Sermon Title: "Blessed are the Upside-Down"
Date: January 30, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Matthew 5:1-12

The Beatitudes are among the most recognizable passages, not only in the Bible, but in all of Western literature.  However, as with all things familiar, such familiarity can be an obstacle to interpretation.  We think we know them so well that readers often fail to read such passages carefully, thinking the meaning of each verse is so obvious that one can recite it and quickly move on to the next.  Sometimes it is helpful to “de-familiarize” ourselves with such texts by a careful examination.

The Beatitudes are so named after the Latin adjective beatus, which is translated “fortunate,” that stands at the beginning of each verse.  The same word in Greek is best translated as “happy” or “blissful” to distinguish it from the Greek “blessed,” which does not actually occur in the Beatitudes.  This means there is a difference between beatitudes and blessings.  Beatitudes—beginning “Happy is the one who…”—acknowledge praise due to an individual for some deed or quality.  Blessings—beginning “Blessed is the one who…”—are petitions that God bless the one who possesses a particular characteristic.

There are two versions of the Beatitudes in the Gospels, in Matthew and Luke.  Both authors drew on the same literary source, though scholars tend to believe Luke’s is closer to the original version.  It is both shorter than Matthew’s version and has a more immediate and material emphasis.

Under my sermon title in the bulletin I placed some comparisons.  Luke writes:  “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  Matthew writes:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Luke addresses the socioeconomic condition of poverty, while Matthew abstractly addresses one’s piety. 

Another example of Matthew’s “spiritualization” of the Beatitudes can be seen in the difference between Luke’s “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled,” and Matthew’s “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”  Luke intimates that those who are hungry for food will receive it, while Matthew suggests that those who wish to see justice enacted will.

Beatitudes were not unique to Jesus.  They can be found in a variety of traditions in the ancient world, both secular and religious.  They are a sort of proverb, an everyday statement about the way things are.  “Blessed are those who have lots of money in the bank, for they will be free from worry.”  That’s a little everyday statement about the way things work in the real world.

Which make all the more surprising what Jesus did to beatitudes.  He uses this little everyday device of making a statement about the way the world works, to turn worldly wisdom on its head.  The world believes that those who are strong, powerful, rich, and happy are blessed.

But Jesus said just the opposite.  He turns this world on its head, upside-down.  He says blessed are the poor.  Blessed are the hungry.  Blessed are the meek.  I wonder if people back then began to question by his second beatitude?  He had turned conventional blessedness on its head.  Those whom we might call victims, fools, the bereft, and the oppressed, Jesus calls blessed.  God has a thing for those whom we regard as losers.  Down through the ages, no wonder the church has never known exactly what to do with the Beatitudes.  Some people have attempted to turn them into new rules, even though there is no “should,” or “ought.’  Other people have attempted to explain them away as some sort of idealistic commandments, just for those who are really, really religious.  Countless Sunday School classes have memorized them, yet never analyzed their meaning.

And yet, consider not what we ought to do with these Beatitudes, but what these Beatitudes do with us, the way they push us from where we are perched, viewing the world as the world loves to view itself, toward viewing the world as God sees us.

And whether these descriptions of the blessed sound like good news or bad news depends, to a great extent, on where you happen to be standing when you get the news.  For those of us up on the top, which is most of us in church at this moment—those of us who are well-fed, well-housed, fairly financially secure—the notion that God’s kingdom takes place on the bottom, blessing those on the bottom, before it moves upward, may strike us as bad news.

But if you’re on the bottom, the meek, the disinherited, the empty, the poor in spirit and otherwise, the bad news for those on the top is your good news.  The Beatitudes are not so much something we’re to do, but something we’re to see.  This is to see the world as God sees it.

The Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown-Taylor says that Matthew’s Beatitudes can be summed up in the phrase, “Blessed are the upside-down.”  That’s not a bad translation at all.  The Beatitudes speak about the world seen from a very different perspective, upside-down from the way we usually view the world.  From the bottom looking up.

Taylor says that when Jesus delivered his Beatitudes he should have asked the crowd there to stand on their heads.  Because that was what he was doing.  He was asking them to turn the known world upside-down, to view the world from a totally different direction, to give themselves an utterly different perspective.

When I was growing up, there was a man in our church in his twenties, confined to a wheelchair.  When he was a teenager, he was at summer camp and dove off the dock into the lake.  He struck his head on a rock, which caused damage to his neck, rendering him a quadriplegic.  This didn’t stop him however.  He could drive a car with hand controls.  When he wanted to take our junior high boys Sunday School class to visit Forest Lawn in Glendale, we boys simply hoisted him into the driver’s seat by his belt.  Our parents figured if he had passed the driver’s test and had insurance, we were safe with him.  After all, they knew him and his parents.

Steve wanted to be a psychologist—a child psychologist at that.  But he had great difficulty getting into the program.  “You have a very obvious physical disability,” he was told.  “Children will be scared to be close to you.”

But a funny thing happened.  At coffee hour after church on Sundays, my little sister Joan, four or five at the time, would stand on the footrests of Steve’s wheelchair and eat her snack off the tray on his wheelchair.  He was on a child’s level.  Kids would come up to him, look him in the eye, and ask, “Why are you in that chair?  Are you sick?  Did you have an accident?  Will you walk again?”  These were questions that adults might like to ask, but never would.  It took someone down on his level to ask such questions, not those on the top, in the superior position of standing up.  Blessed are the upside-down, for they view the world from a totally different perspective.

Steve, incidentally, persevered, earned a masters degree and became a child psychologist.  He got married; though he sadly died in mid-life from the health complications that often affect those who are paralyzed.

The Beatitudes are written from both the present and future tenses.  ‘Blessed are those now…, who will in the future be…’  This will indeed be good news for those whom we often do not “see,” the invisible poor in our midst:  janitors and house-keepers, low-wage nursing home staff we depend on to care for our elderly relatives, day-laborers who stand outside Home Depots across the country, gardeners—all those on whom we rely to keep our everyday world operating smoothly.  It is not enough to assuage them with the promise, ‘Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven someday.’  They need to be recognized, thanked and blessed here and now, in this life. 

New Testament scholar M. Eugene Boring writes:  “Christian faith is a way of living based on the firm and sure hope that meekness is the way of God, that righteousness and peace will finally prevail, and that God’s future will be a time of mercy and not cruelty.  So, blessed are those who live this life now, even when such a life seems foolish, for they will, in the end, be vindicated by God.”

Boring concludes his commentary on the Beatitudes with this sentence:  “The blessing pronounced on [Jesus’] disciples in [the Beatitudes] is for the purpose of their becoming the agents of blessing to others.”

And are we not Jesus’ disciples in this day and age, charged to do the same?  In the upside-down world, we are the ones to give the blessing.