Gathering with you in this place is something I look forward to each week. The freedom and opportunity to sit with people in every moment of their uncertainty or grief, their tragedy and trauma, is central to my spirituality, because it helps me to understand God’s healing power, and our need for it.
The challenge and joy of the pastoral calling is to go back intentionally to the places in our lives, from which we regularly run away. Pastors have to go there on purpose, all the time, to everyone’s hospital rooms, to everyone’s indignity, to everyone’s calamity and brokenness. And that is where the truth of God is; that is where the Spirit of God is, God’s presence among us. It is when we’re hurting that our eyes are open, and we’re casting about for God. At funerals, we lift our eyes up to the hills and ask, “Where does my help come from?” That’s when the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, is revealed to us. God accompanies us in grief and trouble.
But God comes to us in every moment. It’s just that often we’re enjoying ourselves too much to realize it. We see God most clearly, when the abundance of God’s love and grace contrasts most deeply with the scarcity and limitations of our circumstances. As the prophet declares:
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit. Jeremiah 17:7-8
Jeremiah is called the Prophet of Tears, partly because he saw the destruction of Jerusalem and the invasion of Israel, as the King at that time ignored his pleas to rely on the goodness of God. The king instead trusted in empires, trying to pit Egypt against Babylon. But Jeremiah is also known to be one of the more confrontational of the prophets, heaping woe after woe on the people who are beseeching God for help. His words are not unlike words uttered by later faithful figures, such as Frederick Douglas, who said of our own country and people:
Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.
As a country, we seem to be tolerating a lot of poor treatment of the poor. As a Christian nation, we are acting hypocritically. We might be more like the people Jeremiah and Jesus were speaking to than we’d like to think. How will we shift our focus away from our self-absorption and toward the wellbeing of our neighbor? How will we ever change?
The mystery of God is that God would love us so deeply. One pastor conveys the wonder: “In three Persons, God stepped out of eternity and into human history to interrupt the course we had set for ourselves.”[i] And that course we had set for ourselves, to live according to our own will, to follow our own path, leads us not from brokenness to healing but from deep disorientation to even deeper despair. Things just get harder, the more we walk without the words of Christ to guide us. And it is that way of going about things that Jesus challenges. He tells the disciples, he tells us, to live according to a different code.
We are all called to let go of our bad habit of trying to walk on our own. It’s a habit we developed over time. I see it in my son Arthur, as he toddles around the house, supporting himself on his legs, to venture where he wants, to explore what he wants, to be like his big brother, Walker. I see it in myself, whenever I try to prove my worth, whenever I try – and fail – to live up to the expectations of others. When people offer me a drink of water, I reject their hospitality, proudly pointing to my own bottle of water I’ve brought with me.
We like to walk on our own, because it means we can go wherever we choose. When we drive to work, or to school, we can choose the route that goes through the pretty neighborhoods, the quiet streets, the well-kept lawns, the happy people walking their dogs. When we buy groceries, we can choose to shop at the pleasant stores, with wide aisles and everything perfectly arranged – even though the same food is stocked at the other grocery chains. When we plan out our weeks, we can choose to spend moments laughing with friends, playing at our hobbies, and enjoying the sunsets and sipping tea. It’s nice, but it’s a life that is spent listening, not to the words of Christ, but to our own hungers and drives, our own instincts and plans.
To walk with Jesus is terrifying to us. It’s terrifying to the disciples. It’s terrifying to the prophets. But worse still is the fate of those who ignore the Lord.
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals
and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the Lord.
They shall be like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see when relief comes.
They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land. Jeremiah 17:5-6
Christ wants us to live according to his word, to be a people who are born of the Spirit and who live by the Spirit and who walk – not in the dark, not on paths of our own choosing, but who walk – toward the brokenness of our world, because that’s where the grace and truth of God can be found.
If you attend a lot of funerals, or if you lead them, then chances are good that at some point you’ll hear a reference to the Beatitudes, a set of blessings from the Gospels which follow a poetic form. It’s funny that they’re so widely read, because the Beatitudes frame a counterintuitive, unwise, unheard of, and otherwise unrealistic approach to life.
Blessed are you who are poor [who are from humble origins, who give of yourselves for others], for yours is [an entire kingdom,] the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now. Blessed are you who weep now.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full now. Woe to you who are laughing now. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
We don’t live like this. Our world is governed by superpowers; tyrants rule over their citizenries; countries violate borders; bullies get their way: Might is right.
Mistrust of others because of their difference drives us to build walls and detain refugees. It separates Britain from the Continent. It holds us all at arm’s length from each other, as our suspicion snowballs into paranoia, and our isolation shuts out every voice but our own.
This is the world we live in.
So to hear the words of Jesus and to heed them, you need to believe in the one who’s speaking, whose life is one you admire, whose cause you’re willing to join. To take the Beatitudes to heart is an act of discipleship, an act of faith, an act of obedience and trust.
That trust brings blessing, not happiness. You might have heard other translations of the Beatitudes begin the reading with ‘happy:’ “Happy are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me” (v. 11, CEB). But to be happy is to be fortunate by chance, by luck, by happenstance.
Blessing comes from God, from Providence, from grace. To be blessed is to recognize that you are surrounded by God’s love, no matter your circumstance, whether you are happy and fortunate or sad and unlucky. You are blessed, because nothing in creation can stop God from loving you and calling out to you.
What God says to us is a reversal of our expectation. The Beatitudes are an affirmation of God’s ultimate redeeming work in the world, making all things right, exposing all wrongs, giving everyone what they deserve, and meeting our deepest longing for One who knows us and beholds us as we are without condition or rejection. And that’s very good news, especially for those who rarely find acceptance or belonging. God is on your side, no matter how bleak things appear.
Who needs to hear that good news today? The victims, the voiceless, the dismayed, the kind, the faithful, the persecuted. Who comes to mind for you? Maybe you’d agree: anyone who feels broken on the inside by what the world has done.
But maybe you also worry for those who work tirelessly for God’s kingdom, that they’ll wear themselves out and have little to show for it – their efforts just a drop in the bucket. Maybe you think we should stop bemoaning the injustice we see around us and perhaps capitulate to the patterns of this world. It’s a big world to take on, to try to change.
So I pray that you never forget that the Beatitudes are a reminder that God will have the last word. The task for us here and now is to have faith. We need to be able to trust Jesus enough to live as his disciples, a people who are zealously following after his footsteps and listening hungrily to his teachings. Do we have that consistency of faith, which can drive us to be the kind of people Jesus would call blessed?
The Beatitudes, which are often invoked to comfort the afflicted, seem more like a roundabout way of getting us to change our behavior, to transgress the norms we are mired in, and to seek, in the words of Paul repeated the other week, “a still more excellent way,”[ii] characterized by “the firm and sure hope that meekness is the way of God, that righteousness and peace will finally prevail, and that God’s future will be a time of mercy and not cruelty,”[iii] as one scholar put it.
After all, as Pope Francis teaches, “You cannot be a Christian without practicing the Beatitudes.”[iv]
How does that strike you? How do you fare, if you examine your life with these blessings in mind? Do you see room for improvement? Can you admit that you are still growing? Do you believe, that as a Christian, God still is not finished with you? And can you think of something concrete and specific you can do to be more like what Jesus wants from his disciples?
I think we all could learn to live with more humility. We all could learn to expect more of the Church and of ourselves as Christians. We all could become gentler. We all could seek God’s way rather than our own – forgiving others freely, seeing the good in the face of our neighbor, and doing the right thing, even to the point that it bothers others who would rather we not draw attention to a problem everyone else is ignoring.
So I will pray for you, that you can be found in the places in our lives, from which we regularly run away. As a follower of Christ, may you go there on purpose, all the time, to everyone’s hospital rooms, to everyone’s indignity, to everyone’s calamity and brokenness. May you, too, be in those places, a healing presence, a prayerful friend, answering God’s call, and presenting yourself to walk alongside Jesus, wherever he leads.
I’ll leave you to open your hearts to what God might be calling you specifically to do, which could be something unfamiliar and burdensome for you. But the good news is this:
God blesses those who hear Jesus’ words and act on them.
God blesses those who seek to become disciples of Christ.
God blesses those who put their trust in the Lord and seek to follow his commands.
Blessed are you. Amen.
[i] Sermon Brainwave #786: Holy Trinity Sunday – May 30, 2021, Luther Seminary, 05/25/2021, https://youtu.be/IgGWm6BkYKk.
[ii] 1 Cor. 12:31.
[iii] Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” in New Interpreters Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994) p. 181.
[iv] Catholic News Service, The Catholic Herald, http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/10/13/pope-francis-you-cant-defend-christianity-by-being-against-refugees-and-other-religions/, October 13, 2016.
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