Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday February 1 – 4th Sunday after Epiphany
Scripture Readings: 1 Corinthians1:18-31 and Matthew 5:1-12
I
want to start by inviting you to let your imagination run wild! I know that lots of you have a good
imagination, and here is your chance to use it.
What is the wildest, most unexpected, most ridiculously good
thing that you can imagine happening in the world? This isn’t a rhetorical question – I actually
want to hear your answers! What is the
wildest thing that you can imagine happening that would change the world for
good? Let’s have some fun with this – the
crazier, more improbable, the better!
“I imagine a world where all weapons – every gun, every missile, every
nuclear warhead – they are turned to chocolate.”
“I imagine a world where food is free for everyone and where farmers earn a
fair salary.”
I imagine a world where every disagreement, big or small, is solved with ‘Rock,
Paper, Scissors.’”
“I imagine a world where power imbalances have been eliminated, and where
everyone has the same amount of power, no matter their gender, age, race, or
nationality.”
“I imagine a world where icicles grow sideways and the hearts of ICE melt back
into water as they run back to where they came from.”
Image Credit: Diana Doncaster
Used with Permission.
I
wanted to go as absurd as possible with this one, because Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians is talking about wisdom and foolishness. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human
wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength."
What if what we thought of as foolishness – weapons turned to chocolate and the
like – what if things that we think of as foolish are really wiser than we are
able to comprehend?
And I ask this question because the other reading we heard today – the very
well-known part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount that is often call the
Beatitudes or the Blessings – in that reading, Jesus is blessing some very
unexpected groups of people. Blessings
that might sound foolish when we hear them, but also may be a reflection of
God’s wisdom.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the people who have no hope. Blessed are the people who are mourning, the
people who are grieving. Blessed are the
meek and humble. Blessed are the people
who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness.
Blessed are the people who show mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Blessed are the people who are persecuted because they are
righteous. Blessed are you when people
insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about
you.
OK Jesus – these are sounding almost as ridiculous as the wild and crazy
changes to the world we were suggesting earlier! Who would ever think that Jesus would be
blessing the people who mourn, the people who are hopeless, the people who are
meek?
Maybe we need to take a step backwards and begin with the question of “What is
a blessing?” There are lots of different
definitions to the word “blessing,” ranging from the social media #blessed, to
a deeply theological definition of being able to see the present moment through
the lens of the future. But one of my
favourite definitions of a blessing is to set aside or consecrate someone or
something for God’s work.
Last Sunday at Westfield, we blessed a couple of prayer shawls that someone had
knitted. As we blessed them, we
dedicated them, we set them apart so that they might be agents of God’s love,
that whoever wraps themselves in those prayer shawls might be able to sense
God’s love wrapping itself around them.
Those prayer shawls are blessed and set apart for God’s work.
I’ve also been asked to bless various items in the church building, from choir
chairs to wall murals to food pantries. Each of these things, when it is blessed, is set apart for God’s use, so
that God’s love and joy and hope and peace might be known through them.
I love blessing all of your pets too, when we do our Blessing of the Animals
service. The pets that we love are set
apart to be agents of God’s love. At
weddings, I get to bless the couple’s marriage – that the marriage between two
people might be a place where God’s work is done. At the end of every worship service, I get to
bless all of you – blessing you to be the Body of Christ, to be the literal
hands and feet of Christ in the world.
Getting back to Jesus’s beatitudes though. If a blessing sets something apart for God, some of these beatitudes
make more sense than others. Blessed are
the peacemakers – that one makes sense, because building peace is God
work. Blessed are the people who are
hungry and thirsty for righteousness – again, that one makes sense, because
their hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice and peace will spur them
on to action so that God’s work can be done.
Some of them make less sense though. Blessed are the people who mourn and grieve. How might their grief and mourning be part of
God’s work? Blessed are the hopeless and
poor in spirit – this one really puzzles me, as hope itself is a gift from God.
But if God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, then what might God’s
wisdom be? If God’s foolishness is
already beyond any human ability to comprehend, then God’s wisdom must go even
further. And what if it is only through what seems foolish that we can start to comprehend God?
I think that with these beatitudes, with these topsy-turvy blessings that don’t really
make a lot of sense from our human understanding of the world, Jesus is
teaching us about God’s topsy-turvy kingdom where foolishness is wisdom, where
the last shall be first, where the hungry will be fed with good things, where
swords are turned into ploughshares and guns are turned into chocolate, and
where hearts of ICE melt with the warmth of love.
And even though this vision for the world might feel foolish, improbable, and
impossible, what if we could trust in the foolishness of this vision? What if
we could trust that this is God’s vision for the world, and then start taking
baby steps in our own lives to live as if this world was already a
reality? And what if more and more
people joined us, walking the path of peacemaking, and humility, and hungering
for righteousness?
I still might not understand all of these blessings of Jesus, but I do trust
that there is a place in God’s kingdom for everyone who mourns, for everyone
who is without hope – God’s love is embracing you, maybe even more than those
of us who aren’t mourning at the moment.
And some day, this ridiculously good, foolish, peace-filled world is going to
become reality, so that those of us who mourn will be comforted, those of us
who hunger for righteousness will have that hunger satisfied, those of us who work
for peace will be without any work left to do as weapons and oppression will be
no more.
And may this time come soon.
And may this time come soon.
Amen.
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