Sunday after All Saints'

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Sunday after All Saints'
PROPER: All Saints' - Holy Baptism
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: November 7, 1999

TEXT: Matthew 5:1-12
The Beatitudes from The Sermon on the Mount

"When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them . . . . . ."

ISSUE: Jesus calls together his 'in-group' disciples to train them in what true honor is in the sight of God. He teaches them about the Empire of God as opposed to the power hungry empire of the world. It is not the power hungry and the elite who find honor, but those who are the poor, the beggars, the prostitutes, sinners, tax collectors, the poorly treated. These are the ones whom God honors and holds in high esteem. It is a shocking sermon. In our world of pious religion, greed, and fondness of wealth, we must continue to keep in mind who it is that God really honors. The mission of Christ makes us mindful of our need to be reliant on God, and to claim a life of servanthood with him.
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Around the season of All Saints' there is the real temptation to re-inforce the teachings of Jesus with an element of piety. We recall the works of the great saints. and how devoted and pious they were, and indeed many were. But oin doing so our religious faith takes on something to which we may come to feel that we cannot attain, and that it often comes across both to ourselves and the world as a kind of pious, boring, righteousness, lacking in power and vitality. Turning the faith of Jesus into a pious religion reveals how little we really understand it. The more I study Christian scripture the more I become aware of how startling and shoking, and non-pious that Jesus himself must have been. He called for great reversals in thinking and understanding that surely shocked the people of his time.
Consider the reading from Matthew today, which we refer to as The Beatitudes or the passages of blessedness. We can approach it from a very pious point of view as a description of saintliness as being humble and righteous, and kind of wallowing in what seems to be an enjoyment in being victimized or persecuted. We can miss the passion and the vitality, if we are not careful. Let's look at the passage closely.
Jesus is surrounded by a large crowd of people. Jesus had to be doing something extraordinary, beyond piety because there were many rabbis to fill that role. He removes himself from the crowd, and gathers around him his own 'in-group' twelve disciples. He himself sits down, the customary postion of a teacher in those days. He begins to address them with a list of beatitudes relagted to what the Kingdom of God, or better still The Empire of God.
In the world the Empire was the very powerful Roman Empire. To be blessed was to have and to share in the power. Among Jesus own Jewish people to be blessed was to have honor, status. standing in the community that was recognized by the community. That status or honor came from birth, according to whose family you happened to be born into. You might gain some honor through special piety, and through being somehow astute with some wisdom. People both lied alot to maintain their position, and the feuded among one another to keep status as well.
You could lose status by losing your property or inheritance to greedy people. Being poor was not a matter of how much money you had. It had to do with your position in life. If you were a widow without a man, you were poor and powerless, regardless of how much land you owned. Many people were deeply in debt. If you were maimed, blind, deaf, diseased, a leper (and that is merely skin diseased) you lost standing and had no place in the community. If you were orphaned - and the death rate being what it was there were many - you had lost status and community standing. Hopefully to survive someone would take you in as a household servant. Tax collectors and prostitutes resorted to these professions for survival. All these people were the so called poor. They were not needed, considered to be cursed, and alienated. They had no esteem, worth, or value to the society. They were the cursed, the outcasts and the disenfranchised. Such was the world's Roman Empire.
(1) So, Jesus gathers a few disciples to follow him up the mountain side. He seems to be telling them that if they're going to follow him in this new ministry and way, they had best get it straight from the very begiinning as to what the Empire of God is like. (The Empire of God is also what we usually refer to as the Kingdom of God.) Let me tell you says Jesus what the Empire of God is like. Let me tell you, he seems to be saying, who are the highly esteemed and worthy in The Empire of God. The blessed, that is, the honorable and the highly esteemed in the Empire of God are the poor! God honors and holds in highest esteem, the very people that the world eschews, hates, disregards. It the prostitutes, the sick, the tax collectors, and all those that the world curses, they are the ones God honors in the Empire of God. "Don't you know that the tax collectors and the prostitues are going in the Kingdom of God ahead of you." (Matt.21:31b) Isn't this rather shocking for the time?
(2) Blessed, Jesus goes on to say, honorable, in high esteem are those who mourn, who cry out in great pain and suffering. The world thinks the happy folk, those that have it all made are the good, great, and powerful ones. Those whom God hold in high esteem and who will be comforted are those who mourn and fast and weep. These are the ones God loves and seeks to heal and redeem. The world sees those folk as the cursed, but God's Empire they will be the ones who laugh and sing.
(3) Blessed and honorable are the meek. The meek were those who had lost their land in unscruplous deals and cheating. They will inherit a place in the Kingdom or the Empire of God.
(4) Held in high esteem, says Jesus are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice, because they've been cheated. They will inherit what God has to give them.The honorable says Jesus are those who know they need and rely upon the compassion of God.
(5) Held in high esteem are the merciful, those who see that all who have lost or given receive a fair return. In an economy of limited supplies, caring, sharing, and restoring is an essential ingredient of living a good life.
(6) Held in high esteem were the pure in heart. In Jesus' time is was extremely difficult to keep all the purity rules and be considered a rightously pure upstanding person. the marginalized people had no time for all that, and little incentive. But Jesus taught that it was not what went into a person's mouth that was important, it was rather what came out. (Matt.15:11) God values and honors honesty and straight forwardness.
(7) Honorable in high esteem are those who are peacemakers and stop the vengeance, the eye for and eye, and tooth for a tooth, and the challenging of one another's honor all the time. In the Kingdom of God, in the Empire of God, peacemakers are the sons and daughters of a healing God.
(8) Honorable are those who have been ostracized, and disenfranchised, and marginalized by the world in God's Empire. God is love and God will accept warmly all those who have been hated and offended, persectued, cheated, and victimize by others.
So Jesus is say as well to his 'in-group' of discipes that they too, if they step with him into the Empire of God, if they join him as faithful disciples, they are going to be laughed at persecuted, victimized themselves by the world, the world's power structure. Rejoice and be glad because they will be in good company, because everyone who has every served God in the world has had to deal with not being taken seriously, and will be challenged by the world's values. But what really counts? Who we are in the sight of the world, or who we are as the people of God in the Kingdom of God?
The Way of Blessedness, or the Way of True Honor for Jesus as he teaches his disciples was a matter of being different from the world, and recognizing our honor is found in being reliant upon God. The poor, the lost, the least, the last need God as the world betrays them. The honorable way of God is to be a servant of others to be honest makers of peace respecting the diginity of others, and by being forgiving, compassionate, understanding, and enduringly faithful in the face of persecution and difficulty.
All of us gathered here today, especially for the adults to be baptized, and to the parents and Godparents of the children, we are called upon to be close to Christ Jesus, and part of the inner circle. We are called to pay attention to this shocking teaching of Jesus. To be Jesus' disciples is not about being sentimentally pious. It is about understanding what it means to be in the Kingdom of God. All of us are sinners to some degree, and yet we are honored and loved: Honorable are those poor sinners. They and we are cherished by God. We need God, and we too are called upon to be his servants with Christ in the world.
What is honored by many in our world is being healthy, wealthy, and wise. We like to accumulate possessions, big houses and cars, big bank accounts, and security (which sometimes results in miserliness). We value achievement, health, good looks, being self-reliant, self sustaining, self-made, independent, and highly individualistic. We respect education, and that it's purpose is for getting a good job to sustain an extravagant life style. The world is enamored and honors those who rise to positions of power. We honor doing our own thing, and avoiding pain and suffering at all costs. We enjoy and succumb to fads. Some flirt with alcohol and drugs as means to avoid reality, or to be hep and sophisticated. The world even honors pious religion, volunteerism, and good works.
In the Empire of God, the contrast is sharp. God honors, loves,and forgives the poor, the lost, the least, the lonely, the last, the humbled. God loves those who passionately love one another, who serve one another, who die for one another, or care about and for one another, who hunger and thirst, who seek purity and become peacemakers. In the Empire of God, the contrast to the Empire of the world is sharp.