Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15 I Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12
The Rev. Drew Brislin
There is a quote from The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that comes from an interview he gave just months before his assassination in which he says, “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” This idea that in America there is the opportunity to be whatever it is that you want to be, has been the cornerstone of the American Dream ideology. What is interesting though is that this phrase of lifting up by bootstraps was originally an insult used to describe people who suffered from delusions as the actual ability to lift oneself up by their own bootstraps is physically impossible. When we turn on the evening news the world and our communities can often seem like a dark place. Whether it is crime, homelessness, poverty, the economy or war, it seems like we are doomed. On Friday the country held its collective breath as the video of Tyre Nichol’s death was released and the world remembered the horrors of World War II on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the many lives that were senselessly taken and refocused our attention on the rise of antisemitism that we are experiencing today. It is a sad and disheartening state of affairs that the world finds itself in and I don’t fault anyone for watching reruns of Andy Griffith or Friends instead. But take heart friends there is hope!
The setting of our Gospel reading this morning is a world that is very much oppressive. The Jewish people are living under Roman rule. Their status as non-citizens left them with very little opportunity and few means to care for their families. Many lived lives of enslavement and servitude. Life during Jesus’ day was bleak for many. Jesus calls his followers together to give them a sermon on eschatology. So, what does the word eschatology mean you might ask. Well, it is the study of end times or what the world will be like when the Kingdom of Heaven is reconciled with the world. I know this is continuing to still sound rather dark and you might be asking yourselves ‘are we really going to have to wait till we die, or the world ends before things get better?’ The theologian Jurgen Moltman tells us that the death knell of the church is when overall attitude of the church turns from anger to cynicism so stick with me here because cynicism accepts the situation, cynicism loses hope. So, what is our hope? Jesus is Moses, or the new Moses, which is what the author of our Gospel is trying to tell us this morning. That like Moses who delivered God’s chosen people out of bondage in Egypt, so too will Jesus deliver us from the bondage of those things that oppress us. The author of Matthew would have been aware that his audience would be Jewish and that they would be familiar with the story of Moses and would subsequently want to tie the story of Jesus and how he had come to deliver us in the same way that Moses delivered Israel. In the Beatitudes, Jesus is again flipping things over, this time it is our conception of what it means to be blessed. Like Moses, Jesus goes up a mountain (which he does eleven times in Matthew’s Gospel where encounters with God seem to occur in scripture) to speak to his disciples and give them a series of nine Beatitudes very much reminiscent of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. This word beatitude comes from the Latin ‘beatus’ which means ‘blessed’ or ‘happy.’ Being hungry, meek, mourning, or poor, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers persecuted or reviled doesn’t seem like things to be happy about being. Maybe this is where we southerners developed our subtle use of the phrase ‘Bless him.’ I think we need to guard ourselves also of thinking that in order to receive these blessings that we need to give away all that we have or that we need to mourn or be persecuted in order to receive these blessings. There is nothing that we can do to earn God’s grace, no experience or situation that we can put ourselves in to make ourselves more worthy of God. Jesus is not calling us to have pity or sympathy on those who long for better days but rather to have compassion for those who long. In giving us the Beatitudes this morning, Jesus is giving us the tools to be compassionate. To pity someone means you feel sorry for them and to have sympathy means that you understand what they are going through but to have compassion one must go deeper. Henri Nouwen tells us ‘That to have compassion conveys an inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnerships cuts through all the walls which might have kept you separate.’ We are distinct beloved creations but most importantly we are all created in God’s image and belong to one another in one holy family. Compassion doesn’t call us to walk with others but rather to walk in their shoes.
As we look at these Beatitudes this morning, we should engage them in very much the same way that I think the Ten Commandments were meant to be engaged. This is to say they should be experienced as a means for being in relationship with God and subsequently with each other. The Beatitudes give us a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven and that kingdom is about righteousness not about being right. We are tasked with looking out for one another and while someone may be in a situation where they feel they do not need help and can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, not everyone finds themselves in the same situation. Those who fall through the cracks, those who are left behind, those who are persecuted are the ones that we are called to seek out and to be with. In light of how Jesus teaches us this morning, I think that rather than looking at the world through dark and pessimistic, half empty lens like I am sometimes wanting to do that I should rather see it is an opportunity to live in partnership and community with those who are hurting and lonely and yet are God’s beloved creations too. The world is not a dark place, but it is rather a place fertile and ripe with opportunity to share the love of Christ.