The sermon begins a five-week series on the Beatitudes. Interestingly enough, it is the first time I have preached a series on the Beatitudes, although my predecessor here at St. Andrew had done one many years ago (the old-timers can make the comparisons, I suppose!).
When the week started and I did the bulletin, i thought the emphasis was going to be on the difference between Moses and the Ten Commandments and Jesus with the Beatitudes, but that did not bear out as I did my sermon preparation. I do think it made an interesting part of Move 2 in the sermon below.
I was hard to push through all the information I read about the Beatitudes and shape it into a sermon. I also found it challenging to figure out how the Beatitudes speak to us today. Figuring out what to do with the eschatological emphasis of the Beatitudes, while not making the Beatitudes those things that are so beyond our human ability to do them was problematic for me. I think it is also hard to speak of the "poor in spirit" or "poor in anything" in a congregation where most of us do not know what poor is, whether because we have lots of wealth or because we might be deluding ourselves!
I found the discussion of "happy" or "blessed" to be really interesting. I could probably spend a whole sermon (or maybe series) on the concept of blessed as well.
“Words from the Mount” SAPC, January 19, 2020, Beatitude series Week 1; Matthew 5: 1-12
When Jesus[a] saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
3 7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely[b] on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Introduction: Welcome to the Beatitudes, the opening section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
As the story goes in Matthew, Jesus has been baptized in the River Jordan with the voice from the heavens declaring he is the Son of God;
then tempted in the wilderness and overcoming the devil;
Jesus called the disciples;
and now he initiates his ministry by preaching to the crowds.
For Matthew, the Beatitudes are the first real teaching and instruction Jesus does.
We will spend the next five weeks exploring the Beatitudes.
Since there are more Beatitudes than weeks in the series, we will double and sometimes triple up the Beatitudes.
You might note as we work through the Beatitudes that they can be seen as three different sections( Mark Powell, God with Us: A Pastoral Theology of Matthew’s Gospel)119-140):
the first four:
The second four:
and the final section when the language shifts and seems to focus solely on the disciples: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely[b] on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
This morning we look at the Beatitudes in some general ways and then look at the first “Blessed” statement.
Move 1: Do we mean Blessed or happy?
a. If you have been exposed to the Beatitudes over the years, you probably have heard them introduced with the word “blessed” or the word “happy” to begin each phrase.
1. Happy is well within the acceptable translation of the Greek makarios.
2. Literally, makarios describes “certain people wh are in a privileged, fortunate circumstance” (New Interpreter’s Bible). LIterally, Jesus pointing out people who are in a fortunate circumstance.
3. The challenge of using “happy” is that it has the connotation of feeling good, or putting a smile on our face. "Happy" references our emotional state.
4. In fact, the way “Blessed” has become used in recent years focuses more on the emotional state as evidenced by the proliferation of #blessed to describe when something makes us feel good or happy.
b. Jesus is doing much more than trying to make those listening feel good about themselves - Jesus is announcing how we are to understand salvation in the counter-cultural worldview he proclaims.
1. The blessed, particularly in the first four instances (See Mark Powell for his discussion of the three stanzas of the Beatitudes), are referring to those people for whom God shows favor and includes in the kingdom fo God that has come near.
2. the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, and those who thirst for righteousness characterize those who are saved.
3. it is not explicitly a call for the disciples or those listening to become poor in spirit, or mourners, or meek, or people who thirst for righteousness, but a description of how God views the world.
c. This perspective, of course, is counter to the values of the world.
1. the world into which Jesus comes is a world of empire - the Romans have the power, the Romans conquer, the powerful run the world.
2. Even within the religious segment of the world into which Jesus comes, the Jewish community, the religious authorities have the power to demand how one acts and to convey God’s blessing.
3. But Jesus offers a different view - he does not come to live out the commands fo the powerful in the world; he does not come to confirm the worldview that the ones with all the resources and control have it all.
4. No, Jesus comes to offer a different approach that begins with understanding God as the ultimate source of life and power, the God who comes to save.
d. I had a conversation with a friend this week about one of their close friends, a guy I knew a bit, who had died.
As those types of conversations go, we ended up talking about who is in heaven and who is not.
what were the chances of this guy who died getting into heaven.
1. I imagine a similar type of conversation is in the background of the Beatitudes.
2. Jesus’ disciples, who have been looking for the messiah and are betting, literally with their lives, that he is the one, have been listening to him preach, looking out over the crowds.
3. now, they are gathered on the mountain (text not clear about who is listening in at the point; it reads like it is the Jesus with a small group of his disciples, but later it suggests the crowd is still listening).
4. As I envision it, one of the disciples asks jesus, “So Jesus, look at all those people out there. Which ones of them are going to be saved. Which ones of them are what we call “Blessed.”
5. And off Jesus goes, connecting the good news he brings with the world in a very different way - the world’s power does not matter; God’s power to save is all that counts.
Move 2: IN the Beatitudes, we also learn something important about Jesus - following him may be harder than following the Ten Commandments.
a. Jesus comes across in this story as the next Moses.
1. Remember the pattern to Moses’ life: he is saved in a basket during the slaughter of infants; he goes away and then returns as the hero; he literally passes through the waters of the Red Sea; he and the Israelites are tempted in the wilderness; he goes up on a mountain to talk to God.
2. now here comes Jesus: he is saved from the slaughter of infants; he runs away to Egypt to return late as a leader of God’s people; he passes through the waters of baptism; he is tempted in the wilderness; he goes up on the mount to talk about God.
b. I suspect the disciples were looking for the updated version of the Ten Commandments.
1. Black and white rules.
2. Okay, maybe not quite black and white, but certainly rules to live by that seem rather specific.
3. But Jesus does not offer black and white rules.
4. Jesus invites the disciples to understand the world in a different way.
5. Jesus invites the disciples to ground their lives in God’s righteousness, not the ways of the world.
6. God’s righteousness marked by love, mercy, and justice.
c. Moses bring rules.
1. Jesus offers a new way of life.
2. Charles Cook - “We admire the instruction, but fear the implications.”
3. Discipleship is not about following a set of rules, but about giving yourself wholly over to God.
Move 3: Specific example: “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.”
a. The Greek word for ptochoi (poor) is seen as referencing a group mentioned in the Old Testament that are the dispossessed and abandoned ones in Israel.
1. In Matthew, However, it is likely that Matthew extends the image beyond Israel to the "dispossessed and abandoned people of the world in general" [Mark Powell, God with Us: A Pastoral Theology of Matthew’s Gospel, p. 123]
2. the people who understood that they had no hope if they were dependent on what they could do for themselves, or what they could provide for themselves. Their only hope was in God.
3. In fact, there was an Old Testament understanding of the poor that looked upon the poor as being pious, closer to God because they understand their dependence on God.
4. But in Matthew, Jesus adds the phrase “in spirit” to poor, which suggests financial poverty and spiritual poverty.
5. What could be more hopeless than to have no financial viability and no reason to even have hope.
6. And yet, these poor in spirit are the ones Christ identifies as those being claimed by God
b. As we hear Jesus lift up the “poor in spirit,” he reveals how different a message the good news he brings is to the message the world gives.
1. The poor in spirit, the hopeless, the ones who have no power in direct contrast to those who control the world, who can make demands on what people should do.
3. The good news Jesus proclaims is that God sees the world differently than we do.
c. Imagine you are one of those disciples who has given your life to following Jesus in the hope that he is in fact the messiah.
1. or imagine you are one of those in the crowd who are listening as Jesus teaches with authority.
2. Or better yet, hear these words of Jesus today in our own time, as followers of Christ who have access to lots of power and are not by most standards in the world considered poor.
3. how do we hear these words?
4. Perhaps as a reminder that the good news Jesus brings does not reaffirm the ways of the world.
5. We are called to a new way of living the begins with giving our lives over to God, submitting to God’s desires, laying claim to our hope in God, not in the powers and riches of the world.
6. We also hear the good news that as Jesus looks out over the disciples and the gathered people, Jesus claims us as those people.
7. We are not outsiders listening as Jesus describes those other people whom he claims.
8. Jesus claims even us.
9. We may not be there yet; we may still be too caught up in the ways of the world; but Jesus claims us and calls us to a new way of life.
Conclusion: Go ahead and tweet it, text it, announce it - #blessedarethepoorinspiritfortheirsisthekingdomofheaven. And then live it.
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