Blessing, grace, and living in the world
Epiphany 5A | Matthew 5:13-20
I have heard some truly terrible sermons about salt and being salty. So let me say at the outset, that this is just an analogy and one that doesn’t entirely resonate enough in our health-conscious, modern-refrigeration world. Not without an explanation.
So the better word is the one we might have heard last week from the Beatitudes: blessed.
But before we talk about blessing, let’s go back just a bit further.
In the Beginning
Let’s go back to where the story begins and remember. The way Matthew reveals the coming of Jesus, the way his step-father Joseph becomes his real Dad. A man who protects him from the vile Herod, becoming a refugee and then instead of coming home, has to go into a kind ad hoc witness protection.
Then when Jesus grows up, he finds John the Baptist in the Jordan. John baptizes him. And the Spirit thrusts him into the Wilderness. The Devil tempts Jesus with earthly power—with shortcuts to power. To be the king all the people are clamoring for. To hold the power he should want and all the people want to give him.
Of course, Jesus rejects it. And instead, he finds some nobodies fishing and he calls them disciples. And then they go around throughout the region to every synagogue they can find to proclaim the Good News and heal every person they meet. That’s how Matthew describes it. He cured “every disease and every sickness among the people.”
Celebrity
Now, when all these people see this, they get jazzed, not like they’ve seen one of our tabloid celebrities, or like the rockstar who wrote their favorite song, but something else entirely.
They see the grace of God in a human being. And they watched him freely share that grace over and over and over again. And all of these people want more of that.
I imagine it like seeing Desmond Tutu on The Daily Show years ago. Radiating grace and confounding the skeptical Jon Stewart. The jaw is on the floor and all you can say is That. I want that.
And these people following Jesus; they are from all over. North and South. East and West. Rural, big city, and suburbanites. Jew, Gentile, and foreigner. We could add to that list, couldn’t we?
Jew and Christian and Muslim and Sikh and Hindu and atheist and spiritual but not religious. From Terre Huate, Brazil, Sullivan, Indy, Chicago, Rome, Georgia and the other Rome! Paris, Constantinople, Damascus, Tehran. Latin American, Mexican, Haitian, African, Asian, Middle Eastern. Able-bodied, disabled, queer, straight, married, single, divorced, remarried, children, teens, young adults, adults, seniors, rich and poor, renters and owners and homeless, all of these people come hear the Good News and are healed by Jesus. Every disease and every sickness and all these people see that something big is happening here at the ground-level. Not up there in the stratosphere.
And then Jesus turns around and says
You are blessed.
You are already blessed. As you are.
This is the word Jesus brings.
He speaks to this mixed-up crowd of everybodies and nobodies and somebodies saying
You are blessed.
When you see injustice and it hurts your soul? You are blessed. Because God’s kin-dom is yours. This is for you!
When you mourn? You are blessed. Know that you will be comforted.
When you are meek? You are blessed. Because power is for the roots of the grass, not the tips of its blades.
When you hunger and thirst for righteousness? When your belly grumbles with want because there is no justice here? You are blessed. Because this kin-dom of ours is all about justice.
When you are merciful? You are blessed. With mercy of your own. Grace comes to the selfless, too.
When you are pure of heart? You are blessed. God is being revealed all around you!
When you step out into the breach and make peace? You are blessed. Because children of God make peace. Just peace. Equality and freedom beyond sibling rivalries and divisions.
You are blessed.
You didn’t do anything. God doesn’t expect anything. There’s no transaction here. Not between us and God—not between each other. Blessings don’t go to “the good ones.” And there are no strings attached.
You are blessed. Already. As you are.
Jesus starts this big sermon in front of a massive crowd of people by saying to all these people from all over the place:
You are blessed.
Because this is cornerstone of the kin-dom.
Transactions
It may be hard to believe. That we’re blessed already. That this would be the foundation of Jesus’s ministry.
But even now, two thousand years later, we’re making the same mistakes. We disbelieve that God loves us, that God made us, hopes for us, cheers for us. Because we get stuck on our transactional culture.
Long before Jesus showed up, the gods of the world demanded these transactions. If people gave huge sacrifices of livestock or even their own blood, then maybe, just maybe, their god would notice them. And then maybe they could get some good luck in return. Maybe.
And God took a people who tried to gain favor from the gods and said Turn that devotion toward me and you’ll never worry about favor. I’ll be with you. This isn’t about transactions, it’s about the relationship!
Of course, people being people, don’t believe that God could really be about keeping promises. So they kept sacrificing, kept trying to earn a blessing.
They’d look at their neighbors and say “Ope! Looks like God is mad at you!” And no matter how often God would tell the people to cut that out, we insisted. Thinking This can’t be real. God can’t mean it.
And God said, Don’t you love your kids? That unconditional love? I love you like my children. So God went about showing us that love.
Now, spoiler alert. We didn’t quite get the message and chose to give God an ultimate sacrifice of God’s own son. We bickered and transacted with each other. Over and over. We still do it. What do we do when we get mad? We threaten with transactions–withholding money.
This is why Jesus showed up and said you are blessed. Because it has nothing to do with doing and everything to do with being.
Blessed
Several years ago Nadia Bolz Weber preached a sermon in which she expanded the beatitudes. So I think we too can all just go right ahead and fill those blessings in for ourselves. Who do you think needs to be reminded of their blessing?
We might declare–Blessed are the tatted and the pierced, the single moms and dads, the food insecure, people working multiple jobs, those on social security. Blessed are the everybodies because we get it. We already have eyes to see and ears to hear. Hearts which fill and ache and long and love.
And this is what Jesus is getting at with this big sermon and why he starts declaring blessing to people who don’t have it all. He’s picking up God’s conversation with humanity, reminding us that blessing isn’t a reward, it’s the starting condition. Blessing doesn’t show up for doing good things. Or in baptism. Or even in joining The Episcopal Church.
[Which, by the way, used that incredible phrasing several years ago when we were exploring same-gendered marriage: We are blessed to be a blessing.]
Blessing doesn’t come to you. It’s in you already. The divine spark; the image of God. Right there, inside. That’s it. You are enough. Blessed. As you are.
And that blessing informs a life of hope and thanksgiving and love.
That is the point. You are blessed.
And so the question is not What then are we supposed to do?
Because that attaches a string to blessing. So it becomes transactional again. Which spoils God’s gift and cheapens it. It takes God’s love and says God must secretly want something from me. Expecting God to be transactional in light of all of this is to literally disbelieve in God’s grace.
The better question is What do we do with unconditional love?
Because we don’t have to do anything. God gives us grace. Hearts that ache, minds that reason, guts that churn for justice.
We’re salt, this church is a shaker, and we’re sitting by the stove. Don’t you want to get in there? Mix it up? Spice it up? With all these other people who look so different and yet have over 99% of the same DNA?
We are nutrients for the soil. The microbes that make new life in this place possible. Even after thousands of years.
We are blessed. Which means we don’t get gifts from God. We are the gifts. The grace. The love to heal the broken world. To transform our hunger and thirst for justice into repairs to the breach, making peace, and blessing this world. Just being here in it.