Jeremiah 17:5-8

⁵ Thus says the Lord : Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord . ⁶ They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.

⁷ Blessed are those who trust in the Lord , whose trust is the Lord . ⁸ They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.

I Corinthians 15:12-20

¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³ If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; ¹⁴ and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. ¹⁵ We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. ¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. ¹⁷ If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. ¹⁹ If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

²⁰ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

Luke 6:17-26

¹⁷He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. ¹⁸They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

²⁰Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

²¹“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

²²“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. ²³Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

²⁴“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

²⁵“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

²⁶“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

The Sermon

What does it mean to be blessed?

A survey done about ten years ago found that 70% of Americans polled believed their financial situation was “at least somewhat” reflective of “God’s regard” for them (“Harper’s Index” quoted in Funny Times, Nov. 1995, #15).

Is that what we mean when we look at what we have and say, “Thank you, God, for all my blessings—I am so blessed”? That just seems like proper humility, it doesn’t seem like some kind of theological arrogance.

But then that little voice says, “Does that mean that you are one of those 70% who believe that you have the luxury of food on the table, enough gas in the car to get where you’re going, and a little bit of disposable income, at least in part because God thinks you’re just so peachy?

“It’s not because maybe you were born into the right family, or not into the wrong family; or caught the right breaks, or never had to face the same discrimination somebody else did?

“Does that mean that God decided that everybody who doesn’t have what you have isn’t quite as peachy as you?”

A long time ago a college football player kicked a winning field goal from way far out with no time on the clock to win a major football game against Southern Methodist University. After the game, the kicker gave all the glory to God, saying it was God who was responsible for such a wonderful thing happening.

Really? Does that mean, asked the great theologian Bobby Knight, that God had decided to, um, “do something bad” to SMU? (I’m paraphrasing.)

What does it mean to be blessed?

Oh, they talk about this one all the time. When the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, sit around their card table, this one comes up at least once a year.

Mark fidgets in his chair every time the other three start talking deep theology. He’d rather just tell exciting stories that get right to the point about Jesus’ amazing power.

John, across from Mark, doesn’t fidget, but he doesn’t really have a dog in this fight, either.

No, the two contestants are the other two at the card table, Matthew and Luke. And every time this story comes up, they go at it.

When Luke says it was, “Blessed are you who are poor,” Matthew always says, “…in spirit. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

When Luke says it was, “Blessed are you who are hungry now,” Matthew says, “hungry for righteousness. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

And Luke says, no, Matthew; not today.

He says: that works, Matthew, for all of us who want and mean to have our hearts in the right place, but we just keep finding ourselves not quite there.

It works because from time to time, everybody’s poor in spirit.

It works because everybody at one time or another hungers and thirsts for righteousness, usually when you’re watching a news report about people in some far-flung corner of the world being allowed to starve, or being slaughtered by insane warlords. That’s enough to make anybody hunger for righteousness. But a lot of us hunger and thirst for righteousness in the far more mundane, but infinitely more personal—and therefore, to us, more relevant—daily injustices we suffer.

“So and so told me I was wrong, but then when we found out that he was wrong, he never said he was sorry.”

“I was driving my small car on a narrow road, and along came an SUV, so I pulled over to the side like we always do whenever two cars come along at the same time. And that driver just kept right on going, like it was just assumed that I would get out of the way. She never even looked at me.”

“I went and bought groceries, and when I got home, I found that I had paid for a box of Pop Tarts, but somehow that box must have ended up in somebody else’s grocery bag. I ask you, Where is the justice?”

So Matthew, it works when you say that he said, blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness, because sometimes we all hunger and thirst for righteousness. And it works when you say that he said, blessed are you who are poor in spirit, because sometimes we’re all poor in spirit.

But today, he didn’t say hunger for righteousness or poor in spirit. Today he said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh”—a good laugh.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.”

Imagine the audacity of saying that to the thousand who will not survive this hour, and the 24,000 who will not be on this earth this time tomorrow because they are starving—“Blessed are you, for you will be filled.”

They didn’t need any caveats to convince them that he was talking to them. They were poor. They were hungry. They were weeping. And it wasn’t just circumstance or dumb luck or bad judgment on their part or some youthful indiscretion that had gotten them into trouble. They hadn’t gotten married ’cause they had to and dropped out of school. They hadn’t knocked over a candy truck and made off with some petty cash. They hadn’t been pulling a prank and got caught.

They were poor and hungry and thirsty and weeping because endless rounds of war and oppression and famine and domination had made it so. They were poor because circumstances—and people—kept them poor. They wept because they never had a chance to make it out.

To those people, on this day, the Son of God said, “Blessed are you.”

Maybe to be blessed is not to be measured in what you have, or what you are without; or what your chances of survival are. Maybe that is an equally important but separate consideration.

Jeremiah said that to be blessed is “like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”

And the ones who can be described that way are those who trust in the Lord . It’s not that God rewards them for their trust by planting them by flowing streams; it’s just that that’s what it feels like when you trust in God. You feel the nourishment. You feel ultimately secure.

For those whose hearts turn away from the Lord and put their trust in mere mortals—even themselves, presumably—it feels more like living in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.

Maybe all of us who have hope are the ones who are blessed—not because hope earns us a blessing, but because the hope we have in God is itself a blessing.

I rarely see a saying or a slogan written on a church sign that I don’t think is completely trite and unworthy of its prominent place as an evangelistic tool in front of a church. “If God is your co-pilot, you’re in the wrong seat” I thought was OK. A few years ago we had a blazing hot summer, and that little church way up on College Road had a sign, “You think THIS is hot!”

But there’s one that I saw on the way to Elizabethtown the other day that I really liked. It said something to the effect that “your picture is on God’s refrigerator.”

That is a blessing. And maybe that’s something like what it means to be blessed.

Whether you’re talking to Matthew or to Luke, or to both of them at the same time, as Jesus tells it, the blessing is not the reward. Those who are hungry are blessed, but not because their being hungry has earned them something.

They aren’t blessed because there’s something sacred about the state of hunger.

The blessing is that their picture is on God’s wall. They’re blessed because they are not forgotten even in this miserable state which is absolutely counter to God’s will for humankind. They’re blessed because when Jesus found people hungry, he fed them. Even if it took a miracle, he fed them.

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and those who are hungry now, are blessed because in Christ, there is no East or West; in Christ there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female; in Christ, we are all one body and individually members of it.

The body of Christ is now measured in billions of human beings, some of whom—namely, us—have the resources both to share our food supply and to change the circumstances that cause poverty and hunger and want.

A servant of the Lord in Central America named Dom Helder Camara once said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And blessed are you who are hungry now.

What does it mean to be blessed? It means we are not so full that we can’t remember those who are hungry.

It means we find it impossible to receive as much consolation from amassing our wealth as we can from sharing it.

It means we cherish our laughter because we still know what it means to mourn and weep.

It means we could be hated, excluded, reviled, or defamed, but we would still r ejoice and leap for joy, because we still have the most important blessing of all.

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

Blessed are those whose trust is the Lord . They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and it does not cease to bear fruit.

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

February 11, 2007