Date: 1st November 2009
Preacher: Chris
Green
Churches: Draycott
& Rodney Stoke
Readings:
Isaiah 56, 3-8
Matthew 5, 1-12
Well I trust you all survived
Halloween last night. Now we are safely across to All Saints Day, and the
demons and hooligans are all banished for another year.
But who are the Saints we are
celebrating today?
We usually think of a saint as an exceptionally
holy person- which obviously doesn’t mean us! But in the New Testament-
specifically in Acts and the Epistles- this word is simply used for Christians-
all the would-be, ordinary, struggling Christians like you and I. On the one
hand this is more challenging- but it should be encouraging, too. If we
are the saints, this is our day, and we unite ourselves with all
those Christians who have gone before us, in a great and glorious band
throughout history.
And for this special day we have
been given one of the best known and loved pieces of Jesus’ teaching as our
Gospel reading- the beginning of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, covering three
chapters of St. Mathew’s Gospel.
The Sermon on the Mount contains
many of the Christian rules for living, but they are summed up in those first
few verses we had in our Gospel reading, which we call ‘the Beatitudes’- from
the Latin beatus- ‘blessed’.
Some of them seem like
straightforward ethical teaching. “Blessed are the merciful”; “Blessed are the
pure in heart”; “Blessed are the peacemakers”, for example. But others seem
quite startling, especially the first:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.
(There is a different version in
the gospel of Luke, that simply says ‘the poor’, which many think is earlier).
What kind of kingdom is it where
the poor are blessed? In any normal kingdom, the poor are the least
blessed, almost by definition. But in the Kingdom of Heaven this is apparently
not so. What is meant by this Kingdom of Heaven?
Some people have assumed that it
is a kind of euphemism for life after death. But I don’t think Jesus
thought like that. The poor are told that theirs is the kingdom of
heaven (not will be). Moreover the meek will inherit the earth.
And I don’t think Jesus would have had so much of a following if he had simply
been promising ‘pie in the sky when you die’.
So how can the poor be blessed?
There are many religious
traditions that see poverty as a kind of sacrament, something that puts us in
touch with the holy. My brother has just been in Cambodia and my sister-in-law
described to me how the Buddhist monks are fed by the people. All people- including
tourists- kneel and present their offerings to the monks, who come and take
what they are offered. The monks, who have nothing, are acknowledged to be the
spiritually superior ones, and those who give to them obtain merit. So my elder
brother, the successful merchant banker, knelt with the rest and burnt his
hands offering a ball of sticky rice to a barely educated Cambodian in a
saffron robe. There is a sense of appropriateness in this, and not just because
it’s my successful elder brother.
Why should poverty be revered in
this way? Well rich, powerful, self-satisfied people have no need of
God. To properly respond to God, we have to feel ourselves to be poor-
realising that we have nothing that is truly our own, only what God has given
us. This may be what ‘poor in spirit’ means. It is an attitude of mind,
although perhaps being actually rich makes it much harder (remember Jesus’
saying that “it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it
is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”).
Remember too the parable of the
sheep and goats, also in Matthew’s gospel. The righteous are told that in
feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick or imprisoned, they
had done these things for the Lord. So our treatment of people in need becomes
our way of responding to God’s love for us- and we are blessed through them.
‘Blessed are the poor’ can become ‘Blessed are we in caring for the poor’.
It has been said that the Kingdom
of Heaven is what this world would be like if it were ruled by God. Isaiah has
many passages that seem to foretell this Kingdom- where the hungry are
satisfied, the widows and orphans cared for, where strangers and outcasts are
accepted, as in our first reading.
Another way of thinking about the
Kingdom of Heaven is that it is our own world, seen through the eyes of God.
It is a world where love and justice are the core reality, where human power
and the use of force may seem to rule, but are not the last world.
This may seem hopelessly
idealistic, but just sometimes we can glimpse the world in this way. One such
moment for me was when the Berlin Wall came down. After months of stand-off,
with a massacre of civilians expected at every moment, we watched while the
people dismantled the Wall with their own hands, while the once lethal border
guards were nowhere to be seen. All kinds of problems were in wait- but at the
time, we seemed to see the possibility of a better world, a ‘Kingdom moment’.
To be a Christian is to keep faith
with this vision of the world, where barriers can be torn down and oppressive
systems dismantled peacefully.
And how is God’s Kingdom to come
about? Well, in part by the Saints following the teachings of Jesus. By being
merciful, pure in heart (which simply means honest and not idolatrous), and
peacemakers. By loving our enemies, and forgiving our brothers. By believing in
the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven.
And if this seems rather
comfortable and cosy, we get a shock at the end of our Gospel passage:
“Blessed are those whore are persecuted for righteousness
sake… when people revile you and utter evil against you falsely on my account;
…for in the same way they persecuted the prophets”.
The prophets are the people who
throughout Jewish history spoke God’s truth to the powerful and self-satisfied.
They not only cared for the poor- they denounced those whose greed kept them
poor. So we are to be prophets, too!
So I leave you with this sobering
thought. In becoming fit to be citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, we are going
to put ourselves at odds with the present world order. And the demons and
ghouls of this world will fight back. But be of good courage. I leave you with
these words from Desmond Tutu, the best affirmation of the Kingdom that I know:
Goodness is stronger than evil
Love is stronger than hate
Light is stronger than darkness
Life is stronger than death
Victory is ours through him who loved us.
Amen