My Child




Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In Matthew’s Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount inaugurates Jesus’ public ministry. After His baptism in the River Jordan and temptation in the wilderness, after learning that John the Baptist has been imprisoned unjustly by Herod Antipas, Jesus then gathers together a cadre of Apostles and begins to teach and preach within the synagogues.

Moreover, He cures the sick, not just of bodily ailments but of spiritual as well. He stops seizures, undoes paralysis, casts out demons. And this, understandably, causes quite the stir. Soon the afflicted from all around the area—not just in the Galilee, but in the Decapolis, Judea, Jerusalem, even beyond the Jordan into Syria—all come limping, crawling, dragging their way to find Him.

And who could blame them? Miraculous, free healthcare? I’d be willing to give that a go.

But now we have a crowd beyond the walls of any synagogue. So Jesus climbs a bit of a mountain—an area overlooking a large grassy depression, a sort of natural theater, such that thousands can sit and see Him—and there He preaches a sermon laying out His mission statement, the teachings of the Christ for all the world. And He begins with a series of blessings, which we have come to call the Beatitudes.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” He says, “for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be fulfilled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven.

And you have to understand that this is completely ridiculous. Mourning, meekness, poverty, hunger? How can these be blessings? Ought we not to consider them curses instead? As for the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted, since when have they inherited anything at all? The wealthy run the world. The strong take what they want. Why, the Romans, in Jesus’ day, had conquered every known nation of earth, and they did it through warfare and mass enslavement. Seems to have worked out pretty well for them.

Imagine standing before this great gaggle of people from all about the Ancient Near East—many of them afflicted with disease, some plagued by evil spirits, all of them conquered by Rome—and proclaiming: “Blessed are the poor, and the mourning, and the merciful, and the meek.” No, that can’t be right. Blessed are the strong, surely. Blessed are the rich. They have whatever they want. They’re fat and sleek. They live in opulent villas, waited on hand and foot by chattel slaves. They kill whomever annoys them, even their servants and their children, as is their legal right.

And meekness, honestly, is starkly anti-Roman. Romans never trusted a man who couldn’t boast. A little false modesty proved fashionable, in small doses, of course, but the Empire ran on shameless self-promoters. They would’ve loved YouTube.

Christ here in many ways is throwing down the gauntlet. He is proclaiming a Kingdom, a system of values, that utterly inverts the ethics of the government under which He lives. We tend to read the Beatitudes now as though they were sepia-toned and saccharine. But this is the sort of thing that could get a person killed—and Jesus knows it. He’s seen what happened to John. He knows it will happen to Him. And from the very start, He warns the crowd that those within His Kingdom will be persecuted and reviled and done evil.

It’s radicalism in the truest sense: returning to the root. Jesus takes up the cry of the Prophets, the cry of Moses and of Abraham, that God is the God of the slaves, God of the weak, God of the oppressed, God of the conquered and the dying. He has not forgotten you; indeed He suffers with you. In Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God-With-Us, has come and is now here. And we know Him by His fruits: teaching, healing, forgiving, sanctifying, and proclaiming release to the captives.

And always He gives us His promise: that we will be comforted; we will be fulfilled; we will see God in His Kingdom, and be called His children. Thus must we rejoice and be glad, even amidst our affliction, for we know damn well that God does not break promises. It’s a topsy-turvy Kingdom for a topsy-turvy world: an upside-down world, which can only be set aright through the Cross. That’s very counter-intuitive, that God would win by dying, that Christ could be glorified through humiliation, and torture, and state-sponsored execution.

And that we should be saved—sinners as we are—not through ritual, not through sacrifice, not through being purportedly decent people, but simply through God’s love for us: unmerited, undeserving, and absolutely unstoppable! Such is our faith in the faithfulness of Christ, the Crucified, the Savior of this and every world.

There are times—especially in winter, especially now in middle-age—when melancholy hits me like a hammer. I look back on nearly 50 years, nearly half a century, and wonder what if anything I’ve managed to accomplish. I am not wealthy or famous or powerful. Professionally, my legacy will not long outlive me. When I’m feeling down in the dumps, my mainstays are my family and my friends. I love them dearly. But I’ve also failed them in many ways. Every father wishes he’d done better, been better.

And then, suddenly, I find myself sitting in the grass, amongst all the other riffraff, all the other losers: sorry, sad, sick, afflicted, desperate, and crippled. And I look up along with the rest of the crowd at the Man on the top of the hill. And He says to me, to all of us, the most astounding, astonishing things:

“Blessed are you when your spirit is poor; blessed are you when you mourn. Blessed are you when you’re meek, feeling alone and disinherited. Blessed are you when you’re starving for just a little righteousness, a little justice in this world. Blessed are you when you yearn for peace, with your wicked, withered heart. Blessed are you then, for you are yet My child, and I have come to bring you back to home.”

Now that’s the kind of sermon that resurrects the dead.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.







Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026

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