January 15 2023
Matthew 5:1-12, 6:9-13
On the evening of the 2nd of January I, and millions like me, had turned on Monday Night Football to watch what was surely going to be a great game, a game with playoff implications, the Buffalo Bills versus the Cincinnati Bengals. Everything was going along great in the game, Cincinnati had the ball, Joe Burrow threw it to his wide receiver Tee Higgins who slammed into a Bills defensive player, you know, it was just a regular game up until that point. But that Bills defensive player, a safety whose name is Damar Hamlin, got up from that stop that he had made and suddenly collapsed upon the turf. The medical staff were called out onto the field, then the ambulance arrived and emergency medical personnel performed CPR on Damar for nine minutes. Only later would it be revealed that he had tragically suffered a cardiac arrest. In that moment of shock and unbelief when that young man’s life hung in the balance, those who watched did what came quite instinctively to them, they prayed. Dan Orlovsky, one of the ESPN broadcasting crew, brought everything to a full stop and lifted this young man and his situation up in prayer. There on that evening we were reminded that there is something far more important than the game of football. I am still in awe of how people just knew that right there in that moment that they had to cry out to God, that they knew that there is a God who cares and listens to us, a God who is our hope when the situation we watched looked extremely bleak.
What is also surprising is that everyone just seemed to know not only that they needed to pray but they also all seemed to know how they were to pray. Everyone knew that they just needed to cry out to God, plead for Damar and his situation the best that they could. What is not always evident in those times when we lift someone up to God is that when we pray we have an image of what we hope will happen. As we pray for Damar we pray for God to heal him, and so, we also have this image of Damar out of the hospital, perhaps once again standing on a football field. We pray for comfort for his family and we can imagine the living Jesus wrapping his loving arms around them. So, while we don’t always think about it when we pray, the prayers we lift up, the hope that we have, this can be thought of as being an image, a picture of a preferred future that we are calling on God to make a reality.
As followers of Jesus, we have been given a prayer, the prayer that he taught to those who first followed him, a prayer which was not just their prayer but it is a prayer for us as well. We know this prayer simply as the Lord’s Prayer because it is the prayer that our Lord, Jesus Christ teaches to us. In the gospel of Matthew, this prayer is right at the center of the core teachings of Jesus, the teachings that we commonly call the Sermon on the Mount. As we pray the Lord’s Prayer, just like when we pray any other prayer, I believe that we are to wonder just what the world would look like if this prayer would become a reality. Just like when we pray for healing for someone and we envision them whole and healthy, so when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we must also wonder what is the vision that this prayer is asking our Heavenly Father to make a reality. Fortunately for us, Matthew has surrounded the Lord’s prayer with the teachings of Jesus which provide us with images of that future which the Lord’s Prayer is crying out to our Heavenly Father to make a reality.
So, the Sermon on the Mount contains at its core a common prayer which is surrounded by teachings which give us a common vision that we are praying our Heavenly Father is going to make a reality, and this common prayer and common vision is the hope of people who have had a common experience, the experience of being blessed by God. This is what we discover, that right there at the beginning of this sermon that Jesus gave to his followers there are nine sayings that all begin with the word normally translated as “blessed”. So, what Jesus is describing here at the beginning of his message is a common experience of those that he is teaching. They are the ones who can say that they have been blessed by God, the blessing that God has, throughout scriptures, promised would come to all the families on earth. Jesus, in his teaching about this blessing, is speaking about how God’s blessing has come to people and how this blessing has worked in, and has transformed the lives of those, who called themselves blessed by God. As you look at these nine statements about the blessing of God what you discover is that they are written in much the same form as the Psalms, the prayers and songs of the people of God. As we study these blessings we find, just as in the Psalms, there is a repetition of thought for emphasis. This means that to properly understand these blessing we must hold them together as being pairs. So, the first two read, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” This is the beginning of the life of blessing. The promise of living under the rule and reign of God is offered to those who have come to the realization that they do not have what it takes, on their own, to be right with God. They mourn because they know that before God they are as good as dead. It is not hard to hear in these two statements the sentiments of Paul, who writes in the eighteenth verse of the seventh chapter of the book of Romans, that he at last understood , “that nothing good dwells in him, that is his flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” This is what it means to be poor in spirit, lacking in the power to conform our life to doing the will of God. As Paul continues, he states that he, “does not do the good that he wants , but the evil that he does not want is what he keeps on doing.” Further on in this same chapter in the twenty-fourth verse, Paul writes. “Wretched man that I am. Who will save me from this body of death?” This is exactly the situation that all of us find ourselves, yet all is not lost because into this rather hopeless situation there comes a promise that the kingdom of heaven is ours to be had, and there in our mourning over our body of death, we are told that comfort will come. The Greek word translated as being comfort is “parakaleo”, which is the same root as “paraclete”, the name Jesus uses for the Holy Spirit in the gospel of John. Here in our sorrow and our grief at the realization that we are trapped in a body of death comes a voice speaking to us words of comfort, words of blessing. This is the hope we find in the fifty-seventh chapter of Isaiah, the fifteenth verse, where God tells us that he , “dwells in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” This is where the journey of blessing begins right here at our lowest point.
The next two moments of blessing that Jesus speaks of are, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” This meekness Jesus speaks of is the willingness to be obedient to the voice of the Spirit who comforts us. Those who follow the Spirit are those who will receive the future blessing of the earth, renewed and restored to its original glory. This future hope creates in us a present longing for our world to be set right, for justice to at last be brought to bear against the evil that seems to run rampant.
As we encounter the God who comes to us in our grief, the God who calls us to follow in his ways and to desire what he desires, a God who gives us the hope that one day all will at last be set right, we are to be overwhelmed by the great love this God has for us. Ours is a God who is faithful and loyal to us, binding himself to us because this is who he is, this is his holy nature. It is solely because God is faithful to us out of his loyal love for us that he offers us his grace and forgiveness. The question then becomes just what will our response be to this great outpouring of love that God has so lavished upon us? The only right response is that we would love each other with the same faithful, loyal, love that God has first shown to us. If we are people who hunger and thirst for righteousness then of course we will do the right thing and love others the same way that God has loved us. This will purify our hearts because we will love God and people, no matter what. Gone is the belief that we can love God with one part of who we are and hate certain people with another part of who we are. It just can not happen like that. You see, if people can experience the love of God in our life reaching out to them, then this is when God, his love and his faithfulness, will be seen living in us. This then is what is meant by Jesus telling us, “Blessed are those who love with faithful, loyal, love for they are the ones who have received faithful, loyal, love. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The blessing of God is not something we can keep hidden.
Well, it makes perfect sense that if we are people who love others with the same faithful, loyal, love that God has shown to us, the end result is going to be peace. We are going to be people who, through our loyalty and love for everyone, are going to be bringing things together not tearing things apart.When peacemaking becomes not just our confession but our profession as well, then God says, “Welcome to the family.”If we are going to cry out “Abba, Father”, then we have to be about healing not hurting, restoring not wrecking the lives of others. Yes, there will be those who simply will refuse to believe that this world cannot be put right without the use of violence.Yes, there will be those who like the world with all of its strife and anguish just the way it is. When these people are confronted with the dawning of a new way to live, a life of peace, they will cling to life in the darkness. This is why those who choose peace are going to be always met with suspicion and hatred. Those who are about peacemaking will be persecuted yet it is those who follow the ways of peace who end up being a citizen in the kingdom of God. Yes, this persecution is a blessing because it is a sign of desperation on the part of those who refuse to live in the light, a light which always conquers the darkness.
So, this being blessed by God, this is our shared experience. It is while we are poor and lowly in our spirits, dead in our sin and that is when we are awakened to the hope of life in the kingdom of God. There in the certainty of our death the God of all comfort finds us and brings us back to life. Through our listening and obedience to the voice of the one who comforts us we discover hope. Through the experience of being loved by the God who is and always will be faithful and loyal to us out of his great love for us, we become people who allow his love to flow through us so that the world can witness God living and loving through us. The blessing of God leads us then to join him in the work of peacemaking in a world obsessed and lusting after violence. This violence will come against us as we call into judgment those who refuse to learn the ways of peace yet even so, this is a blessing of God. All of this, that comes through the blessing of God, this is what unites us and gives us a common shared experience. And it is those of us who have this common, shared experience of being blessed by God who have been given a common, shared prayer that is to guide us when we cry out to God. This prayer is the reality that we desire our Heavenly Father to bring forth, a future hope that we long to experience, today. So, within this prayer is a vision of our world that we desire to live in today. This world is described for us in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. These teachings take the shorthand of the Lord’s Prayer and give us a vision of what the world will look like when God fulfills the requests we cry out to him.
To see just how the teachings found within the Sermon on the Mount tie in with the requests found within the Lord’s Prayer perhaps it would be good to begin with what is absolutely central to this prayer which is that the will of the Father be done on earth as it is in heaven.When we read this petition what is supposed to jump out at us is that what is already happening in heaven is what we long to see happen here on earth. So there is this sense of unity, a unified way of living which God desires us to live. Another way to put it is to say that God desires that heaven and earth be united into one. This can be understood by remembering that the God of heaven through his faithful, loyal love has united himself with our earthly human cause. Yet as we just learned about the blessings which God has given to us, when we experience this faithful, loyal love of God we then are to turn and love each other with that same faithful, loyal love with which God first has loved us. In this way, through the love of God, heaven and earth are at last united together. This means that when we pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”, we must be mindful of not tearing apart what God is bringing together. This is why in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, in the twenty-first verse of the fifth chapter of Matthew, teaches us that” you have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder’ and whoever murders will be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother or sister will be liable to the council; and whoever says, “You fool!”,will be liable to the hell of fire.” Why does Jesus give us such a stern warning not to get angry or to insult someone? The answer is that such actions tear apart what God is bringing together. We know this to be true because Jesus goes on to further teach us in the twenty-fourth verse, that if we remember that someone has something against us we are to go and be reconciled with them. The word translated in this verse as, “reconciliation”, is the Greek word, diallassomia, and it is found only here in the Bible. It is a different word than is normally used for reconciliation because this word stresses that a change has occurred between two parties who used to be at odds with each other. Where they used to consider themselves enemies now they have become friends, a relationship that reflects unity.
Jesus in this same section of the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with the twenty-seventh verse, goes on to speak about marriages, of how this great act of bringing together a man and a woman in a bond of love is something that should be taken very seriously. One should not allow a passing glance or an obsessive thought to be the beginning of the destruction of this union. Again, the reasoning is that God is bringing everything together so we must not be found to be those who tear it apart. As Jesus teaches us it is better that we lose part of our body, destroying the unity of who we are, than to tear apart and destroy the unity of the body of humanity that is being brought together through the work of Christ.
Lastly, in the thirty-third verse through the thirty-seventh verse of this fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus address the issue of taking oaths, and the problem that we are to not swear falsely. Again, this is about unity, that what we say that we are going to do should be exactly what we end up doing. The unity God is bringing about is to concern the very integrity of ourselves.
So, when we pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”, we as the people blessed by God are to see this vision of a world united. A world where anger no longer tears people apart, a world where calling somebody a stupid idiot would be a terrifying thought, a world where enemies work hard at becoming friends. It is a world where marriages would be entered into very seriously, with the understanding that it is this union which best represents the unity that God wishes to bring about here on earth. If this prayer would become a reality then people would do exactly what they said they would do. This all sounds rather impossible, doesn’t it? And this is why we pray for these things to happen because we realize that for us such a world is an impossibility but yet, with God all things are possible. Our prayer is that we trust God to make such a world ours one day soon! To God be the glory! Amen!
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