Heart of the Rockies Christian Church in Fort Collins, CO

“Are You Sure You Want to be Blessed?”, Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 2/2/14

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“Are You Sure You Want to Be Blessed?”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

Matthew 5:1-12

February 2, 2014

 We turn to Matthew’s gospel, picking up where we left off last week.  In Matthew’s telling of it, Jesus public ministry has just begun.  He’s in Galilee, and he’s just called his first disciples—Follow me—he says, and they do: Peter, Andrew, James, and John trade in their fishing nets for a life of witnessing to Jesus’ teaching, preaching, feeding, and healing.

Today, we hear the first recorded words of Jesus’ ministry according to Matthew.  It’s an introduction to what’s commonly referred to as The Sermon on the Mount, the first major preaching and teaching moment of five recorded throughout Matthew’s gospel.

READ MATTHEW 5:1-12

What would you say if I told you that this morning, I’m not going to preach the gospel?  We just read from the book of Matthew, which is, of course, one of the gospels, so this might seem like a trick question.  But the gospel is literally “the good news” and I don’t know about you, but what I just read didn’t really sound very good news at all.  To be blessed, we need to be poor?  Mourning?  Meek?  Hungry and thirsty?  To be blessed, we must be merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers?  A great reward in heaven means persecution and all kinds of evil being uttered against us now?   Reading this passage from the first gospel doesn’t leave me with a strong desire to be blessed.  You?

My preaching professor in seminary was big on celebration.  A sermon always needs to end with good news, he would tell us.  In fact, one of our first assignments in the class was to write the celebration portion of a sermon and preach it to the class.  It felt weird to write just part of a sermon and even weirder to practice it in the car with my best friend Sarah while we were driving around town running errands, trying to summon up our best televangelist voices in hopes that when we were taken down a few pegs by the nervousness of getting up to preach in front of a class of your colleagues, that a little celebration would still shine through.

I tried to explain this to one of my college friends, who didn’t really seem to get it.  Why does there always have be good news?, he’d ask.   That seems kind of contrived.  Sometimes, there just isn’t good news.  (Keep in mind that my seminary years included Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shooting, tens of thousands of Iraqis dying and tens of thousands of US troops being sent into Iraq.)  And I’m not sure I really got it at first either.  I mean, sometimes life just blows.  There is poverty and death and mourning and hunger.  Tragedies happen.  Systems are broken.  And it can be pretty darn hard to find the good news in all of that.

The Beatitudes, as this passage of scripture is often called, can feel the same way.

As it turns out, the Beatitudes themselves are not the gospel (the good news).  They’re what some Christian traditions call “the law.”  They tell us what we ought to do—be merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, righteous.  But the heart of the good news, the gospel comes right before these verses, from what we read last week:

“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”  Matt. 4:23

What follows – the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount – is a response.  A response to the healing that was happening in Jesus’ midst.  “The Beatitudes are there for the purpose of being done,” one seminary professor explained.

Some speculate that although Jesus was speaking directly to his disciples, he was within earshot of “the crowds” so that they could overhear this teaching and hold the disciples accountable to being the peacemakers, the merciful, the pure in heart, the righteous.

These weren’t exactly new ideas.  Anyone hearing echoes of the prophet Micah?

And what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness (also translated as mercy)

and to walk humbly with your God? (6:8)

But this doesn’t necessarily add up to an easy way to live. Jesus’ beatitudes weren’t like all the other beatitudes in his time.  Yes, beatitudes were commonly used in Jesus’ day, but they were common sense.  They expressed what everyone already knew; they expressed conventional wisdom.  Blessed are those on a low-fat diet, for they will have healthy arteries.  That sort of thing. [1]

Not Jesus’ beatitudes.  Jesus’ beatitudes turned conventional wisdom upside down.  Nobody would’ve associated blessing with being poor or in grief.  And that was just Jesus’ point.  In the kingdom of God, God’s favor—blessing, if you will—is heaped on those who have been forgotten by society at large.  Those who are little: the least, the lost, the lonely.  Which reminds me.  The beatitudes aren’t just challenging because of what they call us to do.  There is also this little matter of who receives this blessing that Jesus is talking about.   The kinds of people just mentioned.

It wasn’t out of the ordinary for people to be forced off their land in the first century world.  A good 15-20% of the population would have been considered destitute.  Another 60-70% of people were in very real danger of being forced to join those ranks.  That could happen for a number of reasons, including losing your family.  When your parents died, or when you were disowned by your parents, as was the case for many first century Jesus followers, not only were you mourning, you were homeless.[2]  Not only were homeless, but you were shamed.  You were meek.  Did I mention you were shamed?

Agrarian, or farming, societies like Jesus was a part of, were steeped in a culture of honor and shame.  Positive shame meant having proper concern for one’s honor.  Negative shame was publicly losing one’s honor.[3] That’s the kind of shame we’re talking about here.

And that’s the kind of upside-down talk Jesus became famous for.  Blessed are those who are down-and-out, rejected, destitute, homeless, shamed.

Blessed.  What do you think of when you hear that word?

I’ll admit that it’s one that I’ve struggled with.  How do I know I’m not confusing blessing and privilege?  Even the Greek doesn’t seem to clarify much – the word that we hear translated as blessed means happy, fortunate, in a privileged situation, well off until you put it into a religious context.  Then it means blessed—by God.

And I guess that’s the difference.  It’s not a “I bought a new car and have a large home and just got my membership to the country club in the mail” kind of blessed.  It’s a “being held in high esteem by God” kind of blessed.  The kind of blessed that removes shame and replaces it with honor; maybe not honor in society as the house and the car and the country club membership will get you (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but  honor with God.   Having your shame removed and replaced with honor with God – that’s blessing.

Okay, you know how I said I wasn’t going to preach any good news?  Well, God is good.  And there’s just no way to talk about being blessed by God without it being good news.

Jesus gathers in all of these people who are completely isolated and without honor in their culture’s eyes, and he gives them two gifts.

[Jesus gives them the gift of honor. In front of the disciples, within earshot of the crowds, Jesus ascribes honor to them, declaring that these are the people whom the God of Israel honors. Their human fathers may have disowned them, but they are children of the God who created the universe, to whom all honor belongs.

And the second gift?  Jesus makes them family. They are the beloved children of the One True Parent, and that makes them all brothers and sisters. They will never be alone, left out, or pushed aside in a community that sees themselves as family.][4] Which I have to imagine was just as complex and challenging in Jesus’ time as it is today, and yet, you’ll recall that being part of a family is what brought honor to one in that society.

And perhaps the greatest blessing of these dual gifts of honor in place of shame, of family in the face of isolation?  Go back and read these verses again.  They’re available to both the ones who are the targets of injustice and the ones who work to end injustice – in other words, on any given day, you and me.


[1] John Petty, Lectionary blogging: Matt. 5:1-12, www.progressiveinvolvement.com

[2] Petty.

[3] Malina, Pilch, Social Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul, p. 370.

[4] Sarah Dylan Breuer, www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/01/fourth_sunday_a.html.