4th Sunday after Epiphany

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We read a section from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians today in which he describes how very different God’s thinking is from that of the world. What God does seems to be foolish to most people. This applies most of all to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What kind of god in his right mind lets his son become a human being, and on top of that lets that son be killed in a painful and humiliating way? Foolish and strange indeed.

Just as foolish and strange are the beatitudes we hear in the gospel today. The title “Beatitudes” comes from the Latin word for blessing. And blessing Jesus does. This is the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, and he begins that sermon by blessing a number of groups of people - groups we would usually not consider blessed at all.

Jesus blesses the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the persecuted. We would never call people in such circumstances blessed. Even less would we call them happy, as some Bible translations have it. How could you be happy when you are hungry and thirsty and mourning? Nobody would look at a meek or persecuted person and think, “Now here is someone truly blessed!”

Would you ever go to a poor person and say, “Hey, you are poor. Good for you. I am sure you are happy.”? No way.

These blessings are also strange when we compare them to God’s will and God’s work in the world.

“Blessed are the poor, hungry, and thirsty.” And yet, God always admonishes the chosen people to share and to watch out for one another so nobody should be in need.

“Blessed are the persecuted.” Yet God is a God of justice who abhors persecution of any kind.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely.” Yet God hates slander and includes among the Ten Commandments the eighth rule: You shall not give false witness.

Puzzling, right? You can see how even the gospel writers try to make sense of this when you compare Matthew’s record of Jesus’ words with the way Luke records them. According to Luke, Jesus blesses the poor and hungry and weeping. In Matthew’s version, Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, and those hungering and thirsting for righteousness. It sounds like Matthew was trying to soften the strangeness of these blessings.

All this made me curious as to what it actually means to be blessed. When Jesus says, “Blessed are you,” what exactly is he expressing?

One explanation that I found very helpful pointed out that being pronounced blessed is something that comes to us from beyond ourselves. We have some control over whether or not we feel happy. How we let things affect our mood is something we can influence.

But whether or not we are considered blessed, honored, treasured in the sight of someone else, we cannot control. Blessing is given to us. Someone else gives it to us.

In the times of the Old Testament and into the years when Jesus walked the earth, people always tried to figure out whom God liked and whom God didn’t like. The main predictor seemed to be how a person’s life was going. If your business flourished and your marriage was stable and you were healthy and your kids developed in a way that made you proud, well, then God must clearly love you. You were blessed.

If you struggled or were sick, then God must have withdrawn his blessing from you, probably because you did something that made God angry. Therefore, those who were sick were judged unfit for God’s presence and not allowed into the temple.

The people in Jesus’ day would have considered the folks he talks about, the poor, meek, hungry, thirsty, mourning, etc., as judged and punished by God. Somehow, they had failed God and now look at how their lives had turned out.

Now Jesus is calling these very same people blessed? Jesus is looking at these folks on the lower rungs of society’s totem pole and is bringing God’s word of honor and love to them? This is radical.

We might be cynical and point out that Jesus is just talking here. Nothing is changing in the lives of the poor and hungry and persecuted. Jesus is just telling them they are blessed without doing anything to make their lives better.

But then we would be missing the power of words. Just how amazing it is to be called blessed when everyone else has written you off as a failure, was brought home to me by the presentation on human trafficking we had here at Calvary a couple of years ago.

Our member Beth Halley worked for a faith-based shelter for women who have been trafficked. She shared with us what she has learned over the years about how women get ensnared by traffickers, how they get abused, and what that does to their souls.

These women are removed from their home environments, often from their country of origin. They are held captive, either physically or through manipulation and mind control. Through means like isolation, lack of food, violence, or drugs, the women’s sense of self and self-preservation is broken down. Once they have been diminished like that, they are exploited, mostly sexually. People will do things to them and say things to them they wouldn’t dream of doing or saying to people they respect.

One item in the presentation that impressed me was a succession of face images of women, showing how they changed during their time of abuse. You could just see their personality vanishing and their light slowly dimming. No self-respect or self-value remain.

When a woman like this arrives at The Samaritan Woman shelter, she is welcomed with words of love and support and acceptance. She is valued as a person. For the first time in ages, someone sees her as a person, a real person, a person with feelings, a person with rights, a person due respect.

For months and years, she has been treated like an object. Now someone speaks kind words to her and tells her she matters. Just words. And yet they make a world of a difference. They open her soul and revive her spirit. They give a glimmer of hope for a better future. They allow her to believe in herself again and dream again. They allow the healing to begin.

All because someone has approached her from the outside and named her valued, honored, beloved, blessed. Just words, but her world has changed.

The poor and hungry, meek and thirsty, persecuted and mourning Jesus blesses experience the same powerful shift. In Jesus, God sees them as real people, valued people, people that matter to God. That day on the mountain side, their world shifts. Jesus’ blessings allow them to dream and to believe and to see themselves with respect. They go home a bit taller, with a bit of bounce in their step. Just words, but with these words Jesus affirms them and allows them to see themselves differently, see themselves through God’s eyes, and to begin the healing.

When we come for worship, we hear God’s voice of blessing. Every time we confess our sins and then hear Jesus’ forgiving words; every time we carry deep regret or heavy burdens and then hear God inviting us to the table of grace; every time the world tells us we are losers and then we hear God calling us beloved sons and daughters, we get to experience the power of blessing words.

And every time we call someone else blessed, we let them experience just how good and powerful and lifegiving such words are.

Whatever your lives look like, listen to Jesus’ words: blessed are you, beloved of God. Amen.