Bloomin' Beatitudes

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

(February 16^th) 2025

 

 

Readings

 

Jeremiah 17: 5-10

Psalm 1

Luke 6: 20-26

 

 

As I’ve no doubt said before, I wish that instead of cries from the Christian Right, especially Christian Nationalists, for the Ten Commandments to be emblazoned on every court and school noticeboard, that the Beatitudes were emblazoned there instead. Emblazoned, recited, sung, whatever.

They represent an upside-down world, that world that the mother of Jesus prophesized from the beginning of her miraculous encounter with God. In her future-scaping words: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the meek and lowly.” Or in the words of her equally stroppy son, “How blessed are you who are poor: the Kingdom of God is yours.”

Commandments and Beatitudes alike are honoured infinitely more in the breach than the observance. So are most of the demands of Jesus, and of the Torah that he embodies. 

That is why we have, or at least enact, a time of spiritual cleansing in every eucharistic liturgy. A cleansing of souls, ears, hearts. Only then can we begin to encounter the impossible – Christ in us, God for us, the Triune Presence in bread and wine and fellowship. 

Always ever only by the initiation of God. The energy of God. The love of God.

While both Matthew and Luke have different emphases as they tell of these poignant teachings of Jesus, neither has him say “how blessed are you when people persecute you for being insensitive gets, insufferably self-righteous, puritanical, or holier than thou.” It is when we speak out of the embodiment of Jesus’ upside down world, how blessed are the “countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse” of Dylan’s famous “Chimes of Freedom,” only when we believe that and act on that, that we are as the Beatitudes put it, “Blessed.”

Which does not mean we go from there to a hunky-dory-cruisy life. The lives of the saints who we are called to emulate make that abundantly clear. The perspective of God is somewhat different to ours.

“Blessed,” then, does not mean a bed of roses. But that is another sermon.

So, do I live up to, embody the call to encapsulate these blessings? No. If any of you do, let me know, and let me know how you do it. 

But having cleaned out soul-ears, every Sunday, Sunday by Sunday, day by day, whatever, our task is to touch one life, take one action, even one random act of kindness, one embodiment of these demands of Jesus. More than that is bonus. 

And to that end, again in our liturgy so carefully crafted over the centuries, we offer ourselves for strengthening and up-lifting by the mysterious Spirit. That Spirit who indwells us at our invitation again and again. That Spirit who makes Jesus and his resurrection, his justice, his judgement (of us) present in us. That invasion of us by all that Jesus is. 

That he will do, by our invitation again and again and again, until that moment when we see no longer through a darkened glass, but in the fullness of the light of Christ.

 The Lord be with you.