I received a request this morning to begin publishing my sermons, again. As you can tell from the date of this post, and the date of the last, I've not been posting!
So, I'll do some going back and posting previous sermons.
The lessons on which I preached today for Epiphany IV:
Micah 6: 1 - 8 (RCL)
Ps 15
1 Corinthians 1: 18 - 31
Matthew 5: 1 - 12
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
We all have our preferences for how sermons should sound. We all have a notion about what makes a good sermon, a bad sermon, a forgettable sermon, a sermon we’ll always remember. We certainly have an idea of how long a sermon should be.
When taking courses on homiletics, on the study of preaching, my instructor gave us the charge: tell them what you want to say, then tell them again, then remind them what you just told them. The rest is just details.
So, during His Sermon on the Mount, how does Jesus do? He gives us what are commonly called the Beautitudes, from the Latin word for blessing. He gives us a list of nine statements, all beginning with “Blessed are, etc, etc.” If I were back in my homiletics class, and my homework sermon was a list of nine statements, my instructor likely would not have been very pleased with my content.
So, why do the Beautitudes have such a prime role in the Christian life and common memory, if they weren’t the most shining example of a sermon? It may be that the statements are all simple affirmations of what virtue looks like. Simple statements, though not easy statements. They teach that being poor in spirit, that’s a praiseworthy thing. If you’re poor in spirit, then the Kingdom belongs to you. And being meek, that’s a good thing too. That’s something to imitate, something to praise, something to tell your kids, “Now look at that meek little old lady over there, Sam. Shouldn’t you be, maybe, a little bit more meek like her?” The Beautitudes hold a straightforward, check-off-the-list summary of moral behavior. They are simple and ever so hard to fulfill.
And, sometimes, when we find difficult or challenging phrases in Scripture, we employ a very skillful little trick to take a tough thing and make it into a do-able thing. We make it an allegory! We may say, well, it sounds lovely and all to be pure in heart, but surely, Christ didn’t mean actually pure in heart, but more like pur-ish in my general heart area, or less than filthy in things that resemble my heart. I can do that! I can be not filthy. Great! I’m good at this! Look at me being all pure in heart…I’ve got this one nailed down, what’s the next Beautitude?
The Monty Python movie The Life of Brian ironically picks on the Church for its ability to water down or change the Beautitudes into something less challenging than the original words of Christ. In the movie, the Sermon on the Mount is attended by a very large number of listeners, and those in the back who arrived a bit late are straining to hear exactly what Christ is saying in His sermon. In fact, they can barely catch anything of what’s being preached. A husband and wife are on the fringes, and are only catching parts of the Beautitudes. The husband can’t quite catch what’s been said, and turns to the man next to him, asking what he heard. The spectator responds: I think it was "Blessed are the cheesemakers". The wife scoffs: Aha, what's so special about the cheesemakers? To which her husband rolls his eyes and replies: Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
The Beautitudes are neither meant to be watered down and rendered powerless by wan allegories nor are they intended to exclude. We might rightly ask: if I’m not meek, am I not blessed, What if I’m not yet poor in spirit, or don’t see how I can be a peacemaker, what if I’m angry and don’t want to mourn or am struggling with thirsting for righteousness? Am I not good enough yet? Am I not blessed?
But the entire Sermon on the Mount and the thrust of the Beautitudes is to show the variety and multiplicity of blessedness in the world. Not just you mourners are blessed and not just you the poor in spirit are blessed. Blessings surround us all, blessings, unique and wonderful are available to each of us, to all of us. Grace is not reduced once it is given; there’s no large stainless steel vat of grace in the heavens, and each meek person reduces the total grace available for everyone else. We do not live in a universe of poverty, of austerity, of limited resources. Grace and the God who bestows it overflows boundaries, divisions, and quantities. His grace, his blessedness is an all-flowing stream that cannot dry up, that cannot be exhausted.
The Beautitudes should drive us to reflect on the grace and blessedness that surrounds us and enfolds the days and moments of our lives. That grace can be hard to see, challenging to smell, elusive to taste. We rely so heavily on our senses to inform us of our surroundings, and grace isn’t easily picked up by our senses. We need to look for its trail, instead, like the wake of a boat that laps across a lake.
The Lord who gives us grace, who gives grace to the meek and the poor in spirit, to the mourning and to the merciful is the same Lord who walked the roads of dusty Galilee and who strode the Milky Way in the moments of the deafening boom of the Universe’s birth. That same Lord, with whom the prophet Micah this morning reminds us we also should walk humbly, is the God who knows each of us by name, knows who among us mourns, who among us thirsts for righteousness, who among us is poor in spirit. That Lord who gives grace to us gives it in ways that leave a trail, and whose wake we can feel lapping along the shores of our souls.
Given to us as examples of those who thirsted for righteousness is a saint whose death we commemorate today. His example of a life as a Beautitude can still inspire us and our lives. On this day, the 30th of January, 1649, innocent blood was spilled because of political, social, and religious strife, and the life that was taken was made forfeit because of a refusal to confess that the Church and its Sacraments were unimportant, that its bishops were useless, that its mysteries were superstition. We honor today the life and the death of Charles, King and Martyr. The veneration of St. Charles centers around not only the holiness of his life, but his unswerving refusal to accept that the Church could abandon the Mysteries it had received, his refusal to say that he did not know it to be true that grace leaves a wake, and that its waves could be felt, rising and falling across his soul. He is called martyr, a man who gave his life for the faith. Martyr was the word used when the Church still spoke only Greek, and means witness. Charles, King and martyr, witness to the life of grace, that Christ still blesses the poor in spirit, still blesses those who are reviled and persecuted for His sake.
In the very back of your Book of Common Prayer (look later, after the sermon, or else you’ll get distracted, and I’ll never get you back!) in the Catechism is a description that is so earth-shattering and at the same time so mundane that we forget about the awesome beauty of it. The Catechism asks: What are the Sacraments? It then answers: The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. The Cosmic Christ who shoved the planets into their orbits and who gives a kingdom to the poor in spirit packages grace in outward and visible signs. Christ folds his very self into Sacraments, in the same way that God Himself was folded into a squirming infant. The Sacraments are our Bethlehem.
The Church number seven sacraments, but truly they are as innumerable as the stars. Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony, Anointing of the Dying, giving someone your parking spot: these are all visible and outward signs of an inward spiritual grace, these all birth the Christ into our world, into our hearts. All human life is enmeshed in grace, all human experiences are sacramental. Doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly with your God, these are Sacraments, these are sure and certain means that we receive Christ’s grace, these are Beautitudes.
All around us we see visible signs of inward and spiritual grace: the smile of a teacher outwardly shows love, shows a child that she is important, that her name is known, that she does not walk a path alone. A candle lit and a prayer murmured show that the dead are not forgotten, are not lost, but are merely changed, that an elderly parent who no longer remembers his daughter’s face is connected still to his family by the one who created us all. A wedding ring is an outward symbol of a spiritual bond of promises made, vows given that no longer would the journey of life be undertaken alone. The laying on of hands points to the sending of the Holy Spirit on a new deacon, on a new priest, and in a few months, on a new bishop. Infants in baptismal gowns show innocence, purity, mystical waters which purify. In all of these, outward signs show that the face of Christ is hovering.
Our liturgy here on Sundays, the work in pew, in stall, in pulpit, at altar, at rail is a composite of outward signs and inward grace. We come together on Sunday morning to learn what Sacraments look like, to receive the Sacraments together. Then, the deacon sends you out. Sends you out with the instruction: Go! Go out and do Sacraments! Go out and bring Christ and His grace into the world through visible and tangible ways. Go shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk, go volunteer at the soup kitchen, go visit a shut-in, go and pray for your parish. Go bring Christ into the world through your actions and words, go perpetuate the Sacraments we unfold here on Sunday mornings and continue those Sacred Mysteries in your lives and work and leisure for the rest of the week. And then come back on Sunday and tell us how you did it! Tell us how the Christ Child was born again in your heart, how your actions, your prayers, the actions and prayers of others made a new Bethlehem. Come and share with us how you, like Mary, said yes to God and brought forth into the world the very Light of Heaven, the Alpha and Omega, the God who blesses the poor in spirit.
Go and be martyrs, be witnesses, that Christ has been born for you. Go and bring Bethlehem to the world.
Amen
