2023-01-30
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
January 29, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Matthew 5:1-12 The Federated Church, UCC
If you sneeze, I am reflexively going to respond, “Bless you” or “God bless you.” I can’t help myself. And maybe you can’t either. Or maybe you say “Gesundheit,” which, of course, is German for “health.” In either case, we’re sending out best wishes to the person. “Bless you.”
The trouble is, the word “blessing” has become so commonplace, so rote, that we often have no real sense of the deep significance of that response. We say those words out of habit, and I suspect we often fail to remember that something precious is, our could be, happening when we say those words. In a blessing, we’re offering something to the person, and it’s more than just empty words. It’s a gift of the highest order.
As Matthew tells the story of Jesus, after Jesus has been baptized and tempted by the devil, after he invites people whom we now call disciples to join him on his journey, he then comes to a moment when he begins to teach them what it is to be a follower of Jesus. You can maybe picture him trudging up a mountain, perhaps just to get away from the crowds, but likely, too, because, by going up a mountain, he takes on the mantle of his predecessor Moses, who also climbed a mountain at a crucial juncture of his life, that pivotal moment on Mt. Sinai when the Ten Commandments were delivered to him by God.
So there Jesus is on this unnamed mountain with some of his closest followers. He sits down, which is what teachers of his time do, and he begins this riveting, searing, transforming sermon of his on the hillside. Some of you will remember that sermon as not for the faint-hearted, as virtually singeing your eyebrows off with its uncompromising demands and bracing ardor. We’ll hear various parts of that sermon in coming weeks, so I’ve done my due diligence and you are now forewarned!
Given the unbending expectations and apparent rigidity of the sermon that’s to come, it’s striking, then, to take in the way it begins. Its very first word? “Jesus taught them, saying, ‘Blessed’” (5:2-3). Nine times in a row, he begins a sentence with that word: “Blessed.” And if you’ve been a longtime churchgoer, you may just possibly yawn or go over your shopping list in your head as you’re lulled into a soporific stupor: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, blessing, blessing, blessing. Heard it a thousand times. Not sure what it has to do with me. What else you got?’
As dulled to their force as we may be by untold repetition, there is still something about these words that may work its way into us like an earworm and prick us with something crucial that we’d forgotten.
You know what our world is like, and what our lives are like. We’re stunned and dismayed this past week by three mass shootings in California—how can this possibly keep happening without our changing something to stave off such atrocities? Then come the videos of police in Memphis killing yet another young Black man, Tyre Nichols—how can this happen yet again? Here a worker is treated by their boss with utter disdain. There a household is frozen by contempt and derision. A man’s retirement years are filled with an unanticipated boredom. A woman’s best friend has somehow ghosted her—no contact, no explanation.
You certainly don’t have to look far to see barren personal deserts of loneliness and tension and sometimes explosive violence. And on a wider scale, it’s all-too-evident how strained our communities are by violence and racism and resentment and callousness and war. Again and again, blessing eludes us in the cauldron of fierce competition, the quagmire of unrestrained ego-exertion, the too-often willful disregard of the wholeness and well-being of people different from us. The depravity and decadence of our world can be utterly wearying.
And it’s into this that Jesus speaks his famed sermon: Blessed are, blessed are, blessed are. And maybe for this moment we can let those words into our hearts for the delicious dessert that they are. These are words that make happen what they say is going to happen. This may be more grammatically technical than some of you would care for, but this is what’s called “performative” language, meaning the words themselves bring into being what they are talking about. A vivid example of performative language is an umpire’s call in a baseball game. When the umpire says “out” or “safe,” it’s that word that establishes the reality. Or in a wedding, when the couple says, “I take you to be my spouse,” the marriage happens. Those words establish a new reality. So also when Jesus says “Blessed are . . .,” his words make true what he says. The people he mentions are blessed precisely because he says so. That doesn’t mean that everything in their lives is suddenly made right. It simply means that, in whatever struggle or challenge they may find themselves, they are also embraced by God in blessing, in favor, in care.
Blessing someone is, in some ways, like laughing at their jokes. If I laugh at your jokes you will likely feel funnier. Laughing at your jokes gives you a lift. It creates a joyful energy. The same is true when we bless someone. The very act of offering a blessing lifts both the blesser and the blessed. It brings a lightness to our step. Years ago, I came into this pulpit one Sunday morning, and there in front of me was a piece of paper saying, “Good morning, Hamilton. You are loved. Always know that.” I bet that made me a better preacher that morning. It was a form of blessing that reminded me who I really am.
It’s crucial to note that Jesus’ blessings are not telling us what to do. To go back to grammar for a moment, these verbs are not in the imperative mood—“you should,” or “you must.” They’re in the indicative mood—“you already are.” There’s a world of difference between those two kinds of sentence. Jesus isn’t instructing anyone how to act. He’s saying: “This is what you are, now, without doing anything. You are blessed. You can’t possibly change that. Period. End of story.”
So the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount isn’t trying to change us or make us better or shape us into something we’re not. It’s simply reassuring us that, in the eyes of God, we are spectacular successes as human beings—already, even now, and not possibly changeable. So take it in. Get used to it. This is who you are: Beloved of God. Blessed.
And those nine blessings cover all manner of human life. Some of the blessings are for people who are struggling with something: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, people who are persecuted. Again, this is a sign that Jesus isn’t here telling people what to do—who wants to be poor in spirit or to mourn or to be persecuted. Others are blessed for a particular quality of their personality: they’re meek, perhaps, or are possessed of pure hearts—again, not something in their control. And finally some are blessed in what they do: those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who are merciful, who struggle for peace. These are things we could, of course, try to do. And truth be told, the world will be a better place if we do. But what Jesus is doing here in these Beatitudes is simply saying that the ones who strive for such virtue are already blessed. And if we take that in, we will know how crucial blessing each other is—as parents, as children, as friends, as colleagues, as this church family.
We know blessing when we see it, don’t we. Blessing happens in the fraught society in which we live, sometimes in surprising ways. Nikole Hannah-Jones led the groundbreaking New York Times 1619 Project, which put a spotlight on the role slavery has played in this country, and revealed how that travesty has formed this nation in often cruel and painful and heinous ways. As part of a recently-produced video version of the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones talked to a man named MacArthur Cotton, “who was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student-led civil rights organization in the 1960s. He dropped out of college to democratize America. He [went] to prison for trying to register voters, where he was tortured—strung up by his wrists until he defecated on himself. He said the only thing that saved his life was that there was a group visiting the prison that day. I got emotional hearing that story and said, ‘I’m sorry that you had to go through that.’ And he was like, ‘Don’t be sorry. This is what we had to do’” (New York Times, The Morning, Jan. 26, 2023). MacArthur Cotton is blessed as a peacemaker, as one who has hungered and thirsted for righteousness. And maybe we’d like to be like that, too.
Hody Childress was a retired farmer in a small town in Alabama. In his retirement, he lived off his meager savings and social security. On the first day of every month, he would fold up a $100 bill and take it to the local pharmacist. He did this for years, until illness finally prevented him from getting to the pharmacy. Childress told the pharmacist he wanted her to help families who couldn’t afford to pay for their medications. “He said, ‘Don’t tell a soul where the money came from—if they ask, just tell them it’s a blessing from the Lord.’” When he died a few weeks ago, his daughter let the community know what he had been doing, and they were stunned. At his funeral, numerous people told about what his help had meant to them. The pharmacist recalled a time “when a single mom and her daughter both needed a medication that their insurance didn’t cover. When [the pharmacist] paid for the medicine out of Childress’s fund and handed the woman the prescription with the [paid] receipt attached, . . . the woman burst into tears. She came back several months later and asked to pay it forward” said the pharmacist, adding, “I believe that Hody sparked that in her heart” (The Plain Dealer, Jan. 27, 2023, p. A13). “Blessed are the merciful,” said Jesus (5:7). And maybe we’d like to be like that, too.
The blessings of God are for unsung giants of the faith like Hody Childress and MacArthur Cotton. And the blessings of God are for the little-known saints who relay that blessing to us in everyday ways. I learn a lot from my granddaughter, Allie, who turned five on Friday, and Mary and I celebrated her birthday with her. A few weeks ago, still four at the time, her sister Riley, two-and-a-half, was struck suddenly with an ear infection. So as our son Alex was driving Allie to preschool, he was somewhat distracted and irritable because the trip he now needed to make to the doctor’s office was going to throw off his entire day. Allie picked up on her father’s irritation and said, “Daddy, are you mad?” Alex, in a model of honest accountability, said, “Honey, I’m not mad at you. And I’m not mad at Riley. But yes, I’m frustrated that my whole day is now up in the air.” And Allie, without missing a beat, said, “Daddy, I think you need a little time to yourself. So tonight, after dinner, the girls are going to watch a movie. And you’re going to go upstairs and have some quiet time. We all need time to ourselves,” she said. Perceptive as she could be, Allie had blessed her father with just what he needed—a little time to breathe and recover and take in some peace. She blessed her father. And maybe you and I would like to be like that, too.
Yes, the word “blessing” may seem somewhat old-fashioned and out of style. Maybe it doesn’t mean much to us. I’m convinced, though, that taking in the blessing of God for us, and conveying that blessing to each other is maybe the greatest gift we can give each other and maybe the single biggest thing we can do to remake the world. Especially when we bless those we have dismissed, or ignored, or despised. So I’m going to provide a moment now for us to bless each other. Turn to each other in the pews, and perhaps those behind you and in front of you. Look them in the eye—your spouse, your child or parent, the maybe marvelous, maybe irritating person sitting next to you, and say: You are blessed just as you are.
God has blessed us beyond belief. Take that in. Revel in it. And knowing how restorative that is, how deeply healing it is, may we be agents of blessing and healing for each other, now and always. For this is who God is. And it is ultimately who we are made to be. God has blessed you and me just as we are. And maybe we’d like to be like that, too.