Bead Work Blessings

Text: Micah 6:1-8, Matthew 5:1-12

[Often the readings of the lectionary—the list of readings for each Sunday—seem like a bunch of beads in a bag. Maybe related, but mostly not. But today is seems to me that each reading is like a bead on a string, held together loosely, but in order, with a beginning and an end. We start with God’s disappointment in the people of Israel. We end with God’s blessing. We’re going to follow that string like a rosary.]

What have I done, God asks, that you should be weary of me? This is a disappointed and sorrowful God. Israel, God’s people, whom God brought out of Egypt, whom God redeemed from slavery, led across the wilderness, given a safe and sacred home, has abandoned God’s law and betrayed God’s blessings.

Earlier in Micah, the prophet lists Israel’s sins. God speaks through the words of Micah, saying: The powerful covet fields of others, and seize them, and take away their houses [2.2]. They cry “peace” when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who have nothing to put into their mouths [3:5]. The rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets [prophesy] for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say, “Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.” [3.11]. These sins against the people (unfortunately familiar) make God more sad than angry.

In this passage we just heard, the people in response ask what they might do to repair the breach they have made with God. What acts of piety do they have to perform before God is pleased with them? How about sacrificing a whole calf? How about a thousand sheep (which is more than the richest king would own)? How about ten thousand rivers of olive oil? The proposals are absurd. The prophet is sarcastic. The question is wrong. Pious posturing is not what God desires.

God’s desire is not a secret. To the Israelites or to us. The good is known. God has told us what it is. God has told us what is required. To do justice. To love kindness. To walk humbly with God.

This sweet list is not one of high-minded intentions, but practical acts. Acts of grace. To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.

Justice comes first. The order is not an accident. Justice is the basis for living as God’s people. Nothing comes before it. Justice is harmony, the right relations between one person and another, reconciliation of trespass. The opposite of covetousness, of indifference to the plight of others, of self-glorification, of engineered advantage over those who are weaker. Just actions are ones that repair lopsided economic and political inequity. A just world is the one God intended at creation. Just actions are those that heal this world that has been broken.

Love of mercy comes second. Mercy is sometimes called kindness, or loving kindness, or devotion. It is compassion more than pity. Being merciful is not a request to temper deserving punishment (as in: have mercy on me) so much as treating all people with kindness because they are God’s people just as you are.

Love here means less all weak in the knees and more faithful or loyal or steadfast. The kind of fidelity that is the basis to friendship or marriage or close relationships. We love mercy not because we choose to feel nice about someone but because we are faithful parts of a community of God’s people.

Walking humbly with God comes third. To walk with God is to follow God’s direction. God’s direction is given in the commands of God. The commands of God are gifts to God’s people that guide us, that show us a way to live, that instruct us how to be just and merciful to one another. To walk humbly with God is to accept God’s guidance rather than our own. To accept God’s sovereignty, to trust in God’s word. It defines us as God’s people, as the ones who follow God.

Yet, like the Israelites, we find God’s guidance to be difficult. Today’s psalm lists some requirements of a godly person. One who is blameless, it says, speaks the truth, never dissembles, does no evil, holds no contempt, does no wrong, never reneges, never loans money for interest, and does not take bribes. I think this psalm is a little Biblical joke. There is no such perfect person. No one is blameless. Everyone does some wrong. Everyone is a sinner.

Paul writes to the church in Corinth. There is an issue in the church. Some people there think a lot of themselves. They seem to think they are not sinners, but good and law-abiding folks. Perhaps they think that they embody Psalm 15 and have it posted on their refrigerators.

They think they are different from the riff-raff with whom they share the church. They are standoffish, and eat by themselves, and put on airs. Paul in this letter reminds them that Jesus comes for the weak and the foolish, for the sinners. This is a shock to the powerful and wise, for in Paul’s culture, as in ours, they are usually not only respected sycophantically but admired and catered to.

This makes the list of blessings in Matthew—which we call the beatitudes—seem so strange. It was strange to those who first heard it and strange to us. To be blessed is to be favored, to be fortunate—endorsed by the fates—and empowered. In what universe are the meek, the heartbroken, the hungry, and the discouraged fortunate?

It would be a mistake to sentimentalize the condition of the subjects of this list. It stinks to be poor, to mourn, to starve. This is a not a recipe for spiritual success. Not some key to the happy life. And not a reward for pure living.

The people who are listening to Jesus at the foot of the mountain are a motley bunch. People who are ill and suffering, people on the margin. When Jesus tells these unlikely folks that they are blessed, he is not celebrating their suffering. But he is celebrating them. The beatitudes in Matthew are addressed to the people Jesus came to heal. They are the broken people, and Jesus comes to minister to them and to change the world in which they are allowed to suffer. When Jesus calls them blessed, he is declaring their worth to him. They are his purpose and his people.

In the Gospel of Mark, the first public thing Jesus does is perform an exorcism. In Luke, the first thing he does is to describe his mission. In John, the first thing he does is to perform a miraculous sign of his divinity. But here in Matthew, the first thing Jesus does is to bless the poor and the outcast.

The beatitudes are a preface to the Sermon on the Mount which follows them. (And which we’ll hear more about during the remaining weeks in Epiphany.) In this way, they serve as an introduction to this sermon. They are not themselves an ethical imperative—not a command to moral action—but they put into context a speech that is. The world is unjust. Those who suffer embody that. But the world does not have to be that way.

The sins of the Israelites against the people was made possible by their forgetting (or feeling free to forget) that God exists. Or of acting as if the commands of God were amusing rather than serious. Historical, mythic, and irrelevant to modern conditions. That deciding that whether or not we are obedient to them makes no difference in our lives or the good of the world.

Yet God’s desires are not secret. God has told us what they are. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds—as we often need reminding just as much as the Israelites did—reminds us that we have committed to be God’s people. That we who follow Jesus are commanded to do justice and to love mercy. And Jesus teaches us how to walk humbly with God.