Rev 7:2-4, 9-14
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
Encountering God’s Blessing on the Margins
The longer I live, the more I come to know and accept
that our God is a God of juxtapositions and seeming contradictions, that God is
so big and so loving and so radically inclusive of all of creation that this
Spirit of our Creator can hold suffering and joy, despair and hope, tragedy and
great celebration. Theologian Elizabeth Johnson talks about this in terms of
embracing God’s radical transcendence and radical immanence in equal measure,
rather than opposing them in a zero-sum game. It is not an either or with God,
but a both and. And this experience of a God big enough to hold it all, is
beyond rationalization. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, and when it
doesn’t make sense that’s often an invitation to let go of our own need to
control and understand, and rather open ourselves to the mystery of God, to let
God in to do the work in our hearts and our spirits that needs to be done. As
St. Agustin reminds us, “If you have understood, it is not God.”
And it can be incredibly frustrating to not understand,
at least for me. Perhaps we have this reaction to some of the beatitudes
tonight. I know that upon first glance for me, my reaction is, “But why do I
have to mourn, to be blessed? Why do I have to be persecuted to be blessed?
That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t seem fair.” And an even bigger struggle
for me, and perhaps for you, is how can I praise God when things aren’t going
well? How can I praise God’s goodness when there is so much suffering and God
himself says that I will be insulted and persecuted because of him? And yet our
Scriptures, particularly the Psalms, are full of this paradoxical mystery:
crying out to God when we are being persecuted, when we mourn our loved ones
and our community being destroyed, when we try to build peace but are surrounded
by war, and in that cry out to God asking Why?, always ending with a deep faith
in God’s goodness, God’s love and compassion, God’s justice.
I recently found myself observing this reality and
struggling with it, while in worship with a Christian community that is
predominantly African American. Hearing the preacher there, in that space, with
that community break open the psalms of lament and praise, it hit me in a new
way. The people gathered around me have lost loved ones to violence, confront
racism in their daily lives, struggle with generational poverty, broken
neighborhoods, and less than quality education for their children, and yet they
still praise God, with more heart and spirit than other religious spaces that I
have been in who don’t face half of these same challenges. This confounds me,
and challenges me to get why Jesus says that these are among God’s blessed,
that joining them, in their space, in a space that quite frankly is unfamiliar
and uncomfortable to me in a lot of ways, this is where I need to be to see and
feel God’s blessing and understand a part of God that I don’t allow myself to
access when I want to control, when I want to be comfortable and in charge.
Our gospel today is a wakeup call and an invitation, to
remind us that God’s kingdom, is not like the kingdoms and institutions of the
earth. While society values status, titles, education, wealth, skin color,
gender, and national origin, Jesus reminds us that God values what’s in your
heart, how you treat others, the values you hold, what you’re willing to
struggle and sacrifice for. God blesses those who are not blessed by the
institutional power structures of the world. Jesus flips all that power and
wealth on its head as he boldly claims that God's favor is with those who
mourn, those who are persecuted, the poor in spirit and the clean of heart, the
peacemakers.
This was a particularly challenging message for the people
of Jesus’ time, because their worldview told them that if you suffered it was
punishment for something that you or a family member did to offend God. But
here is God’s holy and chosen one, God’s infinite self incarnate as a living,
breathing human being, saying no, it is not punishment but blessing to know
what it is to mourn, to know what it is to be persecuted and insulted, to know
what it is to be humble, to seek peace, to hunger and thirst for the righteous
reign of God. This is new, this is different, and it is challenging. When we
are challenged with ideas about who God is, how God relates to the world,and
how we are called to respond, we can feel scared, or uncomfortable, or
defensive. And God’s challenge and invitation is not to back away from those
feelings, but to lean into them.
Elizabeth Johnson, in her book Quest for the Living God,
quotes Karl Rahner in asking the question, “Which do we love better, the little
island of our own certitude, or the ocean of incomprehensible mystery?” Jesus
is challenging the people of his time and us today to take a leap of faith off
our own little islands of certitude and into the ocean of incomprehensible
mystery, to move into those spaces where we aren’t centered, where our views
and perspectives aren’t dominant, where are privileges quite frankly aren’t
given a privileged space, and discover a new piece of this infinite, mysterious
God who dwells there too.
Because yes God loves everyone and yes God is always
present everywhere, and still God also shows up in unique ways in these
marginal spaces and calls us to journey there. Why? Because when we get these
false selves we have built up out of the way, when we get our ego out of the
way, our own perspectives and worldviews about who we are and who God is, we open
up new space for the living God, the mysterious paradoxical God, to come in and
bring new life. We find grace on the margins, in the spaces where we are broken
down and vulnerable and real because it is in those spaces that we can know and
feel in a profoundly real way this truth that we are not alone, we are loved
and connected in a way deeper and more profound than we can rationalize or put
into words and that openness in our vulnerability allows us to experience the
mystery of the living, paradoxical God at work in our lives, the God who brings
comfort to the mourning, fills the hungry, and gives God’s very self and
kingdom to those who persecuted.
This weekend we are celebrating the feast of All Saints,
and one saint who understood this message in his core was St. Francis of
Assisi, one of our patron saints. As many of us know he came from a wealthy,
powerful family with its own set of expectations about his life. Yet he gave up
the life and privilege he knew and the expectations that his family and society
had for him, and allowed God’s blessing to fill his life and guide his work. He
made himself completely vulnerable and open in a way that God’s life and love
could pour into him and he experienced God in every facet of creation. There
was something so real and powerful about the way that God showed up in the life
of Francis, that he drew others to him, who desired to know and live this
paradox of being so full with so little, the mystery that it is by giving that
we receive, that it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and by dying to
ourselves we are born into eternal life. St. Francis embraced the paradox and
mystery of the living God; he understood the message of the beatitudes and
instilled these same values of humility, poverty, peacemaking, simplicity, and
solidarity in his order.
Many saints contained these very virtues of the
beatitudes we hear this evening. They were poor (some voluntarily, others
involuntarily), they were humble and meek, they were great peacemakers, they
were merciful, and mourned their own and other’s suffering, and quite a few
were persecuted and killed for the very faith in Christ that the espoused. And
yet when you read about their lives, one of the unifying factors was this deep
faith in the unwavering love of God and Christ, of their presence with them in
their struggles and pains, and in the promise of something great yet to come.
The saints throughout the centuries accompany us today and every day in this
mystical cloud of witnesses, a cloud big enough to hold such a vast expression
of humanity, to offer us examples and glimpses into the kingdom of God.
We call on them today, we pray for their intercession, to
give us the courage to follow in their footsteps, to trust in God enough to let
our own egos go, to be willing to de-center ourselves in order to make more
room for the grace of God to fill our lives and relationships, to lean in to
the areas where we most want to draw away or step back, and to ultimately
experience grace in the margins, dwelling in the mystery of God in the company
of God’s blessed and beloved.
Amen
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