God Blesses Unexpectedly
Epiphany + 4, January 30, 2011
Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.
I'm not a big fan of the TV show Survivor. I've only ever seen bits and pieces of a couple of episodes. But even I know that these three words define the strategy & the goal of the show.
Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.
Three words that aren't just the tagline for a TV show – no, they describe and define the way we think the world works, what we often think our strategy needs to be. If we are going to survive, perhaps even to prosper, we think we need to outwit, outplay, outlast the competition. If we want to get ahead, we need to be smarter, speedier, stronger, than the other guy. The President's State of the Union address this past week reveals that this is the belief of our culture. During the course of his speech, President Obama said,
"We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future."
“We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world... that's how we'll win.” Outwit. Outplay. Outlast. The world tells us, and so we have come to believe and behave, that this is what we have to do if we want to have the good life. If we want to come out winners, we have to work for it. If we are to experience blessings, we have to earn them. And not just that, we have to out-do everyone else. We have to out-compete our competitors. We will prove that God loves us best when we have finally left everyone else in the dust.
As far as I can tell, the majority of human beings throughout history have operated on this principle, this idea that we have to earn our blessings by outdoing our neighbors. It was true in Jesus' time too... people then longed for the good life, longed to be among the blessed, and people knew that it was the powerful, the popular, the prosperous who had somehow earned God's blessing. Something about them had caused God to smile down on them and reward them with honor and status and possessions. And everyone else, the ones who were just scraping by financially, the ones who faced struggles in their health or challenges in their relationships – well, obviously they were the non-blessed.
But then Jesus comes along and he sits down on this mountain with his followers and the crowds that have been clamoring after him, and he begins to teach. Here we get just the beginning of what is known as the Sermon on the Mount – Jesus starts here and doesn't finish until the end of chapter 7. The first words out of his mouth in this famous teaching are the Beatitudes – so called because that the Latin word for blessings, and with these words, Jesus flips all of our ideas about who is blessed and how we get blessings on their head. What Jesus says here in these familiar, well-known, beloved words of scripture doesn't line up with what his listeners thought they knew or with what we think we know. Jesus here in these words describes a different way of viewing the world, a different perspective on God's blessings:
Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are those who mourn; blessed are the meek; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the persecuted.
See what I mean? In our world, the wealthy, the influential, the movers & the shakers seem to accrue blessings. But that's not what Jesus says here. Under God's rule, the opposite is true – “Blessed are,” Jesus says – not just someday when these “rewards”, the “will-be”s, will come to fruition, but now, today – blessed are all of these folks who the world would overlook or ignore or mock, blessed are these people who are in less than ideal circumstances, who are spiritually poor or in mourning, who wrestle against the injustices of the world and strive mightily for peace, who show mercy and are pure in heart – these are the ones Jesus says God comes to and blesses.
It's hard for us to see that. It was probably hard for Jesus' listeners to see that too. From our worldly perspective, it seems downright foolish to think that even in the midst of difficult times, God can and does bring blessings. And yet, Paul reminds us in the 2nd lesson, his first letter to the believers in Corinth, that God tends to work in ways that the world sees as foolish. Paul says that the message about the message of the cross is foolishness. And if you think about it, it is. At the heart of our faith, we proclaim Christ crucified. That's at the center of our belief: that God comes as Jesus and dies on a cross. How ridiculous that must seem! What kind of a god comes as a mortal human being and lets himself get executed? Why believe in a god who is weak enough to die? But we know that that is the power of God, that through the cross God is making the world new. Through Jesus' death on that cross, we have righteousness and sanctification and redemption, forgiveness of sin, hope, promise, restoration. “For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:25).
So what we hear from Jesus this morning, as foolish as it may sound, is that God's blessing doesn't just come to those who are able to outwit, outplay, outlast the competition. Blessing is not, and never has been about human strength, human wisdom, human accomplishment. It's about God's strength, God's wisdom, God's accomplishment. It's about who God is and what God does – and what God does is come to those who are the least of these, even to us, even in the midst of challenging circumstances and blesses them, blesses us, perhaps because it's in those difficult times that we are most likely to recognize our absolute dependence on God, the absurdity of thinking that we can do it all on our own, and instead, turn to look for the blessing, the help, that can come only from God. God's blessing comes to each of us unexpectedly, and it comes from the one whose love will outlast us all. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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