Matthew 5:1-12
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, we started Year A in the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings shared by many Protestant denominations. The vast majority of our gospel readings this year will come from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew. Years B and C in the cycle focus on Mark and Luke, the three grouped together as the Synoptic Gospels because they are very similar.
The Fourth Gospel, John, has unique stories that get distributed throughout the lectionary cycle. For example, the Sunday after Easter always includes John’s story commonly known as “Doubting Thomas,” a story that is not found in the synoptics.
We’ll do a deep dive into Matthew tomorrow night in Monday School, though it is my least favorite gospel. It is also the one with which many are most familiar. It is Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer that we recite. In today’s reading, we find the version of the Beatitudes we know, part of the Sermon on the Mount, probably the only sermon by Jesus you could name. In it, we hear that “blessed are those who hunger and third for righteousness,” as opposed to Luke’s version, which declares “blessed are those who are hungry now.”
Jesus lived in a time of backbreaking extractions from Rome, a time of famine and drought. I am inclined to believe Luke’s version is the more authentic, consistent with that gospel’s focus on those at the margins. Luke also pair’s the blessings with “woes,” verses like 6:24 which declares “But how terrible for you who are rich, because you have already received your comfort,” which again, feels consistent with First Century Galilee and other aspects of the prophetic tradition, a tradition with which Jesus identified.
Part of Matthew’s agenda is to cast Jesus as thoroughly Jewish, which he was, and particularly as a new Moses, which he probably wasn’t. That is why this sermon is on a mount, meant as an echo of Mount Sinai where Moses encountered God and received the Ten Commandments. In Luke, this text is part of a Sermon on the Plain.
It was not uncommon to think of God in connection to high places, especially on a flat earth. The Temple in Jerusalem is built on a “mount.” Jesus is “transfigured,” revealing his divine nature to the three accompanying apostles, on a mountain. Jesus ascends into the heavens by soaring up into the sky, and will, according to Paul, return at the Second Coming from the sky.
But I grew up on a coastal plain, where the tallest hill was literally a pile of trash, and the water table was just below the surface. I experienced the holy not on the mountain top, but in the ocean. This morning, I want to suggest that the Holy Mystery we name as God is just as present in the level and low places, physical and spiritual, as in the high, whether you are a faithful Trinitarian experiencing the divine as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or an adventurer in the land of the uncharted diaphanous. God is there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, even in the Pit of Despair, even if you are being chased by the Brute Squad.
I lived in Queens in late 2001, worked in Chelsea, where I was on 9/11. Getting to work meant the Seven Train, with the first Manhattan stop at Grand Central. Depending on which downtown train I wanted to take, I might also pass through Times Square and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And every day in the news, I’d hear that these were among the high profile targets for terrorists. Heavily armed guards, military and law enforcement, were everywhere, though we were quickly learning that even those meant to protect us could be radicalized. I started to have panic attacks on the subway.
Being who I am, no one around me knew I was freaking out, but I spoke with my doctor and soon had a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Shame wasn’t really an issue. I understood that I, like so many others, had experienced trauma, that I was in a self-reinforcing loop that needed to be broken. But I didn’t like the side effects.
Then one day, on a New York City subway car, deep underground, the Spirit was with me. I asked myself a simple question: Did I really believe the things I said I believed: about the essential goodness of creation, the power of love, the holiness of art, the command to do justice? And if I did, why was I allowing my mind to spiral off into things that didn’t matter? If every day was a blessing, why was I acting as if each trip on the subway was a crucifixion?
Most of us choose what to believe. I am sure there are people so deeply embedded in a culture, so isolated, that they never see a decision point. There are folks trapped in so many ways, broken bodies, minds, spirits. But that is not most of us. If you are here this morning, if you are watching this online, you probably have enough agency to make a decision, even if the decision is to ask for help. Jesus can tell you that your sins are forgiven, challenge you to roll up your mat and walk, though he cannot walk for you.
We have a decision, just like the people before Joshua in the Jewish scripture, when he announced that he and his house will serve the lord. Our United Church of Christ Affirmation of Faith, found in your hymnal, describes the choice as the ways of life and death, God as seeking to save all people from aimlessness and sin, for aimlessness and sin become a living death, and that is not why you are here.
God is present, even in the worst. Contemporary readers, having lost the cultural thread, read the cry of Christ on the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” as a cry of despair, failing to realize that in starting the 22nd Psalm, he is praying the whole psalm, whether or not he had the capacity to finish it as his lungs fill with fluid. And that psalm, that cry of despair, ends in praise, in confidence in the goodness of God.
The holy is in the dark places too, and God only knows that we are in a dark place right now, as a species and as a nation. Artificial intelligence spews delusion and reinforces what it has learned, selfishness and sin, racism and end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism.
Did none of these people see “Terminator 2”?
The billionaires have their algorithms shunt us off into our own little Matrix pods, fed in turns self-righteousness and victimhood, entitlement and resentment, with no red pill in sight. We are well past the tipping point, or tipping points, economically, environmentally, politically, and it is no longer a matter of restoring, for some things cannot be put back together and probably shouldn’t be anyways.
And yet, the holy is still there, every time we throw out a lifeline to those who are sinking, toss a monkey wrench into the gears of the machinery of oppression, every time we try to imagine what might yet be.
Matthew may not be my favorite gospel, and we definitely need to dish up some real grub before we cook up some rhetorical righteousness, but you know… in the end, I do hunger and thirst for righteousness too.
Now, just like a quarter century ago, I choose to act like I believe what I say I believe: that God is good, that creation is charged with beauty and miracle, that we can make the world a better place. And if you don’t believe it, my best advice is to pretend you do. Fake it long enough, and you will believe.
Come to the table seeking forgiveness, or courage, or peace, or hope. What you will really find is community, which contains all of those things. May it always be so. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Blessed Jesus,
or maybe Blessing Jesus,
for you declared blessed our most vulnerable,
and if Luke is to believed,
you declared cursed
those those who hoarded wealth
and abused their power.
Though, to be honest,
hunger does not feel like a blessing,
the victims of sex traffickers still bear scars,
Rene Good and Alex Pretti are still quite dead,
as are countless others who have died
in ICE custody or a Salvadoran gulag,
nameless because of the color of their skin
or the lingering music of their mother-tongue.
Give us eyes to see a path forward,
a path of love and justice,
the wisdom to choose that path,
and the stamina to keep going.
You kept going
even as religion and empire
conspired against you,
so we pray as you taught us, saying:
Our Father…