Year A

Matthew 5:1-12

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Upside Down Kingdom Values

How many times have you said or heard someone else say “God works in mysterious ways” when something happens that can’t be figured out? I know I definitely have many times. We say it to help us make sense out of an event that doesn’t have any logical answer. All our texts today, on this Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, highlight the ways of God that are hard to understand and are mysterious to us. They surprise us because they are so unlike the way the world functions normally. Yet, our texts are trying to point out the uniqueness of God to stress what is good. They redefine what God desires, what God considers power and wisdom, and who deserves God’s blessing. In so doing, they turn our world upside down and give us new expectations and ways we are to carry out our call.

Today from Micah, Paul and from Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount we are confronted with this upside down God who is not only found among the vulnerable and foolish, but who makes humility a prerequisite for understanding God and God’s actions. Thomas Merton, a famed 20th century monk, once claimed that “pride make us artificial, and humility makes us real.” We serve a God who is constantly on a journey into humiliation, weakness, and lowliness to draw us into God’s life so we can discover God’s wisdom. These upside down themes of humility and vulnerability, undergird what it means to love and follow Christ.

There is no better summary of this upside down theme of Christian ethics, other than in the Sermon on the Mount, than what we read in Micah today of what the Lord requires of us: to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. This ethic is what Jesus showed us in his life, death and resurrection and what the prophets voiced, especially Micah. Micah, a Jewish prophet, appeared on the scene in the ninth century, which was the age of the great judgement prophets; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea and Micah. Their presence indicates a problem, and the problem usually exists in the relationship between God and God’s people.

The prophet Micah today pictures God charging Israel with a crime and taking them to court. God calls the mountains, the hills, and the foundations of the earth as witnesses for the prosecution. God’s accusation is that they are selfish people. They have forgotten God’s generosity. God loved Israel, brought them out of slavery, and gave them a home. We hear today a long-suffering God pleading with the people of Israel in tones, as a parent to a child, who ignores the parent’s love. After they hear the accusation, as usual they miss the point. They think that what God wants of them, consists of worshiping “correctly”, more burnt offerings and by staying away from those who do not do these things.

Micah says to his people, O mortal, God has told us what is good; and what the Lord requires of us. God wants us to do justice-to be a voice for oppressed persons, for the poor and the minorities; to treat every person as a child of God. God wants us to love kindness and to share God’s loving kindness with others; walking humbly with God always listening for God’s voice wherever God may be heard. Micah, in summary, proclaims a prophetic message that attests to God’s deep and abiding love, while providing God’s people a prescription for “God’s will”. There is lowliness and a weakness in and of God that is deeply in tune with human lowliness and weakness. God acts differently than the world and calls us to act differently.

The Beatitudes today in the gospel with their up-side down quality expand on the will of God and the values of God’s kingdom. Jesus shocks the crowd by explaining that actually those who are most blessed-those who are happiest-are those who are gentle, hungry, merciful, and focused on being a peacemaker. Jesus invites the people that day and through the ages with his sermon to a reevaluation of just who in this world is truly blessed, who is happy, who is fortunate, and so on. This “first will be last’ theme and Jesus’ repeated invitation to humility and servitude are to encourage his followers to turn the world’s paradigm upside down. 

So much of what follows the “Beatitudes” in Jesus’ ethical teachings contained in the “Sermon on the Mount” reflects the contrast between how this world works and kingdom living works. The values we admire are not the values that God admires and the invitation of this Gospel is to learn to value humility and peace, for these values will bring us the ultimate joy in this life into the next. Christian singer and songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman in his 1990 album, For the Sake of the Call: asks “What kind of joy is this/That counts it a blessing to suffer/What kind of joy is this/That gives the prisoner his song/What kind of joy could stare death in the face/And see it as sweet victory/This is the joy of a soul that’s forgiven and free.”

And so it is that when we encounter the world around us, we discover a strange antagonism to the gospel. It is good news and it is salvation, yet it is so often treated as irrelevant nonsense. Yet, as Paul tells us today, “To us who are being saved,” it’s precious and life-changing so we are surprised by the world’s indifference or opposition to it. But, what Paul knew then and we know is that the world often, not always, measures wisdom, nobility, weakness, and lowness wrong. Therefore he reminds us that it is not our own wisdom and skill, but God’s wisdom that is vital to us. God’s wisdom may seem foolish to the world.

After all we follow a messiah who was born in a manger, raised as a carpenter, wandered the wilderness with his followers into the back-water towns; preached kindness, gentleness, and mercy in the face of hate and oppression, and who allowed his life to be sacrificed on a cross, rather than respond with hate and violence. That would and does seem pretty foolish to the world in which we live. So Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

This difference is reflected in the reversals that Jesus teaches in the Beatitudes that God chooses the foolish, the weak, the lowly, the poor, those who mourn, and the meek so that one might not boast in the presence of God. God’s ways require followers to walk humbly before God, doing justice and loving kindness in places and towards all people. This foolish God 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. To many, from the perspective of the world, God’s ways seem foolish and weak but once we become foolish and weak for God we find the abiding joy of God’s wisdom in this life that saves us for the next.