"These men who have caused trouble all over the world have
now come here!" (1) So shouted a highly offended, ferocious mob
back during the heyday of the Roman Empire. What had provoked
them? Assassins of another Caesar usurping power? Terrorist
raiders from Parthia firing flaming arrows? Witches in league
with the powers of the underworld? Incredibly, the threat had
come from a couple of ex-convicts, who had just gotten out of
jail in a Macedonian town called Philippi, where they had been
charged with "throwing our city into an uproar." (2) Surviving a
severe beating, Paul and Silas managed to get extricated from
prison and to walk a hundred miles to Thessalonica, which would
become just one more city in which they touched off a small riot.
The Greco-Roman world had seen a few radical teachers come
and go, and those in power knew how to deal with them. Socrates
once badgered Callicles into a corner until in exasperation he
admitted, "0 Socrates, if what you say is true, then the life of
us mortals must be turned upside down, and we are everywhere
doing the opposite of what we should." Socrates wound up being
forced to drink hemlock for suggesting the Athenians had gotten
not just a few things, but everything, backwards.
The teacher that Paul and Silas professed to follow had been
even more gruesomely executed - the iron fist of Rome. Jesus had
rudely crumpled up the mental map of the commonly known world,
saying the last shall be first and the greatest of all will be
the servant of all - everything upside down or inside out.
People tend not to appreciate that, and we know what happened.
Strangely, those who had followed Jesus in life, instead of
folding their tents and sulking quietly into oblivion, fanned out
all over the Mediterranean, and in every place they were greeted
with puzzled looks and clenched fists because they came with that
same upside down, inside out message. "These men who have caused
trouble all over the world have now come here!"
How odd...at least to us! Christianity is something nice
people do, isn't it? And the way we do it is probably so
innocuous to onlookers that the potential for a riot is
incomprehensible. Churches do not turn the world upside down; by
our architecture, dress, and behavior we fit snugly into our
surroundings. Political candidates wear their faith on their
sleeves, and if they don't they get into trouble. Teenagers wear
bracelets that hint at some vague morality: What would Jesus do?
Books on the second coming of Jesus and a movie about his
gruesome death haul in millions of dollars. How did the Jesus
who got his followers into constant trouble in the ancient world
come to fit in so comfortably, and even successfully, in our
world today? Did Jesus adapt himself to the changing times? Are
we more holy and devout, more in sync with God, than those bloody
ancients? Or have we missed something? Or everything?
I wonder what would happen if we took Jesus half as
seriously as did Paul and Silas. Is it imaginable that this
world that most admit is sadly broken and steamily decadent would
take offense? Could cities be thrown into turmoil? What does
Jesus want from me? And for me? If we look into these
Beatitudes of Jesus, what will we find? And might a few things,
or even everything, look different because of what he said? And
might they actually be different, better, more true, more
beautiful, more faithful? Will onlookers say of us, "These
[folks] who have caused trouble all over the world have now come
here"?
To see and hear Jesus with clarity, we need to tune out the
background racket. To do so, it might be helpful to resort to a
time-honored technique of reading the Bible. For the rabbis of
Jesus' day, and for the earliest generations of Christian
theologians, every sentence, every word, every letter in
scripture was there for a reason; nothing was superfluous. Every
phrase, every consonant, was filled with meaning. In the same
way, every omission, everything that was not said, was not said
for a reason; every silence was pregnant with significance. So
preachers and teachers did not merely ask, "What does scripture
say?" but pressed on to clarify, "What does scripture not say?
And can we deduce why?" (3)
Over these next weeks, as we hear the Beatitudes amid the
clutter of our culture, and try hard to actually listen, we begin
by asking, "What did Jesus NOT say?" To be honest, since we know
what Jesus DID say in the Beatitudes and elsewhere, we certainly
acknowledge that much of what we hear in our culture clangs
rather noisily against Jesus words. What passes as wisdom in our
world is directly in contradiction to Jesus.
Think about it. Jesus did not say Blessed are the rich.
But we do, and our society wishes he did. We like the notion
that it is actually Jesus who not only sees the rich as blessed,
but even that Jesus was the one who blessed them with riches in
the first place. Good people. Deserving people. Right? But
then we pick up our Bible and find Jesus saying, "Blessed are the
poor," (4) and he is even impolite enough to add, "Woe to you that
are rich." Quick. Turn the page. Find something else. "It is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (5) C'mon, Jesus, you can't
be serious. We wish.
More. Jesus never said Blessed are the powerful, but we
might wonder why not. After all, the powerful, those who are
"connected," whether politically or economically or socially seem
to be blessed beyond normal measure. Or are they? Perhaps it is
good to remember the complaint of Alexander the Great on his
death bed about there being no more worlds to conquer or John D.
Rockefeller when he was asked how much money is enough and he
responded, "Just a little bit more."
Jesus never said Blessed are those with a superb education,
not that education is an evil to be avoided! But the unlettered,
those without access to the corridors of knowledge, seem to enjoy
some privileged access to Jesus' kingdom. Look at those who were
Jesus' closest friends - fishermen, tax collectors - not a rabbi
among 'em.
Jesus never said Blessed are the free. For Americans, there
is no good, no "blessing," that seems more good, more precious,
than freedom. Politicians have made wonderful careers touting
freedom, freedom, freedom - we're going to arrange it for
everyone in the world, whether they want it or not, and pity the
fool that gets in our way. But what is this freedom? The
ability to do what I want to do, when I want to do it? The
capacity to worship God the way I want? Some folks see us and
think we fritter our freedom away in self-indulgence. They see
us making choices that many think are downright sinful. Freedom
of worship has become freedom not to worship. Is worship about
the way I want to worship? Or is it about God? Is life all
about doing what I want to do? Does that not run into a rather
large speed bump when we hear the one who spoke the Beatitudes
saying, "Not my will, but your will be done?" Freedom?
Independence? Jesus lived and taught DE-pendence, and invited
others into the same dependence upon God, which alone is true
freedom.
Speaking of America, our Declaration of Independence submits
we have an "unalienable right" to the "pursuit of happiness."
How fascinating, then, that Jesus never said Blessed are the
happy. They seem blessed! Robert Schuller even wrote a book on
the Beatitudes with the catchy, alluring title, The Be-Happy
Attitudes. (6) Nothing wrong with happiness! And many of the more
contemporary Bible versions have actually translated the Greek
word makarios which we find at the beginning of each of Jesus'
Beatitudes not as "blessed," but as "happy," and that is a
legitimate translation. The danger, I fear, is that the word
"happy" has gotten so watered down, so trivialized, that the
"happiness" we pursue has virtually nothing to do with what Jesus
had in mind when he said makarios..."blessed."
How do we measure whether we are happy or not? The gauge is
usually superficial: for most of us, we are "happy" if we are
having fun. Laughter, parties, smiles, feeling good, dabbling in
hobbies and diversions: this is American-style "happiness." But
to such "happy" people Jesus does not say, "Blessed are you
because you are happy." Instead, he talks about poverty of
spirit, mourning, meekness, even persecution as contributors to
happiness. It is all upside down, inside out.
To think of this upside-downness, inside-outness from
another angle, look at what the church has taught for centuries
as the "seven deadly sins" - lust, greed, gluttony, envy, anger,
pride, and sloth. Once upon a time, these drove Christians to
the confessional booth. But now, they sound like a commercial.
Watch television, listen to chitchat in the hallway, analyze your
checkbook. Sho' nuff - lots of lust, greed, gluttony, envy,
anger, pride, and sloth. And people who are reasonably good in
at least five or six out of the seven seem to have solved the
riddle of the "happy life. But Jesus never says anything good
about them. Apparently, unless our argument from silence is
totally misguided, Jesus still regards the seven deadly sins as
deadly.
We do need to be careful here, and not make Jesus sound like
a stick-in-the-mud who cannot bear anyone having a good time.
Jesus is not and never was an ascetic. He himself was accused of
being a glutton and a drunkard which would never have happened if
he never ate or drank anything. Jesus has no interest in us or
anyone being miserable, never enjoying life. Actually, Jesus
wants the opposite - deeper pleasures, a higher enjoyment and
delight in life.
Jesus is not anti-aspiration. Exactly the opposite. Jesus
opens his teaching ministry with the Beatitudes not to douse cold
water on our desires, but to whet our appetites, to heighten our
desire, to stir in us a not-to-be-denied determination to be only
the very best we can be (or rather, the very best we were made to
be), to excite our imagination, to appeal to our longing for
completion, to invite us to heaven. These are not so much
attitudes that we SHOULD have as faithful disciples but rather
attitudes that WILL BE - they will come with the territory.
I am wondering whether this might be as good a time in
recent memory for us in America to hear again these words. Never
in my lifetime has there been such a time of dissatisfaction with
the status quo in our nation, which is why every candidate of
every party is calling him- or herself the "candidate of change."
In the paper this past week was an article called "Americans'
unhappy birthday: 'Too much wrong'" (7) People were quoted using
words like "terrified," "disgusted" and "scary" to describe what
one calls "this mess" we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes
the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war,
$4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an
erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so
forth. The article went on to say, "The nation's psyche is
battered and bruised, the sense of pessimism palpable. Young or
old, Republican or Democrat, economically stable or struggling,
Americans are questioning where they are and where they are
going. And they wonder who or what might ride to their rescue."
I have a suggestion: the one who proposed that questionable
priorities of ours about riches or power or freedom or any number
of other things might need some reordering. When we finally
decide that our literally hell-bent quest for self-reliance and
independence is a fool's errand and say and mean "not my will but
yours be done," then these Beatitudes, these amazing upside-down,
inside-out attitudes that WILL BE will be ours.
I am a baseball fan. Even though there are some who liken
watching baseball to watching paint dry, I love the game. This
year, I along with all those who follow Major League Baseball
have been surprised at the performance of the Tampa Bay Rays.
Historically, Tampa Bay has been horrible - the strongest team in
the league...holding every other team UP. But this year, halfway
through the season, they have the best record in baseball. Why?
Most folks credit Manager Joe Maddon and his ability to motivate
his very young and relatively inexperienced team. He has tried
to inspire a mind set that focuses on winning, and he has
apparently succeeded. In the Rays clubhouse there are signs in
four languages - English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean - that
all say the same thing: "Attitude is a decision."
Bingo. That will preach. "Attitude is a decision," and
what your attitude will be will grow out of a basic decision that
you and only you can make. Yes, as we study the Beatitudes over
these coming weeks, you will hear things that are very much
upside-down and inside-out. Then YOU will have to decide. In
whom do you place your trust? Yourself? Your money? Your
connections? Your social standing? Your education? Your power?
Or perhaps you have come to the place in life where you have
found that none of them quite make the grade and you are ready to
trust something... someone...greater, the one scripture says
"whom to know aright is life eternal."
For myself, I choose life. You too? God grant.
Amen!
1. Acts 17:6
2. Acts 16:20
3. I am indebted to James C. Howell, The Beatitudes for Today, (Louisville, KY :
Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006), pp. 1-11 for the ideas behind today's sermon.
4. Luke 6:24
5. Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:24; Luke 18:25
6. Nashville, Tenn. : W Pub. Group, 1996
7. Pauline Arrillaga, Associated Press, Warren Times-Observer, 7/7/08, p. C-3
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