The Netherlorn Churches 1 January 2017

Being Disciples 1 – “Heaven Here and Now”

Psalm 34:4-10; Matthew 5:1-12

Heaven Here and Now Today we enter a new year, usually regarded as a hopeful occasion. This year it brings, for many, more of a sense of foreboding. There has been a general consensus that 2016 was not a good year. The question therefore is whether the new year will be any better? There is a sense that we are entering a new world order where old certainties no longer apply and we wonder where we are going? Our sense of values has been thrown up in the air and we enter a time where our human community is struggling to know what are the values that would be our best guides in shaping our society and determining our future. The social analyst Achille Mbembe offers the rather bleak prediction that: “The denigration of virtues such as care, compassion and kindness will go hand in hand with the belief, especially among the poor, that winning is all that matters and who wins — by whatever means necessary — is ultimately right.”

It is in this kind of environment that we turn at the start of a new year to the famous words of that we find at the beginning of Matthew chapter 5. The phrase “Sermon on the Mount” is one that has entered our language as a particularly convincing sermon. When Margaret once tried to expound the religious and philosophical basis of her politics to the General Assembly, the speech became famous as the “Sermon on the Mound” – named after the street in where the General Assembly is held but deriving its resonance from the play on words with the Sermon on the Mount.

At least until recently, it is a part of the Bible that was well registered in our communal thinking, especially when it came to the question of determining the values by which we ought to live our lives. What is more of a question is whether we always understood properly what this “sermon” is all about. It has often been presented as a kind of moral ideal – “if only we could all just live according to the

1 Sermon on the Mount, things would be fine….” But Jesus was not in the business of presenting moral ideals. He was about good news, not good advice!

This is where what we discover in Jesus goes beyond new year resolutions. It is not a matter of urging everyone to pull their socks up or laying down a code of conduct. He was talking to his disciples, those who had chosen to follow him, and letting them know that the new life on which they had embarked is one that will make them truly happy. But this new life is not something that they conjured up by themselves. Rather, it is a new life that has come with Jesus. It is a new life that we receive as a gift. It is a new life that comes with the inbreaking of the reign of – the kingdom – of which Jesus spoke so often.

This is where we have possibly lost something when we moved in our modern translations from the language of “Blessed” to the language of “Happy” – from “Blessed are the poor in spirit” to “ Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor”. Both are valid translations of the original Greek makarioi but the use of blessing language gives us more of a sense that the happiness has a source – it is the blessing of God. This is a distinction that I notice in couples who come to church for their wedding. Happy – of course, they are happy when they are deeply in love and planning their life together. But the reason they want to celebrate their marriage in church is that they have looked beyond this to appreciate that they are blessed. The love and the joy that they have found in one another are such that they feel they have been blessed by God. So it is with the pattern of life sketched in Matthew 5 – when we enter into it we will know that it is beyond what we could create for ourselves – it is the gift of God, the blessing of God.

What this blessing involves is unpacked in the few choice phrases of what we call the Beatitudes – from the Latin beatus, meaning “blessed”. Here we find the outline of the new life that God gives us in Jesus Christ, the new life that begins when we say “yes” to his call.

In the language of the New Testament this is about being disciples. First and foremost, following Christ is about living this new life. Rowan Williams has

2 reminded us recently that, “Discipleship … is a state of being. Discipleship is about how we live; not just the decisions we make, not just the things we believe, but a state of being.”

It is a state of being in which we tune into the reality of heaven, the realm where God is already king. In the Beatitudes we are offered a sketch of what this “state of being” looks like, the contours of the life of heaven finding expression here on earth. Here is the answer to our prayer for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is heaven. It is about living in the present in the way that corresponds to God’s promised future; because that future has arrived in the present in Jesus of Nazareth. It may seem upside down, turning our expectations on their heads. But we are called to believe, with great daring, that it is in fact the right way up.

Before we look more closely at the contours of this new life, we sing a hymn that might lead us into it – 554 Rock of Ages cleft for me.

Nothing in my Hand I Bring As we embark on our exploration of the contours of the new life that comes with Christ, today we focus on the first two phrases: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are those who mourn”. You can see what we mean by “upside down” – who would have guessed that being poor and in mourning could be the way to be happy?

This is not, of course, suggesting that in itself is a good thing. The Bible is all about liberation from the bondage of poverty. Rather the point is that there is a spiritual reality that is discovered through the experience of being poor. As our Good News translation puts it, “Happy are those who know that they are spiritually poor”. Or as it has been paraphrased, “Happy are those who know that they need God.”

There is a minister in the Church of Scotland named John Miller. As a young man he had the world at his feet. Coming from a privileged background and with film-star good looks, he could have chosen any career path. In fact, he became a parish minister and spent his entire ministry in Castlemilk, one of the poorest districts of the city of Glasgow. “The poor,” he says, “are like this: they have no resources outside themselves. They have no wealth to spend, no property to sell, no bought house,

3 nothing set aside for a ‘rainy day’. They search down the sides of chairs for pennies for the children’s bus fares. They have no slippers or dressing-gown if they are taken into hospital, no money to buy birthday or Christmas presents unless they go into debt. If they come into money, they know what friendship means; and they will often give all they have to others. The poor often think of God, because there is no other help.”

“And the spirit of the poor is found in others, others whose material circumstances may be quite different. All kinds of events can bring us face to face with our own fragility, our mortality, our utter dependence on the One who has given us life … And Jesus affirms that those who have the spirit of the poor keep company with God.”

Through our interaction with our friends at Bemvu, we are in touch with people who are very poor, in material terms. Through them, we know what John Miller is talking about when he says that the poor often think of God because there is no other help. It is this exposure to our need for God that takes us through to the spiritual reality that has possibly never been better expressed than in the verse of the hymn we just sang: Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to thy cross I cling; Naked, come to thee for dress; Helpless look to thee for grace; Stained by sin, to thee I fly; Wash me Saviour, or I die.

Blessed are those who know that they are spiritually poor. Until we discover this we cannot find our way to God. When we do, we count ourselves blessed.

The next statement is perhaps even more enigmatic – “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (4) It is a text, of course, that is often read at funerals and greatly valued as a source of consolation. But it is not only concerned with the circumstances of death where we most readily think of mourning. It has a broader application to many other sorrows. It suggests taking account realistically of the pain and anguish that characterize so much of human experience.

4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was executed by the Nazis, suggested that, “Nobody loves their fellow humans better than the disciple, no one understands their fellow humans better than the Christian fellowship, and that very love impels them to stand aside and mourn.” Bonhoeffer went back to Luther’s German translation of the New Testament and noted that the term for mourning is translated as Leidtragen – “sorrow-bearing”. He suggests that the mourning with which we are here concerned is a matter of entering into the sorrows of others. “The disciple-community does not shake off sorrow as if it were no concern of its own, but willingly bears it. And in this way they show how close are the bonds which bind them to the rest of humanity.”

Mourning, in this perspective, is all about the large-heartedness that allows us to connect with others in their sorrows and to realise that true comfort comes only from God. When Bonhoeffer was reading the Sermon on the Mount he was always concerned to read it in light of the cross and resurrection to which Jesus’ life was leading. He reminds us that it is as we stand beneath the cross that we receive that mysterious comfort that comes only from a suffering God who suffers with us and for us. And the cross is but three days away from an empty tomb, and the revealing of the triumph of the love of God.

For disciples of Christ, concludes Bonhoeffer, “Sorrow cannot tire them or wear them down, it cannot embitter them or cause them to break down under the strain; far from it, for they bear their sorrow in the strength of him who bears them up, who bore the whole suffering of the world upon the cross.”

Today we step into a new year. Let us set our feet on the path of following Christ. It will be full of surprises. What looks upside down may turn out to be right way up. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

In the name of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

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