Blessed are the Poor

The Gospel for All Saints Day begins with a difficult teaching of Jesus.  “Then [Jesus] looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  (Lk. 6:20)  For one thing, we do not normally associate being poor with blessedness.  It gets stranger when we realize that the Greek word translated here as blessed literally means happy.  What Jesus is saying is, “Happy are the poor.”  We certainly do not normally associate poor and happy. 

The strangeness of this teaching may have a lot to do with why the church started trying to soften it right from the very beginning.  Matthew has Jesus saying something along the same lines, but with a difference:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  (Mt. 5:3).  Poor in spirit somehow makes it a little easier to take, although being poor in spirit is no more something I would normally associate with blessings and happiness than being just plain poor.  But is this really a softening?  Or is it more of an invitation?

I had the joy of speaking to the Diocese of Kansas this weekend at its convention.  As you have heard me do many times, I spoke about relationships of solidarity with people who are poor as being sacramental in nature, a way Christians experience the real presence of Christ in exactly the same way we do in the Eucharist.  As is almost always the case when I speak on this topic, someone asked me if the priority on Jesus’ concern for the poor in the Gospels was not really a priority on the poor broadly understood to be any type of need and not really about being poor literally.

Well, maybe.  What I’ve come to wonder, though, is if Matthew really understood the change to “poor in spirit” to be a softening of the way Luke put it, in other words, a way of saying the same thing as what has been attributed (incorrectly) to Mae West:  “I’ve been rich and unhappy and I’ve been poor and unhappy.  Rich is better.”  (What she actually said was “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor.  Rich is better.”)  If so, that would certainly be a big difference between the teaching in Matthew and the teaching in Luke. 

What I’ve come to believe, though, is that Matthew isn’t changing what Luke recorded at all.  He’s making it an invitation to the rich to take on the spirit, which is to say the very life and breath, of the poor.  Luke’s version is more exclusive.  It only extends the blessing to “you who are poor.”  Luke’s version acknowledges there are some who do not receive it because they are wealthy.  But in Matthew, the blessing is opened to all.  The rich, too, have the opportunity to take on the spirit of the poor.  If anything, Matthew makes the teaching more generally applicable by not letting the rich off the hook. 

Blessed indeed are the rich, for they are given the opportunity to become one with the poor.  And in that is the kingdom of heaven.  It’s just an entirely different Gospel if we don’t have to struggle with the blessedness of the poor.

Peace,
+Stacy

Being Thankful

When my children were young, my mother gave them a book.  It was called I Never Say I’m Thankful but I Am.  It was about all the things parents do for their children, especially when they are little, including especially the dirtiest tasks and the ones that try our patience.  It had a picture on the cover of a little boy sitting on the potty.  You get the message. The implicit message was that children never express their gratitude for all the things we do for them, but that they are learning to be grateful human beings nevertheless.

The book, and the concept behind it, relate to the gospel for this week (Lk. 18:9-14).  It is a parable about a Pharisee and a tax collector going to the temple to pray.  It doesn’t really have anything at all to do with saying thank you.  It does have something to do with the need to.  It is the basic issue of Christian life, it seems to me—living thankfully.

The Pharisee prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”  The man was only being truthful.  The Pharisees were good people.  The best people.  They were the most religious people.  They did what they were supposed to do.  They followed the law.  They went beyond following the law.  They were the good church going people.  They were, if you’ll pardon me, us.

The tax collector prayed differently, but he, too, prayed truthfully.  “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Tax collectors, known for being extortionists among other things, were not the best people.

Here, I think, is the point.  The person who left justified to God was the one with little to be thankful for.  The one who left not justified was the one with the most to be thankful for.  The one who had received the most grace from God was not justified.  The one who did not, was justified.

Here is the most disturbing lesson I’ve learned in nearly 25 years of trying to be a pastor.  The very people who have received the most very often have the hardest time being followers of Jesus, myself included most of all.  The very people who have the most reason to be thankful, rarely are. 

And here is the disturbing reality of how I see this playing out.  The people who have received the most grace from God are very often the ones who have the hardest time showing grace to others.  It is the people with the most who are very often the ones who get what they’ve been given confused with what they’ve earned, what has been entrusted to them with what is owned by them, what is compassion shown to them confused with what they are owed, what is mercy confused with what they deserve, what is a gift to them with what is the result of their own moral superiority, which is precisely what the Pharisee in the parable did.  It is a paradox of how God works that is difficult to understand.  The greater the grace, the danger is that the more it tends to separate from God rather than draw to God. 

We must not let that happen to us.

Peace,
+Stacy

A New Name

Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”  Gen. 32:28

My son Andrew and his new wife Jessica had barely left on their honeymoon when I received a phone call.  The caller ID startled me.  It was the first time I had seen my new daughter-in-law use her new name.  Who is Jessica Sauls?

Taking a new married name is much more an intentional choice these days than when Ginger and I got married.  It makes my daughter-in-law’s enthusiasm about it more powerful and laden with meaning than if she had done it because of tradition or someone else’s expectations.  Instead, she had made it an expression of herself and what she was making for herself. 

Jacob also took on a new name at a crucial moment in his life.  His had to do with returning to a family left behind years before in betrayal, but as a new person shaped by his experience away.  Jessica’s had to do with her choice to start a new life with my son.  Both represent adventures, and like all adventures, both have an element of striving in them, which is to say having some strife. 

I think my daughter-in-law will find, as did Jacob,  that the blessing is in the striving itself.  Blessing is found in the striving that comes with building a new life.  That’s how God will shape her . . . and us into new creations.  It is how she will answer the question she has taken on for herself:  Who is Jessica Sauls?

Peace,
+Stacy

Manners

I often get Jesus and my mother confused.  It is understandable.  My mother spoke on his behalf with some regularity. One of his lessons according to my mother was this:  “Remember the magic words—please and thank you.”  And that for a long time was how I understood this story about the healing of the ten lepers (Lk. 17:11-19), the fact that only one of them went back to say “thank you.” That’s the one who was the good boy.  But I had missed the details of the story. 

One of those details is that the only one of the ten lepers to come back after being restored to health was a Samaritan.  I have always thought that detail was there because Samaritans were not noted for having good manners. 

I now don’t think that is what this story is about at all.  The thing to note is that there is no reason at all for the Samaritan leper, even though healed, to go show himself to the priests, as Jesus has instructed all of them.  The priests at the Temple in Jerusalem would have had no more use for this Samaritan as a healed leper than they had before.  He was just as much an outcast as he was before he got rid of the leprosy.  He could no more be restored to the life of the community now than before.

And so this one leper, the Samaritan, does what people who could not be accepted anywhere else typically did in those days, and typically do still.  He returned to Jesus.  The place for the outcast, the marginalized, the oppressed, the misfit, the foreigner is in Jesus.  Polite society—the priests and the Pharisees and the decent folks in town—has nothing to do with these people.  Jesus, however, did.  And if we seek Jesus, we will, too.

Peace,
+Stacy