|
There’s an old saying:
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
I know we are testing some of
you this morning. We did not even have our 8:00 service, the quiet one
with Rite One language that a handful of faithful people love dearly.
We’ve invited everybody to one service, all of us together today,
and we’ve got David at the piano instead of the organ and crystal
chalices and patens instead of the silver ones, and a slightly different
order of service and prayers of the people and Eucharistic prayer.
I’d like to remind all of
us that God tells us himself that God is always doing a new thing, so
maybe the sky won’t fall
if we try something new once in a while.
I’ve promised to do my best
to keep this service to an hour or less, so I’m even going to have to
make my sermon
shorter. Let’s see if I get any complaints about that. Seriously, I want
to honor the fact that most of us find change
at least a little bit uncomfortable and to thank you for being as flexible
as you can be.
On this, the Sunday of our
annual parish meeting, the day I really do want to preach a shorter than
usual sermon, the lectionary springs on me two of the scriptures I could
happily preach for hours about.
The eighth verse of the sixth
chapter of Micah is sometimes called the Golden Verse of the Old
Testament.
By and large people don’t know anything else about Micah, but this is
enough:
what
does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
It’s a rhetorical question that can make us
breathe a little easier when we are beset by the quandary as to what
God’s
will is for our lives. What does God want? The people of Israel pose a
potentially Lord-pleasing list of Old Testament sacrifices for
over-achievers – thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil –
absolutely over the top and undoable,
but the Lord comes back with just this:
do justice, and love kindness,
and walk humbly with your God.
That’s it, we might say?
And God says, “That’s it.” We breathe a sigh of relief.
The Beatitudes, on the other
hand, pretty much have the opposite effect on us. We begin by hearing
words that are so familiar and so poetic that they are comforting, but if
we really listen to them, well, they scramble our brains. They make
us want to protest. They make us want to argue with Jesus.
I like to imagine how the
disciples reacted when they settled down with Jesus supposedly to unpack
the events of their recent days with him. You might say this was the first
lecture in the class called Discipleship 101. Jesus’ public ministry
has just begun. To recap the events of Jesus’ life to this point
according to Matthew. Jesus was baptized, he went into
the desert and outwitted and outlasted the devil, he called four fishermen
to follow him and they headed out into Galilee: teaching in their synagogues and
proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and
curing every disease and
every sickness among the people. That’s all that’s happened up to
now.
Just as the temptation in the
wilderness is a way of interpreting what it meant that Jesus had been
affirmed as the Son of God, so this teaching, which we know as the Sermon
on the Mount, is a way of interpreting what it means to be a disciple of
this amazing man who is healing and teaching and proclaiming the good news
of the Kingdom.
Peter and Andrew, James and
John were probably still star-struck. I’m guessing their heads had not
yet stopped spinning from having walked away from their homes and jobs
without looking back, and here in the towns of the countryside within a
matter of days they are drawn along as Jesus’ inner circle watching him
do things that people just can’t do, And the crowds are thronging
towards them. They have become celebrities in no time at all. So Jesus
calls them to come away with him for some private time. In essence he
says, “Let’s take a minute to debrief.” We imagine there were others
as well, but don’t know who or how many. And they are waiting,
as they sit at his feet, to hear what he’ll say about all this
healing and all this fame.
I think their jaws dropped.
Blessed
are the poor in spirit?
Blessed
are those who mourn?
Blessed
are the weak and the rejected?
Au contraire, Lord. That is
not how things work in this world. To which he might reply, “I’m not
talking about this world. You’re not in Kansas any more, boys. Welcome
to the Kingdom.”
And that is where these two
scripture passages come together. Welcome to the Kingdom. Micah makes us
feel like it is
as comfy as slipping into Mr. Rogers’ old cardigan at the end of the
day. But when we think about what God asks of us it is, as the poet says,
not less than everything. He says to do justice. That is no small order.
Every minute of every day we make choices and our choices –
even small, seemingly insignificant choices – have repercussions
that have to do with justice. Justice on the local level and on the global
level. If the upside down truth of the beatitudes teaches us anything it
is that God especially embraces the poor and oppressed. Doing justice and
loving mercy has everything to do with how we act in relationship to those
who live in poverty, those who live in pain, those who live in grief
whether they are at our front gates or on the other side of the globe. It
has everything to do with our awareness of them and our compassion for
them.
So let’s say this is what
the Kingdom is. The Kingdom is our claiming our mantle as disciples. Not
as celebrities, but as Jesus’ worker bees, being what Jesus was,
teaching what Jesus taught, healing as Jesus healed, and giving as Jesus
gave, and all for the sake of those who are poor in spirit, who are
merciful, who long for peace, and who are pure in heart.
It’s as simple as Micah
tells us and as complex as Jesus taught. And if one thing is absolutely
certain, it is that there will be a surprise around every corner. Welcome
to the Kingdom, everybody.
Amen.
|
