Right now feels like we are poised on the edge of a significant, history-making moment.
Friday a friend on the phone with someone in Washington DC said this person was watching out her window as the city was being boarded up. The National guard is standing by, ready to be deployed. Nobody knows what is going to happen next, or how we all will respond to what happens next.Of course, it’s already history-making, we’re in a global pandemic and all. But it suddenly really feels significant and history-making. Our country feels fragile, things are charged and divided, we are raw about racism and doing hard introspective work about the changes needed in our nation. Our mental health is affected by our limited our ability to be together, the loss of our normal routine with jobs and school, with no way to imagine the future or timeline for when this might be over. We’re struggling to hang on when the ground feels so unstable. So we are coming into this significant historical moment exhausted from nine months of virus vigilance and let’s just say, we aren’t at the top of our game.
We are going into this future-shaping, unknown outcome, amped up stakes, moment feeling especially vulnerable, particularly powerless, and parched in our hearts and souls. Some of us feel a kind of alert, attentive stillness, preparing for whatever comes next, others of us are flailing and wringing our hands in worry, and sighing or swearing a lot.
Perhaps I am not speaking for you, and you’re feeling mostly terrific and unfazed at the moment. If that’s you, I’m genuinely glad for you. If you’re like me, though, what Jesus says today might sound like good news:
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Ok, God, I’m listening.
Blessed are those at the end of their rope. Blessed are the bone dry, those who can’t fake it, those who are facing their own nothingness and know it: God’s way of life is for them.
I want God’s way of life! I want to live beyond the striving and comparing, the judgment and the fear. I want to remember that we belong to God and each other and that can never be taken away. I want to remember that love is real and it never ends. The way back into that that reality is not by determined will or strong faith, but through our own emptiness and longing.
Jesus comes into our death with new life. It is in our impossibility that Christ meets us.
Blessed are… all these beatitudes begin, this whole sermon on the mount starts with a litany of blessing like statements of fact. Happy, contended, grounded are those…. Then it flips everything upside down and says a bunch of things we don’t prefer and wouldn’t chose, and pull us into grace. “Grace means nobody gets what they deserve but infinitely more.” Fredrich Buechner says, “Blessed is the one who gets the joke, who sees that miracle.”
Blessed are the parched souls, God’s way of belonging and grace is especially for them.
Also in on the miracle? Those who mourn. They will be comforted.
This word for mourn is the strongest possible word for mourning. And comforted here is the strongest possible word for comforted. So, blessed are those who are in absolute abject despair. All defenses crumbled, unable to fake it, actively surrendering to all-out no-holds-barred grieving.
They will be comforted, not made comfortable, as in, hanging out in a familiar place with a hot cup of tea and your feet propped up. But comforted, as in completely propped up on someone else’s strength. When we let out our agony, others will bear us up and walk with us, and carry our burdens with us, and not let us be lost or alone.
We are all mourning something. There is loss that we keep in or downplay, that we are invited to let it out.
By the way - Jesus did not say blessed are those who mourn for they will find inner strength to triumph over their circumstances, or blessed are those who mourn for they will be delivered from the things that are causing them sorrow. No, he said, blessed are those who mourn for they will be joined and held up in their grief and their circumstances. When we mourn we find right here the Christ who suffers with and for us. In the presence of those who come around us to lift us up is the actual the presence of God.
The next one feels a little icky. Blessed are the meek. God knows, and this is on full display right now, we will choose security above all else. We will choose it over goodness or cooperation or justice, we’ll choose the way of fear’s promise of safety over love’s vulnerability in a heartbeat. We want to be strong, and right, and self-sufficient, and respectable and buffered from loss. We don’t want to be “meek.”
Lisa once said, “It is hard and humbling to realize that faith leads not to security but to vulnerability.” We belong to God and we belong to each other- we are dependent and interdependent. No amount of striving can make us ever not need God and each other. So saying Blessed are the meek is like saying, Contented are the honest. In on the joke are those who get that they are recipients of grace alongside everyone else. The antidote to our obsessive striving for security is humility.
Lisa said it this way, “To be meek not to be ashamed or small or groveling. It is only to be at peace with our place in the universe, not to be secure, but to be at home.”
In on the miracle are those who are at home in God’s grace, they are at home in the whole world.
And blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness! We who long to live in God’s way, to see justice and kindness and mercy and love as way of life in this life, we will be filled. Because it is not we who bring about God’s reality, it is God who is already and always bringing it. So we watch and wait and pray and yearn that we all could live our belonging to God and each other, and the promise is, that in longing for it, we will experience it.
And being at home in God’s grace, and longing for God’s belonging to be shared means getting comfortable with mercy. But that is not a popular stance these days. Mercy feels risky and embarrassing, and so outdated. Right now our world feels like a very punishing place, without a lot of room for mercy. We’d rather punish others. We ourselves would rather be punished harshly. We are not good at accepting mercy or extending it to others. We’d prefer to restore order, or pay penance, or earn acceptance. Even better, we’d rather just cut people off completely and move on with our lives.
But in the kingdom of God mercy is what keeps us all afloat. Because mercy is how grace works. God’s way is forgiveness and compassion that are not deserved and cannot be earned.
And the promise is, you brave souls who reach your hand toward another with no guarantee they will accept or appreciate it, when you may not get the recognition or justice you deserve, You will receive mercy.
Giving mercy washes away the hardness and the stuckness in our hearts, and receiving it sets us free from the self-judgment and self-punishment we often choose instead.
Blessed, then, also are the pure in heart, those who welcome mercy and live in it, those who for whatever reason, have chosen NOT hard and cynical, NOT self-protective and cunning. Those whom we might dismiss as naive or weak, easily taken advantage of, are the ones who are tuned in to the song of kindness and love and mercy and hope that the rest of us mostly ignore. These are the ones who get to see God.
In on the miracle are those whose hearts are vulnerable and open.
Then there are the peace-makers. The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion”. So the greeting, Shalom, means “May you be completed.” When we contribute to others’ fullness, fullness in the world around us, and fullness between us, we literally share in the substance of God’s life, here and now. Whenever we say, by our words or our actions, “May you be completed,” we make peace.
We smile it, and knit it, and bake it, and write it, and march it, and speak it, and hug it, and listen it into being, we break down strife and strain by wishing wholeness and fullness upon others. And those who are doing this, Jesus says, know with confidence whose and who and whose they are.
But just to be clear, being peace-makers doesn’t mean we’re suddenly no longer tension-makers and crazy-makers too.(Back to the poor in spirit!) It means, as Glen Stassan says, we “abandon the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of our enemies.” Being a peacemaker starts with surrendering our own troubled hearts to God’s mercy, and letting God bring peace through us.
And Jesus ends the whole thing with, Blessed are you when you are deeply misunderstood, labeled, dismissed and hated for living like the game is pretend, and choosing to live in God’s belonging instead. And, then here comes the only command in the whole beatitudes – you should rejoice and be glad, because what you are doing is noticed. You’re undermining the way of fear; you’re making good trouble. And there is a whole cloud of witnesses—those who’ve been in on the miracle longer than you have—cheering you on. And one day, when all this is over, you will be thanked by the Creator for your participation in the miracle.
This moment is significant, and historical, and it is fraught. But beloved children of God, we live in a deeper reality, deeper than any moment, and with a further horizon beyond all the significant historical moments gone before and all those to come, and we know this world belongs to God, and every one of us in it belongs to each other. No matter what, and always. And God is always working. No matter what and always. God’s grace holds us and sustains us.
No matter what and always, this remains true: when we feel parched in our hearts and souls, God’s way of belonging and grace is for us. And when we express our heartbreaking grief we are lifted up on others’ arms. And when we’re at home in God’s grace we find the whole world to be our home. And when we long for God’s belonging between us we find fullness, and when we’re brave and generous with mercy we ourselves are awash in mercy. And when our hearts are vulnerable and open, we see God. And when we surrender our troubled hearts to God’s grace and let God’s fullness come to and through us, we remember whose and who we are, part of the eternal community of good trouble makers, persistent love-seekers and brave hope-bearers.
This week, and always, may we know ourselves to be in on the miracle.
Amen.
PRAYER PRACTICE:
Using a journal, or verbally with a quiet few minutes to reflect and pray, let yourself express to God what is on your heart in this way:
God, I am mourning...
God, I long for...
God, thank you...
Repeat as many times as necessary.
