Where Human Effort Fails – sermon on January 29, 2017
Matthew 5: 1-12 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them. He said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Sermon: Where Human Effort Fails by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Is there anyone here who has any experience at all with grief – have lost a loved one, a greatly desired opportunity, a home or job? And is there anyone here who has suffered from significant pain, whether physical, emotional or social? Good! Then you might be able to help me with this. What are some of the things that are best not said to someone going through these things? (in a better place, God wanted them so, something / someone else will come along, at least…, others have it worse, how long are you going to carry on about this, etc.) What makes it hard to hear those things?
What if someone said to you in your grief, “blessed are those who mourn,” would that be comforting? How about if they added “for you will be comforted?” How about saying to someone who has been picked on and pushed around, taken for granted and abused, “blessed are the meek, for you shall inherit the earth?” So what are we to make of this morning’s readings – these “beatitudes?” He talks about people in difficult situations, saying they are blessed, when we tend to associate being blessed with pleasant situations. I am blessed to have a loving family. I am blessed to have work that I love and is meaningful. You were blessed that the tests came back negative, or that the birth went smoothly or the trip was fabulous. Jesus says something completely different. How typical…
It is important to note that Jesus is not saying these things in an effort to give pastoral care. He is not, in this moment, confronted with a grieving or suffering person. He has gone up a mountain to avoid a crowd, and when those closest to him, his disciples, join him, he begins to teach. So these words are meant to give them insight to an important truth – the truth that God is in those places that are most difficult and painful for us, in those places eager to bless us. And I wonder if one of the reason he wants them to know this is because he will also go to those places, and will want his disciples to go there as well.
Can we admit that it is not easy to go there? It can be hard to sit with someone who is in great pain and know there is nothing we can do to alleviate it, no words we can say to make it better. It can be hard to acknowledge the reality that people really are persecuted and oppressed and shut out of places and opportunity for something as random as skin color or religion, country of birth or gender identity. Sometimes it is hard for me to face these things because it makes me so upset, and I don’t like to feel upset. It does not feel like a blessing to me. I blame, I get self-righteous, I get judgmental. Or I feel guilty over my complicity. All of these are uncomfortable feelings. And yet Jesus taught his disciples, and teaches us, that those are the places we will find God’s blessing. In the uncomfortable feelings, in the unclean places. Kayla McClurg, in her devotional, says, “It’s not when we are already filled up with the gluttony of right answers, satiated by promises of good times to come, but when we are hungry and thirsting for justice and unsure that we will ever be filled that we can honestly search for mercy, beg for a pure heart, and count on receiving them. It is not the peace so much as the longing for peace, the long agony of finding ourselves empty, that draws us closer to the One who has all we need.”
These are provocative ideas, and we can certainly discuss and meditate on them, but I also want to know what it looks like to live this out, to let ourselves be shaped to and for blessings in poverty of spirit, in mourning, in meekness, in mercy and purity, in peacemaking and persecution. And so I considerate it providential that one of our book groups just finished reading The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. She was a Dutch woman in her late 40’s when Nazi Germany invaded Holland. She’d grown up in a joyful home where a primary focus was their Christian faith. The bible was read twice daily, but more importantly, the love of Christ permeated the household. The family shared without a second thought, giving food to whoever needed it, taking in a multitude of foster children, employing people in their watch shop that others deemed unemployable.
Corrie and her sister Betsie were single, childless women living with their widowed father when the occupation began. As the Ten Booms saw what was happening to their Jewish neighbors – registered by the occupiers, forced to wear stars, then their businesses taken over, and finally their captivity, they could not stand by. They became part of an underground Dutch resistance, finding shelter for the persecuted Jews, obtaining ration cards to supply those sheltering them. And of course they sheltered several “illegals” themselves. This continued for 3-4 years with many signs of God’s blessing and protection. But eventually their activities came to the attention of the Germans. The family and several other resistance members were arrested, though somehow the people hidden in the secret room managed to escape.
Their father died in prison, and Corrie and her sister Betsy suffered terribly, first in their imprisonment, which included months of solitary confinement and illness for Corrie. The sisters were finally united on a boxcar to a concentration camp, a horrific journey of several days in a car so cramped and fetid that some did not survive it. They were together in Ravensbruck,and had even managed to smuggle a bible with them, and this is the part of the story that reminded me so of the beatitudes. I will quote Corrie a bit: “There was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Every day something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heave. Will you carry this too, Lord Jesus? One thing became increasingly clear, and that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, the bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory. I had always believed the bible, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were – of hell and heaven, of how people act and how God acts. I had read a thousand time the story of Jesus’ arrest – how soldiers had slapped him and laughed at him and flogged him. Now such happenings had faces and voices.
They were sent to the huge, crowded, tense bunk room – people crowded on platforms covered by soiled, rancid, flea-infested straw. They mined scripture for how to live in such a place. Betsy found the answer in 1st Thessalonians – “comfort the frightened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. See that none of you repays evil with evil, but seek to do good to one another and to all. And rejoice always, give thanks for all circumstances.” Corrie had trouble giving thanks for the fleas, but Betsie persuaded her that they must, and I won’t spoil it for you, but turns out Betsie was right. Their prayer, their reading of scripture to all who wanted to listen, their patience and love affected everyone else there. Peace began to fill the room, even laughter. For Betsie, the call to seek to do good to all included their guards. Her heart was full of compassion for their persecutors, for those whipping the prisoners, even for the man who had turned them in. Corrie, seeing her sister’s incredible love and compassion experienced herself as poorer in spirit, saw the contrast with her own anger, sometimes murderous rage, and would bring those things to Jesus, asking him to carry them for her.
After the war ended Corrie pursued Betsie’s dream of sharing their story, sharing what they had learned about God during the war, during their imprisonment, during their time at a concentration camp. Corrie sums it as as such: “Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.”
It happened again when Corrie was giving a talk in Germany. She said the hunger for her hopeful stories was greatest there, in this land in ruins, cities, hearts and minds of ashes and rubble. She said just to cross the border was to feel the great weight hanging over the land. At the church service she saw a former SS guard from Ravensbruck, and she was overcome with the horrible memories of the mocking and humiliation. And he approaches her, beaming, saying how grateful he was for her message, how Jesus has washed his sins away. He put out his hand to shake, and she couldn’t take it, filled with anger and vengeful thoughts as she was. So she gave it to Jesus again – praying, “Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give him your forgiveness.” Her arm moved up to take his hand, and she felt a current run between them and felt her heart fill with Christian love. She realized that it is not on our forgiveness, or our goodness, or on anything we do that the world’s healing hinges, but on God’s goodness and God’s gift of love. When we are asked to love our enemy, God gives the love itself.
I think this is the counter-cultural and counter-intuitive wisdom Jesus was trying to pass on in the beatitudes. It is not in comfort and worldly success that God awaits you, nor are they necessarily the places God wants to take you as a reward for good behavior. God meets us where we are in need – where we are poor in spirit, or grieving or persecuted or despairing over the hard-heartedness of this world. We can try our best to lift ourselves out of it. We can talk with friends, read, pray, attend grief groups, march on Washington, call our reps. We should try. Human effort means something. But we can also trust that where we fail, God will be there, waiting with a blessing. Again, I wouldn’t say that to someone in the midst of their suffering – “Aren’t you blessed?” But I think it is important that I believe it, that I can hold that vision, or that God can give me that vision. You are loved by God, you are cared for, your suffering is not for naught. Isn’t that, at its core, the most healing truth. May it be so.
