The happy poor
Matt 5: 1 – 12
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 21 June, 2003

“FOR ME, Christianity is living by the Sermon on the Mount.” You've met people who say that, haven’t you? Is this an adequate view of what Christianity is about?
  Of course, the Sermon on the Mount is foundational to Christianity. As Moses went up Sinai and brought down the Ten Commandments, Jesus sat on his mountain and gave the people eight great principles, foundation standards for God’s Kingdom.

  But I suspect that people who say they live by the Beatitudes have never really read them. Do they think it's enough to take just one of the Beatitudes and live by it, and leave someone else to attend to the others? “I’ll be a peacemaker. Once I even got my brothers to stop arguing. Someone else can be meek — I don't like that one at all.”

  This is not a menu, it’s a sermon. You take a sermon whole or not at all. You don’t tell God, ”I’ll take purity of heart,” and God calls back, “Do you want that well done or rare?”

  Jesus says that a Kingdom person will be poor in spirit, will mourn over wickedness, will be meek, hungry for everything to be right, merciful, pure in heart, a peacemaker  and someone persecuted for the gospel.
  We won’t each be equally good at those things. Butt we all know and acknowledge that together they are all what being a Kingdom person is about.
  What a travesty, to be a peacemaker with no thought for putting things right, or a meek person, except when suffering threatens!

  It's like St Augustine of Hippo, who once prayed, “Lord, grant me chastity — but not just yet!” You can't pull in two opposite directions. These beatitudes belong together.

  In the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, there’s a scene among people right on the edge of the crowd which came to hear Jesus, and they can barely hear him at such a distance. They are saying to each other, “What was that he just said?” and someone says, “I think he said, “Blessed are the Greek.” Someone else says, “That’s typical! The Greeks always get everything, and the rest of us get nothing!”

  Make sure to listen carefully and accurately to what the Bible says to us.

  People would have been gobsmacked by this sermon. We know it well enough that we don't flinch when we hear it, but not well enough to live it out.
  I’m sure people flinched when they first heard it. Each of these eight statements promises unprecedented rewards to unexpected kinds of people in incredible ways. Today we are looking at the first of these unprecedented rewards, who receives it, and in what way.
  Jesus challenged people to rethink their entire understanding of God. These are not words of comfort, but of confrontation. They ask us to think, “What is God really like?”

BLESSED ARE...
  Each saying opens with the words, “Blessed are...” It then defines the people who are blessed, and finally explains why.
  The Greek is very simple. It just says, “Blessed the poor in spirit...” It is really more of an exclamation than a statement. It’s as though Jesus is saying, “This is exciting! How blessed are these people!”
  There are two different kinds of blessedness in Greek. The common word is evlogitos. It has three basic parts. Ev is a prefix meaning “good.” To evangellion is the good angellion, the good news or good announcement. Evthanasia — we say, euthanasia, is good thanatos, good death. Ev means good. Log– comes from logos, meaning a word. So there you have evlog- meaning good word. Then there’s -itos, which is very like our ending -ed, but it has an -os added to it. So the whole word, evlogitos, means good worded.

  You remember how Jacob and Esau struggled and contended over the birthright. They were twins, and each of them wanted Isaac’s blessing, where Isaac would lay his hand on the head of one of them and say, “You are my appointed successor: you will inherit the elder son’s share of the property.” It was always a good word when the old farmer said, “You inherit the farm, kid! Good luck!"

  You know that the past couple of weeks have been pretty dire. My father was in and out of hospital and is back again, this time permanently. You know Chris has been in hospital since last Saturday night, and lost a toe to diabetes.
  Some people who asked me about Chris asked because they wanted information. Some asked me because they felt it was their responsibility. Some asked because they like me, and wanted to show an interest.

  Fiona, at work, isn’t the first to come up and ask how things are going. But, when she came and asked, in one of those quiet periods when there weren’t too many people around, she did a really good job. She was very understanding, and reflected the feelings back well. She is one of those people who understand and care.
  I've noticed her doing the same kind of thing before. So I wrote her an e-mail saying that I had appreciated how she did it and that she did it, and remarking that she had done it before. I said she should develop the skill and use it more widely.
  That is an affirmation, which she appreciated. But it is also a blessing, an evlogos. She was evlogitos when I sent her the e-mail, I blessed her.

  Do you see how it works? I give to you. I am in the superior position, you are in the inferior position. And, if you bless me, then I am in the inferior position and you become superior. In that instance, Fiona is superior to me in rank in the office, but was inferior to me in terms of my experience of pastoral care.

  But Jesus says there is more. We are not evlogitos if we are Kingdom people. We are makarios.
  This is a rare word in Biblical Greek. It really comes from Classical Greek, from the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus. Down on earth, people labour and sweat and die. Men die at around 50, mainly from the effects of injuries during wars and while doing their work. Women die in their forties, due to the destruction of their bodies through giving birth ten to twelve times. Children die of appendicitis; pneumonia kills hundreds each winter. Crops fail and people starve. Life is nasty, brutish and short.
  Things are much better on Mount Olympus. They are the immortals. Their crops never fail. They have wine and milk and honey whenever they please. They live in bliss. They don't have to wait for someone else to bless them. They have their own blessedness. They are oi makarioi, the blessed ones.

  That’s the kind of blessedness that we Kingdom people are meant to enjoy, according to Jesus. Not a hand-me-down from God, but the same quality of blessedness that God himself has.
  It might make it clear if we say that the normal word in the Bible is blessed, but here Jesus says the poor in spirit are blissful, filled with blessing.

  If a rich man blesses me, he might give me 10c and say, “Here! Be happy and fulfilled!” It’s a blessing of a sort. I have become evlogitos. But if I have the same quality of blissfulness that he has, I have enough of what he possesses to support the same quality of life that he has. I become makarios.

THE POOR IN SPIRIT...
  Just about every religion honours and values the spiritually rich. In fact, most religions value riches in general. This is false religion. True Biblical Christianity is different.

  When we were working with Muslim families, we noticed that the mosque was not very interested in poor Muslims. This was not because they wanted money and didn't think they got value from poor people. In fact, Islam considers it a considerable virtue and a means of generating merit to give generously to the poor. The reason was more subtle. If they were poor, then Allah was not blessing them. And, if Allah was not blessing them, then they must be spiritually poor or weak. And who can fix that? They are semi-Kaffirs.

  Exactly the same attitude is found in some forms of Calvinism. Wherever people do not have a sense of enjoying God’s blessedness, they try to set up a standard for themselves. Capitalism gained its earliest strength among northern European Calvinists who believed you can’t really tell if you are of the elect until the Day of Judgment. But, if they could make themselves rich — and Capitalism encourages some people to get very rich — if they could get rich, they told themselves, “This is a sign that God is blessing me, so I must be one of the Elect!” I don’t know why they mucked around with banks and factories and all those kinds of things. Why not just rob an ATM? Then you’d be rich, so you’d have to be blessed!

  And we tend to think the same way about the spiritually rich. People who know their Bibles, who are consistent in their spiritual devotions, who can speak as though they play golf with God each Saturday — they must be blessed in a special way.

  So we find the temple full of praying Pharisees telling themselves that God must love them because they are not like other men. But who is it that experiences God’s blessing? The miserable tax gatherer who prays with downcast eyes, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
  This man was spiritually empty, and he knew it. That is the start of true blessedness.

  When you try to pray and can’t —
  When you read the Bible but it goes in one eye and out wherever without touching anything on the way —
  When you look back on your life and everything you have tried to build as a Christian is a crumbling heap of ruins —
  When your family is in tatters —

    — that’s when you turn to God and say, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” You don’t come, telling him what you deserve because of all your achievements. You don’t come claiming any special relationship, because it is long gone. You come

...just as thou art, without one plea
but that Christ’s blood was shed for thee
and that he bids thee, “come to me!”

  And that is where you begin to find the inner bliss that comes only through the indwelling Spirit of Christ.

THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
  Bliss is a very difficult thing to define. I think it was Augustine again who remarked that we can’t really define God, we can only specify what he is not. And it’s similar with God’s quality of blessedness.

  Never fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible means the same thing by “bliss” as what, say, a Buddhist means. In many religions, bliss means an almost anaesthetic state, where nothing touches you, you are totally lifted out of the world and immune to its clamour. No temptation can befall you, because you feel nothing. Some religions even take that one step further and use drugs to achieve something like that state.If that’s what you want, take pethedine!

  Other religions seek a state of ecstasy, to be so absorbed by God’s presence that they have eyes only for him. I have experienced that, and it is very pleasant to spend that kind of time in the Lord’s presence. 

  But that is not the blessedness Jesus means, because it is impermanent, intermittent and unpredictable. It might last a minute or hours or even several days, but eventually it fades. It might come today and not again for weeks or months or years. You don’t know when you might have an experience like that. There are no warnings. Some never have such an experience.

  Jesus says that this bliss is to do with possessing the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Anything which hinges on feelings or emotional states is nice, but unreliable.
  Miss Prim and Proper might get very snuggly at a party and feel that she really does love the man she walks to the door, but we all know that alcohol reduces inhibitions and mucks hormones around, and next morning she’ll just feel embarrassed that she was so unguarded.

  It’s the same with religion. Religious feelings might be as pleasant as falling in love, but, when you boil it all down, it’s all about endorphins and adrenalin and serotonin. They are the accidents of religion, not ths substance.

  But when you come, stripped of pretence, a failure, poor in spirit —  
    when you find, on the authority of God’s word, that you are acceptable in the Kingdom —
    when you know through the Bible’s promises that you don’t get in on merit, but you get in by grace —
    — then you have a basis for a sense of well-being that does not depend on feelings.

  When our boys were little, I took them across Lake Macquarie in a canoe. I knew the lake is dangerous if the wind blows up, and, sure enough, I was about 80% of the way across when it got windy and choppy, and I struggled to row and keep the boat headed in the right direction.
  I was afraid. But I knew that we all had flotation gear, and I knew that I had planned the trip to make it as safe as possible, and I knew that someone would look for me in a power boat if I didn’t arrive within 15 minutes of my scheduled time, and I knew that I might not make it to where I was going, but I could certainly make land somewhere unless the storm got really bad.
  So my fear was real, but my assurances were also very real. I didn't start singing If you're saved and you know it,  and clapping, because all those facts didn’t stop the adrenalin from flowing and making me feel  afraid; but I kept rowing hard, because I had a confidence that I would make it in the end.

  And I know that I am spiritually impoverished, but I know that I will make it in the end, because the Kingdom of Heaven is mine; I belong there; and I’m going to keep rowing until I reach the other shore!

  Are you going to come with me to that land? I pray you will — by faith, from beginning to end.
AMEN