3
February 2002
4th
Sunday After Epiphany – Sexagesima
St.
George’s Episcopal Church
Le
Mars, Iowa
The
Rev. Karen Wacome, Presiding
Dr.
Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
Psalm
37.1-18
Micah
6.1-8
1
Corinthians 1.18-31
Matthew
5.1-12
Blessed
are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5. 3)
Get
Poor Quick!
“Of
course, there were warnings. Like Caesar, Hayes ignored them. A lunatic had
gotten into the fortune cookies in the Lotus House, the only Oriental
restaurant in town. Suddenly, along with their checks, patrons began receiving,
coiled like paper snakes, harsh predictions or dreadful instructions: ‘You will
die of cancer.’ ‘ Someone close will betray you.’‘Sell all your stocks at
once!’”Those who have
already had the pleasure of Michael Malone’s marvelous comic novel Handling
Sin will recognize its opening words and anticipate the events that
precipitate its hero, Raleigh Hayes, into a series of confusing and painful
adventures in which his lifetime of decent, responsible behavior does him no
good at all and fate smiles upon the dissolute and irresponsible. Yet his
trials are in the end revealed as the work of grace, the means of his
salvation. Great good news can start out sounding like bad news. Or, as Stephen
Mitchell says in his instructive little book, The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale
For Consenting Adults, “What we are tempted to call a disaster is
sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.”
This is how I think of the beginning of Jesus’
public life as St. Matthew portrays it in the early chapters of his gospel.
John the Baptist proclaims,“Repent, for the kingdom of God has come
near!” John strikes me as even more over the edge than most of his
predecessors in the line of Old Testament prophets.Wilton Barnhardt’s fictional
rendition of him in his novel Gospel rings true, the image of divine
exasperation with human folly: His John rants and rages, he scolds and
punishes. He has a knack for holding a sinner under water just long enough to
scare the sin out of him without actually drowning him. Encountering a young
man guilty of whoremongering, he grabs him by his ‘member’ and brandishes a
knife, threatening to separate him from it.He beats a fat merchant, takes his
purse, and forces the filthy Roman coins into his mouth. An elder, given to
indiscretions with young virgins, gets hit on the head repeatedly with a rock
and is then forced to kiss and reverence the bloody stone as John taunts “Since
you love the sin for which you are to be stoned, I give you this taste of your
eternity!”Barnhardt’s narrator concludes: “I was lucky because when I
went to him he had just humiliated a lawyer and so his wrath was spent for a
young student as myself.”John’s message sounds like bad news. It might be
bad news you need to hear, because not hearing it, or ignoring it, is even
worse, but it’s not a happy message.
Matthew wants to make it clear that Jesus’
mission is connected to that of the wild prophet who announced his coming.In
chapter four he uses the very same words he used to describe the Baptizer’s
proclamation--“Repent, for the kingdom of God has come near!” --to describe
Jesus’ ministry.Yet it’s immediately clear that there is a dramatic difference
between John and Jesus. The words are the same, but the “near” is becoming
“here.”For a few verses further along Matthew tells us that Jesus went
throughout Galilee proclaiming the good news. Jesus doesn’t just
announce that the kingdom is on its way; he enacts it, he makes God’s
healing, saving rule a present reality: “they brought to him all the sick,
those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics,
and paralytics, and he cured them.” Matthew introduces an implicit
discontinuity by what he doesn’t say. Unlike John, Jesus doesn’t begin
by talking about what’s wrong with people and what they’d better do about it;
he simply gives them what they need. Before we even hear Jesus’ words
announcing the blessedness that is ours because of God’s coming kingdom he is
already at work, bringing it into being.
It’s no surprise that Jesus is suddenly wildly
popular. Huge crowds form and start to follow him about. Seeing the crowds,
Jesus heads up a mountain and sits down to speak, brining us to today’s
lesson.This text, the “beatitudes,” is perhaps the most beautiful in the New
Testament, and it is certainly among the texts most puzzled over through the years.
What is Jesus doing here at the beginning of what has become known as the
Sermon on the Mount?
We should resist the temptation to hear Jesus
setting out some sort of moral teaching here: those who talk about the ethics
of the Sermon on the Mount are missing the point.Those crowds did not stream
out of the cities and towns and follow Jesus up the mountain to hear a lecture
on morals. Let’s face it: ethics just isn’t that exciting. Trollope gets it
exactly right when he says of Mrs. Thorne in Barchester Towers, “Her
virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to
deserve description.”Like most of us, those folks had probably heard all
they wanted to hear about what they ought to do, but those lessons, however
worthy, have never filled their empty hearts. They’re not after moral
instruction. Jesus is speaking to people that, one way or another, are in need.
They’re hungry and they’re acting on the principle eloquently stated by Bertolt
Brecht: Grub first, then ethics.
We can imagine John telling his listeners how
wicked they are, how much trouble they’re in, how if they change their ways and
they’re lucky they might escape the impending judgment, but we can’t imagine
him telling them how happy they should be. That is exactly what Jesus
does.Each time Jesus says, “blessed are…” he’s announcing that his
hearers are happy. Or, if they are not happy yet, it can only be because
they don’t know what’s happening.Matthew’s Greek term (makarioi) is the common word for “happy” in the first
century; it had no special religious or ceremonial connotation.
“Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”The poor in
spirit – Luke’s version shortens it to just “the poor,” but it’s the same
idea: those with nothing to offer, the unworthy, the unqualified.There’s no
notion here of the deserving and virtuous poor over against the successful but
wicked rich. That was a world where being rich was a sign of one’s virtue and
God’s favor. But that crowd gathered around Jesus would have been made up
overwhelmingly of the “poor in spirit,” by people who have nothing that counts
in this world and know it: whether it’s economic, political or religious clout
they are the have nots. They are rich in nothing but need. They have nothing but
whatever hunch or hope or desire drew them to Jesus.Empty handed and
undeserving they are nonetheless blessed, for it is to them that Jesus gives
the kingdom of heaven.
John’s demand for repentance to escape God’s
wrath has been replaced with Jesus’ good news that should make happy those who
have every reason not to be happy. What with John sounds like impending doom
turns out, as Jesus takes center stage, to be simply the prelude to the great
joy about to break out.As Karl Barth would have put it, here in the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus we see the NO of death and wrath
finally and decisively subordinated to God’s YES.I think of John the
Baptizer as speaking the last emphatic NO, the last word of God’s
righteous judgment before he takes it all upon himself and proclaims the
enduring, triumphant YES of grace.
This proclamation of the arrival of the
kingdom and call for repentance that started out with John the Baptist sounding
about as bad as anyone might have expected has been transformed into something
that sounds too good to be true. It is something we can only take on faith,
because we trust the one who promises.
As my ninth birthday approached, the thing I
wanted most in the world was a 26" English bicycle with hand brakes and
skinny tires.I had had enough of my klutzy old balloon- tired bike that was all
too obviously a little kids’ bike. Parental hinting had given rise to large
hopes and I awoke in eager expectation on my birthday.My parents called out “Happy
Birthday” from their bedroom and told me to go down to the kitchen because
my birthday present was waiting for me there.I ran downstairs and stood
dumbfounded by the terrible truth: there was nothing in the kitchen that
resembled a bicycle. No real presents at all, just a fancy, boxed birthday
cake. It was obviously from the man in the church who owned a chain of bakeries
and always had just such a cake delivered to each child in the congregation on
their birthday. Abashed, I burst into tears and ran upstairs crying,
disappointed, angry, the words “Happy Birthday” hollow and mocking in my
ears, yet aiming myself for comfort at my parents, hurling myself onto their
bed. As I did, a flash of blue caught my eye. I looked: there, through
tear-blurred eyes, against the wall in my parents’ room, was an exquisite
metallic blue English bicycle. To this day my parents think this was all really
funny.(I realize that I probably got off easy and, if Connie and Steve had been
my parents, the bike would have been in another county, or disassembled and baked
into the cake…)
The moment I woke up that day, the basis for my birthday happiness had
already arrived. My heart’s desire was already there, waiting to be enjoyed.I
could have been happy, had I only trusted my mother and father who, after all,
had all but promised me the bike. Maybe I could have just enjoyed my parents’ –
I’m sure it was my father’s – little joke and run upstairs unperturbed, saying
“OK, where is it really?” I don’t know, maybe that was a bit too much to
expect of a sleepy nine-year old.But surely if I’d had a steadier view of what
they were like, their underlying trustworthiness, their steadfast love, their
keen desire to make me happy, I’d not have been fooled. I’d have been happy
right from the start and avoided the tears, and the chagrin, of my disbelief.
Jesus, like John, preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come
near!” But what comes clear at last in Jesus is that true repentance lies
in trusting that Jesus himself brings the kingdom into being, and that he calls
us to join him in it, accepting and rejoicing in it as a fact, even if it is
not yet seen.The Croatian theologian (now at Yale) Miroslav Volf, reflecting on
the endless cycles of hate, violence and revenge that have plagued his and
other Balkan peoples, reminds us that as Christians we must think of “genuine
repentance not as a human possibility but as gift from God” (Exclusion and
Embrace, p. 119).Our attempts at repentance are always profoundly shaped
and tainted by our need to excuse and justify ourselves and to condemn others.
The kingdom of God belongs only to those who at last have nothing and can do
nothing but receive it as a gift. Repentance is at last no more than
recognizing that only a God’s mercy can save us now.
The thing about a gift isn’t worrying about how to deserve it; that’s
impossible; if you deserve it it’s not a gift. The only thing to worry about is
for some crazy reason refusing it. Not answering the persistent doorbell,
refusing to sign for it when the UPS man brings it to your door and, when he
stubbornly leaves it on your doorstep anyway, letting it sit there in the snow,
to silly to bring it in, open it up and be happy with it. May our merciful God
save us from whatever fear or pride blinds us to our need for him. May he free us
from the suspicion that leads us to think it’s too good to be true.May he
instead grant us the gift of knowing our poverty, giving us grace to know
ourselves as poor in spirit, and blessed because we are.
Amen.
Return to Sermons Page
Chad's Pinarello 2001
Taliah Lempert