Sunday, January 29th: "Thank God for Blessings"
First United Presbyterian Church
“Thank God for Blessings”
Rev. Amy Morgan
January 29, 2023
Micah 6:1-8
Hear what the Lord says:
Rise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the hills hear your voice.
Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord,
and you enduring foundations of the earth;
for the Lord has a controversy with his people,
and he will contend with Israel.
‘O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,
what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.’
‘With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Matthew 5:1-12
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
3 ‘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.
Every time the Beatitudes rolls around in the lectionary, I get really excited. There is so much here to chew on, so many insights for the life of faith. The positioning of the Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel, right at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, is so key. They set up everything that is to follow. Everything in Matthew’s gospel can really be interpreted through the lens of the Beatitudes. These verses are so rich with meaning that each time I see them coming I just know I’m going to enjoy developing a sermon proclaiming the beauty and depth of this text.
But every time I preach on the Beatitudes, I end up feeling like I’ve come up short. Not like a feeling of personal failure. But like I just couldn’t quite capture everything that needed to be said. Part of that is because I’ve come to understand that anything less than a six-week sermon series is really inadequate for covering the importance of these 12 verses. But it’s also because every time I come to this text it says something new. The meaning here seems to swirl and dance around me like the Holy Spirit herself, daring me to try to pin it down. I try and try, but any firm and lasting clarity seems to elude me.
And so I come to this text once again with these same feelings of joy and excitement mixed with a sense that there is so much more to see here than we can possibly take in.
So instead of doing a deep dive into each of the eight Beatitudes, as I am always tempted to do, today I’m going to focus on just the word beatitude, or blessing, and how it functions in this text.
Blessing is a word that tends to be thrown around rather casually in our culture. I had a co-worker in Michigan who used to announce regularly that she was “to blessed to be depressed!” Our perfectly curated social media lives often bear the hashtag “blessed.” You literally can’t purchase a single product at Hobby Lobby that doesn't have the word blessed plastered on it somewhere.
These expressions of feeling blessed don’t typically arise from those who are poor in spirit or meek or mourning or persecuted. They are emblems of status, attached to photos of smiling families in matching pajamas, insights gained from watching the sun rise on a beach vacation, or awards for our own accomplishments.
The blessings Jesus pronounces in Matthew bear no resemblance to our culture’s version of blessing. The Greek word translated here as blessing indicates a connectedness to God that results in an inner state of well-being. It does not refer to any sort of material gift or elevation of status. There are no external signals of this kind of blessedness. It is similar to the Psalmist’s proclamation of “happy are they.” In the Beatitudes, blessing is a grace that brings about deeper connectedness to God and God’s reign on earth. If the repentance we talked about last week allows us to change our minds and see the reign of God around us, blessedness is the result of participating in that reign.
And that participation, that blessing, functions in three different ways in this text.
First, blessing is used to define the identity of Jesus’s followers. Unlike in Luke’s gospel, where the Beatitudes are addressed to the whole crowd of people around him, Jesus is speaking in Matthew just to his newly minted disciples. These would certainly include the fishermen from last week’s story – Peter and Andrew, James and John. But Jesus likely picked up some more disciples along the way through his ministry of healing in Galilee and the surrounding countryside. There were likely folks from all walks of life in this group – merchants and agricultural workers, men and women, young people and older folks. They came to Jesus carrying a variety of identities: parent, child, sibling; fisherman, seamstress, soldier, servant; Jew, Levite, Galilean.
But in these Beatitudes, these blessings, Jesus gives them a new identity. The first ten verses of the Beatitudes might give us the impression that Jesus is speaking generally about “those people” – those who are meek or make peace or hunger and thirst for righteousness. But then, in verse 11, he brings it all together saying, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” All of the Beatitudes culminate in this identity that invites persecution. If we look at the crew who followed Jesus during his earthly ministry, we find people who lack spiritual riches, who grieve at the pain and sorrow they witness in the world, who are subject to the powers of empire, who are seeking something more than ritual piety, who don’t buy into the cycle of revenge, who are willing to learn and ask questions and admit what they don’t know, who are worn out from violence and war, and who have been beaten down for standing up for what they believe.
None of Jesus’s disciples embody all these traits, of course. But somewhere in his group of followers, each of these Beatitudes lands like a cannonball to the soul. They know he is speaking directly to them. They feel like Jesus really sees them. And in that seeing, Jesus is able to give them a new identity, an identity that will be able to withstand the persecution and oppression they have experienced because of their “blessed” condition and surely will experience more of as followers of Jesus.
Jesus declares them blessed. Each of them and all of them, as individuals and as a unified group, are blessed. Their blessings may manifest in a variety of ways – comfort, fullness, inheritance, mercy, and so on. But they are henceforth defined by their identity as those who are blessed. This identity subsumes any other in their lives. Before they are siblings or servants or Jews – they are blessed. And not because they have happy, healthy families or broke sales records at work. They are blessed because Jesus calls them blessed.
But in order to live into that new identity, Jesus’s disciples will need to understand the second use of blessing here. Jesus uses the concept of blessing to inaugurate a reversal of values. To highlight this point, Pastor and blogger Andy Holt composed a set of “alternative Beatitudes” that align with widely accepted cultural values of the first century:
Blessed are the wealthy,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who rejoice,
for no suffering can touch their hearts.
Blessed are the bold,
for they will inherit the kingdom.
Blessed are those who never hunger or thirst,
for they are always filled.
Blessed are the just,
for they will judge rightly.
Blessed are those who keep Torah,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the zealots,
for they will restore the kingdom.
Blessed are those who die for God’s glory,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus, in his very first sermon in Matthew, his very first teaching to his disciples, turns all these values on their heads. Scottish theologian Jim Gordon writes that “The Beatitudes are a checklist of resistance to dominant cultures that diminish human flourishing through the power plays of injustice.” Jesus lays out this upside-down value system for the purpose of radical resistance to the oppressive and death-dealing values of the world as we know it.
And this leads us to the final purpose of blessing in this text. Blessing is not something we are to passively receive. It is a call to action, a vocation. Last week we talked about repentance as seeing things differently, changing our minds. But once our minds are changed, we cannot live in the same way as we did before. The cognitive dissonance would be too much to bear.
Jesus’s Beatitudes invite us not just to see the world differently, but they call us to live into this set of alternative values. This is really intentionally set up in Matthew. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is cast as the new Moses. We see in the very beginning of his ministry, as in the beginning of Moses’s ministry, Jesus on a mountain, giving instruction. But instead of commandments, laws, Jesus gives blessings. And just as the law gave the Israelites instructions for living rightly with God and one another, so the Beatitudes of Jesus call us to a new way of living with God and with one another. But rather than prescribing particular actions and sacrifices and prohibiting certain things, Jesus invites us into this new way of life by way of blessing.
Jesus’s blessings are not empty words. They are grounded in what Jesus has been doing and will do. He has been teaching and healing and bringing life out of death. And he will descend from this mountain only to climb another where he will be crucified. And he declares all those who are willing and able to come and follow him on this journey blessed. This means they are called to also be agents of insight and healing and new life. This means they are also called to climb that other hill of self-sacrifice, of persecution and even death, trusting that still, somehow, some way, they are blessed.
Theologian Debie Thomas insists that Jesus “doesn’t simply speak blessing. He lives it. He embodies it. He incarnates it. Through his words, his hands, his feet, his life, he brings about the very blessings he promises. Insisting that pain in and of itself is neither holy nor redemptive in the Christian story, Jesus works to bring healing, abundance, liberation, and joy to everyone who crosses his path.” Thomas asserts that “This is the vocation we are called to. The work of the kingdom — the work of sharing the blessings we enjoy — is not the work of a fuzzy, distant someday. It is the work — and the joy — of the here and now. The Beatitudes remind us that blessing and justice are inextricably linked. If it's blessing we want, then it's justice we must pursue.”
Today, as we remember and celebrate our last year together as a congregation, we will get to see how we are blessed. Not because of our accomplishments or comforts or progress. But because our identity is in Jesus Christ, and in our mourning and longing and struggles, Jesus has called us blessed. As a church and as Christians, we live with a set of reversed values, where those most reviled by society are most cherished in God’s reign. And we live into our calling to make those blessings Jesus announces a reality in our lives and in our world. We are blessed indeed.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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