In on the Miracle

 

Matthew 5:1-12

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.

What's Your Identity?

Luke 3:15;17, 21-22

There are things that happen to us in our lives that come to define us. They are the things that most make us who we are. Some of them happen before we are even born – where we are born, the color of our skin, our gender, our DNA that comes with its own timeline and traits, handed down from our ancestors or parents, that predisposes us to disease, temper or genius, a biological tendency toward addiction, or a mind for math.  

Then there are things that happen to us when we are young – particular experiences, like the loss of a parent, a childhood spent moving around from place to place, an exceptionally encouraging teacher, an acutely abusive coach, an accident or illness, or a relentlessly reoccurring message about what it will take to be accepted by our family or community.  

Then, there are the things we experience or choose, the opportunities open or doors closed to us, the advantages or struggles that set the stage for our lives, the terrible mistakes or the soaring successes, the communities that raise us and the ones we seek out, the places we get our stories and the people who tell them to us all shape our identities.

We live in a time where more than ever before in history, it is presumed in Western culture that the purpose of life is to define your own identity.  Nobody else can tell you who you are; that’s exclusively your job, it’s your main job, and it’s your highest job.  

It’s become such an important project, defining your own identity, that we do it all the time without even realizing we are doing it.  It requires comparing ourselves to others nearly constantly.  It means knowing what identities are available so we can figure out where we fit, listening to others who have our chosen identities so we know more how to be whatever they are, whatever we are, so that we can find community or ensure respect by fitting in well enough with whatever that identity happens to be. Who are you going to be?

The tricky part is, some of these things change, in fact, a lot of them do.  Because people change.  You see it most easily with children.  One year their favorite color is yellow, but then it’s blue and you didn’t get the memo.  First it’s dresses and skirts all year, and then, (after you’ve shopped), it’s only pants the next year.  It’s basketball all the time, and then it’s photography; it’s the inseparable best friend, and then a completely new crowd.  Let’s just say, after being able to quote nearly every episode, now nobody in my house will use the Dora the Explorer beach towel in public.  

And being human also means moving through knowledge and development, through ideas, and experiences that shape us and change our perceived identity.  We move from student to master.  From amateur to professional to retired.  From employed to unemployed. From ability to disability, health to sickness, and back again, perhaps several times. 

 And over time beliefs change. So what you might have thought or shaped your life around previously, no longer is central for you, or becomes more nuanced, or is traded out for something else entirely.  And now something new defines you. This new thing becomes your identity.  Until something happens that might shift that again. You move to a new place, lose your spouse, your career ends, your health changes, your child comes out to you, you become your dad’s caregiver, your church falls apart, new questions arise in your spirit, new callings emerge.

And is our identity even consistent from context to context?  With one group of friends we might be the outgoing one, with another group, the quiet one.  In one situation you might be related to everyone in the room, in another you might be the only woman, or only black person, or only English-speaker.  So even though we think it is ours alone to create and shape, our identity has something to do with those around us, and the role we play in the group.

And to complicate things, our culture puts on pressure to be immediately identifiable in your self-chosen labels, so that even thought you’re supposedly completely unique, you should be properly categorized and labeled as a “type.”  People want to know, are you a Republican or a Democrat? Are you Progressive? Conservative?  An ally? An enemy?  What do you do for a living?  Where do you live? Rent or own? Are you single? Did you come from somewhere else? 

We wont admit it, but we want to be able to make assumptions and snap judgments about people based on things like education level, finances, or body weight, which, according to a recent study, is the one area today where stereotypes and prejudices are increasing, while in all other areas, like race, religion, sexual orientation, rates of prejudice are dropping.  

And it really throws us for a loop when people don’t fit neatly into the categories.  What do we do with a black, gay, Republican, Christian Pastor with Asbergers, like my friend Dennis?   Which table does he get assigned to in the lunchroom of life?  I read this week that the Woman’s March founders – for all their unity of goals and perspective, had a personal rift because they differed on whether the Jewish member was part of the dominant white culture, or a marginalized person.   Was she a victim of oppression or part of the oppressive power structure? And we need to know these things so we know how to treat each other. We need to know if you belong, or who belongs more, or who needs to work harder to belong. 

Because in a time when our main job is to create and curate our own identity, we had better not slip up and mislabel others or ourselves and we’d better not lose a prized label once it’s secured.  People are always paying attention, everything we say and do is evidence of our belonging or not, and our place and potential in the world will be shaped by our self-defined identity.  So choose carefully and walk delicately.

This is a new thing. In the past, identities were pretty much given to you by your community.  You didn’t get a say, because it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that it was the individual person’s job to figure that out. For better or worse, you simply were defined by where you were born, and your status and role in society were predetermined.  You just lived into it. Of course, this had its own problems, but whatever they were, people were not swimming in options and drowning in expectations as they figured out their own slippery identity and tried to live it out in the world.

Step into this framework, the Messiah. And here’s an interesting case.  Is he God? Is he human?  In the lineage of a king, or the son of a carpenter?  (Trick questions, the answers to all of them are YES). 

Messiah - This is a one and only role, never before lived into, with a collection of deeply held expectations at the get-go.  Messiah was supposed to liberate the people from an oppressive empire, to bring in a revolution, restore the nation of Israel.  The Messiah belongs to Israel.  Messiah is strong, extraordinary, powerful and obvious, not vulnerable or ordinary, weak or hidden.

So Jesus has already thwarted all these expectations pretty radically by being born in a (debatable) stable, being honored by a bunch of pagan mystics from a far-off land for his cosmic significance to the whole world, and spending the first few years of his life as a refugee, and then having apparently the most ordinary small town, Middle Eastern Jewish upbringing that it’s not even worth mentioning, with an appearance that didn't stand out in any remarkable way. 

And he hasn’t come to overthrow the Romans!  He has come to overthrow death! We don't have a category for that one. So there are lots of identities being thrust upon Jesus before his ministry even begins, but there’s only one that matters.

And it’s spoken at his baptism.  

John has been preaching and raving in the wilderness, and people are flocking to be chastised by his strong language and powerful rhetoric, and then baptized by him.  And Jesus shows up there, just, it seems, as John references this Messiah that is coming, one who is so important that John would not be worthy of even untying his sandal and washing his feet like a servant.

But Jesus slips into the crowd, according to Luke’s telling, and gets baptized right alongside the rest of them, and John seems not to pause the act, and rather than stopping himself from washing the Messiah’s feet, John proceeds, apparently, to wash him completely, just like the person before and the person after him.  

And then the Holy Spirit descends in bodily form like a dove, and Jesus hears the words spoken over him like a pronouncement, “This is my child, the beloved one; I am delighted with him.”  

In this moment heaven and earth converge in the person of Christ.  Jesus is God, fully God. That is his identity.  And the full God shuffles into the waters of humanity, submitting anonymously, alongside everyone else, to this act of repentance and renewal – for that’s what John’s baptism was.  God claims his identity as a human being, a creature in need of God.  

And at the same time the human Jesus reaches out toward the divine, the divinity of God reaches out and claims Jesus with a voice from heaven and blessing, and the Holy Spirit wraps the connection in affirmation, pronouncement, and blessing. The Trinity is present here, and the movement of God toward us and us toward God. 

Every tradition has that movement, by the way – dedication as a baby and baptism as an adult, baptism as a baby and confirmation later, they all try to capture and express the covenant movement of God claiming us and us responding Yes to God’s Yes.

It’s worth noting that baptism is an enactment of dying and rising.  This gets missed with the gentle Presbyterian head sprinkle, but is easier to see with the full immersion dunk.  

We are baptized into Jesus’ own death and resurrection.  We acknowledge that we die. We are, in fact, given over to death.  And then we are raised up in Christ’s life.  Jesus’ own relationship with God, his identity, becomes ours– permanently sealed into the love of God.  Receiving God’s Yes, living toward God as God lives toward us, is our acknowledged purpose.  

And Jesus, all the things he was supposed to be and do, all the messages shaping even his own beliefs about Messiah, and the people’s intense expectations on him, they die here.  And what rises is just the connection with God, just the identity as beloved, just the purpose of embodying the love of God to us and us to God.

We wont talk about it until Lent, but right after this, Jesus is sent into the wilderness to face temptation, all the things that would try to claim and shape his identity. These too are what he is prepared to let go when comes up out of that water and hears spoken his true identity – the temptations he hasn’t yet faced in the wilderness, and every day after that.

Baptism is not some kind of magical thing.  Ordinary water, ordinary words, ordinary people watching and pouring water and making promises.  But in this ordinary moment, we trust that God –who always has claimed you for love – now becomes the source of your identity, the love of God becomes your purpose, the grace of God becomes your belonging.  It’s the convergences of Yeses. God’s and yours, back and forth. 

All other identities, whether long-term or temporary, inherent or chosen, released or reclaimed, whether denied or explored, embraced or rejected, they are not the true identity that defines us.  None of them is powerful enough or expansive enough to determine our deepest self, and our truest purpose.  

There is but one identity that defines us first, last and most completely. It is true of each of us before we came into being, and it remains true after we are gone from this earth. Beloved, child of God, in whom God delights. 

So despite the relentless messages around us, our primary job is not, in fact, to construct our own identity in the world. That’s already been decided for us.  

Our first job, our only job, is to live into the identity decided for us to us before the foundation of the world.  Made in God’s own image to share this life with God, the grace of God reaches out to us by the Holy Spirit, and brings us back, every time we forget – and we forget many times a day! But God’s grace always brings us back to our truest, deepest identity: which is Beloved. Child of God, in whom God delights.

 Your life is a gift, made to be lived in response to God’s grace.  

Each one of us is completely unique, unequalled in all the world. Each one of us is a mix of contradictions and conundrums, beauty and ugliness, struggle and gladness, a glorious hodge-podge of features and facets.  Not one of us fits easily into human categories or labels, nor should we.  We are each meant to be the one and only you or me that has ever, or will ever, walk on this earth. 

But the only way that is possible is if we trust that our identity isn’t up for grabs. It is secure. Unshakable and permanent.  It cannot be altered or abolished.  It cannot be lost and it cannot be earned.  It is bestowed upon us by the Creator of all, given to us by the one who comes in alongside us.  And in baptism, this identity is recognized, confirmed, celebrated, witnessed, and sealed. 

Death gets spoken over you first.  You will die. This is good news.  First because it’s true.  And baptism tells the truth.  

But also because in baptism we die to all the identities we thought made us who we are, or all the things that will one day seek to so.  

They do not determine our being or define our ultimate worth.  

They cannot give us our purpose or take away our belonging.  

We live in this world as though we’re already dead, so we don’t need to fear death or avoid it – even if we’re threatened with loss, rejection or obliteration.  Jesus died for us, Jesus’ death takes on our death, and we take on his.
  

And then, resurrection. We rise to a new life, a new identity.  Beloved.  Child of God, in whom God delights.  Belonging forever to God, existing for life that will never die.

This identity will never fade. 

This purpose will never disappear.  

This belonging will never end. 

It turns out the only person who can really tell you who you are is God.  
And God names you Beloved. 
This is your true self.  

Live it boldly. 

Amen.