Year A

Matthew 5:1-12

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

A Gift to Treasure

Have you ever received a gift that you treasure; a gift you possibly didn’t expect, but gave you great joy?  Today, every one of the scripture readings, give us gifts, treasures that are actually life-giving gifts. Life giving in that they show us a God who gives gifts but not the kind of gifts we might expect. These gifts of wisdom disrupt our expectations and give us new ones and when we live out these new expectations in our lives they can give us great joy. Nowhere is this more illustrated than in the passage from Matthew known as the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes take us into a different world, with different assumptions, values, and practices. They witness to a God who acts differently from the normative, human, worldly powers completely overturning our expectations of God and of what God expects from those who live under God’s rule.

Jesus sees the crowds that have followed him so he goes up onto a mountain, sits down and begins to teach his hearers how to be obedient to the law of God and how to live a life of righteousness in God’s eyes. Barbara Brown Taylor, author and priest, in her book Gospel Medicine says; “I think Jesus should have asked the crowd to stand on their heads when he taught them the Beatitudes, because that was what he was doing. He was turning the known world upside down, so that those who had been fighting for breath at the bottom of the heap suddenly found themselves closest to heaven, while those who thought they were on top of things found themselves flat on their backs looking up.” The Beatitudes are among the most famous words of wisdom that Jesus spoke, and the most difficult.

Yet, for many of us these sayings are so familiar that they have lost any shock value they may have had. We may be struck by their poetic beauty or admire their instruction and at the same time, fear putting into practice or see them as an impossible catalog of demands that are impractical for the world in which we live. Beatitudes were common expressions in those days. The word beatitude is a Greek word that literally means “blessed” or happy. They are virtues that anyone would be happy to have. Happy are the poor in spirit, the meek, and the pure in heart. Yet, today we act on the expectation that the rich, the powerful, the popular, and the beautiful are happy. And we live in a world where sometimes at the expense of others, blessings are given to those who succeed because to be poor in spirit, peaceful, merciful and meek gets us nowhere in our competitive culture. Jesus in this teaching was literally turning the values of the world upside down.

One of my professors at seminary, and also a colleague, as we served together at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Austin, TX, Charlie Cook, professor of pastoral theology writes in one of my favorite commentaries that “the answer to the Beatitudes resides not in their impracticality but in their practicality. We often approach them he says as an impossible challenge for ordinary living. Only the greatest saints are up to the task. Therefore, we wait for the occasional figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Desmond Tutu to show us the way. In the meantime, the world does not get any better, and we remain unfulfilled in our Christian discipleship. The truth, he says, is that Jesus meant the Beatitudes to be for everyone. So how can such a task be accomplished in our own time?” Dr. Cook says it can be accomplished with these three principles to help us; simplicity, hopefulness, and compassion. These principles allow us to live into the spirit of the Beatitudes and allow us to be in the world, while not being totally shaped by it.

Simplicity means to look at this collection of sayings as a whole, rather than individually because each of the Beatitudes is related to the others and they build on one another. For example, those who are meek or humble are more likely to hunger and thirst for righteousness because they remain open to continued learning and growing into God.  When we hear Jesus’ words as a whole we hear him saying, “you are blessed in this life whenever you demonstrate humility, bring a peaceful presence, open your heart to others and show mercy on those who cry out for it.” When we approach our world with simplicity and with hopefulness, we place our hope on Christ who offered hope to the hopeless and we stand sure of the promise given to us in scripture of that one day mercy, humility, peace and love will describe our world.

Compassion goes deeper than just having pity or sympathy for another. Compassion requires walking in someone else’s shoes. The late Henry Nouwen priest and author, a great theologian, offers this insightful description of compassion in his book titled Compassion: compassion “grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnership cuts through all walls which might have kept you separate. Across all barriers of land and language, wealth, and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, destined for the same end.” When we walk in someone else’s shoes we begin to realize that the poor in spirit, the meek, and those who mourn are not just people we can help but people that can help us. They help us to live into simplicity, hopefulness and compassion. They help us approach these saying with openness and hear each teaching for what it is simply saying rather than already deciding they are too difficult.

Christianity is difficult enough if we believe that we can be a Christian and remain who we are. God is really not asking for our time, our money, our labor, God is asking for us, which means that as long as we look at what God requires as something we have to do, instead of someone we are called to be, Christianity will seem impossible. Yet, being a Christian is easy because we were made to be like Christ. We will never be truly happy with half-million dollar homes, popularity, or beauty because we were not created to be satisfied with these things. The vast desires of our hearts can only find contentment in the depths of God. Living into the Beatitudes help us find contentment in the depths of God because at the very heart of them is a call to you and me to be disciples who live life in pursuit of righteousness. To live a life grounded in God’s steadfast love, goodness, justice and mercy which sends us out into the world to serve the poor, comfort the mourning, encourage the meek, and do justice in the midst of unjust systems.

God’s way of being in the world as Micah reminds us today requires us to walk humbly before God, doing justice and loving kindness. Jesus was all of these things, he was “the power and wisdom of God” and we are to be like him. Paul reminds us that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak to shame the strong.” God chose a cross redefining strength, for the cross of Christ is the power and wisdom of God. God’s ways overturn our usual human ways of thinking and acting, and God chooses us, the foolish, weak, lowly, poor, mourning, and meek to work in God’s kingdom. We end up standing on our heads much like those first disciples who when Jesus called they left immediately to answer the call and then lived into the spirit of the Beatitudes. They lived with simplicity, hopefulness and compassion, which is something we can all do. In the process, we will discover the greatest treasure and the only truly right way of living.