blessings

Ordinary Blessings

/ JJS / Leave a comment

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Today’s readings (click below to open in new tab/window):
Psalms 108; 150, Job 38:1-11, 42:1-5, Revelation 19:4-16, John 1:29-34

Divine intervention. We are taught in Sunday School to believe it looks like great reward or great punishment defying the laws of nature – like the parting of the Red Sea or the walls crumbling around Jericho; like the resurrection of Lazarus or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the case of Job, divine intervention felt both like punishment and reward: God stripped everything he loved and valued from him, then restored his fortunes because he remained faithful. Behind the scenes, the motivations for divine intervention in Job’s life weren’t really about him at all.

We should call God’s involvement in the life of John the Baptist a blessing – after all, he had the privilege of preparing Israel for the arrival of Christ – but his reward for faithfulness was execution. When we hear examples like this, does it diminish our enthusiasm for a divine hands-on management style?

What if divine intervention wasn’t always quite so … obvious? It seems counter-intuitive that God would create a universe in need of constant tweaking, but might it be possible that interaction with God is built into the fabric of creation? That we go through each day touched by God in small ways we may or may not notice? Not that the Spirit is some cosmic personal assistant saving us a good parking space or sparing us from the same financial woes someone else is suffering (though there’s nothing wrong with expressing gratitude for these situations).  Every experience we have is an opportunity to connect with God, but we must choose to make that connection.

When we don’t get that parking space or pay raise, are we just as grateful? When we compare our lives to peers we consider more successful than ourselves (never a good idea, but inevitable), do we acknowledge the blessing of an ordinary life?

Maybe divine intervention doesn’t look like God altering the world for us, but God altering us for the world.

We can’t all be leaders and prophets. We can all be followers of Christ. Surrendering our lives to God makes us the very instruments of divine intervention. If we want to see God at work in the world, let’s look inside first.

Comfort: God is available to us always…

Challenge: … but insisting on our own way can make God seem distant.

Prayer: Holy God, thank you for being present in my life even when I don’t feel you. Amen.

Discussion: In what ways do you feel God has changed you to better serve the world?

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Blessed are those…

/ JJS / Leave a comment

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Today’s readings (click below to open in new tab/window):
Psalms 97; 145, Exodus 32:1-20, Colossians 3:18-4:6 (4:7-18), Matthew 5:1-10

Today’s passage from Matthew is commonly known as The Beatitudes. The word “beatitude” means supreme blessedness or happiness. Jesus is telling the people that God does not just sympathize with those who struggle, but places them first.

The words of The Beatitudes are famous well beyond Christian circles. “Blessed are the meek” and “Blessed are the peacemakers”  would be cliché if they weren’t still radical statements.

The Beatitudes describe a world where an oppressive imperial society (Roman or otherwise) is turned upside down by God’s love. We perceive them as blessings, but to anyone holding or seeking power over others, they are almost threatening. No wonder Jesus warns us those who benefit from the status quo or fear God’s justice will revile and persecute and slander the faithful: his message says that not only is their power illusory, they are ultimately irrelevant to us because our only dependence is on God.

Some critics of Christianity use texts like The Beatitudes to paint Christians as passive and long-suffering. The meek, the mournful, the poor, and the hungry – not anyone most of us would aspire to be. Even the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers can be caricatured as mere do-gooders or pacifiers.

The truth is, each of these states represents an active engagement in the world and a refusal to accept less than the fullness of God. Mourning is not mere sadness, but grappling with a world steeped in pain. Meekness is a choice of community over self. Peacemaking is a dangerous profession – ask any police officer called to a domestic dispute.

The Beatitudes spell out how we are to be in the world but not of it. We are not called to suffer for suffering’s sake, but may be called to do so when life in the kingdom of God clashes with the expectations of the world. How such persecution can be a blessing is a mystery, but no more a mystery than how the world can turn a deaf ear to God’s call to justice and love. Which of these mysteries do we want to live in?

Comfort: God’s ways are not the world’s ways. The poor in spirit have the kingdom of heaven.

Challenge: What do you think it means to be poor “in spirit?” Read this article and have a conversation with friends about it.

Prayer: Lord, I depend only on you for my spiritual wealth, only on you to satisfy my hunger for justice. Amen.

Discussion: How might it be spiritually dangerous to assume we are persecuted simply because we are Christian?

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A Level Place

/ JJS / 1 Comment

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Today’s readings (click below to open in new tab/window):
Psalms 84; 148, Hosea 4:11-19, Acts 21:37-22:16, Luke 6:12-26

Do you consider yourself comfortable or afflicted? Luke 6:17 begins a passage sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain. It parallels many of the themes of the better known and more comprehensive Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew. This sermon contains a list of blessings and woes that sound very much like the Beatitudes. They describe a reversal of fortune in which the afflicted will be comforted, and the comfortable will be afflicted. These ideas are equally unsettling to us as to Jesus’s original audience.

When we hear “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry,” does it mean we should go hungry? Is the Realm of God a world in which all people hunger? What if we are the hungry, and through the grace of God we become full? Into which camp – the blessed hungry or the cursed full – do we then belong?

A simple answer might be: if we are full (or rich, or laughing, or popular) at the expense of others, woe to us. Perhaps we should never be completely certain which camp we are in. We would be foolish and ungrateful to reject gifts like a good meal or a sheltering roof. After all, Jesus encourages us to provide these things to the poor. However, we would be equally (if not more) foolish to believe such gifts mark us as specially favored by God. The type of blessing Jesus speaks of in this passage is a state of right relationship with God. When we become complacent or take this relationship for granted, the relationship will suffer. Too much certainty our poverty is a sign of God’s favor is no better than a belief that material comfort is evidence of the same thing. This tension in the relationship helps us actively evaluate and fine-tune it throughout our lives.

Unwavering certainty in our own state of righteousness – or sinfulness – closes us off from the transformational grace of Christ in our lives, and in the lives of others. The gift of uncertainty keeps us humble seekers, always ready to discover Christ in new ways.

Comfort: The less we think we know, the better we can know God.

Challenge: Create side-by-side lists of the ways you think are rich and the ways you think you are poor. Do these line up with the Sermon on the Plain?

Prayer: Glorious Creator, thank you for a relationship that always grows. Amen.

Discussion: What is the difference between feeling guilty about the state of the world, and feeling responsible for it?

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