1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 4:23-5:12

What pictures do you carry with you?
Many of you, I know first-hand, have pictures of your grandchildren
or even great-grandchildren.
But however we keep them -- in our wallets or on our cell phones --
most of us have a picture or two of people we love
that we carry with us all the time.

There’s another picture we carry around, too,
not a physical picture
but one that is just as real
it is a picture of God.

What does your picture of God look like?
A benevolent old man with a white beard
--Santa Claus minus the red suit?
Or maybe in your picture God looks stern
or even angry
God is just waiting for you to mess up.
Maybe your God looks like a young man,
more like we might imagine Jesus.
Or maybe you have a picture that looks nothing like those conventional ideas.

In the book The Shack, God is depicted in several different guises,
but primarily, God looks like a
generously proportioned African American woman
who loves to cook. (1)
For many people, this was shocking, even heretical!
Often we don’t realize what pictures of God
we are carrying around
until we see someone else’s and
discover it is completely different from ours.

You’ve got to figure that’s what happened to the disciples
when Jesus started painting a picture of God and God’s kingdom
that looked completely different than what they had imagined.

The Beatitudes come after Jesus has begun his ministry of healing.
And remember whom he was healing: the sick, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics.
In a culture that assumed any kind of illness was a punishment for sin
Jesus was practicing a radical ministry to “the least and the lost.”
And then, as if to explain this crazy behavior,
he takes his disciples away from the crowds
and pronounces the highest blessings on the very people
the culture has designated the lowest of the low:
the poor
the grieving
the humble
those trying hard to do the right thing
those who extend mercy to others
those trying to bring peace to a violent world.

The problem for us is that it’s all too easy to hear Jesus’ words
as conditions of our faith.
As in, if only we are
poor
sad
meek
righteous
forgiving
peace-making
then we will receive the gifts God wants to give us
then we will be blessed.

Well, the good and bad news of the Beatitudes is this:
Jesus isn’t offering us a recipe for earning God’s favor
he is simply telling us who already has it.

The Beatitudes
reveal the fullness
and the mystery
of God’s grace,
a grace which is unconditional
which cannot be earned
and which is showered upon those who least expect it --
who also happen to be the ones our culture thinks
least deserve it.

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,”
Mrs. Turpin is an excessively judgmental woman
who sizes up everyone and everything she sees,
placing them neatly into categories:
white trash
blacks
ladies and gentlemen.
At night, she sometimes occupies her mind by
naming the classes of people.
The way she sees it,
so-called “colored people” are at the bottom of the heap
just one step above are the white trash;
above that are the home-owners,
the class to which she and her husband belong;
on top are people with lots of money and bigger houses and land.
What bothers her, though,
is the awareness that things are more complicated than that,
for some people with a lot of money are,
in her eyes, “common”
and some people below her had “good blood.”

In the story, she and her husband enter a doctor’s waiting room
and Mrs. Turpin quickly passes judgment on everyone there.
As time passes, she begins to voice some of these judgments out loud,
until finally, a young college girl who has been reading a textbook
and shooting Mrs. Turpin dirty looks
finally has as much of Mrs. Turpin as she can bear.

Fed up, she hurls the textbook across the room at Mrs. Turpin,
hitting her right above the eye
and then attacks her, strangling her, shouting
“Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog!”

Ruby Turpin is shaken to the core.
Later that night as she remembers the incident,
wondering why someone would say such a thing to a
good and respectable person like herself,
she sees a vision.

It’s a highway in the sky,
and upon it
“a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven.
There were whole companies of white trash,
clean for the first time in their lives,
and bands of blacks in white robes
and battalions of freaks and lunatics
shouting and clapping and leaping...
And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people who,
like herself and her husband,
had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
But as she looked closer at this group,
she could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away. (2)

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus begins his first sermon by turning everything upside-down.

It’s a hard message for the disciples to take in
and it doesn’t get any easier over time.
It’s the same message Paul had to deliver to the church in Corinth
when he wrote to this congregation
that cared an awful lot about social status
who was “in” and who was “out”
Paul informed them that God looked very different than they thought:
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
God chose what is low and despised in the world,
things that are not,
to reduce to nothing things that are,
so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”

The core of this message,
the core of the gospel
is that we are blessed by God
at the very moment when we discover we need God most.

Some have suggested that Matthew’s first Beatitude
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” really means
Blessed are those who realize their need for God.
Not just the poor who lack material things
but even those of us who have all the “things” we could ever need
and them some
but who recognize that without God
we have nothing of value.

Blessed are those who realize their need for God.
This blessing sets the tone for all the blessings that follow,
but notice there are no Beatitudes,
no blessings
for those who think they can help themselves.

For the last year, Heather Hendrick and her husband and four children
have been serving the people of Haiti.
Recently, they returned home to Texas for the summer.
Except they no longer have a home of their own to go to.
Heather is grateful to be following God’s call to serve the poor,
but at times she struggles mightily with how her life has changed.

“One year ago we were homeowners,” she writes. “[My husband] had a fantastic job. We had two vehicles...We were the ones people called when they needed help. When their car broke down. When they needed a place to stay. Or live. Our house had the extra bedrooms. We were the ones that offered security to others when things fell apart in their lives. They could count on us for meals, a listening ear, to loan them money, to watch their kids at the drop of a hat when an emergency came up...We were the ones with answers. Secure. Steady.

She continues, “...[E]verything....every single thing....about living the life of a "missionary" is uncomfortable. Not just the actual living in Haiti part. In so many ways, I want my old life back...my mortgage payment, [my gas-guzzling car], that feeling of control and that we're responsible. I liked being the givers instead of the takers.” (3)

In his extensive commentary on Matthew,
Dale Bruner calls the first four Beatitudes the “Need Beatitudes.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit
Blessed are those who mourn
Blessed are the meek
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
These blessings that Jesus pronounces
are “for those who cannot help themselves”
those who have no help apart from God.

What follows these “Need Beatitudes” are what Bruner calls “the Help Beatitudes.”
Blessed are the merciful
Blessed are the pure in heart
Blessed are the peacemakers.
These are the blessings Jesus pronounces
for “those who try to help others”
those who recognize that the only faithful response
to an experience of God’s grace
is to draw alongside others
especially other suffering human beings
and offer them love and support
which is nothing less than what God has commanded us to do.

Finally, Bruner names the last two Beatitudes “the Hurt Beatitudes.”
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
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 Jesus’ account.
The Hurt Beatitudes let us know what Heather Hendrick has discovered,
that following Jesus is not going to be easy,
should not be easy.
In fact, being faithful disciples probably means
we are going to end up just like Jesus
persecuted
ridiculed
hated
In other words,
desperately aware of our need for God. (4)

Which is perhaps not such a bad thing,
because remember: “blessed are those who know their need for God.”

The Beatitudes,
the first sentences of Jesus’ first sermon
reveal to us that following Jesus
is a lifelong endeavor
that looks more like a circle than a straight line.
It is a kind of cycle of faith.
And as soon as we take that first step,
we are somewhere on that cycle.

I like to think of this cycle as a ferris wheel.
Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down.
But you cannot experience the ride if you don’t get on.
And according to Jesus, the cost of this ride
is nothing less than admitting our need for God.
Until we do that, we haven’t really begun to follow him at all.

The Beatitudes are not a recipe for earning God’s favor;
the Beatitudes are a reminder that
in the life and cross and empty tomb of Jesus
God’s favor has already been poured out upon us.
But in order to receive it we have to be willing to admit that we need it
even though needing God’s grace
means we will be required to share it
knowing it will cost us nothing less than what it cost Jesus...
our very lives, given up for the sake of God.

Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Wm. Paul Young, The Shack. Windblown Media, 2011.
2. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978, p. 508. Thanks to Mark Ramsey in his sermon “Reality” (Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, January 30, 2011) for the connection of this story with these passages.
3. http://allthingshendrick.blogspot.com/2011/06/fever-induced-honesty.html
4. F. Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, Vol. 1: The Christbook. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004.