James Finley used to go to Thomas Merton for spiritual direction. When he arrived, Merton would ask him, “How’s it going?’ If Finley answered, “It’s going well!” Merton would respond, “Don’t worry, before too long it wont be going so well.” And if he answered, “It’s not going so well.” Merton would respond, “Don’t worry, before too long, it will be going well.”
You aren’t sleeping through the night?
Don’t worry, soon your kid will be done teething.
You are sleeping through the night?
Don’t worry, soon your kid will be out driving late at night with friends.
You are stable and happy and healthy and have a job you love?
Don’t worry, before too long you’ll get sick, or lose your job, or face some financial hardship.
You are going through a difficult illness, hunting for a new job or struggling to make ends meet?
Don’t worry, before too long your treatment will be finished, you will find employment, and one day you will be finished paying off your student loans.
Jesus is among a crowd of people in what sounds like an overwhelming scene: a massive gathering from the whole region, pressing in on him, trying to touch him because power is going out from him and people are being healed of all sorts of things. In the middle of this scene Jesus looks up at his disciples and he gives them this sermon.
First, a collection of blessings and woes, which is to say a litany of How good you have it!s and Sucks to be you!s.
How good you have it, you who are poor, or hungry, or weeping, or when people say terrible things about you! You should leap for joy! For yours is the kingdom of God, you will be fed, you will laugh, and you are in good company!
And you who are rich and full and happy? Sucks to be you!
For all of that will disappear and you’ll be left with nothing.
Whatever it is that we look to for security, stability, for comfort and ease, the things we assume are defining and sustaining of our lives – they are fickle and changing. Ability, disability, health, illness, weakness, strength, beauty, cruelty, happiness, despair, our lives cycle through it all, and we don't ever stop and stay somewhere, as though we’ve arrived.
So even though we like to imbue them with power, they don’t actually determine reality.
There must be something else, something greater, something deeper, that holds us than this.
We must have to rest our souls, our security, our trust, in something or someone more than what we feel and experience.
There must be something else, something greater, something deeper, that holds us than this.
We must have to rest our souls, our security, our trust, in something or someone more than what we feel and experience.
But we don’t get there through strength.
When we avoid our pain, pretend what someone said doesn’t hurt, prop ourselves up with our assets and gifts and our “at least”s – at least I have my health, at least I have friends, at least I’m not as bad off as they are, we give those things the power over us and we become trapped by the pain, captive to the messages, enslaved to do everything possible to preserve ourselves and at least not lose our at leasts. We cannot be free. But that doesn’t stop us from doing everything we can to avoid the nothingness.
The real life, the real security, the real hope, is found in our weakness. When you know nothingness; you will be ministered to by God. When you don’t try to flee it or avoid it, but acknowledge it and even receive it, you will find that the God who comes to us as minister will minister to you.
My friend Phil in my pastor group is teaching the Enneagram in prison, gathering with groups of prisoners who want to talk about what unthought responses and defense mechanisms of their personality types trap them and get them into trouble. When he first started, he kept marveling to the rest of us about how receptive the prisoners were, and and how dramatic the changes in them once they started recognizing their patterns. These are people living right up against their impossibility. They have no illusions about their weakness. Their gut reactions and unthought responses have clearly not worked out for them. He said, “They are so much freer than I am. They have nothing more to lose and no illusions about their own imprisonment. I get to walk around feeling like I’m doing pretty well. My defense mechanisms are working pretty well, thank you very much. I get to pretend I am not trapped in my own ego and cut off from real connection and relationships.”
So, how good it is to be you when things aren’t working out so well, because you can confess your death and be met by life. And sucks to be you when you’re doing a good job escaping your nothingness and deluding yourself that you’ve got it handled. Because your death is going to come as something of a shock. How good it is to be you who can embrace your nothingness. And sucks to be to you who believe you can escape it.
That’s the first part of Jesus’ sermon. And I like to imagine that the chaos has died down a little bit around him and people are straining to eavesdrop as he continues talking to his disciples.
And the part he says next would get a lot of clapback on Twitter. Social media is a perfect medium for destroying each other. The extraordinary speed and venom with which we can soundly condemn someone is matched in force only by the hopelessness of finding redemption once you’ve been condemned.
So imagine how Jesus’ message would go over with us: Bless those who curse you-? Love your enemies-? Don’t just love those who love you, that’s meaningless. Love those who hate you! Reach out to those who’ve rejected you from their tribe! Pray for those who abuse you! When someone does something terribly hurtful to you, deserving to feel the sting they’ve inflicted on you and the pain they’ve caused you, don’t give it back. Instead show them mercy, pray for them, be kind to them. Share your stuff with the people who don’t return it-? Lend to those who may not repay you-? Big whoop if you engage in an economy of trading and bartering things and emotions and respect. What does that prove? Anybody can do that, he says.
Weirdly, God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. We’d much rather see the ungrateful and wicked taken down a few notches. In fact, we’ll gladly do that ourselves. We’ll call them out, shred their reputations, give them one star and call them trash. We will make them pay for their ingratitude and wickedness.
But Jesus says, Live in God’s mercy and extend it to others. Live in God’s forgiveness and extend it to others. Live in God’s grace and extend it to others. Especially when they don’t merit it. That’s when it really matters.
Don’t judge and you wont be judged, don’t condemn and you wont be condemned, forgive and you’ll be forgiven, give and it will be given to you. Trust in this reality where there is enough – enough love and forgiveness and grace and hope, and where we are not heaping judgment and condemnation on each other and ourselves.
Live this way and this is how you will live.
It was important that he said the first part first.
Because this part is harder, and makes no sense without the first part.
You’re always stuck in impossibility, Jesus tells us, so surrender. The only way to move from the way of fear to the way of God is through death and resurrection. Die to yourself and all you thought might keep you safe or make you invincible or good or immune. Die to what you thought was giving you life.
When you surrender, you get your humanity back. When you’ve surrendered to your nothingness and embraced your death you are no longer ruled by it. You will not be overtaken by comparison, or consumed by jealousy. You will not need to prove yourself better than or equal to others. You will not need to get caught in defensiveness and retaliation. You will be free.
Everything we do in life is to escape nothingness – we’re terrified by it, obsessed with it. It’s why Adam and Eve ate the apple, and it’s why we tweet. We want to build our own somethingness and fiercely uphold it. But if you’re my disciple, Jesus says, walk right into nothingness. Walk into your weakness and surrender to it. Lay down your life and you will find it. Live with your nothingness.
Right up against it is where you’ll find the love and grace, the mercy and forgiveness of God. Right up against it is where you’ll find freedom. You can’t kill what’s already dead, Paul reminds us. And we are those who have died and been raised into new life with Christ. We are those pulled into the love and care of the Father to the Son by the Spirit. The grace of God inside the Trinity spills out into the world to create and claim us, as beloved, in God’s own image, and God ministers to us in our need.
If this is where you begin – already in your nothingness and impossibility, then you cannot be pulled into the game of creating your own somethingness and defending your own possibility. It is in our nothingness, our poverty and hunger and sadness and death, that God comes to us, and gives us back our humanity. And it is here we minister to each other, giving and receiving love and care, living out the image of God. God puts us in communion with God and each other, to rediscover our true belonging that is at the core of it all – to return to the love we most deeply long for, and that we recognize in our deepest self when we experience it.
All around you the lie is going to continue to rage that says we are apart and against and there’s only enough belonging for some and only enough respect for a few and the winners will win and the losers will lose and it can be locked in, settled and final, as we human beings strive to avoid and overcome the nothingness.
But the core of it all is God’s grace and mercy. And the kind of world God made and has redeemed us for is one of deep connection and love. And it comes through death, not apart from it. Don’t protect or guard yourself from being hurt, or try to create and uphold your own possibility in the world, but surrender. Surrender to the impossibility and the inability to save yourself and find there your salvation.
The time is coming when nobody will be hungry or poor or sick, when everyone will have enough and nobody will be less than, discarded or overlooked. This is God’s reality; it is as things are meant to be and will one day be for good. It is where we all will one day stop and stay. We join in it now.
Then, beyond the game and the illusion and the constant striving and comparing, we are participating in the real reality. We are acting as though we belong to one another because we do.
Treat someone as worthy of respect, even if they don’t deserve it.
If someone takes your coat, give your shirt too.
Give more than is demanded unfairly of you. Upset the apple cart. Be the one who sets the terms.
Don’t react and keep track; die to that way of life and rise to a different way of being.
Refuse to be divided by other people’s actions or words.
Refuse to let them make you reject them.
Refuse to let their pain or rage or hatred or vitriol set the terms for how you will treat them.
Instead of strong, be weak.
Instead of wary, be generous.
Treat people as more deserving of kindness than they generally are, says Jesus, who right as he is saying it is also doing it, showing kindness, without distinction, liberally healing all those who come near. They touch him and they’re healed. They don’t even have to ask the right way, or show they’ve earned it, or be a good person, or have the right religion, or turn their live around and use it for good. Jesus is just healing them. Because it’s who Jesus is. It’s what God does.
Jesus is standing in a sea of broken and longing people, very few deserving at the moment and those who are wont be for long, people who are mostly confused, mostly unkind to each other, people who are lost and frantic to escape their nothingness, people not unlike you and me and all those we know. And he’s just giving out healing and hope willy-nilly, without prescreening or checking credentials, and in the midst of this madness he’s gathering those of us who are longing to follow and are willing to be sent, and he is inviting us to face our own nothingness.
He’s telling to embrace our own impossibility, to recognize the futility of our reliance on anything to save us – be it goodness or health or wisdom or financial security or reputation or hard work or people’s praise and good opinions of us, because just wait, tomorrow it will be gone.
Instead, he’s inviting us to live as though we are already dead, which is to be truly alive. To discover in our honesty and weakness that our ground of being cannot be shaken, because it extends deeper than the things that come and go on the surface; we are rooted and grounded in love. We are held and upheld in God.
And then he’s giving these ludicrous instructions, these self-emptying kind of instructions. These ministry kind of instructions. Be merciful like God who is merciful, who empties Godself to take on the form of a human being and come right in alongside us. So empty ourselves and go toward death, toward suffering, toward the nothingness and impossibility inside of us and others. Let our utter vulnerability make us invulnerable to destruction. Let our weakness becomes the strength to go right in alongside each other where Jesus is.
Go toward each other, make the kind of relationships where people are seen and heard. Live the deeper truth.
Live the wider hope.
Live the greater mercy.
Show forgiveness – a rare, upsetting and potent thing these days.
Surrender to God, who surrenders to us, and then surrender to each other.
Come alongside each other as God comes alongside us.
Be ministers.
Let God set you free.
And it will be contagious. It will be returned to you when you don't expect it; it will be filled up bubbling over kind of infectious.
Live this way and this is how you will live.
Amen.
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