Discovering a
Beatitude Filled Life
“Blessed
are the poor in Spirit”
By Rev Steven R
Mitchell
Mountain View
United, Aurora, CO 2/9/2014
Based on Matthew
5:3 and I Corinthians 2:13-16
Last
week the lectionary reading dealt with Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ first
sermon, Sermon on the Mount or The Beatitudes. As I reflected over those particular verses,
I came to the realization that we need to slow down and ponder a bit longer upon
this Sermon of Jesus. So over the next
few weeks I am going to take each “blessed are…” and reflect upon their
original meanings to the First Century Church and how they may be heard and
understood in today’s world.
The very first
“blessed are…” makes it very easy to think of these nine blessings as relating
to a world in the future and not of this physical world but of life after this
world. Yet these words of instruction,
or guidance, or even disciplines are not the how to get to God’s kingdom, but
indicates what life is like in God’s kingdom.
I truly believe that these nine “blessed are” to be the hardest of
Jesus’ sayings for those of us who live in this country. I believe this because most of us live at a
standard that we identify as “middle class.”
Scripture warns us about the indifference that comes with being
“lukewarm”, of not being either hot or cold.
As middle class, we are neither poor nor wealthy, we are middle, we are
lukewarm, putting us in a perilous place to exist in. It is perilous because it dulls our
perspectives and more dangerously it dulls our passions. Middle class is our world of The Matrixs – that
sensation of living life without truly living life!
“Blessed are the
poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So what does poor in Spirit mean and how
long do we have to wait before we are rewarded with living in the Kingdom of
heaven? We first must understand what
Matthew meant when he used the word “heaven.”
When we hear the word “heaven”, we are conditioned to think about the
place where God lives, and we all know that God lives somewhere “up there”, up
there in heaven, just as we understand the devil to live “down there” in hell,
which is someplace in the center of earth.
But Matthew was writing for a predominantly Jewish audience, meaning
that you as a devote Hebrew would never use the word “God”, because it was religiously
forbidden to say God’s name. We struggle today in mainline denominations with
how to refer to God by not using gender pronouns. So one way to deal with this issue is to
assign a different word for God and Matthew chose to use the word “heaven” as a
way to refer to God. So when substituting
the word “God” into this first beatitude it would read, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of God.”
This is consistent with Jesus’ pronouncement that the Kingdom of God is
at hand, or is present. So the Beatitudes
are concerned with the present not some distant future.
This is not a hard
concept for us to understand, but what about the first half of the sentence, “Blessed
are the poor in spirit?” What
does it mean to be poor in spirit? A few
weeks ago, I was challenged with a question by a person who wished to know how
I would describe what it means to be “living in poverty.” To be very truthful, my first reaction to the
question was one of repulsion. I was
repulsed because I had spent the early part of my life working my way out of a
world that we call poverty and into middle class. Yes that’s right into “lukewarmness.” But that question started a very long
conversation that is still ringing in my brain and has much to do with what does
Jesus mean when he said “blessed are the poor.”
A man by the name of Clarence Jordan asked this
question: Does Jesus mean “blessed are the poor” or is it merely an image? Clarence was a man who believed he should
live out what he read in the bible, so he started a farming commune, where
blacks and whites lived together, sharing their property in common – and he did
this in the 1940’s in rural Georgia, subjecting himself to the hatred of the
KKK and affluent Georgians. Preaching on
this question of whether Jesus meant spiritual poverty or monetary poverty, he
said: If you have a lot of money, you’ll probably say spiritual poverty. If you have little or no money, you’ll
probably say physical poverty. The rich
will thank God for Matthew; the poor will thank God for Luke (who said,
“blessed are the poor” and left it at that).
Who’s right” Chances are, neither
one. For it is exactly this attitude of
self-praise and self-justification and self-satisfaction that robs people of a
sense of great need for the kingdom and its blessings. When one says, “I don’t need to be poor in
things; I’m poor in spirit,” and another says, “I don’t need to be poor in
spirit; I’m poor in things,” both are justifying themselves as they are saying
in unison, “I don’t need.” With that cry
on one’s lips, no person can repent.” The Beatitudes for Today by James C Howell
I think what we
have to come to understand in what Clarence was saying is when we are filled
with ourselves, whether rich or poor, with our own justifications of self,
there is no room for God in us. We are
unable to receive the blessings that God has for us until we are able to change
the “I don’t need” to the “I don’t have anything”. In AA it is called “admitting you are
powerless.” It is in our spiritual
poverty that we are able to recognize the need for relationship – with God,
with one another, and with our environment.
It is in our
middle-class environment that gives us a false security of living the “I don’t
need” mentality. In affluent American communities, it is often the case that our
material abundance creates a kind of spiritual poverty in which the sufferings
of life cannot be acknowledged and God’s blessings cannot be celebrated or
cherished. Instead of our abundance
giving us freedom to act, it actually fosters a deep seeded insecurity, a life
that is filled with anxiety, a fear that what we have today will be gone
tomorrow. It is a mentality of living
life in scarcity not truly receiving the blessings of abundant living as given
by God. Claiming the Beatitudes by Anne
Sutherland Howard pg 14 Why?
Because we don’t recognize that we are living in the “I don’t need”
instead of living in the “I am powerless” mode.
This is the peril with us living in the middle – we do not fully open
ourselves up to the true blessings that God has for us. Living in the middle holds us back from
moving beyond charity to advocacy, from moving beyond seeing the poor as
“other” to seeing ourselves in solidarity with these brothers and sisters in
Christ.
The very first
reality of living in God’s kingdom, whether in heaven or here on earth is to
recognize that we have to trust in God solely for our existence; that the
blessing comes with God being in charge not ourselves. Another
way of looking at this would be: As
followers of Christ, we have an unbreakable relationship with those who are
persecuted, suffering, or destitute. Their material poverty reveals our own
spiritual poverty. They are poor so we
are poor. Often we choose not to
recognize the relationship between the immensity of poverty in the world and
our spiritual incompleteness. But in the
beatitudes, Jesus challenges that kind of denial of involvement or self-removal
from a world of suffering. Claiming the Beatitudes, pg 17
Paul told the
church in Corinth: Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that
is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we
speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the
Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.
Our culture tells
us that “more” is satisfying, that you look after number one, that those who
are poor deserve to be poor, but God tells us that God’s ways are not
understood by the world. Jesus tells us
that being a part of God’s kingdom is empting ourselves of the fear of scarcity
and trusting in God and that this can only happen when we are “poor in spirit”,
for it is in our poverty that we recognize God in our lives. Amen
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