January 23, 2011
Beatitudes - Matthew 4:23-5:12
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadYou have come to Church today, among many other things, to have an encounter with the holy. First of all, the Church did not come to you. You came to it. You chose to get up, get dressed, and come to Church. Many thousands of people have chosen to do the same thing. (Many thousands more have not, but that’s for another day.) You have come if for no other reason than to have an encounter with the Holy. You have come to meet God here. To the extent that this Church offers that, you’ll come back. And to the extent that this Church does not, you won’t come back, or you’ll go to another Church that does. It’s called capitalism, or the free market economy. My two girls have decided that Chick-Fe-Le has better chicken nuggets than McDonald’s. Therefore, they go to Chick-Fe-Le. We are not in the chicken business. We are in the holy business. Now how we define the Holy is different, and how we know that we have met the Holy is also different. Is it that you got misty eyed? Is it about emotions? I get very teary eyed sometimes when I listen to good country music, even if it is about “mamas, and trains, and prisons, and getting drunk.” Is it all about feelings? How do you know that you have met the Holy?
When people encounter the Holy in Scripture, they are always surprised and almost always scared witless. Adam had a great walk and talk with God when he first saw him in the garden, but after he ate that apple, his encounter with God was awkward at best. Abraham was doing well. He was not able to have children, but he had long since accepted that and moved on. He had built a large fortune for himself, and at the age of seventy-five was probably ready to enjoy that fortune. Yet, God told him in Genesis 12 to go. That was it, oh yeah, and that he would have lots and lots and lots of children. I am forty years younger than Abraham was at the time, and the Lord has blessed me with three beautiful children. I don’t know what I would do if I found out that the Lord was going to bless me with one more. Isaiah was scared to death when he met God in the Temple. Jeremiah said, “woe is me, for I am only a child.” All those people were doing well, and then they encountered the Holy, and, to say the least, things changed. I’m sure that they got emotional, but it was probably a different emotion than a Merle Haggard concert would bring.
The disciples came to Jesus in Matthew 5 for very same reason that you have come to Church this morning. They wanted, I think, to encounter the Holy and Jesus was being associated more and more with the holy. Like everybody else in the Bible who met God, what they expected was vastly different than what they got. What they got was not a warm and fuzzy lump in their throats. What they got was a new community, created, called, and consecrated by God himself. What they got was the Church. That new community, what Jesus would later call “a city on a hill,” had a completely different set of values than what the disciples had previously known, or than what we have previously known. Jesus called them and us to be vastly different than what we already are. Being part of the Church and all, we are in a completely different world now. We all know people who live in a “different world.” Normally, we think they’re a little bit “off.” Well, Christians live in a different world, too, and for most of our existence, when we were authentic, people thought that we were “off.”
Nothing expresses that different world better than what we have come to know as the beatitudes, which begins what we know as the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said there that what we thought was a curse is currently a blessing, and will be reversed in the future. “Blessed are the poor in spirit (current), for theirs is the Kingdom of God (future). Blessed are the meek, for they shall (future) inherit the earth.” But the thing is, who wants to be poor in spirit? Who wants to be poor period? Who wants to be meek? The President is giving his state of the union address on Tuesday night and one the things that we do not want him to be is meek. He just met the leader of China, which is an up and coming super-power. We do not want him to be meek and mild with China. If we inherit the earth at all, it will certainly not be through meekness and mildness, but through economic and military stength. What Jesus talks about here is a different world, so different that many people who claim to follow Jesus will spend lots of time trying to figure out how Jesus did not mean what he said here. Yet, this is mostly what Jesus had to say.
Jesus addresses this to the Church, to us. I do not believe that Jesus is saying that if we are not hungry or sad or poor than we cannot be disciples. What I do think, though, is that the way to which Jesus calls this new community, the rules by which this new community lives and governs itself might very well make us, in this current world, sad or hungry or poor. So if you are sad or hungry or poor because you have lived the values of God’s Kingdom, then you are blessed because you are actually living in what is to come. You are living the future.
One of the things that successful people are good at is reading the future. If you knew fifteen years ago that the real-estate market was about to explode, you would have invested heavily in real-estate and you would have gotten wealthy. And then if you knew three years ago that the real-estate market was about to implode, then you’d stop investing in it, and you’d still be wealthy. What Jesus is telling us is that this new Kingdom is on the cutting edge of the future. And so what we need to do is to invest in that future, and live by the rules of that future. The problem, Jesus says here, is that that future is not here just yet, so in the meantime, we’ll have some heartache, maybe lots of heartache. We may be persecuted, or poor, or hungry, or sad, but it’s good that we’re clashing, so to speak, with the values of the current world, because that means that we’ll really hit the jack-pot in the coming world of heaven. And just so you know that I did not make that last part up, the last thing Jesus told us in this passage is “your wages are many in heaven.”
Stan Morris, Scott Moss, Beverly Cheek, George Hege, & Joe McGrath are all being ordained and installed as elders today. Judy Creel, Vic Duran, Karen Noblett are being ordained and installed as deacons, and Sharon Wilson and Dave Barbee are being installed as deacons (they have previously been ordained). The Presbyterian Church places a lot of responsibility in their hands. In all but two of their cases, they have never served as elders or deacons before. The pressure on the Church today is greater than it ever has been, certainly in this country. At one time, we were the center. We were it. For whatever reason, now we’re not. We are not the center anymore, and we won’t be for the foreseeable future. The days when people just came to Church are long since gone.
So the Church is afraid. We’re afraid that we’re going to die. Success therefore in the Church is almost always measured in terms of growth. I’m not arguing against growth, by any means. But the dilemma that we face is do we become the community that Jesus calls us to be and risk failure, or do we survive and even thrive at any cost? At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus had a crowd. That crowd would grow into the thousands (success). But when people realized what this community entailed, it shrunk even more. Matthew’s Gospel only covers about a year of Jesus’ life. So in a year, the Church grew rapidly, and then it shrunk even more rapidly. By the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the only member left was Jesus.
The Christian faith, when it has been authentic, has always been counter-cultural, which has led to some very difficult things. So Jesus said that if we’re facing difficult things here, then it’s actually a blessing. Actually, we’re getting rich in heaven. So, these new officers’ job is to help us all get wealthy in heaven. In order to measure their effectiveness, I want us to use what Jesus said here in the Sermon on the Mount. Now if we’re really serious about this thing, and if we really live it, then I can’t promise anything like worldly success. But we’re in another world called the Kingdom, and that’s the only one that counts. So let’s take Jesus seriously here. And let’s get rich.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
