“Living in the World Imagined in the Sermon on the Mount”

A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Christine Jerrett at Central United Church, Sarnia, Ontario on January 30, 2011.


“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

How many of you memorized the Beatitudes when you were young? I had to memorize them in elementary school.  At that time, I thought of them as bits of good advice for getting along in the world:

“Blessed are the meek . . . nobody likes the schoolyard bully or the office psychopath.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers . . . everybody should try to get along and it’s even better if you’re the person who helps them do that.”
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy . . . what goes around comes around. Give someone a break now and, down the road, they will return the favour.”

Helpful sayings.

I did not think any more about it until the mid 1980’s when I was leading a confirmation class. I thought we would review of the basics of being a follower of Jesus and explore what those basics meant. I had the group read over the Beatitudes. To my surprise, they did not really know them. Then, I asked the class participants what they thought of the Beatitudes. Without blinking an eye, they told me that they disagreed with them.

In their experience, it was not true that the meek inherit the earth. The rich and powerful inherited the earth and pretty much everything else as well. In their experience, the poor in spirit probably suffered from low self esteem and they had better fix that quickly before they got trampled by people who knew what they wanted and were determined to get it.

As I sat there, listening to them, two thoughts crossed my mind: 1) I had not idea what I was going to do next. Whatever I had prepared was not going to work with this crowd, and 2) somewhere between my childhood and theirs, the world had shifted. The culture had stopped co-operating with the church in the task of forming Christians. Instead, the culture had been aggressively evangelizing these children into a very different set of convictions, a very different view of the world. The church and the culture were no long even pretending to co-operate. They were in competition for people’s hearts and minds, and the culture was winning. The Beatitudes were no longer ‘good advice for living well.’ They sounded strange, impractical and just plain wrong.

In a context such as ours, we are probably closer to hearing the Beatitudes in a way similar to the way the disciples of Jesus fist heard them. They are not pithy sayings to help make children moral. They are an introduction to a view of the world that turns our world upside down. The Beatitudes invite us to live in the world in a radically new way.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says all sorts of outrageous things about  the way the world works. He says,  “This is reality. This is the way the world really is because this is what God is doing in the world.”

Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist in the 20th century. He hovered on the edges of Christian faith for most of his life. One of the things that attracted Malcolm Muggeridge to Christianity was ‘its sheer absurdity.’. “I love all those crazy sayings in the New Testament -- which incidentally turn out to be literally true -- about how fools and illiterates and children understand what Jesus was talking about better than the wise, the learned and the venerable; about how the poor, not the rich are blessed, the meek, not the arrogant, inherit the earth, and the pure in heart, not the strong in mind, see God."   This is not how most of the world think the world works but, those who dare to live in the world imagined by Jesus in the Beatitudes find them unexpectedly true.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s favourite example of the unexpected truth of the Beatitudes was Mother Teresa. What she did and what the Missionaries of Charity do is, of course, patently absurd. They take homeless, dying people off the streets. They wash them, feed them, care for them until they die. Sometimes that is only for a few hours. Sometimes it is for days or weeks. It does not matter.
Why do they do it? When the needs of the living are so great, why spend time and energy on people who are not going to get better, whose death nobody will notice anyway.
She said, “I want them to have the comfort of seeing, even for a few hours or minutes, a loving face and the comfort of receiving loving care instead of closing their eyes on a world that is hostile or indifferent to their suffering.”
“But why do it?”
Because, “in every single suffering human being I see the suffering of Christ. So, a grizzled head, a stricken face laid low in the gutter, is He to whom all care and all love are due.”   (Christ and the Media, p. 71)

One of the reasons I have enjoyed taking people on mission trips is because it gives us, who lead such privileged, coddled lives, an opportunity to glimpse the truth of the Beatitudes. We are constantly being converted by television and other media to believe that the only way to have a good life is to make lots of money, to have connections with the right people, to wear the right clothes, to possess the right things. On these mission trips, we get away from all that for a week or so. We live in a community where children sometimes don’t have shoes to wear to school. They sit at worn-out desks and do their school work with little stubs of pencils. We worship among adults, many of whom are unable to find regular work. Many of them cannot access adequate health care. We experience among them a profound joy that wells up from gratitude for all the blessings God has poured upon them. They stand up in worship and say, “I want to thank God that I woke up this morning and am alive today.” One will tell of some trouble that she or he has experienced but will finish by saying, “God is good.” The congregation will response, “All the time.”

The people who go on these trips usually think that they are going there to help people who are less fortunate than themselves. Instead, they are overwhelmed by the blessed they receive. They come back changed because they have experienced the blessings that Jesus talked about in the Beatitudes.

It is almost always hard for them to come back into our world. They find it hard to come back into a life pre-occupied with concerns and values that now seem superficial, shallow, unimportant and less real.

I do not want to romanticize the lives of those whom we visit. There are many problems that come with such poverty. Also, I am acutely aware that we need to be grateful for all the opportunities and comforts that come to us through our wealth as North Americans. Nevertheless, the gift of such trips is that we catch a glimpse of the truth of Jesus’ claim that the poor, the meek, the pure in heart are blessed. Somehow the conditions on the trip open us to God whose will for us is life, true life.

We are so easily deceived into worshipping gods who cannot save us. We are so easily seduced into believing fantasies. The Beatitudes keep us turning toward the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Thanks be to God.

Let us pray:

God of life and of truth,
Your Son invites us to see the world through your eyes and we find ourselves disoriented:

You bless the poor
You bless the meek
You bless the pure in heart.
You turn our world and its values upside down.

We have signed on to follow your Son
but this is strange territory.
It doesn’t look anything like
the life we have been taught to yearn for,
to work for,
to believe will bring us happiness.

Yet, You know the despair that besets
so many of our young people
who fear that their future has been mortgaged
by our greed and carelessness.
You hear the cries of those who
have traded their souls for power and money
and now have emptiness as a friend.
You see those who are caught in lives that
lead only to weariness and anxiety.

Set us at Jesus’ feet
so we can learn to judge our lives differently.
Awaken in us that hunger and thirst for you
which will lead us to your will
and your peace.

Open our eyes to see your unexpected blessings.
Open our hearts to welcome you
when you come to us in strange ways.

Then make us into a community of blessedness
that beckons this neighbourhood
into your joy.

We ask these things in the name of Jesus
who blesses us with your living presence
and fills our lives with your life-changing truth.  Amen.