First preached on November 2, 2008, All Saints' Day, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC.
Matthew 5:1-12
Dedicated to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus begins his sermon on the mount by telling us the surprising news of the people who really have it great. They are blessed, he says – which translates better as “happy!” They are blessed and happy. The latin prase is Beatitude, and so that’s what we’ve come to name this magnificent section of the gospel: the beatitudes.
A minister I know once went to the bedside of an elderly woman, who was dying – they both knew it. He asked if there was anything he could do for her, and she said, “why don’t you take that Bible there and read the Beatitudes. My mother used to read those to us all the time. I didn’t understand them as a child, still wrestle with them today.”
And so he read those words, just as we heard them read this morning. Afterward there was silence, and then she said to him “I don’t know. Kind of sounds like a mixed blessing.” She was right.[1]
The problem is that the ones Jesus calls blessed do not look much like the people we would generally consider blessed – assuming, that is, that being blessed has something to do with being well off, comfortable, entertained, and healthy. That’s what we usually mean by the words blessed and happy. So what do we do with what Jesus says, that you are blessed if you are poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and persecuted? Even the nice sounding ones are a good bit of work: to be merciful, peacemakers, pure of heart, or to hunger for righteousness.
It’s not the kind of list we are used to, but then isn’t that why we are here – shift our perspective, to change our paradigm, to realign our direction. After Jesus is baptized, the first words out of his mouth are “repent, the kingdom of God is near.” Repent – it means turn around, go in a new direction. And the reason we turn around, the reason we trade in our old list of blessings for a new one is because the kingdom of God is near, and we can enter it right now. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates that teaching:
“You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” Sometimes it takes the failure of our old blessing system before we are ready to live in the kingdom of God.
Dick Howser was a baseball player in the major leagues and went on to manage the Royals and the Yankees. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child, don’t you? And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, he saw that the real world had taught him “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success.” But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
What would be our wake-up call to tell us that the blessing system designed for the kingdom of success isn’t working and isn’t worth it? What is the wake-up call? That might come in different ways for each of us, but on this day, I want to suggest that it will come from listening to our ancestors, the saints who have gone before us.
The finality of death and the memory of our ancestors has a way of re-ordering our priorities in a wonderful way, and that is partly the reason why we take this day to remember our saints, and this is partly their gift to us.
One of the great privileges in my ministry is to be with families when someone has died. We gather in a room and we make arrangements for the memorial service, and then I get to hear the family stories. I want to tell you that the most treasured memories, the gifts that mean the most, are not their successes and achievements, awards or titles, proud as we may be of those honors. The most important stories have to do with the blessings in the Beatitudes. We tell stories of challenges faced and faith deepened, of mourning in sadness and finding comfort and strength, of making peace in the face of conflict and strife, and of being pure of heart when surrounded by corruption, by jealousy, by greed. In the last accounting of a life, those are the stories we tell, the lessons we take, the gifts that we receive.
So why then, do we get stuck in this thinking that what life is really about is keeping everything smooth, secure, and fun? We want to make ourselves invulnerable to heartache, sadness, and pain, and the longer we can walk that tightrope, the more we consider ourselves blessed. We make the pain-free, struggle-free life our goal. Even worse, we make it our responsibility, so much so that when something does inevitably go wrong, we actually blame ourselves.
And yet, when we remember our saints, when we think about their lives, we realize that we often saw their best when they faced challenges: when they were poor in spirit, mourning, even persecuted – when they had said and done things for which they needed mercy. It was in those times that they found the blessings of God: when they received comfort, when they received mercy, when they found the kingdom of God that cannot be taken away by our pain, our mistakes, our failures, or our grief.
The beatitudes remind us that God does not promise to take away sadness or pain or even death, not in this life. In this life, hardship comes to everyone. The kingdom of God does not mean a short cut to easy street. What it means is that even when we face the tough times that are a part of every life, our suffering does not define who we are. We will not be remembered by the number of nights we went to bed with full stomachs, the worth of our home or the size of our bank accounts. We will be remembered, rather, by the number of nights we went to bed with a peaceful soul, the worth of our mercy, and the size of our love.
Funny how often we lose sight of all that. Funny how quickly we fall back into thinking that being blessed and happy is about being well off, comfortable, entertained and healthy. And I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with any of that. We should take care of our bodies and our homes; we’d be irresponsible not to. But if we get really good at taking care of ourselves, then we need a word of warning that we are in danger of thinking that we are not dependent on God but only ourselves.
On All Saints’ Day, let their lives be that warning, that reminder, that wake-up call to us, that we might seek a different set of blessings. The path to the beatitudes begins when we join with the poor in spirit to remember that even we who like to declare our independence really need to make a declaration of dependence on God. “You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.” More of God is no mixed blessing. It is what we’ve been longing for all along.
[1] Dr. Richard Wing, from his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, in his sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
