Long Term Change
Commentary
An epiphany is a moment of clarity. We may be struck by a new idea about the Atonement, or about how to make someone’s work easier. We may suddenly realize that the person arguing with us over a bit of theology in our latest sermon wanted to be a pastor years ago but could not follow that path. We may be in the middle of preaching and have an impulse to share a story, realizing that it will make a point more digestible to many in the congregation. These are all epiphanies.
Today’s scriptures point us in the direction of social action. Change is never acceptable to some people, and even the most enlightened sinner will try to deflect changes, whether in worship or government or social change. Even as I’m writing this, I hear on the news that the programs enacted by the previous administration to improve school lunches will be cut back to allow teens to eat snacks and pizza as part of the school lunch program. The kids covered by that program were, of course, resistant to ‘eating healthy’ if they’d never eaten that way before. A lot of food wound up being thrown away. But as many kids became used to the changes, they asked for different foods even at home. Long-term changes need to be left in place long enough to “sink in.”
This is what Jesus is about. We need to change. We need to be helping others to change. Only that way can the world be changed from angry confrontations to a peaceful way of life.
Micah 6:1-8
The beginning of Micah 6 constitutes the assembling of a court of law. God says that the mountains will witness God’s complaint against the people of Israel, like a jury in a common earthly court, because they are “the enduring foundations of the earth.” This is fitting, in a metaphorical sense, because the mountains have seen all of the events that have taken place in their part of the world from the beginning. They are impassive, solid, unmoved and unmoving. Furthermore, they represent “the high places” where the Canaanites conducted their religious ceremonies and offered their sacrifices. They have also seen the Hebrews climb those same hills and engage in those same rituals. If these hills cannot render a verdict, who can?
The Lord, unlike the mountains, is angry. It’s not just that his people have put other things before God, to whom they owe their lives, their freedom, and this very land on which they live. Nor is it simply that they worship the gods of the Canaanites, though that has provoked the Lord over and over. They have begun to worship in the way of the Canaanites (and the Hittites and others in the area). If God sounds like a wounded lover or husband or father, there is a reason for that. It is because God has surrounded them with love, has kept them alive despite the many setbacks they encountered over the time of the Exodus, has fought on their side, and specifically warned them against the religious practices of their slaveowners. But the first time they did not have Moses to carry God’s word to them, they melted down all the gold they had in order to create a golden calf. In Egypt, the gods were often represented standing on the back of a golden calf. Their adultery was all the more galling because they deliberately chose to make God like the gods of Egypt.
This caused God to make them wander the wilderness, never having a permanent home, never owning any of the land, so that none of those who remembered how the Egyptians worshipped would enter the Holy Land that God had promised.
Then, after they were settled in the Holy Land, they began to worship in the same places as the Canaanites, and engaging in the same fertility rituals as well, which included ritual sexual relations, usually with sacred prostitutes, both male and female, and the sacrifice of “whatever opens the womb.” This meant that the first born of every female animal in the compound, would be given as a burnt offering — including the first born of every human woman.1 The horror that God feels when we do this sort of thing is reflected in Ezekiel 16:21, where God says, “You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to the idols.”
The writer of Hebrews refers to the fact that Abraham was about to do the same thing when God intervened and gave him a ram, caught in a bush by the horns, to sacrifice instead of his son. The impulse to give to God those things most important to us can be powerful when we are aware of our dependence on God and a profound sense of gratitude for our salvation. But God does not want this sort of sacrifice. This is reflected in the third stanza of Micah’s words to the people on God’s behalf.
Here, we read,
With what shall I come before the Lord,
And bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come … with burnt offerings…?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
With these words, Micah leads us away from the horrors of animal or human sacrifice and into the loving arms of God:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, and to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?”
When we live as unjust people, and watch others sin openly, and look the other way while the innocent are made to suffer, and the environment to be despoiled and God’s animals to be mistreated and killed so that we can boast of a trophy (especially of endangered or nearly extinct animals); when we suspect that a child is being abused, or that a spouse is being abused (and yes, there are men who are abused by their wives as well as women by their husbands), and do nothing, say nothing, even try to gloss things over when a spouse comes to us and asks for help, we are lacking in justice and kindness. And Micah says that all God asks of us is to do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with God.
Of course, that sounds easier than it may be in real life. When we turn our backs on the poor, the immigrant, the outcast — in other words, the powerless — we’re doing nothing but going along with the crowd. It’s easy to dismiss poverty as the fault of the poor until you walk into a home with five children and cupboards that are bare except for a can of soup and a half-empty box of cereal. Dad is employed, but they have no money for the next five days, when his paycheck will come in. The house has three bedrooms, one for the three boys, one for the two girls, and one for Dad and Mom. Only, Dad has moved out because Social Services has told them that he earns too much (by $20 a week) and as longs as he lives there they cannot get help.
Twenty-five years ago, in the middle of a cold snap, one of my neighbors came to me and told me that a woman down the block had gone away and left her English sheepdog outside, chained to his doghouse. When she went over to check on the dog, there were overturned dishes, which probably had been filled with water and food, but no sign of care was to be found. There was no blanket or bed or even a rug in the doghouse, and the dog’s hair was matted in various places all over his body. “She says she’s a member of your congregation, you know.” A check of the records showed that she hadn’t attended our church for five or more years.
Since I was in a city, I called the Humane Society and told them what I knew. They went over and looked at the dog and posted a notice on her door that the dog must, under the law, have the mats removed from his fur. Nothing said that no one was giving him food, since there was a dish there. And while it wasn’t good for the dog to eat snow, the law didn’t cover leaving him without water, and any water would have frozen anyway. “Charming,” I said. The man said, “We can’t take him in, he looks OK, despite the mats.”
When the woman came home, she came to church. “Look at this notice!” she shouted, “I’ll have to keep him in the house if I have to shave his fur to get those mats out! I hope you’re happy!” And she kept screaming at me until I said, “As far as I’m concerned, you should be in jail for leaving him outside without relief from the cold the whole time you were gone.” Not that I didn’t dread people’s reactions to this argument. It didn’t take long — it was a small church.
“Good for you!” said a man standing nearby. Then others spoke up: I had been brave.
And good. And kind. And had suffered for it. I denied that I had suffered, though I had wondered how the church community would respond to what she was saying. I needn’t have worried.
That is what usually holds us back from seeking justice. Fear. That is also what holds us back from doing a kindness. We’re afraid of being seen as meddlers, of being called ‘nosey,’ of overstepping a line. Micah probably felt the same way when God told him to go tell his neighbors and those in authority that God sees our unkindness and is fed up.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Paul is writing to a church in a major city, noted for being a strategic location on the isthmus (an arm of land that stretches between two bodies of water) of the Peloponnese. Because it was a narrow strip of land, ships could dock on one side of the isthmus and cargo could be carted across to the other side with ease. The people who lived there were largely immigrants, recently freed persons, looking for a better life. Included in that mix was a large arts community, producing bronzes, pottery and mosaics. There was a small group of wealthy people at the top of the community, and a large population of the poor. The Christian community was likewise a mix of rich and poor, with immigrants from around the Mediterranean, thus representing a variety of cultures (Roman, Greek, Arabic, Jewish and Sub Saharan African), as well as economic differences.2
When we are addressing a group of mixed cultures, the trick is to know something about the cultures we are addressing and to respect (and help the members of those various groups to respect) those differences. This is what Paul is doing in today’s passage.
Just before our current selection, Paul has been discussing the question of baptism. Since he was a famous preacher, when he came to town there were people who had been attending worship who wanted to be baptized by him. He is very concerned about this kind of Christian, and about the possibility of people boasting that they had been baptized by Paul himself. He is quite clear, however, that it doesn’t matter who baptized them, it matters that they are one in Christ. For this reason, his preaching rests primarily on the crucifixion of Christ and the Good News that Christ died for sinners, before we ever knew anything about God’s incarnation in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Gentiles, whether Greek or Roman, had great respect for eloquent teachers and speakers. The Greek Philosophers had set the tone. They were trained by great speakers, and in turn, when they had polished their own style, they passed on not only what they knew, but how to be an eloquent preacher. This appreciation of eloquence as well as sound teaching had carried over to the Christian churches.
But the experience of the Apostles was that once they had surrendered to God in Christ, the baptism of the Holy Spirit would give them the right words. Polish had little to do with it; what counted was the sincere love of God for humans being expressed. This is an interesting understanding by Paul, for he himself was highly educated by Gamaliel, who had a reputation as the best teacher of rabbis of his day, and got into the most trouble with the authorities because people flocked to hear him speak.
Furthermore, he preached what the Jewish authorities had proclaimed to be the worst kind of heresy — that God was in Christ, and that Christ was crucified because of that message. In addition, Christ died on that cross and was buried, only to be resurrected on the third day. This whole story Paul condenses into the phrase “the message about the cross.” In the seminary I attended, it was shortened into “the crucifixion event,” which started with the arrest of Jesus and ended with his ascension into heaven. By any reading, however, the good news was and is that God loves us and came in the flesh to die on the cross so that we might see God’s love for us in the face of all that we could throw at him.
This seems absurd. In the first century, in the twenty first century, it is laughable to the vast majority of people. Why would God make himself vulnerable to us?
When I was about 20, a friend of mine invited me to go horseback riding with her. She had a regular time slot at a ranch just a few miles outside the city, but she was new to the group, and she thought it would be more fun if she had a friend with her. I had to admit that I was afraid of horses. I’d only been around horses once or twice, and they had hooves that could cause real damage to soft flesh.
She didn’t make fun of me. She promised that if I were still frightened by the end of two weeks she wouldn’t press me again. I was still frightened, but she said something that made me decide to try: “Sandra, the only way to be around a horse is to get to know a horse. It would be best if you could start with a young horse and watch it grow up, but this is the second best way. We can go on a hike with a group, and you can get to ride the same horse twice. No galloping, no free riding, just a walk in a line with other horses. Please?”
So I went. I was introduced to a black Arabian mare with a white blaze. She was smallish, beautiful and quiet. We went on the “hike.” I loved it. By the end of the second session, I was still nervous, but no longer expecting the worst. By the end of the summer, I was delighted to go on a moonlight ride through a field of tall grasses, all fear of the beauty I had come to know.
I think this is why God came in the form of a baby. So we could watch him grow up, listen to him talk about love and kindness and his anger against those who would not allow “sinners” to enter the Temple, demanding a price for the ritual bath and a ram or even two sparrows to be burnt on the altar. This way, we could learn that God wants all people to come close; because, after all, how can they know the love of God if we close the “sinners” out of our churches? This is a baby, a child, a young man, one of us, telling us to come closer, that we need not be afraid of God, who loves us as a good father does.
But this story is a stumbling block (a scandal) for those who prefer a God who is far away, regal, impressive, a towering figure who calls us rather than coming close and proving his love by being vulnerable, able to be brokenhearted over our selfishness and lack of compassion. Many denominations have died or split off from the rest of Christianity because God has insisted on coming to us in the guise of the immigrant, the homeless, outcast or destitute, begging on the highway on-ramp. Many people’s hearts have grown cold, just as Jesus foretold (Matthew 24:3, 10-12; and 25:32-46).
“Consider your own call…. God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world… to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” After all, God chose us, not the other way around. It is not we who initiated our relationship; it is God who reached out to us! We don’t get to say, “I am proud to say that I chose God.” Because it’s the other way around: God chose us “so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” To say that we have given our hearts to God is to deny that God claimed us, body and soul, before we ever knew him (Romans 3, esp. vv. 27-28). God reached out to us, when we were unworthy, so that we might confess to those whom we are calling to a relationship with God that we, too, were unworthy until God called us and filled us with the Holy Spirit and gave us this ministry.
Paul is reminding his hearers of the end of God’s life in Jesus, hanging on a bloody cross. But it is equally important to remember that at the beginning of God’s life in Jesus he made himself vulnerable as well. The Epiphany season is a reminder of both ends of the story of the Incarnation— literally, the coming of God into the material world by taking on the human state of vulnerability and the fact that everything that lives, dies. The difference for us Christians is that we know there is likewise a resurrection, that when this body dies the ineffable substance that God blows into us to make us alive blows again, and we at last can live entirely in love and peace with God and one another.
Matthew 5:1-12
Ah, the Beatitudes, that most perfect set of words of Jesus — so perfect, all we have to do to please God is to memorize them. Or so I’ve been told more than once by well-meaning parishioners. In fact, these are among the hardest of Jesus’ words to us, and each one could be the subject of a sermon. There are too many of them to do a Lenten series, however, and people do get uncomfortable when one of our set ideas is questioned. We get uneasy when we are asked to re-evaluate our values.
Many years ago, I taught Lay Speaking Classes in our Conference. One day, a man in my class came to me during a break, and pointing his finger at me said, “I’ve got you figured out at last!”
“Really?” I answered. Since his mother was a District Superintendent, his statement put me off balance.
“Yes!” he said triumphantly, “you are an agent provocateur!” A member of the French underground in WWII, the agent provocateur’s job was to undermine the lies of the Vichy — those in the national government who were fighting Hitler’s ideas so that the average person could see the true aims of the Nazis in France. I burst into whole-hearted laughter.
“How right you are!” I laughed even harder. “Discovered! And to whom will you turn me in?”
“Oh, I think our bishop already knows,” he said through his laughter. “Why else allow you to teach Lay Speakers at least once every year?”
The same could be said of Jesus. If you’ve been reading the Beatitudes for years and are still troubled by them, good for you! As Jesus himself would say, “You are not far from the Realm of God!”
The first thing we need to know is that not all is as it seems in this speech by Jesus. In every attempt at translation of any manuscript, there are words that cannot be translated into equivalent words in another language. Take v. 3 for example: Blessed are the poor [in spirit], for there is the kingdom of heaven [kingdom of God]. The sense of the word commonly translated “the poor” actually carries the meaning of those who have lost everything. The English equivalent is not “poor” but rather “destitute.” Those who have no work, no money, no home, no safe place to sleep, no family of any kind, and now no friends, either. They have no soap, so to get clean they use sand to scrub the stink off their bodies and what little they have to cover their bodies.
[I had no idea how bad the destitute can smell until I gave two adults and a child a ride to a nearby hotel that had washing machines available for their use, and they loaded three big garbage bags of their possessions in the back seat. I rode home in 30-degree weather with all my windows open and sprayed the car with a fabric deodorizer. I thought I had understood when the wife said, “Oh, they have a big bathtub! I can soak up to my chin!” She wasn’t just wanting to indulge. She couldn’t stand the smell of her own body.]
But Jesus calls the destitute ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ (Luke 6:20; another translation of the original Greek word for ‘blessed’). How can the destitute be thought to be happy, fortunate or blessed? Matthew’s record of Jesus’ words is “the poor in spirit.” If we have a destitute spirit, that’s clearly different from being poor, but either way, there’s nowhere to go but up, both physically and spiritually. What could be more devastating than having to literally beg, face to face, for enough money to eat your next meal? Being in a deep, anxiety-ridden depression springs to mind. Knowing Jesus, the destitute are blessed because we have come to a point where we know we need help and have lost the option of covering up our need. The prayer of the destitute might be reduced to “Lord, I need a little help here. I can’t do it on my own. Could you send an angel — anyone — to help me?”3
Likewise, the word “meek” in v. 5: who are the meek? The online thesaurus suggests such words as ‘humble’ ‘timid’ ‘fearful’ and ‘weak,’ but also ‘modest’ ‘gentle’ and ‘quiet.’ Meekness is one of those words where the meaning is in the eye of the beholder — is Jesus meek and mild? Remember his rampage through the Temple at the beginning of the last week of his life? His cursing of the fig tree that had failed to produce fruit out of season? (Matt. 21:18-19) Yet when he was brought to Pilate for judgement, he spoke not a word — did not defend himself, did not pontificate. Like Mother Teresa in Calcutta, he took care of the poor and healed the sick and disabled; he did not raise an army to march against the Roman claim on his homeland, did not engage in politics to get the government to care for the destitute, to build and maintain hospitals and hospices and provide occupational therapy.
Verses 3-6 express the needy of the world, those who long for the promised reign of God, when justice and mercy go hand in hand. These are the ones who pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Next, Jesus pronounces blessings for those who are blessed for their state of mind:
Those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and those who are pure in heart.4
These are the attributes of those who look at the world from God’s perspective. And in our world and our country, they are the ones who keep an eye on the children, separated from their parents at the border with Mexico at a time in their development when their brains are still forming. We know that such separation produces anxiety and depression that usually lasts for the lifetime of such children, not to mention the physical toll that results from such separation. They are the ones who track down the child abusers, those who profit by the sale of human beings to be sex slaves, to tend to our crops, to clean the houses of their owners. Those who are pure in heart must be mourning over the state of our world, where nations are behaving badly, the truth is twisted and retwisted to serve those who would have power.
Finally, Jesus blesses those who are merciful and who are the peacemakers. These two things are active, not passive. They require us to put our faith in action, not contemplation (though contemplation gives us the spiritual muscle to carry out what we should be doing). In contemporary sociological parlance, we are to be working toward shifting the balance of personal interactions from negative interactions to positive interactions. Doing so shifts the personal economy at the office, in the coffee shop, over the phone with customer service, at the grocery store, in our churches and within our homes.
It can be a difficult effort to shift the personal economy of our surroundings. We have to maintain our cool, not respond to negativity or insults, and watch our tongues. Other times, we can contribute to a positive economy when we are cheerful and sympathetic toward those who are helping us; for example, when I ask the store cashier her name as she starts ringing up my purchases, and thank her for the service she is giving; when I ask the customer service person on the other end of the phone, “How are you today?” the rewards are immediate for both of us. It’s a fact of life that many customers are rude and sharp-tongued. I have reduced her tension at the start of our interaction. This is one simple way to begin spreading mercy and a peaceful atmosphere.
I have a friend I eat out with every month or so. The last time we were in a restaurant I’d not been to before, so I knew none of the waitresses. When our waitress approached our table, I returned her greeting of “Hi, I’m ___, and I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” With “Well, ___, it’s nice to meet you. This is my friend, ____, and my name is Sandra.”
She smiled and said, “That’s good to know” and giggled a little.
“Well, since you have to tell us your name, I figure it’s only right that you should know ours. Oh, and ___, there’s gonna be a test later.”
She laughed out loud and said, “I’m looking forward to that!”
She took our orders and walked away with a little bounce to her step that hadn’t been there a moment ago. My friend said, “I know what you’re doing. You’re seeing to it that we get good service. You do that with every wait person we get.”
I laughed, but also said, “Yes, but that’s not why I do that. I want her to know that we’re not difficult patrons. I want to provide a light spot in her day.”
“Uh-huh. You’re just making sure we get good service. There’s malice aforethought there.” I resented that but shrugged it off. Laughter makes the laugher healthier, and the effects last long after the laughter fades.
And that brings us to the last blessing in the Beatitudes. “Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” I know I didn’t expect that when I was ordained! It turns out that being God’s person carries its own difficulties. Punishment is bound to hit us when we correct false statements or do the research to find out the truth. We are bound to be mocked when we speak out on the issues of our day. We make a comment on the internet and attract “followers,” some of whom will curse at us, call us names, or insist that we should be “locked up.” We protest the abandonment of the values Jesus and the prophets preached, and we may well be persecuted by trolls on the internet. “Rejoice and be glad,” Jesus says, “for your reward is great in heaven.” We’re just being treated as the prophets were in their time. So rejoice and be glad — it’s a sign that you’re doing your job.
1 See Leviticus 20 (especially vv. 1-5); Ezekiel 16:22; Ezekiel 20:31; and Ezekiel 23:37-39.
2 See the Introduction to this letter in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, p. 2035-2039 for more information.
3 This corresponds to the first 6 steps of the 12-Step Programs to help people to overcome addictions.
4 The Greek original is katharos, which is used 27 times in the New Testament. It means to be clean, like the cloth in which Jesus’ body was wrapped (Matt. 27:59). According to Wayne Jackson, writing in the Christian Courier, online. He also quotes William Barclay who said: “pure” may describe the heart that is free of unadulterated “motives” (Commentary on Matthew, I.101). The Greek word has persisted in our medical community. ‘Catheters’ are tubes which can be inserted into the body to drain contaminated fluids.
Today’s scriptures point us in the direction of social action. Change is never acceptable to some people, and even the most enlightened sinner will try to deflect changes, whether in worship or government or social change. Even as I’m writing this, I hear on the news that the programs enacted by the previous administration to improve school lunches will be cut back to allow teens to eat snacks and pizza as part of the school lunch program. The kids covered by that program were, of course, resistant to ‘eating healthy’ if they’d never eaten that way before. A lot of food wound up being thrown away. But as many kids became used to the changes, they asked for different foods even at home. Long-term changes need to be left in place long enough to “sink in.”
This is what Jesus is about. We need to change. We need to be helping others to change. Only that way can the world be changed from angry confrontations to a peaceful way of life.
Micah 6:1-8
The beginning of Micah 6 constitutes the assembling of a court of law. God says that the mountains will witness God’s complaint against the people of Israel, like a jury in a common earthly court, because they are “the enduring foundations of the earth.” This is fitting, in a metaphorical sense, because the mountains have seen all of the events that have taken place in their part of the world from the beginning. They are impassive, solid, unmoved and unmoving. Furthermore, they represent “the high places” where the Canaanites conducted their religious ceremonies and offered their sacrifices. They have also seen the Hebrews climb those same hills and engage in those same rituals. If these hills cannot render a verdict, who can?
The Lord, unlike the mountains, is angry. It’s not just that his people have put other things before God, to whom they owe their lives, their freedom, and this very land on which they live. Nor is it simply that they worship the gods of the Canaanites, though that has provoked the Lord over and over. They have begun to worship in the way of the Canaanites (and the Hittites and others in the area). If God sounds like a wounded lover or husband or father, there is a reason for that. It is because God has surrounded them with love, has kept them alive despite the many setbacks they encountered over the time of the Exodus, has fought on their side, and specifically warned them against the religious practices of their slaveowners. But the first time they did not have Moses to carry God’s word to them, they melted down all the gold they had in order to create a golden calf. In Egypt, the gods were often represented standing on the back of a golden calf. Their adultery was all the more galling because they deliberately chose to make God like the gods of Egypt.
This caused God to make them wander the wilderness, never having a permanent home, never owning any of the land, so that none of those who remembered how the Egyptians worshipped would enter the Holy Land that God had promised.
Then, after they were settled in the Holy Land, they began to worship in the same places as the Canaanites, and engaging in the same fertility rituals as well, which included ritual sexual relations, usually with sacred prostitutes, both male and female, and the sacrifice of “whatever opens the womb.” This meant that the first born of every female animal in the compound, would be given as a burnt offering — including the first born of every human woman.1 The horror that God feels when we do this sort of thing is reflected in Ezekiel 16:21, where God says, “You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to the idols.”
The writer of Hebrews refers to the fact that Abraham was about to do the same thing when God intervened and gave him a ram, caught in a bush by the horns, to sacrifice instead of his son. The impulse to give to God those things most important to us can be powerful when we are aware of our dependence on God and a profound sense of gratitude for our salvation. But God does not want this sort of sacrifice. This is reflected in the third stanza of Micah’s words to the people on God’s behalf.
Here, we read,
With what shall I come before the Lord,
And bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come … with burnt offerings…?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
With these words, Micah leads us away from the horrors of animal or human sacrifice and into the loving arms of God:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, and to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?”
When we live as unjust people, and watch others sin openly, and look the other way while the innocent are made to suffer, and the environment to be despoiled and God’s animals to be mistreated and killed so that we can boast of a trophy (especially of endangered or nearly extinct animals); when we suspect that a child is being abused, or that a spouse is being abused (and yes, there are men who are abused by their wives as well as women by their husbands), and do nothing, say nothing, even try to gloss things over when a spouse comes to us and asks for help, we are lacking in justice and kindness. And Micah says that all God asks of us is to do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with God.
Of course, that sounds easier than it may be in real life. When we turn our backs on the poor, the immigrant, the outcast — in other words, the powerless — we’re doing nothing but going along with the crowd. It’s easy to dismiss poverty as the fault of the poor until you walk into a home with five children and cupboards that are bare except for a can of soup and a half-empty box of cereal. Dad is employed, but they have no money for the next five days, when his paycheck will come in. The house has three bedrooms, one for the three boys, one for the two girls, and one for Dad and Mom. Only, Dad has moved out because Social Services has told them that he earns too much (by $20 a week) and as longs as he lives there they cannot get help.
Twenty-five years ago, in the middle of a cold snap, one of my neighbors came to me and told me that a woman down the block had gone away and left her English sheepdog outside, chained to his doghouse. When she went over to check on the dog, there were overturned dishes, which probably had been filled with water and food, but no sign of care was to be found. There was no blanket or bed or even a rug in the doghouse, and the dog’s hair was matted in various places all over his body. “She says she’s a member of your congregation, you know.” A check of the records showed that she hadn’t attended our church for five or more years.
Since I was in a city, I called the Humane Society and told them what I knew. They went over and looked at the dog and posted a notice on her door that the dog must, under the law, have the mats removed from his fur. Nothing said that no one was giving him food, since there was a dish there. And while it wasn’t good for the dog to eat snow, the law didn’t cover leaving him without water, and any water would have frozen anyway. “Charming,” I said. The man said, “We can’t take him in, he looks OK, despite the mats.”
When the woman came home, she came to church. “Look at this notice!” she shouted, “I’ll have to keep him in the house if I have to shave his fur to get those mats out! I hope you’re happy!” And she kept screaming at me until I said, “As far as I’m concerned, you should be in jail for leaving him outside without relief from the cold the whole time you were gone.” Not that I didn’t dread people’s reactions to this argument. It didn’t take long — it was a small church.
“Good for you!” said a man standing nearby. Then others spoke up: I had been brave.
And good. And kind. And had suffered for it. I denied that I had suffered, though I had wondered how the church community would respond to what she was saying. I needn’t have worried.
That is what usually holds us back from seeking justice. Fear. That is also what holds us back from doing a kindness. We’re afraid of being seen as meddlers, of being called ‘nosey,’ of overstepping a line. Micah probably felt the same way when God told him to go tell his neighbors and those in authority that God sees our unkindness and is fed up.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Paul is writing to a church in a major city, noted for being a strategic location on the isthmus (an arm of land that stretches between two bodies of water) of the Peloponnese. Because it was a narrow strip of land, ships could dock on one side of the isthmus and cargo could be carted across to the other side with ease. The people who lived there were largely immigrants, recently freed persons, looking for a better life. Included in that mix was a large arts community, producing bronzes, pottery and mosaics. There was a small group of wealthy people at the top of the community, and a large population of the poor. The Christian community was likewise a mix of rich and poor, with immigrants from around the Mediterranean, thus representing a variety of cultures (Roman, Greek, Arabic, Jewish and Sub Saharan African), as well as economic differences.2
When we are addressing a group of mixed cultures, the trick is to know something about the cultures we are addressing and to respect (and help the members of those various groups to respect) those differences. This is what Paul is doing in today’s passage.
Just before our current selection, Paul has been discussing the question of baptism. Since he was a famous preacher, when he came to town there were people who had been attending worship who wanted to be baptized by him. He is very concerned about this kind of Christian, and about the possibility of people boasting that they had been baptized by Paul himself. He is quite clear, however, that it doesn’t matter who baptized them, it matters that they are one in Christ. For this reason, his preaching rests primarily on the crucifixion of Christ and the Good News that Christ died for sinners, before we ever knew anything about God’s incarnation in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Gentiles, whether Greek or Roman, had great respect for eloquent teachers and speakers. The Greek Philosophers had set the tone. They were trained by great speakers, and in turn, when they had polished their own style, they passed on not only what they knew, but how to be an eloquent preacher. This appreciation of eloquence as well as sound teaching had carried over to the Christian churches.
But the experience of the Apostles was that once they had surrendered to God in Christ, the baptism of the Holy Spirit would give them the right words. Polish had little to do with it; what counted was the sincere love of God for humans being expressed. This is an interesting understanding by Paul, for he himself was highly educated by Gamaliel, who had a reputation as the best teacher of rabbis of his day, and got into the most trouble with the authorities because people flocked to hear him speak.
Furthermore, he preached what the Jewish authorities had proclaimed to be the worst kind of heresy — that God was in Christ, and that Christ was crucified because of that message. In addition, Christ died on that cross and was buried, only to be resurrected on the third day. This whole story Paul condenses into the phrase “the message about the cross.” In the seminary I attended, it was shortened into “the crucifixion event,” which started with the arrest of Jesus and ended with his ascension into heaven. By any reading, however, the good news was and is that God loves us and came in the flesh to die on the cross so that we might see God’s love for us in the face of all that we could throw at him.
This seems absurd. In the first century, in the twenty first century, it is laughable to the vast majority of people. Why would God make himself vulnerable to us?
When I was about 20, a friend of mine invited me to go horseback riding with her. She had a regular time slot at a ranch just a few miles outside the city, but she was new to the group, and she thought it would be more fun if she had a friend with her. I had to admit that I was afraid of horses. I’d only been around horses once or twice, and they had hooves that could cause real damage to soft flesh.
She didn’t make fun of me. She promised that if I were still frightened by the end of two weeks she wouldn’t press me again. I was still frightened, but she said something that made me decide to try: “Sandra, the only way to be around a horse is to get to know a horse. It would be best if you could start with a young horse and watch it grow up, but this is the second best way. We can go on a hike with a group, and you can get to ride the same horse twice. No galloping, no free riding, just a walk in a line with other horses. Please?”
So I went. I was introduced to a black Arabian mare with a white blaze. She was smallish, beautiful and quiet. We went on the “hike.” I loved it. By the end of the second session, I was still nervous, but no longer expecting the worst. By the end of the summer, I was delighted to go on a moonlight ride through a field of tall grasses, all fear of the beauty I had come to know.
I think this is why God came in the form of a baby. So we could watch him grow up, listen to him talk about love and kindness and his anger against those who would not allow “sinners” to enter the Temple, demanding a price for the ritual bath and a ram or even two sparrows to be burnt on the altar. This way, we could learn that God wants all people to come close; because, after all, how can they know the love of God if we close the “sinners” out of our churches? This is a baby, a child, a young man, one of us, telling us to come closer, that we need not be afraid of God, who loves us as a good father does.
But this story is a stumbling block (a scandal) for those who prefer a God who is far away, regal, impressive, a towering figure who calls us rather than coming close and proving his love by being vulnerable, able to be brokenhearted over our selfishness and lack of compassion. Many denominations have died or split off from the rest of Christianity because God has insisted on coming to us in the guise of the immigrant, the homeless, outcast or destitute, begging on the highway on-ramp. Many people’s hearts have grown cold, just as Jesus foretold (Matthew 24:3, 10-12; and 25:32-46).
“Consider your own call…. God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world… to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” After all, God chose us, not the other way around. It is not we who initiated our relationship; it is God who reached out to us! We don’t get to say, “I am proud to say that I chose God.” Because it’s the other way around: God chose us “so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” To say that we have given our hearts to God is to deny that God claimed us, body and soul, before we ever knew him (Romans 3, esp. vv. 27-28). God reached out to us, when we were unworthy, so that we might confess to those whom we are calling to a relationship with God that we, too, were unworthy until God called us and filled us with the Holy Spirit and gave us this ministry.
Paul is reminding his hearers of the end of God’s life in Jesus, hanging on a bloody cross. But it is equally important to remember that at the beginning of God’s life in Jesus he made himself vulnerable as well. The Epiphany season is a reminder of both ends of the story of the Incarnation— literally, the coming of God into the material world by taking on the human state of vulnerability and the fact that everything that lives, dies. The difference for us Christians is that we know there is likewise a resurrection, that when this body dies the ineffable substance that God blows into us to make us alive blows again, and we at last can live entirely in love and peace with God and one another.
Matthew 5:1-12
Ah, the Beatitudes, that most perfect set of words of Jesus — so perfect, all we have to do to please God is to memorize them. Or so I’ve been told more than once by well-meaning parishioners. In fact, these are among the hardest of Jesus’ words to us, and each one could be the subject of a sermon. There are too many of them to do a Lenten series, however, and people do get uncomfortable when one of our set ideas is questioned. We get uneasy when we are asked to re-evaluate our values.
Many years ago, I taught Lay Speaking Classes in our Conference. One day, a man in my class came to me during a break, and pointing his finger at me said, “I’ve got you figured out at last!”
“Really?” I answered. Since his mother was a District Superintendent, his statement put me off balance.
“Yes!” he said triumphantly, “you are an agent provocateur!” A member of the French underground in WWII, the agent provocateur’s job was to undermine the lies of the Vichy — those in the national government who were fighting Hitler’s ideas so that the average person could see the true aims of the Nazis in France. I burst into whole-hearted laughter.
“How right you are!” I laughed even harder. “Discovered! And to whom will you turn me in?”
“Oh, I think our bishop already knows,” he said through his laughter. “Why else allow you to teach Lay Speakers at least once every year?”
The same could be said of Jesus. If you’ve been reading the Beatitudes for years and are still troubled by them, good for you! As Jesus himself would say, “You are not far from the Realm of God!”
The first thing we need to know is that not all is as it seems in this speech by Jesus. In every attempt at translation of any manuscript, there are words that cannot be translated into equivalent words in another language. Take v. 3 for example: Blessed are the poor [in spirit], for there is the kingdom of heaven [kingdom of God]. The sense of the word commonly translated “the poor” actually carries the meaning of those who have lost everything. The English equivalent is not “poor” but rather “destitute.” Those who have no work, no money, no home, no safe place to sleep, no family of any kind, and now no friends, either. They have no soap, so to get clean they use sand to scrub the stink off their bodies and what little they have to cover their bodies.
[I had no idea how bad the destitute can smell until I gave two adults and a child a ride to a nearby hotel that had washing machines available for their use, and they loaded three big garbage bags of their possessions in the back seat. I rode home in 30-degree weather with all my windows open and sprayed the car with a fabric deodorizer. I thought I had understood when the wife said, “Oh, they have a big bathtub! I can soak up to my chin!” She wasn’t just wanting to indulge. She couldn’t stand the smell of her own body.]
But Jesus calls the destitute ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ (Luke 6:20; another translation of the original Greek word for ‘blessed’). How can the destitute be thought to be happy, fortunate or blessed? Matthew’s record of Jesus’ words is “the poor in spirit.” If we have a destitute spirit, that’s clearly different from being poor, but either way, there’s nowhere to go but up, both physically and spiritually. What could be more devastating than having to literally beg, face to face, for enough money to eat your next meal? Being in a deep, anxiety-ridden depression springs to mind. Knowing Jesus, the destitute are blessed because we have come to a point where we know we need help and have lost the option of covering up our need. The prayer of the destitute might be reduced to “Lord, I need a little help here. I can’t do it on my own. Could you send an angel — anyone — to help me?”3
Likewise, the word “meek” in v. 5: who are the meek? The online thesaurus suggests such words as ‘humble’ ‘timid’ ‘fearful’ and ‘weak,’ but also ‘modest’ ‘gentle’ and ‘quiet.’ Meekness is one of those words where the meaning is in the eye of the beholder — is Jesus meek and mild? Remember his rampage through the Temple at the beginning of the last week of his life? His cursing of the fig tree that had failed to produce fruit out of season? (Matt. 21:18-19) Yet when he was brought to Pilate for judgement, he spoke not a word — did not defend himself, did not pontificate. Like Mother Teresa in Calcutta, he took care of the poor and healed the sick and disabled; he did not raise an army to march against the Roman claim on his homeland, did not engage in politics to get the government to care for the destitute, to build and maintain hospitals and hospices and provide occupational therapy.
Verses 3-6 express the needy of the world, those who long for the promised reign of God, when justice and mercy go hand in hand. These are the ones who pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Next, Jesus pronounces blessings for those who are blessed for their state of mind:
Those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and those who are pure in heart.4
These are the attributes of those who look at the world from God’s perspective. And in our world and our country, they are the ones who keep an eye on the children, separated from their parents at the border with Mexico at a time in their development when their brains are still forming. We know that such separation produces anxiety and depression that usually lasts for the lifetime of such children, not to mention the physical toll that results from such separation. They are the ones who track down the child abusers, those who profit by the sale of human beings to be sex slaves, to tend to our crops, to clean the houses of their owners. Those who are pure in heart must be mourning over the state of our world, where nations are behaving badly, the truth is twisted and retwisted to serve those who would have power.
Finally, Jesus blesses those who are merciful and who are the peacemakers. These two things are active, not passive. They require us to put our faith in action, not contemplation (though contemplation gives us the spiritual muscle to carry out what we should be doing). In contemporary sociological parlance, we are to be working toward shifting the balance of personal interactions from negative interactions to positive interactions. Doing so shifts the personal economy at the office, in the coffee shop, over the phone with customer service, at the grocery store, in our churches and within our homes.
It can be a difficult effort to shift the personal economy of our surroundings. We have to maintain our cool, not respond to negativity or insults, and watch our tongues. Other times, we can contribute to a positive economy when we are cheerful and sympathetic toward those who are helping us; for example, when I ask the store cashier her name as she starts ringing up my purchases, and thank her for the service she is giving; when I ask the customer service person on the other end of the phone, “How are you today?” the rewards are immediate for both of us. It’s a fact of life that many customers are rude and sharp-tongued. I have reduced her tension at the start of our interaction. This is one simple way to begin spreading mercy and a peaceful atmosphere.
I have a friend I eat out with every month or so. The last time we were in a restaurant I’d not been to before, so I knew none of the waitresses. When our waitress approached our table, I returned her greeting of “Hi, I’m ___, and I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” With “Well, ___, it’s nice to meet you. This is my friend, ____, and my name is Sandra.”
She smiled and said, “That’s good to know” and giggled a little.
“Well, since you have to tell us your name, I figure it’s only right that you should know ours. Oh, and ___, there’s gonna be a test later.”
She laughed out loud and said, “I’m looking forward to that!”
She took our orders and walked away with a little bounce to her step that hadn’t been there a moment ago. My friend said, “I know what you’re doing. You’re seeing to it that we get good service. You do that with every wait person we get.”
I laughed, but also said, “Yes, but that’s not why I do that. I want her to know that we’re not difficult patrons. I want to provide a light spot in her day.”
“Uh-huh. You’re just making sure we get good service. There’s malice aforethought there.” I resented that but shrugged it off. Laughter makes the laugher healthier, and the effects last long after the laughter fades.
And that brings us to the last blessing in the Beatitudes. “Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” I know I didn’t expect that when I was ordained! It turns out that being God’s person carries its own difficulties. Punishment is bound to hit us when we correct false statements or do the research to find out the truth. We are bound to be mocked when we speak out on the issues of our day. We make a comment on the internet and attract “followers,” some of whom will curse at us, call us names, or insist that we should be “locked up.” We protest the abandonment of the values Jesus and the prophets preached, and we may well be persecuted by trolls on the internet. “Rejoice and be glad,” Jesus says, “for your reward is great in heaven.” We’re just being treated as the prophets were in their time. So rejoice and be glad — it’s a sign that you’re doing your job.
1 See Leviticus 20 (especially vv. 1-5); Ezekiel 16:22; Ezekiel 20:31; and Ezekiel 23:37-39.
2 See the Introduction to this letter in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, p. 2035-2039 for more information.
3 This corresponds to the first 6 steps of the 12-Step Programs to help people to overcome addictions.
4 The Greek original is katharos, which is used 27 times in the New Testament. It means to be clean, like the cloth in which Jesus’ body was wrapped (Matt. 27:59). According to Wayne Jackson, writing in the Christian Courier, online. He also quotes William Barclay who said: “pure” may describe the heart that is free of unadulterated “motives” (Commentary on Matthew, I.101). The Greek word has persisted in our medical community. ‘Catheters’ are tubes which can be inserted into the body to drain contaminated fluids.
