Blessed Are

Blessed are you

when you are poor, mourning, meek;

hungering and thirsting for righteousness;

merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers;

persecuted, reviled, slandered with evil.

Rejoice and be glad . . . . .

These are not blessings I want.

These are the experiences I am trying to avoid.

Oh, I do admire the merciful and the peacemakers, but when I’ve been the one trying to make peace it has been agonizingly hard,  just being in the presence of the angers and bitterness in which families get ensnarled exhausts me, I ache and my heart is weary from that work.

And letting go of my own anger, lifting my heart out of its grudges, which is the work of mercifulness, is wrenching, at least until I have done it.

I would rather be rich than poor, elated than grieving, self-assured than meek.  I would rather be right than hunger for righteousness.  Yet Jesus does not offer such blessings.  He holds up a blessedness that heals hurts and transforms sorrows, but this is not the glory of winning.  I want to bask in the good life, but he offers blessing in the shadows of death.

His blessings are often compared to the Ten Commandments: he proclaimed them from a mount, and they describe the best way of living.

And the endless invitation to join the first disciples in the work of telling  stories as he told them, full of these blessings, should engage us in exploring them.  Yet, the church which calls itself Christian, is known the world around for the proclamation of rules he never preached, and the decrying of those toward whom he was, without exception, merciful.

Jesus did not say, Blessed are you when you bear a child you do not want.  Nor did he say, Shame on you if you are pregnant and unmarried.

He did not say, Blessed are you if you are heterosexual, nor did he say Shame on you if you are gay.

Jesus did not hold up Adam and Eve as physical models nor did he ever mention them as the source of sin.  Nor did he hold up marriage or motherhood as preferred life patterns.

The Church busies itself in proclaiming a righteousness derived from assumptions about Jesus and from opinions in Paul’s letters, rather than exploring Jesus’ Beatitudes.  Pope Francis has bravely said as much, that the church focuses too much on sex and not enough on helping the poor, where we could show the merciful love of Christ.

Nominated for Best Picture this year is Dallas Buyers Club, the story of gay men, transvestites, and prostitutes with AIDS figuring out how to get the drugs they need into the US from Mexico.  Becoming a blessing for one another, in the midst of their reviled and cursed and slandered lives.  If only the churches of America would tell such stories, sponsor such films.

Also nominated is Philomena, the story of an Irish woman’s quest to find a son taken from her without her permission and sold for adoption to an American family by the convent she had turned to for mercy when she was a pregnant unwed teen. Hers is a testament to the blessing, the power, and the sacredness of mercy, a mercy born in the crucible of blame, shame, humiliation, and oppression she received from a religious community which deemed her a sinner.  In all of this she became a woman who would not blame others.  If only our churches would embrace her as a teacher of God’s love.

Another nominee (and already voted Best Film at the Golden Globes), Twelve Years a Slave, tells the true story of Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in New York State, who is drugged and sold into slavery, where he remains for twelve years, till, through a chance encounter with a Quaker, he is freed.   Many church folk I know have said they cannot bring themselves to see such a painful film.  Yet African Americans have this heritage, carrying such stories in their minds and hearts, stories heard at the kitchen tables of their childhoods.  Blessed are you, said Jesus, in your suffering . . .    How can the church find the meaning of blessing if we avoid the sufferings in which Jesus said blessing lives?

Perhaps the hunger and thirst for righteousness , which threads its way through all these stories, is our stumbling block.  If only we could measure our righteousness by what we have, rather than by a dream.  From Isaiah to Martin Luther King, from the dream of Commandment perfection to the visions of Easter, our righteousness has been a vision travelling before us, calling for our attention, our gaze, our longing.  Yet we cling to what we have in hand:  money in the bank;  the house; a long marriage; the children; plans we have made, as proof of our good living.

For Jesus, the feast that fills that hunger is spread by our reaching out to the pain of another, who has also lived without mercy.  Rejoice and be glad, said Jesus.  And in each of these stories of lives lost in the wilderness, the sound of rejoicing can be heard.

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Illustrations:

1.  Praying at Gethsemane.  He Qi.  China.  2000.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

2.  Knocking Till It Opens.  Google Images photo.

3.  Adam and Eve, by Lucas Cranach the Elder,  c. 1500.  Peter Willi/The Bridgman Art Library.  Used by permission.

4.  Dallas Buyers Club, poster.

5.  Philomena, Movie Poster.

6.  Twelve Years a Slave.  Poster.