Blessings on Those Facing Forward

Epiphany 4

Matthew 5:1-12

I Cor. 1:18-31

Let’s play a game called name that subculture.  I’ll name some stuff this group likes and you take a guess: Pabst Blue Ribbon, polaroid cameras, fake-wood paneling, mustaches, Johnny Cash, taxidermy, tattoos, early 80’s computer electronics, fixed gear bikes, flea markets, skinny jeans, large rimmed glasses, trucker hats, and -- more than anything else -- being known as “early adopters”.  Right -- the hipster culture.  We’ll come back to this.

Beatitudes

Jesus’ so called Sermon on the Mount begins with nine “blesssings”.  The first blessing reads in Latin beati pauperes spiritu -- blessed/beati, hence “Beatitudes.”  Jesus refers nine times to those who are “blessed” or “happy” or “fortunate” in God’s new kingdom.

By this point in Matthew’s gospel, we know that Jesus is the hinge that turns history in a new direction.  He is a king like David but more important.  He is the Son of God.  The long awaited “messiah” figure.  He is “Emmanuel” or God with us.  Though he lives in complete fidelity to God, he is baptized like other sinners.  Out of Matthew’s rather long literary prologue (four chapters), Jesus steps forward into the midst of our lives with startling clarity and authority.  He invites us away from attachments to our professions and possessions with a simple command, “Follow me.”  And then, like a light in the darkness, he continues to speak: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  So with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension, we set off after him.  The crowd is growing, and one day, he goes up a mountain in Galilee to teach.  Along with the crowd, we quiet to listen.

Jesus begins the sermon with “blessings” on the “poor in spirit.”

Blessings are the first word.  He will have more to say about the demands of sacrifice and generosity and honesty in this sermon.  But he doesn’t begin with demands.  He begins with blessings.  In God’s kingdom, you cannot awake to what’s going on unless you first hear this word of God’s blessing.  The first word is that we are loved, forgiven, and blessed.  Jesus is a Jew whose imagination is thoroughly immersed in the biblical framework of blessings and curses.  For Jesus, God is alive and present and actively blessing the world to move it in new directions. 

And the blessings fall on the “poor in spirit.”  Now the diseased and deformed, the widows and those too old to work were likely glad to be included.  The healthy and strong, the capable working folks - fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James and John - probably shifted in their sandals.  Is he talking about us?  Poor in spirit??

An article from the Onion a couple years back was entitled, “Rock-Bottom Loser Entertaining Offers From Several Religions.”  

Findlay, OH -- Local resident Owen Pritchard’s recent downward spiral into drug addiction, unemployment, and complete and utter hopelessness has sparked the intense interest of several top world religions, each of which is vying for his services as a devotee, the 39-year old uncommitted prospective convert reported Monday.

“I’ve finally reached a point in my life where all the big religions want me,” said Pritchard, whose two failed marriages and mounting gambling debts have left him penniless and in a state of blind despair.  “I have no job, no family, no direction whatsoever.  So right now, I’m totally in the driver’s seat. . . . Obviously, I bring a lot to the table,” Pritchard said.  “I’m a broken shell of a man with nowhere else to turn and I will believe just about anything at this point, so if a religion really wants me, they’re going to have to sweeten the pot.  You’re going to have to do better than eternal life,” Pritchard added.  “Everyone’s offering that.”

Beginning with the “poor in spirit,” Jesus pronounces nine distinct blessings.  He’s not naming nine different groups of people.  He’s describing nine times the people God loves and blesses.  Cumulatively, these nine blessings describe the dynamics of the community that responds to the kingdom’s nearness.

What a refreshing surprise.  These are not people who have it together.  They are not well dressed.  Their teeth aren’t straight.  They do not stand and speak with confidence.  They do not draw attention to themselves.  Their bodies are not healthy.  They’re not the ones found laughing at parties to which they’ve been invited.  They aren’t the smart.  They don’t know how to play their connections and networks into safety nets for their own personal brand.  

Here’s what they do have: a voracious sense of their own need.  They are attuned to their own and others’ poverty, suffering, and pain.  When wronged, they are willing to forgive.  They know how to heal and make peace.  They know how to bear up under shame and ridicule.  This is the kind of community that forms when God’s kingdom “comes near.”  If you are wealthy, or well educated, or well connected, or physically healthy, or good looking, you can only enter this community by a God-given desire to live alongside the “poor in spirit.”  You’ll have to get along with Owen Pritchard!

In Paul’s letter to the Roman church, he reminds them in his concluding remarks to associate with the “lowly”.  Paul can write to the early followers of Jesus at Corinth: “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”  When we serve meals for our homeless friends.  When we share the food from our CSA with the teenagers in the shelter at Holy Trinity who have been kicked out of their houses because of their sexual orientation.  We are not doing anything all that surprising or interesting.  We live with and for the “poor in spirit.”  And we are working to become a community in which the poor and the poor in spirit are welcomed and loved.  Churches that gather on Ivy League campuses will be tempted to congratulate themselves on their sophistication.  So let us beware.

So along with Owen Pritchard, I’d like to welcome you to God’s new family.  And if the life of poverty, mercy, meekness, and peacemaking earns for you the condescension and rejection of your peers.  Well, rejoice, says Jesus.  Take heart.  You’re in good company.  The way of love has always been hard.  Siding with the poor and broken over against the successful and powerful has always been mocked as the loser’s path, the fool’s way.  The Hebrew prophets before you were persecuted too: Jeremiah and Amos and Francis of Assissi and Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.  It’s no fun to be reviled, but at least we’re in good company.

Now I would like to take up two questions in light of Jesus’ teaching about God’s kingdom.  The first one is psychological and the second is political.

1. If Jesus marks the decisive arrival of God’s kingdom, why aren’t things different?  How will I find the resources that enable me to keep going?

There are plenty of normal frustrations and challenges associated with the life of faith.  No sense  aggravating them with false expectations.  So let’s try to be honest about the difficulties involved.  If there are two or three days a week that you are convinced that God’s love is real and is really making a difference in you and in the world, you’re probably on track.  If God’s love only seems real to you a few days a year, you might well be in what’s called “the dark night of the soul.”  You’ll be OK, but you should talk to someone, and perhaps you can find some kindred spirits among medieval mystics.  If you believe it every single day with a smile, enjoy it while it lasts, and probably cut back on your Joel Osteen podcasts.

When Jesus call us to repentance, he says God’s kingdom “has come near” or “is at hand.”  This is perhaps one of the most vexing features of Jesus’ message.  God’s kingdom arrives from the future.  The kingdom is “here” in the mode of just arriving.  It is the future, and yet that future has only begun to be worked back into the present.  The yeast is in the dough, but the dough has yet to raise.  The seed is planted, but has yet to blossom into an enormous tree.  Or think of it like this: pass a strong magnet near a pile of iron shavings, and the shavings will begin to move as the magnet draws closer.  The magnet bears on the shavings even before it fully arrives.

Now look to your own life and heart.  Are there moments of humility, a recognition of your own smallness against the largeness of God’s mystery?  Are there moments of mercy and compassion, the movement of your heart towards those who suffer?  Are there moments of open-handed generosity, when you relinquish something as a gift given gladly?  Are there signs that your hard-heartedness towards others who have hurt you is melting, signs that you can imagine your way towards forgiveness?  Are there little promptings in your heart by the Holy Spirit to pray for those who are in distress?  Do you occasionally find your heart reaching out in a prayer-like love towards those you meet on the street who are obese, or confined to wheel-chairs, to those deformed or disabled, or whose appearance is repulsive?  These are all signs of God’s kingdom love breaking into your life and beginning to rearrange your desires.  This is God’s Spirit bringing you into repentance, turning you towards God’s future.  

So if you struggle with despair and darkness, look to these small bits of light in the world around you and in your own heart.  They are signs that God’s kingdom has come near.  And don’t worry too much about the occasional burst of frustration or cynicism, the flagging of our energies now and then  -- these are to be expected among a people following a crucified Jesus.

2. A political question: Is Christian faith primarily a “conservative” impulse?  Does faith in Jesus Christ look backward?  Does going to church presume that you are politically, socially, and theologically, “conservative”?

No doubt the Christian faith in the U.S. has, to some extent, been aligned with the Religious Right.  This is a politically and socially conservative interpretation of faith.  In its most visible forms, this means that Christianity is aligned with hawkish foreign policy, preoccupation with issues like abortion and homosexuality in domestic politics, and a preference for unfettered free markets in economic policy.  And I suppose this kind of “conservatism” is important in its own right - because many Christian communities have simply laid this largely Republican ideology on top of the Christian faith.  And many others have opted to steer clear of Christianity if this is all it amounts to.  

But I have in mind a slightly different use of the term “conservative.”  The term denotes an impulse to “conserve,” to spend one’s energy guarding and protecting what has come down to us from the past.  The “conservative” impulse characterizes anyone who feels that patterns of wisdom from the past should be “conserved” in the present.  The “conservative” impulse favors the familiarity of the status quo over against the emergence of something different.  In this sense. all of us are “conservative” to one degree or another.  We might disagree on which features of the past are worthy of safeguarding, but we would agree that sometimes what’s old is better than what’s new.  In this larger sense, certain parts of Jesus’ life and teachings are “conservative” -- he preserves much of the Jewish wisdom about how to live well before God.

But my question is this: Is Christian faith primarily conservative?  Or is it not also progressive and transgressive?

Jesus’ favorite topic, the symbol he uses most frequently, is God’s kingdom or reign.  He uses it in all kinds of different ways, freely and easily.  Yet never once does he define it.  The closest he ever comes to defining it is in the prayer that Jesus teaches his followers.  “Thy kingdom come -- now what does that mean?? -- Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  We as his disciples are invited to work and pray for God’s kingdom to become a reality on earth.  God is already king.  But we pray for that kingship to become a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  That is to say, faith in Jesus Christ is turned fundamentally toward the future.  We live and work in hope that all resistance to God’s plan for the earth and its people will be defeated.  In the words of one of my teachers, the “transition on earth will dissolve the contradiction between what now is and what ought to be” (Keck, 68).

It is this future-facing feature of Jesus’ message that compels us to acknowledge a certain progressive dynamic in the way of life he teaches us.  If the earth remains caught in a violent, unjust, and selfish contradiction to God’s reign, the our task is not only to resist, but even to protest and break the grip of those contradictions in favor of the “poor in spirit.”  Some features of Jesus’ message are “conservative.”  Much more of it is “progressive.”  Regardless, Jesus is always more lovely and large, more powerful and persuasive than our partisan politics.

You may have heard before that the word “repent” (shuv in Hebrew) means to “turn.”  And it does.  Yet we often assume it means turning back or returning.  We assume Jesus is calling us to return to the previous path, “marked by remorse and the determination to do better” (Keck, 88).   I screwed up and now I feel remorse about it and want to start over.  But Jesus’ call to repent is different.  It is a turning towards the future.  Jesus pulls us forward into the newness of the day just now dawning.

Conclusion:

So we started out talking about hipsters.  Williamsburg’s latest homespun, tongue-in-cheek nostalgic restaurant is Mable’s BBQ.  Founded by a guy from Oklahoma.  It’s getting rave reviews for an Oklahoma staple: cheese dip made by dumping a can of Rotel spicy tomatoes into a melted block of Velveeta!  Trust me, it’s delicious.  Long live the hipsters.  

Actually, NY Magazine recently declared that the hipster decade is drawing its final breaths (“What Was the Hipster?”).  Sociologists refer to the essence of the hipster as the “rebel consumer.”  “The rebel consumer is the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive.”  Hipster communities are basically communities of early adopters.  And moving to the right neighborhood is crucial.  Because there “the game of knowing-in-advance can be played with maximum refinement.  The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumers distinction.”  Hipster culture is forward-facing, always looking for what’s next before the masses figure it out and catch up.

Jesus calls you to make a bet with your life about where the future is headed.  Jesus matters because he’s the one calling us to a real counter-culture (including the politics).  Calling us into a real community of early adopters who are living out God’s reign ahead of time. Yes, it’s tempting to despair.  But now and then, here and there, we see flashes of light, small signs of goodness, pockets of mercy.  And sometimes, behind our backs and without our even knowing it, we become this sign of goodness for others.