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.

Being in on the miracle

"Reconciliation" by Rebekiss

Matthew 5:1-12 (9-12)

Beatitude Series - Part 5 (of 5)

The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion”.  So when you greet one another or say goodbye, with Shalom, what you are really saying is, “May you be completed.”

Blessed are the shalom-makers, Jesus says, the peace-makers, the fullness-makers.

Peace is not a wispy idea or ethereal concept. It’s an actual thing. 
Conflict and division – they are real, heavy and dark and sharp, a crushing and weighty thing. But peace is not just taking that away, leaving nothing in its place but a vacuum, a hollow restlessness, shallow emptiness where squashed down discord smolders or discontent breeds like mildew.  
Peace is not an empty, wasted space of enforced silence between otherwise foes.  No. Peace has substance and girth. It exists in the world. It is something you can hold and touch and smell; Peace is tangible and real wholeness.

It’s what God’s kind of life tastes like and feels like in your hands.

We know the feel of peace.

It’s that thing that happens between people when forgiveness is slowly labored into, 
and when love is discovered and shared. When, drifting along untethered, someone sees you and values you.

To the drug-addled mind and listless soul, peace is clarity and grounding.

To the fearful and lonely person, peace is belonging and trust.

To the frenzied and chaotic life, peace is order and settled calm.

To the heartbroken and despairing ones, peace is solidarity and hope.

Between warring factions, peace is not just taking away weapons or working out a tenuous agreement not to set each other off.  It’s the building of bridges, the joining together, the solidarity and shared humanity.  Choosing to see each other and reach out.  It’s enemies into friends.  It is together instead of separate, whole instead of shattered. Harmony instead of discord. 

And Jesus calls us not peace-keepers or peace-noticers but peace-makers. 

Peace is something we can make.

We can literally share in the substance of God’s life, here and now. 

To contribute to others’ fullness, fullness in the world around us, and the fullness between us, we can do that.  Peace-making is not just the job of negotiators on the front lines of international treaties, it’s all of us.  Every day. 
Whenever we are part of the wholeness and fullness for others, whenever we say by our words or actions, “May you be completed,” we make peace. We weave it and bake it and write it and say it and hug it and listen it into being and pack it into the empty crevices so it fills up the space where once there was strife and strain.

Each one of us, every day, in as many ways as we notice, can be peacemakers in the world.

But, being peace-makers doesn’t mean we’re suddenly not tension-makers and crazy-makers too.  We still get impatient and frustrated and annoyed and angry and lashing out from things often come easier and opportunities for them come just as often.  And being a peace-maker is also not the same as being a conflict avoider, you might “keep the peace” by not addressing what’s really going on, but you are not making peace. 

Making peace is to face reality and stand in the place of tension, holding out prayer and hope for the fullness and completion of each person in the room despite and in the midst of conflict.  Being a peacemaker starts with “being surrendered to God, for God brings peace."

Glen Stassen says, “We abandon the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of enemies. God comes to us in Christ to make peace with us; and we participate in God's grace as we go to our enemies to make peace.
” (with David P. Gushee, Kingdom Ethics)

In on the miracle are, then, are those who surrender to God and participate in the fullness and completing God brings among us –  they share in the very substance of God.

Our second movement today is the longest beatitude, and the one that suddenly shifts the conversation from blessed are they to blessed are YOU…

Up to this point, Jesus’ big sermon opener was hypothetical, theoretical, even.  It was general and universal– the meek, the poor in spirit, the peacemakers.  You could read yourself into it or not.  You could be sitting back in the grass and letting this sermon float right over you, or jotting down your notebook the wise isms from this guru and close it up, take it home, put it on a shelf and leave it at that. Until he says, You. Blessed are you when people persecute you and slander and revile you for my sake, your reward is in heaven! Subtext: This will happen.

Now, it’s one thing to get the pep talk about how you’ll be glad you did this hard thing because you’ll immediately notice why it was worth it, exercise because it will make you stronger, eat healthier and you’ll feel better, forgive the person who hurt you and you will be free, mourn and you will be comforted.  That’s one thing.

 But being told, this is going to suck, and even if nobody else around you now sees or appreciates how hard this is, one day when this is all over and this life is past you’ll be rewarded. 

Also, just to make it even punchier, it is the first time in five weeks we’ve had a command.  All the rest of the beatitudes are just telling us like it is – the meek are blessed, the poor in spirit, they’re blessed too.  Now, when we get to persecution and slander and people telling terrible lies about you, we find our first command: Rejoice! The Greek here is literally, “Leap exceedingly”!

Kick up those heels, baby, when you’re being torn to shreds! You’re in good company, and not only that, you will have a tremendous prize when this life is all over! Yipee!

Now, there have been, and are now, Christians who experience terrible persecution for their faith, like torture and death, and the first century people hearing Jesus’ words in Matthew are no strangers to the threat.  I was a child of the 80s, and the thought of Russian Protestants hiding in underground meetings and facing imprisonment and punishment for their faith was seared into my consciousness. Persecution for following Jesus is real, and it’s not to be taken lightly.  But in case we’re tempted to pass over this beatitude, thinking it applies only to these extreme circumstances, we get persecution broken down a bit, to include “despise and insult you and make up lies about you on my account.”  Blessed are you when you’re hated for representing me.

Fourteen years ago I was a green and timid chaplain, responding one night to a code blue. A code blue meant someone had stopped breathing, and the chaplain came mainly to sit with whatever family might be around, to provide some comfort, to be a non-anxious presence while all the medical personnel were rushing in and out of the room.  I was jolted awake from my restless sleep by the page, shivering in my tiny on call room, hurrying to pull on my shoes and blazer, smooth down my hair and put my badge around my neck, and dashed out and made my way to the floor as fast as I could waking up as I went. When I rounded the corner into the long white hallway, I could see the scene unfolding on the other end, blaring lights, code siren still beeping, people in white coats and scrubs rushing into the room, a chaotic dance of voices and movement and intensity.  Just outside the door, a woman sat on a chair with her head in her hands, gently rocking.  I began walking toward her, and she lifted her head and saw me – 30 yards away -- I have no idea how she knew from that distance that I was the chaplain, but she did --- and her face twisted into a look of total terror and rage and she rose to her feet and shouted at the top of her lungs at me, “NOT YOU! You Go AWAY! Do NOT Come Any Closer! We DO NOT WANT YOU HERE!!!”

“But I’m just here to sit with you…,” I stammered, “nothing more…”

“NO!  I MEAN IT. GET OUT OF HERE NOW!!!!!” She roared.

Her words hurtled down the hallway and hit me in the chest, I stumbled backwards, struggling to breathe and fighting back tears, and turned and raced back down the stairs to my on call room where I slammed the door and leaned against it crying.  What did she think I was there to do? Did she think the chaplain showing up meant her loved one would die? I wondered. Or had she had such a terrible experience in the past with religion or religious people that I represented something hateful and vile to her? Something that would take away instead of give? I wanted her to know I was not there to hurt her and only wanted to help. 

But after a while I began to see that this was her deep pain and nothing to do with me.  And I could still help.  I could hold her in prayer from a distance.  She could hate me if she wanted to.  It would make no difference in the truth of what I was there for, whether she chose to recognize or believe it or not, I would remain on her side and support her if she needed me, regardless.  And most importantly, I knew God was with her, loving her through this, and if not through me, I’d continue to pray for a way she could know that too, in a way she could receive it.

In a world where people are more often against instead of for each other, where so often we hurt and ignore others, where mercy is not the means of relating, when you’re hated for standing in the way of Christ, and you will be at some point, rejoice, and take heart.

When you step out of the game, turn away from strategies of manipulation and violence, decline competition, and the corrosive need to be right or control what people think of you, and instead you seek to love people – all people, when you want the overlooked to stand side by side with the prestigious, and you think there might be enough to go around if we shared and so you take steps toward that, and when you try to forgive instead of hold onto anger and grudges, and you let gratitude lead you to be generous, and you have some sense that this is all gift, and even the most terrible suffering is not meant to be borne alone, and so you seek to go there with others, the truth is: You are not doing this to get people to like you and admire and respect you, and include you in their list of important people.  And since you’re undermining the system, that’s probably not going to happen. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s not why you’re in this to begin with.

You’re living this way because you are in on the miracle, and you’ve heard the love of God calling you to stand with Jesus in the world on behalf of your neighbor. 

So, the promise of this last beatitude is that what you are doing is noticed.  Maybe not by those around you right now- maybe it will even be deeply misunderstood and you will be labeled and dismissed or hated. But the world would not be the same without you, and there is a whole cloud of witnesses, of 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 of all for your participation in the miracle.

So blessed, then, are the peace-makers, who share the substance of God, and contribute to the fullness and completion others, and blessed are you when you are persecuted for the sake of the kingdom of God. 

You have some sense that there is more to all this than we can see, and one day, alongside others who’ve given their lives to love, you’ll receive the satisfaction and joy of knowing you got to be part of life as God means for it to be shared.

That concludes our season with the beatitudes, where life as God means for it to be shared begins with blessing.  

So as we close, hear this:

Sisters and brothers, you are in on the miracle. 

Blessed indeed, are we.

Amen.