Sunday, April 27, 2008
Orinda Community Church (UCC)
A sermon by the Rev. Frank Baldwin

BLESSED ARE THEY         Matthew 5:3-13
I.          Among the old photographs that hang in the “stairway gallery” of family and friends in our Orinda home, there is one that was taken at a holiday gathering around 1955 in my grandparents’ Berkeley living room.  There are ten of us grouped there in front of the Christmas tree:  my grandfather, U.S. Army Retired, resplendent in his full dress uniform; my grandmother, serene in her fanciest dress; my uncle John and aunt Dorothy and their children, my cousins Chandler and Mary Louise; my father, sitting uncharacteristically cross-legged on the floor; my mother, demure on a chair; my sister Karen in her bratty state; and me.  I love to pause in front of this picture as I go up and down the stairs at home, because it instantly carries me back to the images and stories of that happy time and those beloved people.  I have vivid recollections of many such childhood Christmases, and in the old photograph, they all live again.  (I know that many of you have similar hallway or stairway galleries in your homes.)
However, as evocative as this old photo is, returning me, in memory, to a special moment in the past, I am always aware that I cannot really enter it without taking along with me a vital consciousness of the present time.  Because I know how most of the life “stories” represented in this picture have turned out over the subsequent decades.  Karen is now no longer six years old, but closing-in on sixty, with two grown-up children and a career and living in Orange County.  Chandler lives in Silicon Valley where he had a meteoric career in high technology before being forced into an early retirement by Parkinson’s disease.  His sister Mary Louise, an energetic pre-schooler in the old photograph, got cancer and died just shy of her 30th birthday.  The grandparents are gone too, of course, in their old age; so are my uncle John and aunt Dorothy, within six months of each other; as well as my father, already thirty years ago this spring.  
Of the ten who posed there in my grandparents’ living room that long-ago Christmas afternoon, only four of us are still around today.  But the family stories told – or perhaps foretold – at the moment when the flashbulb went off continue to unfold in our lives and the lives of spouses, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and now already great-great-grandchildren the old folks could only have dreamed about.  These stories – some of which originated in times long before my own – have continued their slow telling from generation to generation, even unto this present moment.  The past can only be viewed through the lens of the present, and the people we have loved and lost do live on in us today.
II.        The Christian gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – all look back on the events of Jesus’ life from a vantage point of 30 or 50 or even 80 years.  Like an old family photograph, they too hold the memories and meanings of stories that unfolded only gradually, in the lives of those who had been there, as well as the lives of their descendents in the community of faith.  The disciples had reason to remember well those dramatic and indelible times.  As evangelists and apostles they spent years collecting, clarifying and conveying the stories of Jesus, rehashing, reshaping, rehearsing them in thousands of settings throughout the Hellenistic world.  They felt inescapably their responsibility to tell the truth as they had seen and heard it, to the people of their generation as well as all the generations yet to come. 
But the gospel writers not only knew the stories of Jesus from their own participation and experience; they also knew how these stories had continued to unfold in their lives and in the lives of others.  They had lived out their faith in Christian in those crucial decades after the resurrection.  They had not only witnessed miracles, but also created a few themselves.  They had convinced people who had never met Jesus of Nazareth to follow the way of Christ.  All of the apostles were particularly attached to some little first century Christian congregation, perhaps one that they had planted themselves.  And so when they retold his stories they saw before them not only Jesus as they actually remembered him, but also as they continued to sense his presence in Antioch, and Ephesus, and Philippi, and Corinth, and Alexandria, and Rome.  Jesus lived on in their world and in their church; and his spirit was just as present with them a generation or two later as it was with those who first walked beside him along the dusty streets and byways of Galilee or Jerusalem.
Thus Matthew, carefully recalling the specific setting and words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount also sees and hears it in the light of his subsequent experience as an apostle and member of his church at Antioch in Syria.  In the Bible as in our own contemporary experience, the past can only be viewed through the lens of the present, where people loved and lost live on in images and stories as we recall and retell them.   
When Matthew remembers Jesus saying at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the poor, he sees not only the poor gathered on a Galilean hillside, but also the poor gathered – probably in someone’s house – at Antioch or anywhere else in the world.  When Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn, Matthew thinks also of the grieving ones in his own congregation.  When Jesus says, Blessed are the meek, Matthew knows those shy and sensitive souls who are always watching and listening there at the edge of the crowd.  When Jesus says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, Matthew is aware of the spiritual hungers and thirsts of people he knows and loves well.  When Jesus says, Blessed are the merciful, Blessed are the pure in heart, Blessed are the peacemakers, Matthew can name them, one by one, counting the blessings each has been to his present family of faith.   When Jesus says, Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, Matthew prays again for the many of his people who have suffered greatly for the gospel.  When Jesus says, Blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, Matthew is acknowledging exactly what believers of the first generations endured for embracing the name of Jesus.  And when these beatitudes conclude with the words, Rejoice and be glad anyway, because your reward is great in heaven, Matthew knows that this benediction of Jesus is for the faithful of every time and every place.
So then, whenever we revisit the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, we cannot help but to enter the picture, and engage ourselves with the story.  We are present not only with the crowd that first heard him speaking to their hearts in Galilee, but also with those who later heard him speaking also to their hearts in Antioch, just as he speaks again to our hearts this morning in Orinda.  Such is the mystery of Holy Scripture that as we hear and tell again these ancient gospel stories, we hear and tell our own deepest spiritual stories as well. 
III.       I bring this up today because I have a strong hunch that during the next six months it may be unusually difficult for us to remember who, and what, Jesus Christ regards as blessed.  And that is because we’re entering a presidential election season.  A season of particular urgency, passion and desperation.  As you know, we have currently underway a deepening recession, a financial meltdown in the vital home mortgage sector, rising unemployment, an unpopular foreign war in the Middle East as well as a smoldering cultural war in our own country, an immigration crisis, a continuing threat of terrorism and state-sponsored violence, an escalating bill for food and gasoline, deficit budgets for infrastructure, education and social services, and a looming environmental calamity of unforeseeable consequences.  The challenges, anxieties, angers and intensely conflicting opinions attending each of these issues pretty much guarantees that we’re all in for a very rough ride ahead. 
What troubles me is that in such circumstances as these our national political narrative tends to veer so recklessly in the opposite direction from the Sermon on the Mount.  In the months ahead we are likely to hear and see a great deal that celebrates the significant – but limited – virtues of power, might, forcefulness, strength, readiness to command and take charge, protection of our way of life, security, toughness, readiness to fight, leadership, self-reliance, and certainty.  What we are not likely to hear is much at all that recognizes or affirms the claim of the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, or those who mourn, who hunger and thirst, who are persecuted and reviled for the sake of righteousness:  those very qualities that Jesus said were blessed, those very people that Jesus said would be comforted and filled, would inherit the earth, receive mercy and the kingdom of heaven, and be called children of God. 
In this anxious and angry election season it will be essential for our community of faith – for people like you and me – to remember who we are, and where we have come from; to keep the blessed of Jesus in the picture; to broaden and deepen the political dialogue by recalling and retelling the stories of our faith as we have received them in the gospels and renewed them through in our own spiritual experience with Jesus Christ who still says, Blessed are they: the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, or those who mourn, who hunger and thirst, who are persecuted and reviled for the sake of righteousness.  Indeed, with Christians of every time and place, may we yet again rejoice and be glad with them, for their reward is great in heaven.