Jackson Community Church

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Bob Dufford

Reflections on beatitudes and blessings (themes from Matthew)

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The leaf of every tree brings a message from the unseen world. Look, every falling leaf is a blessing. — Rumi

SONGS about BLESSINGS:

Gospel According to Shug― Alice Walker
HELPED are those who are content to be themselves;
they will never lack mystery in their lives and
the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos
rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm,
for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life
and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness,
knowing neither brand name nor fad;
they shall live every day as if in eternity,
and each moment shall be as full as it is long.
HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults;
to them will be given clarity of vision.
HELPED are those who create anything at all,
for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception,
and realize an partnership in the creation of the Universe
that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
HELPED are those who love the Earth,
their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die;
in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood,
and in their joy in her lively response to love,
they will converse with the trees.
HELPED are those whose every act
is a prayer for harmony in the Universe,
for they are the restorers of balance to our planet.
To them will be given the insight
that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos
welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
HELPED are those who risk themselves for others’ sakes;
to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the world
in which no one’s gift is despised or lost.
HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger;
their reward will be that in any confrontation
their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace;
on them depends the future of the world.
HELPED are those who forgive;
their reward shall be forgiveness of every evil done to them.
It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence
of the Creator’s magic in the Universe;
they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart;
theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
HELPED are those who love all the colors
of all the human beings, as they love
all the colors of the animals and plants;
none of their children, nor any of their ancestors,
nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight,
as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars.
None of their children, nor any of their ancestors,
nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole;
none of their children, nor any of their ancestors,
nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion.
HELPED are those who find the courage
to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another–plant, animal, river, or human being.
They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid.
HELPED are those who lose their fear of death;
theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.
HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differences.
HELPED are those who KNOW.

Prayer — Anne Lamott
Hi, God.
I am just a mess.
It is all hopeless.
What else is new?
I would be sick of me, if I were You, but
Miraculously You are not.
I know I have no control over other people’s
Lives, and I hate this.
Yet I believe that if I
Accept this and surrender,
You will meet me
Wherever I am.
Wow.  Can this be true?  If so, how is this
Afternoon – say, two-ish?
Thank You in advance for Your company and
Blessings.
You have never once let me down.
Amen.​

COMMMENTARY on BEATITUDES

While the Ten Commandments are about creating social order (a good thing), the eight Beatitudes of Jesus are all about incorporating what seems like disorder, a very different level of consciousness. With the Beatitudes, there is no social or ego payoff for the false self. Obeying the Commandments can appeal to our egotistic consciousness and our need to be “right” or better than others.
Obedience to the Ten Commandments does give us the necessary impulse control and containment we need to get started, which is foundational to the first half of life. “I have kept all these from my youth,” the rich young man says, before he then refuses to go further (Mark 10:22). The Beatitudes, however, reveal a world of pure grace and abundance, or what Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory would call the second tier of consciousness and what I call second-half-of-life spirituality. Francis doesn’t call it anything; he just lives it on his path of love. Mature and mystical Christianity is “made to order” to send you through your entire life journey and not just offer you containment. — Richard Rohgr, sourcel https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-spirituality-of-the-beatitudes-2017-06-22/

Someone asked C.S. Lewis if he cared for the Beatitudes, “As to caring for it, if “caring for,” means liking or enjoying, I suppose no one cares for it. Who can like being knocked flat on his face by a sledgehammer? I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of a man who can read it with tranquil pleasure.” — Margaret Ashmore, full article: https://christiancounseling.com/blog/uncategorized/the-king%E2%80%99s-speech-beatitudes-part-one-of-six/

Jesus is, I think, inviting us to imagine what it’s like to live in the kingdom of God and, by inviting that imagination, drawing a sharp contrast between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world and challenging our often unconscious allegiance to the latter. Notice first that the people who Jesus is calling “blessed” are definitely not the people the larger culture viewed as blessed. Those who are mourning rather than happy? Those who are meek rather than strong? Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness rather than wealth? Absurd. And that holds for pretty much everything on Jesus’ list.
So perhaps Jesus is playing for larger stakes than an improved ethic. Perhaps he’s challenging who we imagine being blessed in the first place. Who is worthy of God’s attention. Who deserves our attention, respect, and honor. And by doing that, he’s also challenging our very understanding of blessedness itself and, by extension, challenging our culture’s view of, well, pretty much everything. Blessing. Power. Success. The good life. Righteousness. What is noble and admirable. What is worth striving for and sacrificing for. You name it. Jesus seems to invite us to call into question our culturally-born and very much this-worldly view of all the categories with which we structure our life, navigate our decisions, and judge those around us. — David Lose, full article: https://www.davidlose.net/2017/11/all-saints-a-preaching-a-beatitudes-inversion/

…. primarily a blessing is about relationship: with the self, with God, with one another. And blessings are about wholeness. Blessings seek wholeness of the self and community without denying the brokenness – the reality of slippery truth, the fact of the degradation of our planet. They reach into a source beyond our present frontiers and do this for the sake of wholeness and healing.
To reach into a source is to live with recognition of the self as being in process: ‘we are distant from the homeland of wholeness.’ It is an old truth that we’ve almost forgotten that the best things in life take time, we need the leaning in of time to form who we are becoming. The gift of time actually is the enabling vehicle which evolves us. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that we need to remember that we are shaped by time, otherwise we are in danger of losing of what it is to be human. So, the practice of silence and reflection enables us to ‘enter into that forecourt of the soul,’ that source of intimacy which enables possibility to emerge. Rowan Williams goes on to say: ‘Time is a complex and rich gift; it is the medium in which we not only grow and move forward, but also constructively return and resource – literally re-source – ourselves’
There are two Greek words translated as blessing or to bless or blessed in the New Testament. The first one is eulogeo: to speak well of God, to ask God’s blessing on a thing – to praise, to invoke, to consecrate something and set it apart for its ongoing wellness in God. Luke 24:30 ‘He took bread and blessed it, and broke, and gave to them’; Mark 11:9 ‘Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord’; Matthew 5:44 ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.’ The second word is markarios – this is the one we most often translate as ‘blessed’ from the Beatitudes: it means to be a partaker of God and the fullness of God. Makarios in particular has that deep sense of joy and grace. — The Carmelite Library, full article: https://thecarmelitelibrary.blogspot.com/2018/06/subversive-by-blessing-what-does-it.html

A Benediction — Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber, source: https://thecorners.substack.com/p/blessed-are-the-agnostics

Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’ lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside who his world—like ours—didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance.

Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards. I mean, come on, doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do? Extravagantly throwing around blessings as though they grew on trees?

So I imagine Jesus standing among us offering some new beatitudes:

  • Blessed are the agnostics.
  • Blessed are they who doubt. Those who aren’t sure, who can still be surprised.
  • Blessed are they who are spiritually impoverished and therefore not so certain about everything that they no longer take in new information.
  • Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. Blessed are the preschoolers who cut in line at communion. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
  • Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.
  • Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean. Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.
  • Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried.
  • Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted anymore.
  • Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
  • Blessed are those who “still aren’t over it yet.”
  • Blessed are those who mourn. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
  • Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers.
  • Blessed are the forgotten. Blessed are the closeted.
  • Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented.
  • Blessed are the teens who have to figure out ways to hide the new cuts on their arms. Blessed are the meek.
  • You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
  • Blessed are the wrongly accused, the ones who never catch a break, the ones for whom life is hard, for Jesus chose to surround himself with people like them.
  • Blessed are those without documentation. Blessed are the ones without lobbyists.
  • Blessed are foster kids and special-ed kids and every other kid who just wants to feel safe and loved.
  • Blessed are those who make terrible business decisions for the sake of people.
  • Blessed are the burned-out social workers and the overworked teachers and the pro bono case takers.
  • Blessed are the kindhearted football players and the fundraising trophy wives.
  • Blessed are the kids who step between the bullies and the weak. Blessed are they who hear that they are forgiven.
  • Blessed is everyone who has ever forgiven me when I didn’t deserve it.
  • Blessed are the merciful, for they totally get it.

I imagine Jesus standing here blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.” This Jesus whom we follow cried at the tomb of his friend and turned the other cheek and forgave those who hung him on a cross. Because he was God’s Beatitude—God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.

 

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