Reverend Dr. William A. Evertsberg

God’s Odd Benedictions, IV: The Hungry

This is the most sensible and least odd of God’s Odd Benedictions. We get this one. Of course Jesus would love the righteous. Of course God would bless them. But that’s not exactly what Jesus says. He doesn’t say, “Blessed are the righteous.” He says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. It’s not enough to be righteous. You have to be desperate for it. You have to ache for it. Without righteousness, these kinds of folk have a visceral and existential, almost carnal, emptiness in the pit of their stomach.

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God’s Odd Benedictions, III: The Meek

When you study Jesus’ Beatitudes, you have to pay attention first to the eccentricity of the folk who receive a blessing—the poor, the sad, the meek, for example. And then you have to attend to the particular blessing each kind of blessed person uniquely receives.
The poor says Jesus, will receive the kingdom. The sad will be consoled. And the meek—what do they get? They get everything. The meek will inherit the earth.

Eugene Peterson translates this beatitude like this: “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.” Everything that can’t be bought.

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God’s Odd Benedictions, II: The Sad

The First Sunday in Lent
Said one Jewish scholar, “It is frustration and sorrow that are our passports to fellowship and sympathy. Life teaches us at every turn how insufferable are those who have never suffered.” Yes? Have you experienced the in-sufferability of the unsuffering: the frozen face, the unmoved affect, the narcotic numb-ness of the unsuffering?

When Katie Lancaster and Melanie Flynn train our Stephen Ministers, they know that one of the greatest obstacles they have to overcome is a stubborn lack of self-confidence. “I can’t do this,” they think. “I didn’t go to seminary. I don’t have the skills.”

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Jesus’ Grandmothers, IV: Bathsheba

Maybe on the simplest and most transparent level it’s nothing more than a morality tale. Maybe Matthew alludes so subtly in his Jesus genealogy to the story of David and Bathsheba to remind us that every illicit union is a fatal attraction, quite literally. Maybe nobody dies most of the time, at least not literally, but something always dies. Love dies, trust dies, your self-respect will be gone forever; it is unlikely to experience any resurrection whatsoever.

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Jesus’ Grandmothers, I: A Royal but Checkered Pedigree

Perhaps part of Matthew’s point in giving us this royal but checkered pedigree is to show us that God can use anything, anything at all, to bring about God’s purposes in God’s story on God’s green earth. History happens at this coincidence, this coherence, this meeting, of twisted human connivance and stealthy divine providence, so that despite all the turns and meanderings and dead ends of human history, God comes up with Jesus, the most perfect life that’s ever been lived. God uses what is mixed and fixes what is broken and heals what is sick and points the lost in the right direction.

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