A Different Way, Just When We Need It - Matthew 5:1-12

Last Tuesday night I worshiped with our friends up the street at Second Baptist, along with several other Little Rock clergy. It was lovely to be there. I got to attempt to sing songs I didn’t know and worship in a style very different from ours. The vigil was held ahead of this Tuesday’s election. I think the Baptists who organized the event might have peeked at our lectionary, because they used the Beatitudes from Matthew’s Gospel, which we hear this morning. The clergy took turns offering a prayer on a beatitude and lighting a candle in a moment of quiet. My assignment was “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” I began my prayer with these words: “God of all nations and peoples, teach us the way of Jesus. In a world that worships power, teach us the strength of gentleness. In a world that rewards domination, teach us the courage of humility. When we are tempted to believe that your kingdom depends on our ability to control others, remind us that Jesus showed us another way.”

Have you noticed that the Beatitudes have a way of arriving just when we need them? In these anxious days before the midterm election, however you plan to vote, it is good to hear some of Jesus’ most beloved words. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Jesus was a master at cutting through the worries of his day and getting to the heart of what matters, which is loving God and one another well.

It may be a busy time for our country, but it’s also a busy Sunday in the Church. This is All Saints’ Day, when we honor the communion of saints, past, present, and yet to come. It’s a day for baptism. It’s a day for remembering the saints we have lost, so it feels especially fitting to hear “Blessed are those who mourn.” We’re also in the midst of stewardship season, and our post-renovation celebrations begin this week. And that’s just parish life. You come here today with your own busy season of joys and sorrows, and I trust that the words of Jesus offer something you need to hear this morning.

And that would be more than enough. But there is more to the Beatitudes than what we first hear. I learned this from the scholars on the Bibleworm podcast, who read the Beatitudes next to the Hebrew Bible, the way Jesus’ first listeners would have heard them. Take “Blessed are those who mourn.” I always heard that as a comfort for those of us who have lost someone, and it is. But read it next to Isaiah 61, and mourners are people grieving the exile and the destruction of their community. Theirs is a collective grief, a sorrow that the world is not as it should be. If you feel in your soul that the world is not as it should be, blessed are you.

Take “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” That was my beatitude on Tuesday night. "The lowly shall possess the land," reads Psalm 37. There's something here about knowing your place in the world—not making yourself bigger than you are, but not making yourself smaller, either. Not taking what belongs to someone else, and not surrendering what is rightly yours. Which is harder than it sounds.

Or, “Blessed are the merciful.” The Hebrew word echoing here means loving-kindness, an openness toward our neighbors that comes out of generosity and not out of a sense of scarcity. When we live that way, we build the kind of community that will show mercy back to us.

Read with these nuances, we begin to see that the Beatitudes are more than familiar, comforting words. They are a roadmap for a demanding way to live, with holy grief, honest humility, and compassion for everyone. And Jesus is honest about the cost. He says “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” Those who lord power over others will not love this way of life. But take heart, he says, because you are part of a long line of prophets who were treated the same way. The prophet Micah sums up this way of life beautifully: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The long line of prophets and saints we honor on All Saints’ makes this a great day for a baptism. Eleanor Kate and Tulsen Edward Hogan come to the font with no power of their own at all. They can’t recite a creed yet or keep a promise, so we will say the words for them. They will be marked with water and oil, called by name, and told that they belong to Christ.

They are part of the “yet to come” in the communion of saints. Someday, long after we are gone, maybe they will remember us as their saints. One might say, “She taught me the hymns,” or “He sat next to me every Sunday.”  They will certainly be shaped by how we lived the way of the Beatitudes in all of life’s ups and downs.

And note that the Beatitudes are not only about some future reality. They are true here and now. We don’t have to wait for the kingdom of heaven to arrive in order to start living in it. We can begin today, faithfully and publicly, so that others may be drawn in. And so we begin with our baptismal candidates today. We will promise these children our love and support, and to show them what blessedness looks like.

So take whatever comfort you need from the Beatitudes this morning. And then let them send you out. Jesus has shown us a way to live, with a long line of saints behind us and two new ones in front of us. May we live that way faithfully, so that the children we baptize today, and all those who come after us, will know what it means to be blessed in Christ.