Sermons

And so when Jesus ascends the mountain to share what the kingdom of God is like, and he says “blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” there is something inherently foolish knit within. You cannot win or achieve or work for or attain something that already was in the beginning. “In the beginning was mercy.” This is not something that can be earned. Mercy is not tit for tat, quid pro quo, like for like, or what goes around comes around. Mercy already was, already has been, always will be.
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.
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.
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.”
They [third graders] also told me that being blessed means that you can still feel happy and content if you are poor in spirit because the kingdom of God is here, still growing like a tiny seed that will one day be big enough for all the birds of the air to find shelter in its branches, and all creatures to find shade under its canopy. We should be proud of these young people who condensed 2,000 years’ worth of Christian interpretation of this Beatitude into 150 words! Well done!
There is a kind of poetry to this genealogy. I wouldn’t have thought so before. A list of begats. He begat him, and he begat him, and he begat him and his brothers. But the rhythm of the genealogy, this poem that tells Jesus’ story with an economy of words, the rhythm of this biographical bloodline is broken, punctured, punctuated by women who disrupt and displace the predictable pace and pulse of patriarchy placing atypical, unexpected, surprising women at the center of the story. Jesus’ named grandmothers are not the matriarchs like Sarah or Hagar, Rebekah or Leah or Rachel, but instead Jesus’ grandmothers named here are those in danger, those outside the patriarchal line, those beyond the social norms of their day who disrupt the orderly administration of power and privileges and thus become symbols of scandal.
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.
Now I call this a messy history because if you look at the genealogy of people in the line of Jesus, you would see a rag tag group of ragamuffins and ne-er do wells who have stolen, murdered, lied, lusted, some worked in careers that were deemed questionable and destitute, and much more. But before you bring anybody out to the town square and say stone them, are we any better? We all in a sense live in this space of fragmentation, with cracks that dig deep into who we are, distorting our ability sometimes to live into our full selves. One of the things we talked about in this theology intensive I attended this week was the idea of the fall of humanity being seen in our need to differentiate and subjugate. A part of our messiness is our desire to uplift ourselves, but downplaying, or dehumanizing another.
Many have called Tamar’s tale scandalous. But focusing on the dicey details obscures the reason she might be included in Matthew’s version of Jesus genealogy: God will use what God will to accomplish God’s will. Tamar illustrates God’s definition of righteousness, which is concerned for the vulnerable. We see this unexpected kind of righteousness so often in Jesus' ministry we should expect it by now; Jesus talked with and ate with many whom society considers scandalous and unworthy. Jesus' righteousness is doubly inherited. First from his divine parent who cares for the least, the lost and the left out. And also from his grandmother Tamar, who shows us that God’s righteousness transcends our imperfect, human laws and systems. Righteousness is the trait passed through the bloodline of Jesus’ ancestry.
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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