Bless Your Heart

Sermon on the Mount Intro

Matthew 5:1-12

Around a decade ago, there was a Christian fad where we were asked to frame our lives and experiences around a question: “What Would Jesus Do?” So in any given situation, we were urged to ask that question and to behave as we would imagine Jesus would have behaved. That is a good practice and proves helpful in our interactions with others, but the reality is that there are times when it’s not as helpful – for example, if I am in the stern of a boat sleeping during a terrible storm, what would Jesus do? He would calm the storm. Since I can’t exactly do that, what do I do? Of course, asking the question What Would Jesus Do? is of no use if you don’t know who Jesus is or what Jesus did!

Now, most of us have known someone who lives by the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Part of the beauty of what Jesus said is that not only did he say it, but he lived it as well. He talked the talk and walked the walk.

There are sometimes, however, misconceptions about exactly what Jesus said. This is why I am starting a new sermon series this week looking at the largest single collection of Jesus’ sayings, the so-called Sermon on the Mount. In effect, I am doing a sermon series on a sermon series! We’ll be delving into Jesus’ sayings from Matthew 5-8.

One of the tasks of Bible study is discovering the who, what, where, why, and when of the text. If you jump into Matthew 5, you find Jesus’ motivation for preaching this sermon is “when he saw the crowds.” Who exactly are the crowds? They are described in Matthew 4, where Jesus is depicted calling his disciples and then going out into Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, preaching the Good News of God’s Kingdom (Good News is literally the Gospel) and healing every disease and infirmity. So all through the region, the news about Jesus spread, and, as you might imagine, people came from far and wide for healing. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea the region across the Jordan followed him (Matthew 4:25).

One of the hallmarks of Jesus’ ministry is his response to the crowds: he had compassion on them. You can see his compassion first in the healing, but Jesus recognized better than anyone that you can heal a body but if the spirit hasn’t been healed, you’re no better off than before. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? (Matthew 16:26)

Before we even get to his teaching, it is important to see why Jesus is teaching. I’ve been reading an amazing book, When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor, and the authors make an important point: if we help someone physically but do not care for their soul, we have not really helped them. Where do they get this crazy idea? From Jesus! The idea is that there are factors that cause poverty that are deeper than just a lack of money, and Jesus actually cares about the whole person. So we find, as Jesus has been healing the sick and demon-possessed, now he brings his disciples to him and goes for a time apart to begin to teach them. He has such compassion on the crowds that he wants to multiply his effectiveness – to send twelve well-prepared disciples out to change the world, and they’re going to need taught.

I want to interject just a little cultural background here: in Jesus’ time, the rabbi sat while the listeners stood. This was just the way things worked then. In fact, even the early church buildings never had pews – the congregation expected to stand (don’t worry – we’ve got no such plans to go back to the old days!). So Jesus sat and taught.

I think it’s interesting the way that Jesus went about things with his disciples. He first went and called them to follow him – which was the opposite of how traditional rabbis did things; potential disciples had to come to the rabbi and apply to become his disciple. The rabbi then accepted or rejected them. Not so with Jesus – he went and called his disciples. Then he immediately started to work with them, and after they had ministered together for a time, sat down to teach them.

So as we prepare to dive into Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I have to ask you – who here has done a major home-improvement project? Not just stripping some wallpaper and painting some walls, but something major. One thing you’ve probably already discovered is that there is no such thing as a simple home-improvement project. At the church in New Knoxville, the fellowship hall floor was pretty nasty and needed replaced, but when they got the floor up, they realized that the sub-floor needed a whole lot of work. Then when they got the new floor in, they realized how grungy the walls looked…

Our parsonage in Millersport needed work, and there was ample time before we moved in, but I sometimes think church time is on a different kind of clock than regular time, because they finally got around to ripping the back end of the house off (including half the kitchen) on Labor Day, and we got a wonderfully rebuilt dining area and a half bathroom on the main floor and a new bathroom and laundry room upstairs… just before Thanksgiving. We lived in the midst of a huge home-improvement project for months.

Why am I talking about home improvement projects? Because the kind of transformation that Jesus brings about in us is kind of like a home improvement project. Just when we think we’ve figured out the issue, we find that the issue has a whole bunch of other stuff underneath and behind it. And when we dig out one sin, we find that there are others. But Jesus wants to transform us from the inside out. Which means he’s going to be blowing out walls, tearing out floors, re-pouring foundations, building new roofs, and all while we are living in the midst of it.

So Jesus begins teaching with a familiar passage that has become known as the beatitudes. Matthew 5:3-12 includes Jesus pronouncing various blessings. This wasn’t an unheard of practice – there are records of such blessing statements from other Ancient Near East cultures even before Jesus. The Old Testament contains forty-five blessing statements, some of which are familiar. There are times when we quote Psalm 33:12, often around the National Day of Prayer: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

We can recognize Psalm 84:12, if not the actual verse, at least the content: “Lord Almighty, blessed is the one who trusts in you.”

We probably have heard the content of Psalm 94:12 and if you really think about it, it probably makes you squirm: “Blessed is the one you discipline, Lord, the one you teach from your law.”

In the Old Testament, this blessing is translated to mean “Oh, the happiness of the one…” ascribing happiness to someone because of their praiseworthy religious behavior or attitude. The whole idea was that they were judged as fortunate because, as everyone knew, God rewards those who trust in him with worldly well-being.

We generally use the same formula as we pronounce blessings. I’m not talking about the southernism “Bless your heart” which means “you’re such an idiot.” We generally pronounce blessing after the fact – when something good happens, when we get the answer to a prayer, when we get an unexpected bonus, when someone knows just what we need and comes through with it, we say we’ve been blessed. While I agree that we experience God at work in all kinds of ways, and it’s always a good thing to stop and thank God when we see those answers, I think we can cheapen what it means to be blessed by God when we understand blessing only in those categories.

Maybe it will help you to think about it this way: if you like watching t-ball games and you think that’s all there is to baseball, never considering that there could be something more, like the World Series. Or going to high school musicals and thinking that’s all there is to musical theater, never considering that there are all sorts of musicals on Broadway. Yes, we are blessed all the time and in many ways, but God’s blessing is unique. Indeed, there are even situations where, like in Malachi 3:15, we get it all wrong. “But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly evildoers prosper, and even when they put God to the test, they get away with it.” There are plenty of people who have material and financial success and have done so by sinful practices, and our culture considers them blessed.

So to read the beatitudes without a clear vision of what Jesus means by “blessed” is unhelpful at best.

There are Bible translations and paraphrases that haven’t helped either; some translations just use the word “happy” – while this is part of it, again, it’s like thinking you just watched the World Series when you were really sitting out there watching three and four year olds hitting off a tee.

When we think of blessing in the Bible, there are a few things that are clear. First of all, blessing, true blessing, always comes from God. If you look back to Genesis 1, when God was creating, on the sixth day, God created humanity, and God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28)

When Noah and his family came out of the ark, Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” (Genesis 9:1)

How about God’s covenant with Abram, one of the most important verses in the Old Testament: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. (Genesis 12:2-3)

God is saying more than “you’ll be happy.” Indeed, God’s blessing is life itself. Which makes it interesting to see that on the seventh day of Creation, God blessed the Sabbath. Meaning that Sabbath rest is life-giving.

But by the time we get into the context of the New Testament, blessing has deeper meaning. It no longer only means life strictly in the mortal sense. In fact, by this time, blessing has become widely associated with the end-times – that blessings are completely future-oriented; when we get to Heaven, we’ll receive those blessings. This is the same thought-process that saw the old Black spirituals come about – though there is trouble and distress now, you just wait until we get to Heaven!

So Jesus steps into this situation and pronounces blessings – which his audience would understand to mean “end times.” However, it didn’t seem to be the “end times” and this world didn’t seem to be Heaven, so Jesus must have had something else in mind. Or did he?

You will note that blessing in the New Testament is always related to the joy of the presence and activity of Jesus himself. What he is in effect saying is exactly what he said in Luke 4 when he read from Isaiah and closed the scroll and told the congregation: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21) He is saying that the new day is at hand. With Jesus, the end-times have begun! Everything that the prophets said is now starting to come true!

There’s a lot in life these days where you figure, if people would just use common sense, they’d figure things out. But you’ll find in the next few weeks that what Jesus is pronouncing “blessed” isn’t exactly common sense. In fact, it doesn’t make any worldly sense at all. Instead of saying things like, “Blessed are those whose lawnmower starts on the first try, for their shoulder won’t hurt all day,” Jesus pronounces the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted as “blessed.” Surely he isn’t so deluded that he thinks those states are preferable to wealthy, filled, and at peace!

Really, what he is declaring is, “Happy are the unhappy, because God will make them happy.”

So what we see in Matthew 5:3-12 is God granting salvation and a new paradigm. Blessed, in this context, really expresses happiness that is the result of God-given salvation. When you realize and understand and experience God’s salvation, you have a kind of happiness that transcends everything else. To go back to the home-improvement analogy, you can live with a huge sheet of drywall partitioning off half of your dining room, because you know that the room you’re going to get is going to be great.

And unlike the situation we had in the Millersport parsonage, God is at work! Maybe God is working behind the scenes, but God is at work in your life, transforming you while you live in the midst of the transformation. Part of the difficulty of the beatitudes is that we live in a culture that says, “Your house is fine the way it is.” And then there is the Christian subculture that expects everyone to have it all together and not sin – when we show up and there’s sawdust everywhere in our lives and it’s pretty clear that major work is going on, but it’s far from finished, how do people respond?

Now that I’m finished with the introduction, are you ready to get into some home improvement?