Micah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12
For thousands of years, God has been trying to teach us how to live in community. I begin with a few examples:
First, God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve, and gave them one simple rule: don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But they did, with the encouragement of the serpent and their own curiosity.
Later, God said, over and over again to Abraham, trust me. I will give you land, and offspring, and recognition. It took 25 years, but finally, Isaac was born.
Then, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, ten simple rules for being God’s people: put God first in your life, and be honorable with your family and community members. The original 10 became 613 in all of Torah.
Next, it was the Prophets trying to shake the people up, to get them to trust God and be honorable with their community members. In today’s reading we hear Micah: God “has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” And John the Baptizer called people to return to the Lord, to repent and be baptized.
Jesus spent his whole life inviting people to trust God and view all people as God’s children. Everything he said and did spoke to this intent, as the Beatitudes in today’s reading makes clear. The Beatitudes take the Ten Commandments and make them personal, pointed directly at those who need comforting because they are oppressed, and at those who do the oppressing because they need to stop.
Paul riffs on the Beatitudes, making it clear that we are foolish to brag that we are smart, or wealthy, or powerful, because God chooses the lowly, the foolish, the oppressed to save the world and all who are in it.
Fifteen hundred years later, a collection of reformers [Calvin, Luther, Zwingli] renewed the call to return to the Lord, to know and obey the Ten Commandments. Luther interpreted the Commandments in light of the Beatitudes.
Luther turned the “thou shalt nots” into positive actions as
well. So, it’s not only, “don’t lie about your neighbor,” but “do everything
you can to see your neighbor in a positive light, and talk about them kindly.”
Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr, said: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny".
Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan teacher and leader. He focuses on the positive results of justice as healing and wholeness. "God's power for justice is precisely God's power to restore people when they are broken or hurt".
It’s common to understand sin as individual action. Oops, I missed church today, I didn’t report all my income on my taxes, I want/ I covet a bigger, newer TV, car or house.
But sin in scripture has always been interpreted by God as
community action. Such sin is systemic, the oppression of groups considered lesser,
other. While the specific group named other or lesser changes over the
centuries, it’s hard to ignore the power of the system, the governing body and public
opinion in the oppression of particular groups of people.
Scripture provides some examples:
Exodus and Deuteronomy and others insist that widows, orphans
and foreigners are to be welcomed and cared for. By Jesus’ time a man could
divorce his wife for any reason, leaving her dependent on her family of origin,
if they welcomed her back, or the community. In Acts, we read that there was a
large ministry caring for Jewish and Greek widows.
Jews and Samaritans mistrusted each other because they
interpreted God’s word differently. This is one reason why Jesus often spoke
intentionally with Samaritans and foreigners, to demonstrate that they are all
children of the same God.
During our lifetimes, we have seen, and continue to see, the failure to include and true oppression of many groups based on their ethnicity, their religion, their health, their level of addiction to drugs, their mental prowess, their age, their size, their ability, whether or not they have a home, and so forth.
We can use the narrow window of the Lutheran church for the
inclusion, or lack thereof, of various groups. Ordination of women was accepted
in 1970, just 56 years ago. Although there were a handful of Black men ordained
in the Lutheran Church bodies in the US in the 1800s, the first black woman was
ordained in 1980. In 2009, when the ELCA voted to allow LGBT pastors to have
spouses, many congregations left the denomination.
… What does this mean for us today? As individuals, we can be aware of our tendency to judge others against ourselves, and ourselves against others. Instead, let’s remember we are God’s beloved children, and our only judge is Jesus, who always offers us grace and mercy.
And we can be aware of the way systems work, from the
congregation, to the ELCA, to the community, to politics in the state and nation. We can be aware
of how some people are hurt, oppressed, and note who is doing the oppressing. We
can take a stand against the oppression, write or call elected leaders, join a
protest movement, and so forth.
At the same time … and I do know how hard this is … we can
remember that those doing the oppressing are also God’s beloved children.
Let’s finish by rewording the Beatitude a bit. The word translated as blessed in some Bibles, and happy in others, at heart means favored by God. We could extend that to mean beloved. So, it could sound like this:
3 “Beloved are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.
4 “ Beloved are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5 “ Beloved are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6 “ Beloved are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for
they will be filled.
7 “ Beloved are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
8 “ Beloved are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9 “ Beloved are the peacemakers, for they will be called children
of God.
10 “ Beloved are those who are persecuted for the sake of
righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “ Beloved are you when people revile you and persecute you and
utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your
reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who
were before you.”
It is God’s desire that no one is oppressed, that all know they
are blessed and beloved. Wherever you find yourself in this list, you, too, are
beloved by God. Amen
