Blessing in the Active Voice

Matthew 5: 1- 12

Luke 6: 17 - 26

Luke 6:17-26

6:17 He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then he looked up at his disciples and said: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. "Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

Blessings in the Active Voice

Jesus must have been a great preacher. The gospel writers remember his style and content quite clearly. They remember the settings of his sermons: preached from a boat, on a mountain, on the plain. Like any good speaker, Jesus apparently repeats some of his best material. I imagine the disciples may have even rolled their eyes a bit at hearing some of the same things over and over again. But they remembered. The passage from Luke we just read is the beginning of what is called the Sermon on The Plain. Matthew records what is called the Sermon on the Mount and it begins with some of the same elements. What we call the beatitudes. They are like the passage from Luke we just heard, but a bit more extensive:

[3] "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.

[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 on my account.

Blessing in the passive voice.

The two sermons are different in many ways and the beautitudes are different, but today I’d like to focus on their similarities. Specifically, how they both are in the passive voice.

Now, when I was in school, if you used the passive voice (the egregious error of the passive voice, as my English teacher Mr. McLain would say) you were marked down. The passive voice is a cagey way of saying something happened without saying who did it. “Mistakes were made” was Ronald Reagan’s famous way of talking about errors in Iran in his 1987 address before congress. Things aren’t quite clear when you use the passive voice.

Sometimes the subject in the passive voice is assumed. We assume in the beatitudes that God is the one doing the blessing. Jesus could very well have said “God is blessing the poor.” But he didn’t. He said “Blessed are the poor.” Now Jesus is a cagey character. He often says things to get us thinking. In this stump sermon, delivered at least twice, he chooses very carefully to use this passive voice. Perhaps he is suggesting something more than just God is doling out sweet rewards to certain classes of people.

What if the active translation of these blessings has to do with us? What if we are the forces behind this blessing business?

We are called to bless.

We believe God works through us. We believe we are the body of Christ. The resurrection appearances of Jesus say over and over and over “Feed my sheep.” Jesus is all about serving others through us.

Yet when we read the beatitudes, we are like lottery ticket holders waiting for our number to be called, listening for the category that most includes us so that we can be assured of our blessing, our winnings. Even Matthew, who writes later, takes Luke’s edgy ‘blessed are the poor” and makes it into the innocuous “blessed are the poor in spirit.” Thanks goodness. That surely must mean me. Or the mourning. I do that. I’ve certainly been hungry. Yep. The beatitudes are really all about me. Me. Mimimimi. My personal blessing religion. No?

The Greek word used in the beatitudes for blessing when used in its active form in the New Testament is all but once used with us as the active agent. Later in the same sermon, Jesus says, “bless those who curse you” using a different word form.

We are so eager to be on the receiving end of the divine gravy train that we have failed to hear our responsibility here for all these years.

The Beatitudes are NOT the announcement of the divine lottery winners, but a job description. A job description for all of us together. If any one of us felt the burden of this completely, it would be overwhelming, but Jesus delivers this message to the crowds, the church, to us. This is not one of the special teachings for the elite few. This is the message for the masses. It takes a village to bless. Let’s walk through the beatitudes in Luke and see what this might mean.

Bless the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

This means not blaming to poor for being lazy or having bad study habits or whatever. What is the best thing that would happen to the poor. What would God do?

Does God love poor people more? Many theologians have said yes to this question. Does this mean we are suppose to love or bless poor people more? Could be. Blessed are the poor may be our call to arms rather than God’s loving one child more than another. Blessing the poor may require us to know their names, or at least their condition. How exactly does a family of three live on $50 a week? In Nigeria, how exactly does a family of eight live on $50 a year?

Bless the hungry so they will be filled.

Remember the beginning of one of the feeding miracles. The disciples come to Jesus looking to send the hungry people away. He tells them “You give them something to eat.” (Mark 6:37) We are the blessors and the blessees all at once.

This means collecting the cans and living modestly and designing a way of living so that hunger is a thing of the past. Bread for the World is a great cooperative religious program that gets at the substance and cause of poverty all over the world. Our denomination is an active and enthusiastic sponsor of their work.

Bread for the World, U2 singer Bono, and others have joined together in the “One” campaign to provide “fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans . . . at a cost equal to just one percent more of the US budget.” This is a way we bless the hungry.

Bless those who weep now, so that they might find the time of laughter.

Weeping is a necessary part of life, but not a part that needs to last forever. There is a time for everything. As Steven ministers know, we walk with people in their grief. Shawls and brownies are all a part of our mutual caring that Christ calls us to.

And so this congregation has sought to be God’s blessings to people in grief in the hospitality that so many show after services. Daniel’s warm and deep ministry is a reflection of our corporate understanding of how important it is to care for one another. To love one another as Christ has loved us.

Bless those who are hated.

Rosa parks wasn’t always celebrated in our land. It wasn’t always safe to talk about how invading Iran may not be a great idea. People were beat up for suggesting the war in Vietnam was short-sighted.

We need to bless the prophets of our age, even if we disagree with them. Perhaps especially if we disagree with them. Pray for your enemies. Bless those who persecute you. Sound familiar? So let’s make this injunction clearer. Bless people you hate.

Blessings are for you too.

Now I know that life has not always been kind to you. I know that each of you need some blessings in ways no one else but God will ever understand.

But unless we together contract to bless each other, contract to act out the blessings of God, our faith is too self-serving. If you love children, you can understand the concept of sacrificing your needs for the greater needs of someone else. Putting kids through college or even putting kids in shoes often requires that someone go without something. And yet those sacrifices of love are their own blessings. The rewards of love live in the heart and are the true blessings of God. The rewards of love live in the heart and are the true blessings of God. It is the true kingdom of God.

When people sneeze, it’s common to say “God bless you.” I suggest to you this morning that the Godly response is also, “Can I get you a tissue?”

This is all good news. This is not just another list of commands, it is the real hope of how the world can be. When blessing is how we act, then we will rejoice in that day and leap for joy. Hot diggity dog.

Go Deep

Go Deep

This Sunday is particularly important in the American liturgical calendar. It is the Sunday we celebrate the triumph of good over evil, of truth over untruth, of the ultimate victory of the righteous. I mean of course that this is Super Bowl Sunday.

One of the most thrilling plays that we will wait for; one of the plays known in backyard games and college playoffs, is when the quarterback gets in the huddle and in whatever code is used, looks intently at a receiver and says “God says, “Go deep.””

It means that the quarterback will throw the ball far and true deep down the field. Fans will be thrilled, situations redeemed, careers rescued.

This drama will be played in the midst of what is often a grinding sport of men smashing into each other and being carted off the field. It is the drama of our lives, because our lives often feel like a wearing tension of and unending series of runs up the middle.

Life is often tedious and religion irrelevant.

Most people have lives of grinding regularity. Their waking hours are filled with repetitive tasks and few real challenges. Most interpersonal relations stabilize into a steady state of habitual actions in which conflict and caring takes very predictable forms. We are people of habit who put on our pants one leg at a time because of the way pants and legs are made.

In this life of cycles and circles, there is a dim understanding that there must be more. And so we reach for the divine, the not us, the holy other, the prophetic perspective on who we are to take us to a new, livelier place.

We skim across the surface of what looks like monotony. The deeper waters are rich and alive, however. I enjoy scuba diving and will go wreck diving in Malta with my father in law in just a few days. Off the Florida keys I have been diving in John Pennecamp state park. This completely marine park is a sancuary for the reefs and is off limits to fishing. You will find in its depth colors and darting fascination you wouldn’t suspect from the surface. You will also find in its depths a statue of Jesus that was sunk there many years before called “Christ of the Abyss.” Christ of the Abyss is a 8 1/2 foot, 4000 pound bronze sculpture of Jesus Christ that stands in 25 feet of water off of Key Largo, Florida. Jesus has his hands outstretched, reaching up, waiting to be discovered by those who look beneath the surface.

The church has often been irrelevant in our search for deeper meaning. Paul Tillich, in the beginning of his systematics says that religion, for the most part, has been “answering questions no one ever asked in language no one can understand.” It is not unusual that people have given up on the church. We are caught up in committees and structures, fighting battles the culture finished years ago. We still fight about full participation for gay and lesbian people when it is a fact of life for most of our culture.

Peter Hears the Call

Like Peter, we are trying to get on with the business of life and watch in amusement as the church does its thing. Peter, like most of us, is fatigued and skeptical. Like us, he has been fishing in the dark for many fruitless hours.

Clarence Darrow was quoted as saying his favorite bible passage was from Luke 5:5, "We have toiled all the night and have taken nothing." For all his accomplishments, he felt his efforts were often fruitless. History judged him differently.

The call to dedication did not come to the early disciples in the cloistered halls of some worship center. The call came to them in the midst of the frustrations of their normal life. The people who built and rebuilt this church after its fires were people who faced the dedication required by the events of the day in the midst of the complexity of their lives.

The unusual suggestions of God have to do with how we go about the regular business of our life. Jesus spoke to the fishermen disciples through their very vocation. “Put out into deep water.” The fishermen thought they knew better than this holy guy. They knew the fish weren’t biting. They were at least polite, of course. With much eye rolling and perhaps a nudge to each other they followed Jesus suggestion with only a mumbled protest. Jesus calls them to have faith and fish where the big ones are. He calls them to expect great things.

It was as though an obscure minister came to an engineer who was trying to get a light bulb to work after thousands of trials and errors and said, “Have your tried a carbon filament?”

God’s Unusual Suggestions for Us

Jesus has suggestions for each of us and they call us to the deeper waters of life. They seem unusual only because we think we know better.

When the culture wants you to settle for mere comfort. God says, “Go deep.”

When your employer wants to take all your energy. God says, “Go deep.”

When your children want the easy answers. God says, “Go deep.”

When you’re down by 6 and there’s only a minute left. God says, “Go deep.”

When the people in your life are like things and things are like people to you. God says, “Go deep.”

When our country wants you to think only about short term gains and sacrifice principles. God says, “Go deep.”

When the chips are down folks are afraid to go deep, even in desperation. In the history of the Super bowl, the longest reception was 81 yards (Favre to Freeman – 1997), this season in the NFL there were 10 longer than that. We are afraid of the depths, afraid of being intercepted, afraid there will be no one at the other end.

Don’t be afraid. The depths will not crush you. Let us go together in this boat, the church, into deep water. Let us transcend the ordinary today and find God’s extraordinary presence in our lives.

Lord’s Supper as Going Deep

The elements of the Lord’s Supper that we are about to take are completely ordinary. We have eaten bread and drunk juice thousands of times before. Jesus dines with us in the midst of the ordinary and asks us to put our nets into the deep water again. We approach the table fatigued and skeptical, but Jesus continues to meet us here. After the teaching, after the work, Jesus comes to us in the ordinary actions of our life with the extraordinary suggestion that we go deep into the mysteries that bring us home.