Jesus' teachings for us

When I teach an intro class to the Bible, I often start out talking about what the Bible is not: it’s not a history book; it’s not a storybook; it’s not a book of devotions; it’s not a philosophical treatise. And it’s not an instruction book. Of course, I say, the Bible has some of all of those things in it, to be sure; but you can’t just treat it as if it’s one of those alone. It’s much more complicated than that. Reading and interpreting scripture is work, work we do together in community and in prayer for God’s guiding Spirit. We can’t just open it up and expect to do just what it says.

Which basically is true. But then I come to scriptures like we heard today and I sort of want to say, never mind. Because there are times when the Bible just turns around and punches you in the nose. When it becomes clear that real people taught and wrote real words so that we would actually change our hearts and lives and live differently. And all the airy intellectualizing we are so fond of doing just turns out to be avoidance of the clear simple truth. When we hear scripture like this, then to say ‘the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God’ and to go off to coffee hour unchanged might just be one of the oh-so-many ways we have of making Jesus weep, yet again.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

Thus writes our prophet of the day, Micah.

For we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block…and foolishness … but to those who are the called, … Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Thus writes the apostle Paul.

And blessed are the poor in the spirit, and those who mourn, and the meek, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and the pure in heart, and the peacemakers, and the persecuted…says Jesus. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And Jesus also says, Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

But don’t we like to find all kinds of excuses why doing that will of God doesn’t quite apply to us, at least not right now. Now is often inconvenient, isn’t it? And doing all those things Jesus teaches? Well, it can feel a little extreme. I listened to part of a podcast with a Catholic priest named John Dear, who told of a time in 1982 when he was a young man visiting Israel, staying by the Sea of Galilee. He was at the church of the Beatitudes, where it is believed Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, and reading the words of the Beatitudes, blessed are the peacemakers, when Israeli bombers began flying overhead on their way to Lebanon, the deafening roar of the planes echoing over the lake as a new war began. And he suddenly realized, these words of the Beatitudes, they actually mean something real. And they mean something for me - not just for other people, priests or scholars or professionals, but me personally. I have to devote my life to working for peace and an end to violence. And so he did.

And to take that point further, no less than Mahatma Gandhi found the words of the Beatitudes so compelling that he took them as one of his own sacred texts, alongside the Bhagavad Gita. He and his followers read and meditated on the Sermon on the Mount twice every day for over 40 years, calling them the greatest teachings on nonviolence in all the world’s traditions. He knew that to practice and lead nonviolent resistance, he had to ground himself in those powerful words.

We might not feel called to lead the whole world toward peace and nonviolence. But what about in our own lives? As John Dear realized, these words are for each of us, not just some of us. To be a faithful Christian means we have to take Jesus’ teaching seriously. The Beatitudes actually mean something. And, like all scripture, the meaning opens to us more and more the further we go into it – Gandhi spent 40-something years on these words because they kept teaching him. The Spirit’s wisdom is endless.

But what can we hear from these words today?

Blessed are the poor in spirit. We must begin with knowing the poverty of our own spirits. We start with our own need, our own lack. We start with the humility of knowing we are not self-sufficient, we don’t have it all wrapped up. We need help.

Blessed are those who mourn. In a culture that is always moving onto the next news cycle, it can be hard to recognize our grief. No life is without grief – even the youngest child wails with grief when their parent leaves. We are all of us grieving loss, the loss of a beloved or beloveds; but also grieving what is not, what has ceased to be, what should be and isn’t, in our own lives and in the world around us. We can’t skip over that and pretend it doesn’t matter – the grief is still there, like it or not.

Blessed are the meek. To live without grasping after power, how hard is that? We want to achieve, we want to succeed, we want to have it all. And yet Jesus calls us to live empty-handed, trusting, generous to others. To turn the other cheek and forgive, not to seek revenge and our own way.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. I think part of the intensity of our emotions around politics these days comes from this: longing for the world to be what it was created to be. There’s a lot of other stuff mixed up in that too, of course – greed and power and self-righteousness and contempt for others – but what if we started with and stayed with our hunger and thirst for righteousness? What if we started with the prophets’ teaching of righteousness – to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God? What could that lead to in our world?

Blessed are the merciful. When Bishop Marian Budde called on the President to show mercy, it was a startling reminder of that powerful word of our faith. It’s not spoken of much these days. Mercy means realizing how we all fall short – I know my own weakness, and so I can be merciful to yours; I know my own fear and so I can treat yours gently. And it means recognizing the power we wield over others, and using it carefully, for their good as well as ours. What a difference that mercy can make in our world.

Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are we when we begin to focus more and more on God, to root ourselves in God and God’s love, to let go of all the other things that clutter up our souls. We are made in God’s image, we are always held in God’s arms, we can find our way back in each moment to God as our source and strength. The rest of it doesn’t have to matter so much.

Blessed are the peacemakers – those who seek to change the world towards God. Maybe in big ways, more often in small ways, living nonviolently, loving our enemies, every one of them; and shaping our decisions of power and purse toward that peace.

And blessed are you when you are persecuted for all of these things. For although the world needs people who practice all of this to survive, the world will resist it whenever people do. It has always run counter to the culture of the world around us, throughout time and history. There is very little of this that will be affirmed and cheered on by public opinion. Just about none of it aligns with the powers that be in our world today. And yet it is the way of life.

So much there in these words of life. So much for us to take in, to hold in our hearts, to sift and be sifted by – enough for at least 40 years of daily meditation, as we seek to align our lives and behaviors with Jesus’ word. These words are for each one of us, everyone who calls themselves by the name Christian. And what light we can shed in this dark world when we begin to live by them. May God help us to do so.