You Are Blessed...

Today I did the service at Good Shepherd Lutheran - Episcopal Church in Galax Va. It is a lovely church built in 2006. The people, the music and those who assisted with the service all made it a wonderful morning. I preached on the gospel lesson from Matthew 5 - the Sermon on the Mount. Part of the sermon follows:

The teaching that Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount is foundational to our lives as Christians. Perhaps the very first thing we notice about this teaching is that there are no shoulds or oughts; no thou shalt or shalt not. The language of the Beatitudes and today's teaching is NOT about a transaction with us: if you do this you will receive that; or if you do that, you will receive this. Instead the language used here is descriptive language. It describes who WE are and who Jesus is.

You are God’s children, says Jesus; you are peacemakers. You are salt – you give the world a different flavor; you are light. You see God; your heart is pure. 

This is not the language of the OT law, this is the language of the new age – the Kingdom of God. It is the gospel, literally the good news! This is the good news of hope and promise that the way things are now is not the way they will always be. Those who find themselves at the back of the bus now; they will be sitting in first class as the journey continues. Jesus is saying "open up to who you are." Climb up to the housetop…let your light shine. This is the Olympic podium and you are always a gold medalist to God!

In the 17th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles Paul and Silas are shinning their light in Thessolonica. They are preaching…perhaps even repeating Jesus' words in the SOM. A riot breaks out because of the radical implication of their preaching. The townspeople complain to the authorities saying: "these people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also." And they are right: the good news of the radical, subversive preacher Jesus turns us upside down. This good news stands us on our heads so that we can't see the world in the same way. "Upside down we can't be sure anymore who are the winners and who are the losers." (Barbara Brown Taylor)

Last week we learned about the death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. I liked Hoffman as an actor although I didn’t always like the people he played. Hoffman was baptized and confirmed in the RC church as a child. He became addicted to drugs in his teenage years but managed to get clean; he relapsed as an adult and went through rehab last year. He died from an overdose to heroin. At his funeral  James Martin, a Jesuit priest who worked with Hoffman as an advisor when he played a priest in the movie “Doubt”  said that Hoffman called himself a” believer” even though he rarely attended Mass. Martin said that Hoffman described Jesus with admiration for being an outcast who was “unwieldy” and caused “havoc”. Reading this story made me wonder if we “dumb down” Jesus portraying him only as Jesus meek and mild. Turning the world upside down means shaking things up…not just shaking a little salt out once in a while. It means turning a flood light on injustice, not just risking our penlight when we feel courageous.

A wonderful Italian saint, Catherine of Siena said, "All the way to heaven is heaven…'" God's kingdom unfolds like a flower in us. Tasting heaven along the way, we hunger, we thirst to become all that God tells us we are…for we are those who mourn and you are those who show mercy. You are those who are meek, your hearts open to God and we are peace makers. You are misunderstood and we feel your sense of persecution.  You are salt and light and we are on our way seeing heaven, longing for home but ready to turn the world upside down one more time.