4th Sunday After the Epiphany

Matt 5:1-13

Okay I am finally ready to talk about Minnesota, okay I am not actually ready but I am going to do it anyway.  And it fits, because we are now right smack dab in the middle of our series about what it means to be a means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.  And this week is when it starts to get hard.  Because the message in our lessons this week is pretty serious, and seriously misunderstood.  I mean they shouldn’t actually be that hard, really we all know what these texts say, the message is clear, we just don’t always like it.

And so, we start today with our Gospel Lesson, where Jesus begins his great Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes.  And I am sure that this text is pretty familiar, probably very familiar.  I would say this passage is probably in the top 5 of most quoted scripture passages in the Bible.  Everyone knows the Beatitudes, but when we really look at them deeply and carefully, I am not sure they actually make any sense, at least not the way we often understand them.

And part of the reason that this gets hard is that we have a problem with this word rendered here as blessed.  It is frightfully hard to translate and so it causes holes in our understanding.  When we hear the word blessed, we often think of being happy, successful or content.  Scroll through enough social media and you’ll see Hashtag Blessed pictures of all sorts of people showing off how beautiful, happy, successful or fulfilled they supposedly are.  To be Hashtag Blessed in our culture is primarily to be comfortable.  There is a word for this sort of thing in Greek and in Hebrew too that is often also translated as blessed.  And I guess I am happy for those people, living that life.  But I am sorry dear people, that’s not the word in our passage today, that is distinctively not what the word that is there means.  That is not what Jesus is talking about. 

Jesus instead uses a word that we hear as blessed in a restatement of Psalm 1 that comes from the Hebrew word Ashar which doesn’t actually mean happy or comfortable, but literally means ‘to find the right road’.   Ashar is a wayfinding word.  Jesus is telling us that we are on the right path when we do the things he lists in the Beatitudes.  It is not that we are supposed to be happy when we mourn, or are hungry or thirsty or reviled or persecuted, that would be psychotic.  It is that being willing to do those things puts us on the right path.  This is the way in Jesus’s eyes to fulfill what he would later tell us is the heart of the law, “to Love God with all our heart and our mind and our soul and to love our neighbor as ourselves”, to do what the Bible says Lord requires of us in Micah 6 to “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

And to do these things is a grave responsibility and one that often comes with significant cost.  In many ways, finding the right path that Jesus describes promises the opposite of the happiness, ease and comfort of the hashtag blessed life.  But in its place it offers infinitely more.

Earl Palmer tells us "That I am to mourn means that I am to weigh those around me with the weight they have as Christ's sisters and brothers, and to treat them with such honor that, were they to suffer or die, I would grieve. That is what Jesus calls the right road. We are to care that much."  We are to grieve because we care.  We are grieve because we love.  And in this way it is a privilege to grieve, it is a privilege to do all these things listed because it means that we have something to love.  That we have something worth fighting for, worth sacrificing for, worth risking everything for.   And in the same way we are called to hunger and thirst and be merciful and make peace and maybe even be persecuted and reviled because we do so out of love for our neighbor. 

Jesus calls us all this day and every day to find and then to walk this right path for our neighbors that we are called to love.

And while I am absolutely horrified by the news coming out of the state of Minnesota almost every day, I am also strangely inspired by the tenacity of Minnesotan resistance.  Being Lutheran I have a lot of friends in Minnesota.  It’s kind of our mother land.  So I am getting a lot of stories and prayer requests from friends and colleagues that don’t often make the news and some that do.  And I can assure you that what is happening there is every bit as horrific and disruptive as you can possibly imagine.  And also unfathomably beautiful.

There is a certain character in Minnesotans that I suspect is here in Michiganders too and in all the great peoples of the North that holds us on Jesus’s right path.  That drives ordinary people, people exactly like you and me to stand on street corners and follow ICE trucks armed with nothing more than whistles and cell phones against a heavily armed, militarized force.  That drives them to show up and show out every day in -30degree weather, to protest, to hide their neighbors in basements, to use their bodies to block the entrance to schools, to not just deliver groceries but to design whole networks of support and care from nothing in a matter of weeks.   All because they cannot help but defend their neighbors.  Because they are unwilling to stray from what they know is the right path.

And I pray dear people, I pray every day that this reckoning will not come here.  But it quickly becoming time to begin to consider what the right path will be for you if it does.  Because Jesus calls us to a path of costly love and service, a path that truly loves our neighbor as ourselves, every time, everywhere, every one.  No matter the cost.  And this path will not be easy or comfortable, but the day may come, sooner than we might think, when there are no longer any easy choices, only right ones.  Amen.