“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”

Scriptures: Psalm 95:1-7, Matthew 5:10-12

 

Even though we’re only halfway through our Lenten journey with the Beatitudes, we’re looking today at the last two because the emphasis here is on both the kingdom of heaven and what it means to be followers of Jesus. It is not always – or perhaps even rarely – an easy thing. Ours is a crucifixion faith. In the lead-up to the events of Holy Week, Jesus wants us to be sure we understand that.

To remind ourselves: we have said that Lent is a good time to look at the Beatitudes in more detail, because Lent is a time for us to relate us back to the basics of our faith, and these nine Beatitudes are as basic as it gets. So far we have examined: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy”; “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God”; “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth”; and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

But what an odd note to end on! Here we have two Beatitudes that speak of how we who choose to follow the Christ will be persecuted. Is this going to make us feel blessed – or “happy”, as we have said is one way to translate the beginning of each Beatitude? Do you really want to be living your life as one who feels persecuted all the time? (I know, I know, there are those martyrs among us who would just love to be able to say, “poor me, look at how persecuted I am” – and then have everyone else feel sorry for poor little me. But that’s not most of us, most of the time – at least, I don’t think so.)

Back in my seminary days I was enamored of a little book written by Martin Marty that had to do with the “scandal of the cross” (that evidently isn’t its actual title, because I couldn’t find it when Googling it). But I do remember that Marty, like other authors, used Paul’s words in I Corinthians about the message of the cross being “foolishness” to the wise to point up how our modern world understands the meaning of the cross. Paul wrote in these familiar words: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” and then in one of the great paradoxes of our faith Paul summarizes: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (I Cor. 1:18-25) What Marty was saying, riffing on Paul’s words, is that the world sees a faith based on a crucifixion as something to be ridiculed, scandalous, based on a weakness that would never be acceptable in the “real” world. This is perfectly captured in a satirical song from the musical “For Heaven’s Sake”, which was written in the early 1960s. Three business men meet at a bar after work and sing this lament called “Some Career”:

He was a flop at 33.
His whole career was one of failure and of loss…
He never owned a home or built a swimming pool…
He was licked right from the start
When he said “do to others as you wish they’d do”,
For to make it you must strive,
Because of course the fit survive,
You’ve got to do the other in or they’ll do you.
He paid no heed to social codes –
The status factors that can help you get ahead…

And then in the final verse they come to the realization of why this is such a scandalous event – especially for them:

We fought our way up to the top;
We’re all established as successful men of worth;
So the thing that puzzles me
Is why that “flop at 33”
Is called the one successful man to live on earth.

Of course those who practice a crucifixion kind of faith are going to be persecuted by the kind of men represented in this song. In fact, anything that seems so odd as a crucifixion faith is going to find persecution from all kinds of people who want to define success in terms that are easier to quantify and are much more appealing to those who think of status as being, as the old line has it, “the ones with the most toys”.

And the scandal of the cross continues. In his review of a recent book called Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity by David Kinnaman, Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, notes that what we have come to call “Generations X and Y” have a problem with the kind of Christianity they see. Galli says: “Unchristian‘s motive is praiseworthy –the author implores us to take these generations’ critiques seriously as we try to call them to follow Jesus. And the book’s central assumption seems reasonable enough: if we could just get Christians to act like Christians, more people would be attracted to Jesus. But the problem with the book, and with those who eschew the Christian label, is that they fail to take the sinfulness of the church seriously enough. They also fail to recognize how far the scandal of the Cross reaches. Simply put, Jesus not only died for but also chooses to associate with sheltered, judgmental, proselytizing hypocrites who have put their faith in him….. Part of the scandal of the Cross is the scandal of grace. And part of the scandal of grace is that I am part and parcel of the company of the graced. When we invite people to follow Jesus, we’re inviting them into the desperately sinful church that Jesus, for some odd reason, loves. To be a Christian — or whatever term you’d prefer — is to identify not just with Jesus or with the healthy church of our imagination, but also with the tragically dysfunctional church, which is mercifully embraced, if not by us, then certainly by the One who was a scandal in his own day.”

That fascinating author George F. MacLeod hits the nail on the head when he says, “The greatest criticism of the church today is that no one wants to persecute it because there is nothing very much to persecute it about.”

Jesus tells us that we will be “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. Recall what we said last week about what “righteousness” is: “to bring people into right relationships with one another…. In gentleness and humility – meekness – we are called upon to reach out to others, for this is what our righteousness calls us to do.” This is a far cry from, as the song lyric has it, “He was licked right from the start, When he said “do to others as you wish they’d do”…. You’ve got to do the other in or they’ll do you.”

Now, in many ways this is counter-intuitive. Think about the rest of the Beatitudes – even those we haven’t dealt with yet. If we were to follow them would we not become the kind of people the world would warmly welcome? We would like to think so, wouldn’t we? As Sinclair Ferguson in his book Sermon on the Mount: Banner of Truth puts it, “Is this [not] the reverse of what we would expect? Men and women who are poor in spirit, mourn for their sin, live lives of gracious meekness, long for God’s righteousness, show mercy to others, are pure in heart, and seek peace between God and (hu)man – would such people not be welcomed with open arms? After all, these are the very men and women the world needs! The world in which we live assumes that it will welcome Christians with open arms – until the first time it meets the genuine article….. When the Beatitudes make up our character, the character of citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, we as true believers will be persecuted for walking the radical, ‘narrow way’ that leads to life, in marked contrast to the broad way that leads to destruction.”

“…the character of citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven”, Ferguson says. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Another phenomenal promise. It doesn’t matter how the world sees us – how much of a scandal our “cross-i-form” behavior is in the eyes of the world, for we are acting as citizens of a completely different realm. And the promise gets even better in the final word Jesus has to say at the end of this list of Beatitudes: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” We are linked to a long line of those who have seen what Susan Blain calls “the vision beautiful” and who have acted upon it…and who have then had it thrown back in their faces by those who would rather believe that this man was indeed a “flop at 33”. All of these prophetic voices participate in that blessing that Jesus offers here at the very end of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” The key word here is “falsely”. The perceptions of the world based on status and privilege and consumerism values lead to a form of persecution that is, quite simply, wrong when seen from a kingdom perspective.

However, there is one disconnect here within these Beatitudes. We’ll need to deal with this more directly in two weeks when we end our series with the Beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers…..” John MacArthur, whom as you can tell I’ve been fond of quoting during this series, points to the disconnect in these words: “It is fascinating to me that the believer who lives in the Beatitudes will be both a peacemaker and one who creates persecution. You will both make peace and make trouble.  There is an almost awesome ambivalence.  The believer is a peacemaker, and yet, the believer is one who stirs up strife.  We hear it from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who said that He came as the Prince of Peace to bring peace, and then elsewhere, He said, ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword.’  There is this constant ambivalence where the believer is, in the world, a peacemaker who is able to make [someone] at peace with God by the presentation of the Gospel.  But on the other hand, where there are those who will not respond [to that person’s] peacemaking effort, [that one] is a troublemaker, and invariably, brings about persecution.”

This disconnect is reminiscent of the famous Harry Emerson Fosdick dictum that “the Christian is one who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”. We are called upon to do both: to be peacemakers and to stir up trouble where there is injustice, even though it means we will be persecuted and have “all kinds of evil” uttered against us. Indeed, if we are being true to our role as “…citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven”, what evil is being uttered against us may not be “falsely”. It is “false” because the world sees us as challenging the status quo, but it is “true” in relation to the values that Jesus wishes for us to be bringing into the world.

When we are being true to these gospel values there is indeed much reason to “rejoice and be glad”. Jesus doubles up this refrain, thereby emphasizing how great our gladness will be, how honored our happiness is in heaven. Persecution no longer matters. Happy are you when you are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Happy are you when people revile you and persecute you. It washes down off your back like water off of a duck. You are a kingdom person, and all manner of “evil” that is uttered against you falsely because of our allegiance to Jesus is just so much hot air.

And because we are kingdom people we are enabled to, as the 95^th Psalm has it, “sing to the Lord;…[and] make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” After all, this is where rejoicing and being glad lead us. Like many another minister before me, I used to love to begin every service with those oh-so-familiar words from the 6^th and 7^th verses:

Oh come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker!
For God is our God,
and we are the people of God’s pasture,
and the sheep of God’s hand.

In so doing we are indeed making a joyful noise to God with our songs of praise. This is what it means to “rejoice and be glad”. This is what it is to know that our great God shields us from all persecution. This is how we experience the reward that is in heaven (and that means right here and right now, not at some later after-life time). “Blessed are you when 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…..” I hope you are rejoicing and feeling blessed today.

Next week, as our Lenten journeys continue, we will look at two of the more familiar Beatitudes – “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” and “Blessed are those who mourn…” – along with communion and the beloved 23^rd Psalm.

I hope that your Lenten journeys continue to go well.

Amen

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 27, 2011