Righteous Blessings

1-29-17 (Epiphany 4A)

Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12

Righteous Blessings

What does it mean to you to say that something or someone is “blessed?”  What kind of qualities come to mind?  Do you think of something that is “blessed” as having some kind of divine favor, like the priest who blesses his golf clubs in the hopes that it might give him a better edge on the back nine? Is it some kind of heavenly luck?  The near-miss on the highway that makes you take a second and give thanks for the guardian angel who was sitting on your shoulder that morning, or the $20 bill you find in the pocket of your jeans just as you were cursing yourself for forgetting your wallet before you left the house?  Or maybe it’s something more akin to a natural, God-given talent, the success that you’ve earned in doing whatever it is you do - a bumper crop this year harvested and stored in record time because you worked out the right schedule, or the hefty commission check you hauled in after a couple difficult hours of haggling and negotiating with a challenging customer?

Whatever your understanding is of what it means to be “blessed,” chances are there’s something our ideas all pretty much have in common - if something or someone is “blessed,” we tend to believe that there’s something that’s made them worthy of that blessing.  They’ve had a run of bad luck and their turn for God to smile on them for a second has finally come; God has something God wants them to be able to accomplish, so they’ve gotten a little boost up in a time of need; or they’ve put the skills God gave them to such good use that the seeds they’ve planted are finally coming to harvest and they're experiencing the reward for their hard work and talent.  Clearly, whatever the case, they genuinely deserve the blessings they are receiving.

This was the attitude especially in the first century Jewish community - there was a deeply held understanding that God’s blessings were given only to those who were the most faithful, the most righteous, the most deserving of God’s blessings.  If someone was blessed by God, then it showed.  The person who had a healthy flock, a full belly, fertile land and plentiful crops was the person who was favored by God.  The person who was in good health, who had a happy healthy family, who wanted for nothing in this world - that was the person who was blessed by God.  And they were blessed by God because they were faithful.  The person who was blessed by God was supposed to be the same person that you saw day after day at the synagogue and at the temple, giving their offering, saying their daily prayer, and following God's laws to the letter.  The view of that time was that God had made it clear in the Torah that this was the way it works: Keep my commandments and you will be blessed.  Fail to keep my commandments, and I will take those blessings away.

And yet the list that Jesus gives here in his “Sermon on the Mount” of who is blessed… it really goes against the grain of who and what you’d expect to hear are the recipients of God’s blessings.  There are some that you could maybe see the blessings for - peacemakers, the pure in heart, the merciful… God looks kindly on that kind of action, after all.  But to say that blessed are the poor in Spirit, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… blessed are the meek, those who mourn… those who are persecuted… it strains the imagination.  If people are experiencing hardships, it’s usually because God is judging them for something.  If they’re poor, whether only in spirit or in full reality, it’s because God is withholding blessings from them.  If they’re in mourning, if they’ve lost things important to them, it’s because God has taken those things from them.  God doesn’t look out for losers - only winners, because the winners are the ones God has been blessing all along anyway… the winners win because they deserve to win, because God wants them to be successful and prosperous.

It’s a jumble of two competing messages, a kind of cognitive dissonance that Jesus establishes among the people who follow him and come to hear him speak.  The message of the world butts up against the message of the Word.  And we’re stuck between the two, wondering what we’re supposed to do to live into that reality.  What does it really mean for us to be blessed, then?  If we’re wealthy, if we’ve never truly thirsted for anything, if we’ve spent our lives in a neighborhood where things have always been peaceful… when you live in a place where the closest thing to persecution you’ve ever experienced has been Starbucks switching to a red cup… then where does that leave us?  Is Jesus telling us we need to go out and mourn more, to stick ourselves into dangerous situations just so we can make peace in them?  Do we need to drop what we’re doing, pack our bags, and go to Calcutta to serve in a leper colony?  What if we’re not called to Calcutta - what happens then?  Does that mean that we’re not blessed enough?  Does it mean we haven’t done something right in our lives to warrant either the blessings we’ve already received, or that we can’t expect any further blessings in our lives?  Did Jesus give the Beatitudes as a list of prescribed behaviors, or was it just a rhetorical tactic to make people uncomfortable with the status quo?  And if it is a list of prescribed behaviors, then how much of that list do we need to accomplish?  And how often do we need to accomplish them?  And what happens to us if we fall behind once more?

It’s this very dissonance into which Micah himself speaks - God begins the conversation and it’s clear that God is very disappointed in God’s people.  God summons the mountains themselves to stand witness to God’s dispute with God’s people - God reminds them of all God has done for them; their deliverance from slavery, the blessings which they received from their Creator.   And yet when the argument continues, the question is asked of God: “What more could you want from us?  If we are so sinful, so ungrateful, so frustrating to you…. what will be enough to make us right?  What can atone for all the stuff we’ve done that’s made you so upset?  Thousands of rams?  Thousands of rivers of oil?  What sacrifice will be enough?  Our own firstborn children?”

Micah relays God’s answer, which is simple enough, and yet also harder than we ever give ourselves credit for: “God has told you, O mortal, what is good;” It’s as plain as the nose on your face what God’s expectations are… and what are those expectations?  What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God?  What more could the journey of faith entail but the pursuit of these most basic elements of goodness?

And yet we have such trouble living into even these matters - what is justice, and how much justice must we do to be in good standing?  Who must we be kind to, ultimately, especially when there are so many people that it is so hard to be kind to?  Do we end up needing to make all-new “to-do” lists for ourselves, end up stressing over what we’ve done and left undone once again, no better than we were before?

Ultimately, it comes down to the last part: “Walk humbly with your God.”  We don’t need to have all the right answers - we don’t even need to have the right questions half the time.  But what God does ask of us is that we trust God, that we rely on God and seek God’s guidance.  As we learn to do that, as we truly live into the challenge and the call to walk humbly… slowly and surely God works to transform us, to mold us to such a point that we actively seek to do justice, that we take complete and utter joy in kindness.  We become transformed into the image of God that makes us peacekeepers, that comforts us when we mourn, that lets us be content to be meek, to let others be first.  And as we are transformed, we find ourselves constantly hungering and thirsting for more - more of God, more of God’s justice, more glimpses of the Kingdom of God which we proclaim with such anticipation.  And as we experience these things, as we continue to be transformed by God in the power of the Spirit… we understand at last what it means to claim with certainty that we are, indeed, blessed.  May God’s blessings be upon each of you.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.