feed your family. It was a world that showed mercy to no one.
          Jesus is offering a radical alternative to the first-century Roman world. Jesus is saying, in the kingdom of God, you will be made whole. If you suffer from an injustice, those injustices will be put right. You no longer have to fear poverty or loss. Jesus declares that you are blessed, as you are right now. These blessings are true because they are spoken by the Son of God and they became true in the instant that Jesus said them.[4] And this kingdom of God is not an otherworldly kingdom; it is not yet actualized, but the kingdom is coming and it has begun to break in because Jesus has the authority to make it so.[5]
          As I think about the crowd that was gathered at the foot of that hill to hear Jesus speak, I imagine that a great many of them were comforted when they heard Jesus pronounce these blessings. But there must have been at least one person in that crowd who said, “Really, Jesus? Blessed are the poor?” That sounds as crazy as . . . as crazy as . . . Well, it sounds just as crazy—as it does right now! Blessed are the poor? Are you kidding me? We don’t bless the poor in our society, we curse them! We blame them for their failings and we say that they deserve their lot in life. Now I’m not saying that each and every one of you does this. But collectively, as a society, we praise the rich and the powerful and the bold. We worship the cult of success. We buy self-help books that tell us how we, too, can get rich. We orient ourselves towards the things of this world; we make idols of wealth and self-assurance. We see ourselves as agents of our own salvation. Our world is very much like the Roman world in Jesus’ day. This is not what Jesus offers us in the beatitudes. Jesus doesn’t offer us the world as it is; he invites us into the blessing of the world as God wants us to be! But how do we get there?
          The blessings that Jesus proclaims are also a call to ethical action. That is to say, the “community that hears itself pronounced blessed by its Lord does not remain passive, but acts in accord with the coming kingdom.”[6] The people who hear the blessings must live into the blessings. Their actions must be consistent with the blessings that Jesus has proclaimed. Our actions must be consistent with the blessings that Jesus has proclaimed.
          This isn’t easy, but we have a really good roadmap: the Gospel of Matthew is just filled with examples of Jesus telling us how we can live into these blessings. One of last week’s readings was Matthew 22:34-46. In that story, a Pharisee asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest, and Jesus gives him two answers. First, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Second, love your neighbor as you love yourself. We are called to act on that love. It is not enough to say, “I love my neighbor.” This kind of love is not just a state of being, it is a state of doing. We are called to demonstrate God’s love for us by doing actions that show God’s love for all of creation.
          The greatest commandment is connected to the beatitudes. The blessings that Jesus spoke in the beatitudes were spoken to people in need of God’s love. Jesus is telling them what the world will look like when God’s kingdom has come to the world. Guess what? We can be those blessings. We can work to build God’s kingdom here on Earth.
          That is a huge task. Where do we start?
          A couple weeks ago I went to hear Harry Belafonte give a lecture. He has lived an amazing life, and as he told his story, I was struck by the gifts that he received—and I’m not talking about his singing voice. Belafonte was not destined for fame and fortune; he was unaware of the great talents he possessed. He was a poor, working-class kid from Harlem. He suffered from dyslexia, so he wasn’t a great student. He dropped out of high school and joined the Navy during World War II.
          Belafonte returned to Harlem after the war. He found work as a janitor’s assistant at an apartment building. One day he made a small repair at a woman’s apartment. To say thank you, she gave him two tickets to a play. He thought to himself, what do I want with tickets to a play? I wish she would’ve given me cash.
          Belafonte had never seen a play before. He was transformed by the experience. After seeing the play, Belafonte decided to take acting classes; he used his benefits from the G.I. Bill. Do you know who his classmates were? Belafonte went to school with Bea Arthur, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Sidney Poitier, and Rod Steiger. What an amazing group!
          While he was in school, Belafonte appeared in a play in which he had to sing. After rehearsals, Belafonte and the other actors would go to a nightclub called the Village Vanguard. There, they listened to and hung out with the greatest jazz musicians of the day: Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Max Roach, and many others.
          Belafonte invited some of them to see the play. The musicians heard him sing, and then they invited him to sit in with the band at the Vanguard. That led to a recording contract, and eventually, a role on Broadway for which Belafonte won a Tony Award. At every turn, Harry Belafonte benefited from unexpected acts of generosity during the early years of his career. In turn, Belafonte decided that he would offer his time and aid to any performer who came to him for advice or help.
          Perhaps this is how we should live into the work of building God’s Kingdom and remembering our lost loved ones. The saints of the church have blessed us with their love, time, and care. Let us all seek new ways to give of ourselves. Let us look for new people with whom we can share our blessings—people that we’ve never reached out to before. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Benediction
          Now, beloved, as you depart from this place, remember that we are called to be the Church, the body of Christ in the world today. We are called to go forth and be instruments of God’s love and peace and love and reconciliation. Do not return evil for evil to any person, but know that we are all loved by God, and that we are called to reflect that love to everyone we meet. Go forth and be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, let all God’s children say, Amen!


[1] M. Eugene Boring. The Gospel of Matthew. In Volume VIII of The New Interpreter’s Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press (1995), 177.
[2] Boring, 177.
[3] Douglas R.A. Hare. Matthew. John Knox Press (1993), 38.
[4] Boring, 177.
[5] Hare, 37.
[6] Boring, 177.

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