Catching the Vision in Love
February 24, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-16
Today’s reading from the Gospel is the beginning, and just the beginning, to the long text from Matthew’s Gospel known as the “Sermon on the Mount”. The teaching covers the whole of chapters 5, 6 and 7 in Matthew’s Gospel, and many people consider it to be the fullest single exposition of the teachings of Jesus. Amazing enough, however, it almost never comes up in the lectionary. It is found in the lectionary only in Year A (remember, the calendar of readings is a three-year cycle – years A, B and C – we are currently in Year A). Easter can fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25. So this year, when it comes on March 23, it is almost at its earliest. If Easter is as late as it possibly can be, then before Lent begins, there would be six weeks when we would study the Sermon on the Mount. In order for this to happen, we have to have a late Easter (as we did two years ago) AND it has to be in Year A. Before I get us all terribly confused, let me just say this doesn’t happen very often. But it will happen in 2011, when Easter will be one day shy of the latest possible date, so we can all look forward to an in-depth study of the Sermon on the Mount then. In the meantime, I wanted to at least look at some of the central teachings of this collection, and also connect them to some related readings in the Old Testament – because, you may remember, I am convinced that the teachings of Jesus are not entirely new. What is new in the Gospel is the way Jesus pulls together these teachings into a coherent vision of life in God’s kingdom. The best way to experience these teachings is to read them all in one sitting – I actually thought about reading the whole passage today, instead of a sermon, but I wanted to go shorter today, and the sermon of Jesus is longer than my sermon. I have made copies of the entire Sermon on the Mount in the contemporary version I read from today. These are available on the back table – or you can email me and I’ll send it to you. Take 15 minutes and read it all – it’s a marvelous vision of the Kingdom.
For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is a present reality. Jesus, like some of the prophets in the Old Testament, particularly Jeremiah, was not so much teaching a prescription for life as a description of the world. He is trying to teach people to see the world differently – I’ve often called it, “seeing with Kingdom eyes”. When we see with Kingdom eyes, all other humans are our brothers and sisters. People other than Jesus have been able to see with Kingdom eyes: Mahatma Gandhi, Chief Seattle, Martin Luther King, the great Sufi mystics Rumi and Hafiz. These include Hindu, Native American, Christian and Muslim teachers. All of these are able to understand the world as rooted in love, a home for all creatures, where peaceful responses weave us together, with each other, and with a God who delights in us and desires our good.
Jesus is not telling us, in these opening verses, about things we should be doing to achieve such a world – he is telling us that this is the way the world is. God is blessing those who seem left behind by life. They are still cherished and honored by God. In ancient Israel, poor circumstances were often viewed as a punishment from God. So people who were poor, or whose loved ones had died, or who were on the outs with others, were viewed as people who were also on the outs with God – their misfortune was thought to be a result of their mistakes or at least, a result of bad karma, so to speak.
So when Jesus is saying that blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, to use the traditional language, he is telling us that these folks who are traditionally seen as losers outside the blessing of God, are in fact already being blessed by God – not because of their circumstances, but despite their circumstances.
Jesus is teaching that God isn’t a God we need to measure up to, but is a God who is pouring out immeasurable love, that we are living in a world that is already rich in blessing and goodness. And if we can learn to see and believe in this goodness, we will likely respond in goodness.
So many people tend to look at the world as a bad place, where their own standing is constantly at risk. When people look at themselves as losers, they tend to act like losers. When people understand themselves as cherished, they tend to act differently. There was an article in the Stevens Point Journal yesterday, I can’t remember who wrote it, but it was about Judge Fred Fleishauer, and who was just named the 2007 Judge of the Year by the Wisconsin State Bar Association. The article opened with a fascinating story of a recent case. The article reads “On a Friday afternoon in January, Judge Fred Fleishauer had just heard arguments from attorneys about how he should sentence a 31-year-old convicted of his seventh operating-while-intoxicated violation. After hearing the defendant tell Fleishauer he couldn't promise to stop drinking because he had broken too many promises in the past, Fleishauer said to the man, ‘You don't believe you're lovable and you've set out to prove that you're not. And I think you've got to accept the fact that you are lovable even at your worst moments, and if you come to that I think you could come to an acceptance of yourself that would allow you to make different choices.’ He later suggested the man read the book The Ragamuffin Gospel, written by a priest who is also a recovering alcoholic. He also sentenced him to six years imprisonment, the maximum sentence allowed by law.”
Fleishauer was giving the defendant the same message as Jesus gives in the Beatitudes – we are lovable even in our worst moments. We are already blessed. We are already loved. We are already chosen. And what does it mean to be chosen? Are we chosen instead of other people? No, we’re chosen FOR other people. Just as the people of Israel, so too for us. As Franciscan priest Richard Rohr puts it in his most recent book, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, “Only beloved people can pass on belovedness. If we do not understand election as ‘inclusive election’ (chosenness is for the sake of communicating the same to others), religion almost always becomes an exclusionary system against the ‘non-elect,’ ‘unworthy’ or ‘impure.’”
Remember, two weeks ago I recalled that in his baptism, Jesus heard that he was beloved, and then he was sent by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted and prepared for ministry. I described the temptation of Jesus in the desert as being all about his identity, and how being who he was would shape his ministry. I also said that the Sermon on the Mount would be teaching us about our identity, and likewise, our identity shapes our ministry.
God is already loving us, always loving us, all about loving us. And when we understand that, our actions are not the actions of people anxiously seeking God’s approval, they are the glad responses of people who know themselves to be loved.
And when we really get it at our core that God is all about love, and loving us, we don’t just analyze God the way a scientist understands an object, we seek to know God the way the beloved wants to know the lover. We are indeed called to be theologians, but our study is not disinterested, it is similar to the way we study the people and places in our lives that we love. We study them to know them. We love them with our minds.
Relationship is at the essence of who God is, so when people describe some dimensions of faith as mystery, it doesn’t mean that it’s something you’re just supposed to believe without understanding – mystery in this sense means that it cannot be understood through the mind alone, it must be understood through relationship. This is who the mystics are – people for whom the experience of God has shaped their knowing. And it is the same for us when we are in human relationships – our friendship or our love relationship with someone gives us a heart knowledge of them that cannot be fully explained outside of relationship. It is a different kind of knowing, a knowing in which we ourselves are also known.
So in that being known by God, our understanding of ourselves is different as well – this is what it really means to be “born again” (language I rarely use) – it means that we can cherish ourselves, care for ourselves, be secure in ourselves as people who are thoroughly loved, instead of being people who always have to worry about how we measure up in the world. We don’t need to measure up. And because we don’t need to measure up, we can spend our energy helping others to catch the vision of themselves as beloved, and of the world as a place of blessing. This is what it means to be salt and light – and we are already salt and light. We are told that we exist to bring out the flavors and colors of God in this delightful God-breathed world – that we are charged with the mission of helping others to see the world and themselves with Kingdom eyes.
When we begin to understand the teachings of Jesus, we finally understand that faith isn’t really defined by what we believe about God; it ends up teaching us what is most important about ourselves: we are blessed, we are beloved, we are salt and light, we are connected to all that is good and beautiful in this world of blessing, of love, and of goodness. And when the prophet Micah describes walking humbly with God, it means that we don’t end up determining who God is, we are learning from God who we are, and helping others to know themselves to be loved as well.
This is what it means to be the baptized – it means that before we are anything else, we are loved. It means that the central fact of our life is that we are cherished by the Creator; that the One who pronounced the world good, pronounces us blessed. Just as we are. Already and forever. All that is, just as it is, already the place of blessing. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-16
Today’s reading from the Gospel is the beginning, and just the beginning, to the long text from Matthew’s Gospel known as the “Sermon on the Mount”. The teaching covers the whole of chapters 5, 6 and 7 in Matthew’s Gospel, and many people consider it to be the fullest single exposition of the teachings of Jesus. Amazing enough, however, it almost never comes up in the lectionary. It is found in the lectionary only in Year A (remember, the calendar of readings is a three-year cycle – years A, B and C – we are currently in Year A). Easter can fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25. So this year, when it comes on March 23, it is almost at its earliest. If Easter is as late as it possibly can be, then before Lent begins, there would be six weeks when we would study the Sermon on the Mount. In order for this to happen, we have to have a late Easter (as we did two years ago) AND it has to be in Year A. Before I get us all terribly confused, let me just say this doesn’t happen very often. But it will happen in 2011, when Easter will be one day shy of the latest possible date, so we can all look forward to an in-depth study of the Sermon on the Mount then. In the meantime, I wanted to at least look at some of the central teachings of this collection, and also connect them to some related readings in the Old Testament – because, you may remember, I am convinced that the teachings of Jesus are not entirely new. What is new in the Gospel is the way Jesus pulls together these teachings into a coherent vision of life in God’s kingdom. The best way to experience these teachings is to read them all in one sitting – I actually thought about reading the whole passage today, instead of a sermon, but I wanted to go shorter today, and the sermon of Jesus is longer than my sermon. I have made copies of the entire Sermon on the Mount in the contemporary version I read from today. These are available on the back table – or you can email me and I’ll send it to you. Take 15 minutes and read it all – it’s a marvelous vision of the Kingdom.
For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is a present reality. Jesus, like some of the prophets in the Old Testament, particularly Jeremiah, was not so much teaching a prescription for life as a description of the world. He is trying to teach people to see the world differently – I’ve often called it, “seeing with Kingdom eyes”. When we see with Kingdom eyes, all other humans are our brothers and sisters. People other than Jesus have been able to see with Kingdom eyes: Mahatma Gandhi, Chief Seattle, Martin Luther King, the great Sufi mystics Rumi and Hafiz. These include Hindu, Native American, Christian and Muslim teachers. All of these are able to understand the world as rooted in love, a home for all creatures, where peaceful responses weave us together, with each other, and with a God who delights in us and desires our good.
Jesus is not telling us, in these opening verses, about things we should be doing to achieve such a world – he is telling us that this is the way the world is. God is blessing those who seem left behind by life. They are still cherished and honored by God. In ancient Israel, poor circumstances were often viewed as a punishment from God. So people who were poor, or whose loved ones had died, or who were on the outs with others, were viewed as people who were also on the outs with God – their misfortune was thought to be a result of their mistakes or at least, a result of bad karma, so to speak.
So when Jesus is saying that blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, to use the traditional language, he is telling us that these folks who are traditionally seen as losers outside the blessing of God, are in fact already being blessed by God – not because of their circumstances, but despite their circumstances.
Jesus is teaching that God isn’t a God we need to measure up to, but is a God who is pouring out immeasurable love, that we are living in a world that is already rich in blessing and goodness. And if we can learn to see and believe in this goodness, we will likely respond in goodness.
So many people tend to look at the world as a bad place, where their own standing is constantly at risk. When people look at themselves as losers, they tend to act like losers. When people understand themselves as cherished, they tend to act differently. There was an article in the Stevens Point Journal yesterday, I can’t remember who wrote it, but it was about Judge Fred Fleishauer, and who was just named the 2007 Judge of the Year by the Wisconsin State Bar Association. The article opened with a fascinating story of a recent case. The article reads “On a Friday afternoon in January, Judge Fred Fleishauer had just heard arguments from attorneys about how he should sentence a 31-year-old convicted of his seventh operating-while-intoxicated violation. After hearing the defendant tell Fleishauer he couldn't promise to stop drinking because he had broken too many promises in the past, Fleishauer said to the man, ‘You don't believe you're lovable and you've set out to prove that you're not. And I think you've got to accept the fact that you are lovable even at your worst moments, and if you come to that I think you could come to an acceptance of yourself that would allow you to make different choices.’ He later suggested the man read the book The Ragamuffin Gospel, written by a priest who is also a recovering alcoholic. He also sentenced him to six years imprisonment, the maximum sentence allowed by law.”
Fleishauer was giving the defendant the same message as Jesus gives in the Beatitudes – we are lovable even in our worst moments. We are already blessed. We are already loved. We are already chosen. And what does it mean to be chosen? Are we chosen instead of other people? No, we’re chosen FOR other people. Just as the people of Israel, so too for us. As Franciscan priest Richard Rohr puts it in his most recent book, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, “Only beloved people can pass on belovedness. If we do not understand election as ‘inclusive election’ (chosenness is for the sake of communicating the same to others), religion almost always becomes an exclusionary system against the ‘non-elect,’ ‘unworthy’ or ‘impure.’”
Remember, two weeks ago I recalled that in his baptism, Jesus heard that he was beloved, and then he was sent by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted and prepared for ministry. I described the temptation of Jesus in the desert as being all about his identity, and how being who he was would shape his ministry. I also said that the Sermon on the Mount would be teaching us about our identity, and likewise, our identity shapes our ministry.
God is already loving us, always loving us, all about loving us. And when we understand that, our actions are not the actions of people anxiously seeking God’s approval, they are the glad responses of people who know themselves to be loved.
And when we really get it at our core that God is all about love, and loving us, we don’t just analyze God the way a scientist understands an object, we seek to know God the way the beloved wants to know the lover. We are indeed called to be theologians, but our study is not disinterested, it is similar to the way we study the people and places in our lives that we love. We study them to know them. We love them with our minds.
Relationship is at the essence of who God is, so when people describe some dimensions of faith as mystery, it doesn’t mean that it’s something you’re just supposed to believe without understanding – mystery in this sense means that it cannot be understood through the mind alone, it must be understood through relationship. This is who the mystics are – people for whom the experience of God has shaped their knowing. And it is the same for us when we are in human relationships – our friendship or our love relationship with someone gives us a heart knowledge of them that cannot be fully explained outside of relationship. It is a different kind of knowing, a knowing in which we ourselves are also known.
So in that being known by God, our understanding of ourselves is different as well – this is what it really means to be “born again” (language I rarely use) – it means that we can cherish ourselves, care for ourselves, be secure in ourselves as people who are thoroughly loved, instead of being people who always have to worry about how we measure up in the world. We don’t need to measure up. And because we don’t need to measure up, we can spend our energy helping others to catch the vision of themselves as beloved, and of the world as a place of blessing. This is what it means to be salt and light – and we are already salt and light. We are told that we exist to bring out the flavors and colors of God in this delightful God-breathed world – that we are charged with the mission of helping others to see the world and themselves with Kingdom eyes.
When we begin to understand the teachings of Jesus, we finally understand that faith isn’t really defined by what we believe about God; it ends up teaching us what is most important about ourselves: we are blessed, we are beloved, we are salt and light, we are connected to all that is good and beautiful in this world of blessing, of love, and of goodness. And when the prophet Micah describes walking humbly with God, it means that we don’t end up determining who God is, we are learning from God who we are, and helping others to know themselves to be loved as well.
This is what it means to be the baptized – it means that before we are anything else, we are loved. It means that the central fact of our life is that we are cherished by the Creator; that the One who pronounced the world good, pronounces us blessed. Just as we are. Already and forever. All that is, just as it is, already the place of blessing. Amen.