BLESSED
February 3, 2002

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Psalm 111
Matthew 5:1-12

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:3

Silence in us any voice but your own, O God, and startle us again with your truth and grace
and love: in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Preachers are on the look out for material—everywhere and all the time: in books, newspapers,
movies, theater, sometimes sporting events. Across the land today, many of us will find the
afternoon’s activities in New Orleans irresistible, and somehow we will find a way to use the
Super Bowl for illustrative purposes. Just when I had about given up on a Super Bowl
connection, our organist, John Sherer, put on my desk an “Order of Service for Super Bow!
Sunday for the Episcopal Church.” It includes the following instructions:

Prior to the entrance hymn, the pastors will toss a coin. The winner may elect to be the
preacher or celebrant; the loser may elect to defend the pulpit or the lectern.

Any acolyte found to be in illegal motion will be assessed a five-yard penalty or the loss
of one candle.

The celebrant may fake a hand-off to the lay reader and read the lessons himself, provided
changes in audible signals are given.

A sermon in excess of fifteen minutes will be regarded as “Delay of Service.”
The two-minute warning will be played by the chimes.

e take our ideas where we find them, and one consistent place is the cover articles in national
magazines. A particularly fertile source are those stacks of magazines one encounters in the
doctor’s office or the barbershop. And so it was that my eye fell on the January issue of Esquire,
which caught me with the bold topic “The Meaning of Life.” What preacher could possibly resist
that? The feature article was titled “What P’ve Learned, 1000 Years Worth of Wisdom and Wild
Foolishness from 17 Extraordinary Lives.” There were 56 pages of wisdom from highly
successful and famous Americans. I thought to myself, “There has to be a sermon in there
somewhere.” A few choice bits of advice:

Chuck Berry (blues musician): “Of the five most important things in life, health is first,
education or knowledge is second, wealth is third, I forget the other two.”

Loretta Lynn: “Cheatin’, love, and the Bible—that’s what we sing about. The rest of it are
Just fantasy songs and they ain’t gonna make it.”

Yogi Berra: “Ask questions. It might lead to something.”

Homer Simpson: “My favorite color is chocolate.”

George Steinbrenner, for the purposes of this sermon, perhaps got off the best one:
“Second place is really first place loser.”

The truth is there wasn’t a sermon in there. On the other hand, there is a sermon in what was not
there and certainly in the topic itself, the meaning of life, the relentless human quest for it, or for
something very much like it: fullness of life, happiness, wholeness, contentment, fulfillment,

which our culture, so eloquently expressed by Esquire, relentlessly defines as being orae oo
wealthy, famous—a winner. tot

My colleague, Carol Allen, loaned me a book of essays she had found recently by one of my
favorite authors, Wendell Berry\The title of the book is What Are People For? In an essay of that
title, Berry, who is a Kentucky farmer, describes the demise of the small farm and the exodus of
rural farmers to the cities because they can no longer make it. Berry muses about the conclusion
of agricultural economists that there are “too many farmers,” but when the cities fill up with
more people than there are jobs, the same economists conclude that we have on our hands the
“permanently unemployable.” “Maybe we have too many agricultural economists,” he speculates
and then reflects, “Is the greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings
now our social goal? .. . The great question that hovers over this issue, one that has been dealt
with mainly by indifference, i uestion of what people are for” (p. 125).

It is the purpose of religi § figure out the answer to that question. It is the purpose of
religion to help us understand apd affirm and then live out the meaning of our lives. And so, one
day, at the beginning of his refationship with his followers, men and women who had walked
away from what they were‘doing—which is to say walked awayrom the old meaning and
purpose of their lives as’fishermen, tax collectors, tent makerg/ tradespeople—to follow him, one
day he took them away from the crowds that were attractedéverywhere they went and sat down
in the middle of thém, sat down as a rabbi always sits in the midst of his students, and the clear

purpose of the exercise was to teach them—something about the meaning of their lives, what
they were for. And he said:

we

a

— 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 . . . and those who hunger and thirst, and the merciful, and the pure
in heart, and the peacemakers, and the persecuted . . .

or ow om wn ara

I’ve always had trouble withyhat word blessed. It always seems a little soft and pious: “Blessed
assurance, Jesus is mine”; “Bléssed be the tie that binds.” Someone recently called blessed a
“bland and mushy word” (Lilliar\Daniels, Christian Century, 16 January 2002).

So I was delighted to discover that the word translated “blessed” really means “happy.” We’re
not talking only about a state of blessedhess, which sounds frankly a little saintly, but a state of
happiness, a contentment with who one is and what one is doing, a profound sense of wholeness
and purpose and meaning, if you will. Who wouldn’t give anything for that?

The sClolars .
Experts Fave always puzzled over these sayings of Jesus, which are known as “The Beatitudes.”
They remain a bit of a mystery. They are more poetry than moral instruction. They remind me of
the question a reporter once asked a famous Russian ballerina after a particularly superb
performance: “What did you mean by that dance?” he asked. She responded, “If J could explain
it, | would not have had to dance.” The Beatitudes are clearly not moral imperatives. Jesus did
not say, “Become poor in spirit and you will receive the kingdom of heaven.” They are
declarative sentences, descriptions: ’Happy are the poor in spirit, the meek.” And yet you can’t
get away from the moral and behavioral and social implications.

What they are, J think, are a radically new definition of the purpose and meaning of human life
and, beyond that, a radical new definition of God’s gift of meaning and purpose and happiness.
Happiness, blessedness, Jesus said, is something you are given—particularly as you find yourself
poor in spirit or mourning or hungry for righteousness or merciful or persecuted. Blessedness or
happiness is something you are given apparently when you stop striving for it, trying to earn it or
accomplish it, and give yourself to something else—to God’s concerns for human life, God’s
agenda, which Jesus calls the “Kingdom of God”; to caring for and loving others, becoming poor
in spirit, sharing the burden of others, particularly their mourning. Happiness is your gift from
God when you show mercy, not judgment, for instance in your approach to the moral dilemmas
of life; when you give yourself to the pursuit of truth and justice, above all. You receive the gift
of wholeness, happiness, blessedness, when you care about something so deeply you risk
persecution, the disapproval of your friends, the criticism of your peers.

It is a new definition of what human life is about, and it is radically different from what the world

offers. You are not defined by how much money you earn, how much you have accumulated, N.
how much power and influence you wield. The meaning and purpose of your life is not defined

by how beautiful or handsome you are or how successful you have become.

Instead, you are blessed—which means deeply happy—when you love enough to become poor in
spirit and meek and hungry, when you love enough to experience pain and grief, when you are
willing to lay your life on the line for God and God’s kingdom, God’s program, on earth.

I traveled to Alaska last Sunday to gi
Sheldon Jackson.

Sheldon Jackson College has been in Sitka for most of this century, serving a largely native
Alaskan student body, which comes from the widely dispersed native villages of the Inner
Passageways on the western coast, most of them accessible only by boator float plane.

Sheldon Jackson is—and always has been—a challenge to maintai4, and one of the ways it stays
in business is by volunteers: Volunteers in Mission we call thens- Presbyterians who give six

months to a year as a voluiateer and get in return room and beard and a lot of work. Most, but not
all, are retirees.

At Sheldon Jackson, I met Joa Corliss, a retired proféssor of education at the University of
Dayton, who lost her husband and in her grief decided to teach native Alaskans who want to be
schoolteachers.

I met Duna Williamson, a retired IBM exegfitive, single, who decided to begin the retirement
chapter of her life teaching math and takiftg her meals in a college cafeteria in Sitka, Alaska.

I met a retired couple, both professionals, attrattive, obviously successful, from Idaho, who
worked in a hostel Sheldon Jackson sponsors for Nelatives of native patients who come to the
regional hospital in Sitka. Sheloes the administration, the room assignments. He is the chief
maintenance man: shovels show, replaces windows, cléans the bathrooms.

The dozen or so Volunteers in Mission invited me to lunch, sager to hear how things were going
in the PCUSA, but J€ould hardly get a word in: they were so eXyberant, so eager to tell me about
what they were doing, and their adventures. Duna, for instance, spegt Thanksgiving at the
northernmost Presbyterian church in the world, in Barrow, which on ‘Ryanksgiving uses its
sanctuary forAhe annual distribution of whale meat. The feast begins right there, but not with
turkey andfranberry sauce but slightly fermented whale blubber. “Did you‘gat it, Duna?” I asked
the forrmér IBM executive. “You bet I did,” she said. “It was terrible.” They laughed and laughed
and Ithought, “These people are happy. They are so happy, they are blessed.”

In Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming, the author asks, “Is it possible for people to miss

their lives in the same way one misses a plane” and then he describes a man: “Not once in his
entire life has he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but forever cast
himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist, not

once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed as a dream” (See Eugene Peterson’s
Reversed Thunder, p. 192).

So the question comes to each one of us: What are you for? What is your purpose? What is your
meaning?

And the invitation is to take a long look at how you are defining your life—to maybe let go of the
frantic striving and to follow him, where you are, the One who promises blessedness, blessed

wholeness and happiness in his service: Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen.