The Rev. Peter M. Carey
Sermon – 4 Epiphany
30 January 2011
Emmanuel Episcopal Church
The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia
Matthew 5: "Blessed are you"
Blessed are you. Bless you. God bless you. The blessing of God, Almighty, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and his Son, Jesus Christ.
Blessed are you.
When do you hear that you are blessed? When do you give blessing? Often, we hear “bless you” as a kind of a knee jerk reaction when someone sneezes – whether in an elevator, in a meeting, or on the street. Bless you. We may offer a blessing over food, or ask God’s blessing upon the food that we are about to eat. “Bless this food for us and us to thy loving service.” Do we still worry, with the medieval people, that evil demons would flow up our nostrils when we sneeze, unless we are blessed? What do we do when we offer a blessing before a meal, isn’t the food already blessed – for God made all that is and said “it is good.”
Blessed are you.
The word blessed is consistent with the words, “good,” and “happy,” and “fortunate,” and “healthy” and “well off.”
In our common thinking, we say “we are blessed,” when we have much. We say “we are blessed with plenty,” or “we are blessed with good friends,” or “ we are blessed with good health,” or “we are blessed with generous parishioners.” “We are blessed” then, can be seen as consistent with having the things in this world that give prosperity, and health, and wealth and comfort and peace.
Blessed are you.
However, Jesus does something quite different, perhaps, with blessing. In today’s gospel, from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, he lays out the reality of who is blessed. He describes who is blessed, and if we have ears to hear, it may strike us as odd – and perhaps even inconsistent or in conflict with the value system that we cherish. These blessings are often called “the Beatitudes,”
In the Beatitudes, Jesus reverses the general value system of his day, and also reminds us of the ways that our own value system may not be in accord with Christ’s vision.
Blessed are you.
While they may sound like commands or instructions, they are not. In these statements of blessing, Jesus is not commanding, he is not instructing his hearers about how to become blessed, rather, he is describing the blessed community.
He is not exhorting his hearers to become poor in spirit, or to become peacemakers, ….(we’ll get back to this later)…he is not speaking in the imperative mood, he is not using the word “should”…or “must”…Interestingly, and most challengingly, he is using the indicative mood. He is declaring blessing on the community by pointing out the qualities that are blessed by God. The word blessing here could be translated, “fortunate”… “happy” … “in a privileged situation” … “well-off.”
And it sounds strange when we translate blessing this way…the “well off are the ones who are poor”….the “happy are the ones who are persecuted”….the “peacemakers are in a privileged situation.”….These are quite strange statements to our ears, our ears which are far more accustomed to the sense of blessing as being happy and well off and comfortable; blessed with plenty, with leisure, with goods, with toys, with vacations, with the stuff of the world.
These are quite strange statements to our ears when we, in some sense, believe in the “prosperity gospel,” … that if we believe in God, go to Church, and follow all the dictates of the church then we will receive wealth, health, and long life. However, when we reflect deeply, we see that– the stuff of this world do not give us deep connections. We also know that all too often whether or not we believe or go to church or follow the dictates, our lives can get messy, and the church is no protection against the vicissitudes of life – the ups and downs of every human life. (And, we know that we are not getting out of here alive.)
When we truly enter into this text, it may resonate with us in a deep way – but we may have to set aside the myth of blessing meaning that we will have a lot of things, and life will be easy (even Jesus said he was not good, but only God was good).
These sayings are not practical advice for successful living (quite the contrary, in some ways), but prophetic declarations made on the conviction of the coming (and already here) kingdom of God.
They do not merely describe something that already is, but brings into being the reality they describe. The truth claim embedded in the message is not dependent upon the message itself, but, rather, rests on the shoulders of the speaker. That is, the statements have weight, and have transformative power because it is Jesus who declares the blessings. Isaiah 61:1 – Jesus is the anointed one – and he is here to bring about the year and the time of Jubilee…prisoners go free, hungry are fed…etc. “what cannot be forgotten is that the one who preaches the sermon is the Son of God, that is, he is the Messiah, making all things new. The sermon is the reality of the new age made possible in time.” (Stanley Hauerwas)
These crazy words only have meaning because they were said by Jesus, and Jesus alone has the power to enact them, to not only describe those who are blessed, but also to do the work to constitute the blessed community. Hear in these words the presence of Jesus – to follow Jesus is to take on his journey – the one who is poor, the one who is a peacemaker, the one who is persecuted. These words describe, but also create community. These are not merely a series of statements, but there is an enacting going on, a transformative quality. “What cannot be forgotten is that the one who preaches the sermon is the Son of God, that is, he is the Messiah, making all things new. The sermon is the reality of the new age made possible in time.” (Stanley Hauerwas)
They are not merely statements about general or cultural human virtues – because most of them will “get us nowhere” in the world’s currency. They look opposite to common wisdom. They are for the “eschatological community living in anticipation of God’s reign.” “the sermon is not a heroic ethic. It is the constitution of a people.” (–Stanley Hauerwas)
Jesus lived the message of the Sermon on the Mount. He “put his money where his mouth was,” he “walked the talk” of his sermon, he “preached what he practiced, and practiced what he preached.” Beyond being merely consistent, because he is the Son of God, he also created a community with these words. As God created the universe by speaking it into being, “let there be light,” here Jesus created the beloved community.
Blessed are you.
And so, here we are, sitting (or standing) here and wondering how our own sense of blessing, matches up with the blessing of Jesus. For we may not be poor, we may not feel like a peacemaker, we may not be persecuted. But Jesus does bless us, even us, in our incompleteness, even us in our brokenness, even us in our inconsistencies and our failures. Jesus blesses us and binds us together as a community, including those who are poor, including those who are peacemakers, those who are persecuted….and through his words of blessing we receive the goodness of God, and we are given the strength and the charge to continue his mission in the world.
Blessed are you.