The Beatitudes challenge us to see the love in vulnerability, hope in fear, and in the blessing of justice.
to share the saddest stories
Epiphany 4A | Matthew 5:1-12
About eighteen years ago, Rose and I were talking with my Dad about our wedding plans. We read through all of the suggested readings in the Book of Common Prayer. And we settled on a gospel reading that spoke to our common values. How we saw the world.
That passage was this one from Matthew. The one we call The Beatitudes.
And my Dad was more than a bit surprised. He was both bemused and anxious. Because, in nearly thirty years of marrying people, he had never had any couple pick this one. Ever.
Why? Well…isn’t it obvious? At least to someone who isn’t me?
The Beatitudes trouble the ego.
What we want. Our desire for happiness, consistency, and familiarity.
This passage doesn’t pontificate on the beauty of love or its enduring grace.
In other words, we weren’t giving my Dad the material to go all Presiding Bishop Curry on the Royal Family. No: “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
We were making him talk about mourning, meekness, and mercy.
And isn’t that a perfect example of the challenge the gospel invites?
The gospel is about love. And it is about joy.
Yet, to ignore what erodes love and destroys joy is also avoiding the gospel.
When we stand in front of another person and agree to love them until we are parted by death—this isn’t a bummer of an idea. We aren’t stealing people’s joy by promising that this commitment is forever. It’s naming the reality of life and love. Why this whole thing is worth anything. And what makes it beautiful!
That my own happiness is worthless if the people around me are miserable. How can I know the love of God when the people around me feel so alone?
Poverty in Spirit
For the longest time, I misunderstood the very first blessing. I heard it as saying “Blessed are the poor”. And those next two words just fell away. I didn’t hear them.
So I took these blessings as a directive to look to people in poverty. They have so little and God is giving them so much! That’s how I took it.
And then, when I finally sat down to write my first sermon on the Beatitudes more than a decade ago, I noticed those words. Really, for the first time.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
And I remember where I was. I was in the chapel at St. Paul’s in Newnan. And the chapel is in the north transept and so I was looking out the clear glass window at the other side of the building.
Then I started to imagine what I would see if that church were downtown like this one (it was on a road leading out of town). If people were walking by, and I could see their faces, what would I see? From the warmth of inside the building out into the chilly winter air.
And I thought about the political climate that was enraging our people, the economic downturn that had broken the spirits of the people just a couple years earlier. The aftershocks of which were still crippling the finance sector there.
It was all so much.
There were so many things affecting so many people. People who would fill the church on Sunday and all those who never would.
And it wasn’t primarily about the money. It was about people, their lives, and sense of worth. Their dignity.
What I recognized right then, was that the more I thought about the pain any one of us could see out our windows, if we really looked, the poorer my spirit got. But rather than reject that poverty, treating it like an unwelcome guest, I chose to invite it in for some coffee. Saying “Stick around. Warm up. Tell me your stories.”
What it told me
And what it told me was what it was like to lose. A parent, a spouse, a child. Or a job, livelihood, or vocation.
The Spirit shared with me stories of deep sadness. And I joined her in sorrow.
But she also didn’t stay in that space of sadness. It wasn’t the whole of the story.
She told me about not seeking greatness, perfection, or the adulation of her peers. How grateful she was to not have to speak for others, but could encourage them to share their stories.
And she told me about children being forced to make adult decisions, whose sweetness is beaten out of them by bullies or the rigid expectation of building grit.
Or, who would rather say goodbye to life itself than endure the evil we tolerate as normal.
So when the Spirit brought me to stories of hunger and thirst for righteousness, justice, God’s true Shalom, I was already there. Her stories were my stories anyway. I knew this one. How it felt.
How it is to hear the story of a person on death row who is innocent, but the Court just doesn’t want to deal with that. Or any of the uncountable stories of injustice we all know. I know about that hunger. That empty-bellied feeling of that poverty.
But she wouldn’t let me stay in my own place of hunger.
We had more to share.
She shared with me stories of incredible mercy. The profound work of saints, both the famous and those close at home.
And she reminded me of where that strength comes from. It comes from that hunger for righteousness and a generosity of spirit. The desire to ease the poverty of spirit that leads to injustice. To change the whole paradigm.
To not just show mercy, but to extend yourself so generously that your own ego isn’t in the way. That, if we can be so generous in our hearts, we can see God in other people.
If I could learn to be generous with myself and all the people around me, then God’s presence in all of us would be revealed to me.
And if I could do that, it wouldn’t satisfy the hunger inside me. It would drive me to make that very love and joy present everywhere.
Out the Window
What I found, looking out the window, was the very meaning of life.
How we could say with confidence that God is love. And that our very purpose in this community is to make that love known.
Because in our stories—stories that aren’t only about the happy times—we find a wealth of spirit.
Feeling sad, lonely, or uninspired isn’t poverty. Avoiding the heart of the gospel, though, impoverishes our lives. But it’s worse than that. It impoverishes all of our lives.
Our egos, selfishness, desire for unchanging systems, preservation of hierarchies that abuse; these aren’t without consequence.
This is why Inside Out, the Pixar movie from a few ago, was so profound. It dared to say what our world would rather reject. [Spoiler Alert!] That joy and sadness go together. That our love requires sorrow.
These stories also lead to action.
We think our desire for unity justifies taking shortcuts to unite. We cannot make peace if we allow others to cause suffering. Our bellies are never truly full when those outside our windows go to bed hungry.
How can we ever be at peace when we keep people in prison knowing that an officer of the law lied or a lawyer cheated?
Sharing that truth, that the gospel condemns the existence of poverty in our world, that war is anathema to peace, that injustice is unholy often gets coded as divisive. So saying hard truths about the world we live in gets us in trouble.
But not with God. Jesus calls that blessed.
This is why I love the Beatitudes.
They kind of hurt. None of this is easy to hear. But it also is exactly how I’ve experienced the world AND the Kin-dom.
I’ve experienced that poverty of spirit so often in my life. And it would be easy to catalog all of it as depression. Take something and get out of that funk. And sometimes that is what that is. But most of the time, it is feeling things. And wanting to feel things. To feel loved because we aren’t feeling loved.
And Jesus is telling us to stop always avoiding that feeling or solving that feeling. Sometimes that scarcity is turned into abundance.
When I feel most poor in Spirit, I find the Spirit is often closest to me. She is there. There in me, around me, and in the people around me.
And most importantly,
It reminds us to love.
Inviting us to bless the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the hungry for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the people making true peace, and the persecuted for daring to love like Christ. To be these things and to bless those around us to be these things.
To take the love we are given and share it. No matter how much.
And we tell our stories. For those stuck in the pit and those who found their way out. And even for those who refuse to acknowledge the pit exists.
Because these stories are blessings.
And we are blessings. To each other and the world.
We share for them, for the joy, the gratitude, the love, all of it, is here with us. In all of our shabby glory. Yes, confused, afraid, earnest. Loved, grace-filled, blessed.