Blessings are a funny thing. I love the internet. I love it. I hate it sometimes, but I love it.
Social media is a lot of fun, right? But it's also kind of complicated at times. But what I always laugh about, I've seen it happen more and more, is we try to find a way to justify sharing something that we might feel is just a little bit too much, or there's the whole idea, you've probably heard of the humble brag. It's like, okay, I'm about to share something.
I should feel embarrassed about it. I'm gonna kind of brag a little bit, so I'm just gonna put hashtag blessed behind it, and I know I can get away with it. It's just there. We can't just make fun of younger people forward.
I think anybody who grew up in the deep South, and I've been here 35 out of my 39 years, a small stint in Kentucky, as much as I claimed it, I would tell them they're not actually Southern. I think of how many times you've heard this phrase uttered by a sweet little old lady, and you know she's not being that sweet when she says bless your heart. That's like a great Southern irony right there, isn't it? Like we all know what that actually means.
And blessings are just like, we don't know what to do with the work. Like we say the blessing, but it's turning to something that we don't even necessarily know what it is right now. It's a complicated statement. It almost like mocks the humility and the loneliness that we know that it should have.
It's become just something outside of its own meaning so much in our own life. And so we're going to think about blessings this morning, but we're going to think about more of it. Like how do we actually talk? Like how do we use this word to talk about what God has done for us?
Like how do we talk about blessings in our life? We're going to use some passages that are pretty familiar. They're called the Beatitudes. It's from the Sermon on the Mount, it's the Blessed or the Zayuku, and there's seven of them.
But we're not going to talk so much about the contents of each of the Beatitudes, but we're going to think about what does that mean to tell us about the spirit of blessing? What is it for us to live life? Where we recognize that we have been blessed? But what also does that mean for us to bless others?
I think of my friend TJ in town. She's a pastor in the Methodist Church. She serves a couple of places. Every time I see her, she always says, I'm blessed to be a blessing.
I know that's what's going to happen. I thought about the words of my friend TJ so much this week because I was preparing this message. But what does it mean for us to be a blessing? Now Matthew, and this is kind of in a specific place.
And Matthew, if you think about Matthew's gospel, the first chapter is the lineage of Jesus. So it's so and so had a Sunday and so and so and so. It's kind of boring parts that we normally skip over. We don't know what to do with those parts.
And then we find some stories of the birth of Jesus. They're interesting. Then Jesus grows up. We hear an incident running away from his parents on a road trip.
So he was a 12 year old boy just like if you all have 12 year old boys, he did the same thing there. And then Jesus meets his cousin, John the Baptist. He's baptized. He's thrown into the wilderness during a season of temptation by the Holy Spirit.
Chapter four. Then he meets his first disciples, the end of chapter four. And then he has the sermon on the Mount, this piece that we'll read the beginning of today. And we talked about this couple of weeks ago.
The sermon on the Mount really is like the ethics of Jesus. We preached a series a few summers ago on the sermon on the Mount. We call it Jesus his greatest hits. It's like every single thing that he says, it capsulated together on this important.
But he leads off these statements, these vision of his world with this passage called the Beatitudes. So we're going to read this morning and think about blessings. But let's hear these words together. Matthew chapter five will read the first 12 verses.
This is what we read. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountains and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs the king of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek for they won here at the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in the heart for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for a righteous mistake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And blessed are you and people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven.
From the same way they persecute the prophets who were before you. So blessings, like I said earlier, blessings are complicated. Our definition of blessing, it helps us not just interpret this passage. And it's not just helps us understand the sermon on the Mount, but it really with a way that Matthew has laid this out before us.
It helps us understand Jesus. It helps us understand Jesus' message and the content of his message and what Jesus is asking us to do. But blessings are a complicated word. And where Matthew gets it and uses it and how he uses it actually comes from several different places.
In the Old Testament there are several different words that are used for blessing. There's two primarily. The first one is a word and this is what ancient Hebrew would do is they would take a noun and they would give it like action. They would make it a verb.
And so one of these words for blessing is the word for meek. Like we all have a knee. But this attitude of blessing that happens is almost like we see it in the patriarchs in Abraham and Isaac. And the sons of they would bless their grandson's.
They put them on their, like Santa Claus. Remember that when you're a kid, you sit on one knee and your sister sits on another knee and your mom threatens you. You don't take a picture. Like he sits on a knee.
That's a blessing. That's a blessing of covenant. It was also to get really super awkward if two people exchanged property. They would bless each other and they would come and they would assume a position where you could grab behind the kneecap of the other person.
Like on the inside of their thigh. How many people do you want to sell stuff to like that? Like awkward. But it's this is covenant.
But if that's the thing, if you think about that action or sitting on somebody's lap, it's a state of vulnerability. It's a statement of intimacy. It's a statement of covenant of holy promise. This other word that we find for blessing in the Old Testament is this idea of being aware of the right path.
Or being aware of the queer path. Like I mean, this is a language we see in the book of Psalms. It's this type of blessing. We're actually going to read that in a little bit coming down later.
But these two very different ideas of blessing in the Old Testament in the Greek world. And especially sometimes you get into ideas like this. And we also want to see like how did like the secular Greek philosophers use this word. So like Plato or Aristotle or Socrates.
Like these people we heard about in history class. And don't really pay attention to after we get to history class. Then the Greek world, the idea of blessing is what happens when someone is good enough to be elevated to the state of the gods. This idea of okay, you have been risen above like the place of oil and hard work.
And you now get to live a life that only the gods enjoy. So you think back to jokes you make about laying on a couch just like feeding you grapes. Like we've all seen that in cartoons and stuff like this is this Greek understanding of blessings and what this means. And Matthew, the way that he speaks about that, he actually kind of rolls them all in together into one.
But one commentator that I would read a lot of getting ripped this message, he says that in our ideas and our minds perhaps the best way to understand this is not translating it, blessing or blessed or other translations will translate it as happy. But it's to translate it and say flourishing. Because that wraps up all of these concepts that Matthew would have been bringing into it when he says blessed. So of covenantal promise, of intimacy, of vulnerability, of clarity and awareness of what's going on.
But also of elevated state of life that is better than something else. So think about that, just kind of put that in your mind when you say flourishing or those who mourn, for they will be comforting. Flourishing or the meek for they won't hear the earth and so on and so on and so on. If this is a better way for us to think about that.
It is interesting though because like we think blessed, okay, we think blessed, okay, I don't know what that word means, it's kind of awkward. You know, happy is we don't know what to do with the word happy anymore. In 2016 a survey said that only 31% of Americans are happy. In 2017 it went up to 33%.
So at most only a third of Americans are happy. The hair over two thirds of Americans are not happy. Happiness is a confusing term to us now. Sadly we don't know how to deal with happiness.
It seems funny because we have everything we might want. I shared the URL on Facebook, I can't remember exactly what it was, but I found a world income calculator. It allows you to stick your yearly income in this calculator and it will tell you what percentage of the world's wealth you have. Where are you on the list of the richest people in the world from the absolute richest to the absolute poorest?
It's very interesting. So I did more googling, did more researching, average annual income, starting to lose the annum, is $42,000 a year. That's the mean household income for starting to lose the $42,000 a year. If you make $42,000 a year, you are among the 0.47% of the richest people in the world.
If you make $42,000 a year. If you make $100,000 a year, you are among the 0.05% of the richest people in the world. So when I ask ourselves that question, how am I happy or what is happiness or I'm not happy, even though I seem to have every single thing in the world afforded to me, perhaps I'm not happy because I'm not flourishing. Because maybe flourishing is a sicker thing to me.
Makes that whole hashtag blessed for a little bit more in perspective, doesn't it? Jesus is our s.b. flourishing. And we can only flourish when we are in a covenantal relationship, a blessed relationship with God.
And we have the necessary orientation to God's revelation. And we understand those two things that we were able to live a life that is elevated above the cares and concerns of this world. Flourishing or the meat for the one here at the earth. Flourishing or the merciful for the mercy.
Flourishing or the pure in heart for the people. Flourishing or the peacemakers. Because they would be called children of God. We can see if we kind of draw, I don't know, I can draw things out.
I did not actually draw this out because my handwriting is horrible. I made it short for us. I was wanting to look at it. Think about this in some way.
If being blessed is this action that it's experiencing the favor of God. And we experience the favor of God. Then we begin living in a way that causes favor. And we're living in a way that causes favor.
Then we're able to experience even more of the favor of God. And we experience more of the favor of God. We begin to live even more of life that causes favor. You see how this idea of blessedness, the way that the scriptures talk about it in this deep formative thick way.
It actually grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and this causes the flourishing. You know, the world calls it happy. What scripture calls it though is truly flourishing. We read Psalm 1 for you.
This is really an amazing picture of a way to think about this. Psalm chapter 1, old chapter. Happy. Are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path of sinners tread or sit in the sea of scoffers.
But their delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law they meditate day and night. They're like trees planted by streams of water which yield their fruit and season. And their leaves do not wither and all that they do they prosper. The wicked are not so but they're like the chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment. Nor centers in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked shall perish. The most interesting thing about this to me is this description on verse 4, the wicked or not.
So they're like the chaff that wind drives away. Typically if we expect for God to be judging what he calls wicked. This is very differently saying is they don't have the stability. They don't have the firmness to be in one spot.
Whenever the wind comes, whenever life comes they get blown about in all directions that chaos is introduced into their life because of their lack of grounding, their lack of a clarity of a path. This begins to reframe things for us to understand that blessedness is just a lot bigger. That blessedness is not just I get cool stuff. I guess we see them in the rest we see on Instagram right.
There's a slight sidebar. There's moments when you realize you're actually old. You know what those are? Like you get that.
Okay, I'm old. A couple weeks ago I read an article about social media in the church. I started talking about this thing called TikTok. I got on TikTok.
First of all, I feel really old. I don't understand any of them. I'm like Mr. Wilson in Dennis and I'm like what are these?
What is this? But there's a thing on there that's called my best friends rich check. And they just like, yeah it's silly. You'll feel old if you get on their pick, trust me.
But it's just like this fancy stuff their friends have. And then what's so funny is on the journey over at the very end of hashtag blessed. Like being blessed is not about having cool stuff. Being blessed is also not about saying good stuff happens to me because I'm good.
You see that's kind of problematic for us to think about God rewarding things in that way, doesn't it? Like that's part of this broken system that Jesus is railing against so many times. He's dealing with the fact that these religious leaders were saying well bad stuff happens to you because you're bad. Your parents are bad.
You can't affect your changing thing. Just for us to say good stuff happens to us because we're good. That makes some statements about God that just simply put him in a box and make him too small. Whereas instead, then we'd be an understanding blessedness in the way that the scripture tells us that saying I'm living inside of the kingdom of God.
I'm living inside of this and it influences my world more than the culture around me. I'm going to find my foundation on different things. I want to be like a tree planted by streams of living water. It bears its fruit and seeds in other places.
Jesus says bear fruit according to righteousness. I'm going to find my stability, my anchoring presence inside the presence of God and allow that to be the thing that defines what I have and how I use it. The blessedness is very, very different. The demands of this ethic of Jesus, they're designed to make us dependent on him.
But they're also designed to make us dependent on each other. It's so interesting the last two beatitudes are beatitudes of relationship. The first one in the last of the pouring spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The very last one, a blesseder those who are persecuted for righteous and say for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Now this is a communal thing. This is not an individual thing. This is a thing of relationships. This is the thing that God calls all of us in together for.
Jesus also, I love the way that Matthew puts this. He says for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For they will be comforted. For they will inherit the earth.
For they will be filled. For they will receive. For they will see. They will be called.
And for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. He's putting this in the future. But he's also doing something so interesting because he's speaking about a present state and a future reaction. He's saying Jesus finds these people who've aligned themselves to me in this way.
This will be their reward. It's kind of a call to make us feel uncomfortable. It's not that oh, Jesus is going to make us like this one day. It's no, this is what Jesus is looking for.
When Jesus comes he'll be aware of how people are following by how they've allowed my word to change them and direct the way they are living in life. It's not like hey in the future, I'm kind of like, I don't remember one time a Lindsay Killen referred to me as a joke and then she said that's not that much of a joke. She called me Captain Chaos. And I was like wow, that's really funny because it made sense.
But I was like man how do I create my own chaos? I'm like what are the things that I do that make my life too busy. So I can't see the things in front of me that I might be needed to do. So I can't see the things that God's calling me to do.
So I don't slow down and have the time to do the things I need to be doing. What Jesus is saying is that people who are following me and are understanding this covenant promise, this life of intimacy and vulnerability that we're opened up to with God and that they're by seeing a clarifying direction in life will be peacemakers or we will be me because we understand our true standing of life is down in Jesus. He's calling us to this in the present. And when he comes when he sees the people who he sees the sin will be the ones who inherit the things this earth.
It's a present statement of expectation for us to see the future reign of Jesus Christ. Later on the storm on the mountain, we're going to kind of dance around the storm on the mountain a little bit these next couple of weeks. But later on the storm on the mount Jesus says why does the past that leads to destruction and narrow is the way to the door of salvation. And for a long time with this passage, you kind of freak me out.
I don't like the idea of Jesus filtering people that much. It kind of scares me. No matter what we say about who he is, we always want to be on the right side of what Jesus is looking for. It's just kind of we'll get in our situation.
So I always didn't know what to do with this. Jesus, you're saying that only a few people will see this. Do you only truly love a few people? Is that what's going on?
But the more you read it, the more you kind of apply it to this larger message of Jesus, what you seem to say. And it's not narrow, it's not only a few will make it, but it's narrow. And the fact is clearly defined. It's a very distinct set of characteristics that people who are finding me will have in their lives.
It gives us the story of this. The story of what this life looks like. Not just in words he said in things like the Sermon on the Mount, but the way that he dealt with people, the way that he lived, the way that he acted among us. Because why on earth would he ask for us to live differently now than we will be living with him in eternity?
We can either say, well, Jesus has impossible, so I'm not going to do it now. Or we can say, you know, because of you and your life, your death, your resurrection, the power of your Holy Spirit, I'm going to believe that I can do some of these things to a certain measure. That I can walk in the way that leads to salvation. I can live inside of your kingdom.
I can develop eyes to see in ears to hear in women this way. And Jesus would not call meekness and righteousness, and mercy would not call these present actions if we are not capable of ourselves. Now, this morning in my devotional time, so we said earlier in the mission, I'm beginning to just chuckle at the way that God works. And I've been praying the last couple of days saying, God, I don't know how to finish up this message on Sunday.
Like a little bit of like preacher toolbox stuff, you know, for me, landing the plane is a lot harder than anything else. I read this this morning in my devotional time. And I thought about it so much. It's from 1 Peter 3, verse 8 through 12.
Finally, all of you who have unity of spirit, sympathy, and love for one another, attend your heart and humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse, but on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this you were called that you might inherit a blessing. For those who desire life and desire to see good days, let them keep their tongues from evil and their lips from speaking to see.
Let them turn away from evil and do good. Let them seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on their righteous and his ears are open to their prayer. And the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.
It is for this you recall that you might inherit a blessing. Gracious people to gracious people to faithful people to faithful things. Blessed people receive a blessing. So let us pray for the intimacy and the vulnerability of our hearts as we offer ourselves to God in our own honesty and our own truthfulness.
That we may more become a covenant people called by Him, able to see a queer path laid before us of righteousness, of justice, of love, mercy. And let us see that in this world now and let us also see that in the age to come. Let us pray together this morning. God, we thank you so much.
Jesus, we couldn't call you a good God. We couldn't say that you're big enough. You were simply the same size as us. And so Lord, this morning as we finish our time together, God, I just pray for each of us to see in our hearts a way to experience you in a full measure.
And God, not just to have more. Not just so we can say we have more Jesus and other person does next to us. We got in a way that we can see and understand your graciousness and your generosity in our own lives so that we may be for the world these people. Or we lift up high this calling that you have given us.
God, we reclaim our salvation. God, for those of us who are short on the journey to Jesus and we are hearing and seeing these things for the first time, Lord, let us respond with the grace that we need. And Jesus, for those of us who have been hearing this for a long time, let us just take a step deeper into that life that you have called us to.