24.3 Righteous Is . . .
Have you discovered that words can’t be taken in isolation? They have to be looked at in their environment. My folks have a friend named Noreen who has red hair. One afternoon Dad was sitting at a red light in Saint John when he noticed Noreen standing back to waiting for the crosswalk light to change. So he rolled down the window and hollered “Hey you old red head, you looking for a man?” Dad later said “She was certainly a redhead, and she may have been looking for a man, but she definitely wasn’t Noreen.” Had it been Noreen she would have found it funny, because it wasn’t Noreen she found it hilarious. And perhaps if the stranger had of known Noreen she might have found it amusing, but she didn’t and she didn’t. Dad said the worse part was the light stayed red for a really long time and he had no where to go.
Words can’t be taken in isolation. There are topics which can be talked about say at medical school that wouldn’t be really appropriate at the dinner table. An advertisement arrives in the mail for a cemetery, and there’s just been a death in the family. Words can’t be taken in isolation but they exist against a background of experience and present circumstances. So when Christ said in Matthew 5:6 God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
He wasn’t originally speaking to well fed Canadians. The people of Palestine not only lived in an occupied land where the very best of everything went to the occupier not the occupies. And the people he spoke to weren’t the upper crust, or the middle class, they were the labourers, the fisherman, the carpenters and the farmers. He was talking to people who knew what it was to go to bed hungry, not just a craving for food but a gnawing hunger. The hunger that Christ spoke about wasn’t just a Big Mac attack in the original language it meant hungry to the point of starving and thirsty to the point of death.
The word that is used here in the New Living Translation is justice but in other translations it is righteousness, and because that is more familiar that’s where we are going today.
1) Blessed are those who Hunger and Thirst after Righteousness. Christ is trying to convey the thought that the quest for righteousness is not some idle task that you do when there’s nothing on TV and you have nothing better to do with your time.
The story is told of the young man who came to Socrates and told him that he wanted knowledge. “Follow me” the philosopher told the student and led him to the edge of the ocean and into the water, without warning Socrates grabbed the young man and plunged him beneath the water and held him there until the struggling stopped. He dragged the boy to the shore, left him gasping on the sand and returned to the market place. When the boy recovered he sought out the teacher again and asked him why he tried to drown him. Socrates replied, “When you were under the water what did you want more then anything?” The reply of course was “air”. And Socrates responded by saying, “When you crave knowledge like you craved air, then you won’t need me or anyone else to guide you.”
We have to come to the same place with righteousness. You see too many of us view salvation as a trip to Timmy’s for a coffee and donut, just a snack, something to take the edge off the hungers. We never see what Christ is actually offering and that is a great banquet table laid before us. Most of us desire righteousness but in a listless way, not sharp & burning. We need to ask ourselves what we’re willing to sacrifice for righteousness, is it dessert, that we can take or leave. Or is a life saving meal of a starving man. In fact a good many of us suffer from what Robert Louis Stephenson described as the “Malady of not wanting”
If righteousness topped the list of desire of each person in this church, what a difference it would make not just to Cornerstone Wesleyan Church but to our entire city. Let’s be truthful, if we asked you what you’d want if you could have anything at all, what would it be? A new car, a bigger home, a better job? What would it be? Maybe that’s the problem. How many of us would have honestly said “If I could have anything in the world I would ask for righteousness”?
OK, at this point if I’ve done my job properly you should have a handle on how much you should want it, the next part of the job is to define, “IT” What is it that we are supposed to desire? “Well righteousness of course Denn haven’t you been paying attention at all” Ok next question is whose righteousness? “Well mine of course” you say. Oh right, all that is good and moral and holy and righteous in your life, not.
You see traditionally unhappiness happens to those whose goodness never satisfies them. And what a dilemma that puts us in. For each of us to engage in a never ending quest for personal righteousness is to embark down a road of bitter disappointments. A number of years back a movie was released about the life of Astronaut John Glenn, it was called “The Right Stuff” maybe you remember it? Well the truth of the matter is this, John Glenn may have had the right stuff but we have the wrong stuff, we don’t have what it takes. Kind of goes back to that first beatitude which talked about being poor in spirit, or recognizing that we don’t got it.
And as we try to become more and more righteous we begin to run in circles and become the proverbial dog chasing it’s tail. Until finally our mission which was to draw us close and closer to God only succeeds in driving us further and further away as we become idolatrous in worshipping the very righteousness he commands us to seek. And as we follow this futile trail we propagate a salvation by works and our own goodness. Remember the words of the prophet Isaiah 64:6 We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. “Well Denn, I am really confused now, first you tell me to seek after righteousness and now you tell me I can’t get it.” You talk into bigger circles then Stephen Harper”
Maybe this will explain it David writes Psalm 5:8 Lead me in the right path, O Lord, or my enemies will conquer me. Make your way plain for me to follow. Usually the first thing that happens when you accept Christ as Lord and Saviour is that you fall madly in love with God and want to do whatever it takes to please him and then someone hands you a long list of sins, and tells us, “You gotta do this, and this and you better not do that or that.” And we become so busy trying to make ourselves morally acceptable to everyone in the church that we forget that we aren’t called to do that. “Gasp”
You say “what are we called to do then?” We are called to serve God. If we first seek the Kingdom of God, if we seek to grab a vision of God, if we seek to please God, then those other things will fall into place, because Christ said, Matthew 5:6 God blesses those who hunger and thirst for righteousness why? for they will be satisfied. Do you see why those who are hungering and thirsting to the point of death for a taste of God’s righteousness are happy, right because when they seek it God gives it to them, to the very point of it overflowing their soul. You can’t earn it
and it is very doubtful that you will ever deserve it. But when God and his righteousness become the centre of your being then you will be filled, and it will no longer be a chore to clean up your life, instead if will be a labour of love.
Christ goes on to say in Matthew 5:7 God blesses those who are merciful, for they will be shown mercy. So the next thing is 2) Blessed are the Merciful I’m sure that most of us would agree that true happiness come from helping someone less fortunate then ourselves. This could almost be the Canadian beatitude. No one in the world seems to be a greater champion of the underdog then Canadians. All you have to do is say somebody doesn’t have a chance and we’re all on his side. Anyone who has ever helped someone of a lower station in life knows the wonderful warm feeling that you get inside. You know the warm fuzzies. But Jesus isn’t just limiting His command to be merciful to the underdog, he wants us to be merciful to the equal dog and the over dog as well. In Australia they often talked about how Australian it was to cut down the tall poppy. When anyone rose above the norm in any vocation they were fair game, and it was so much fun to watch the tall poppy fall. We don’t call it that in Canada but I think it’s enjoyed just as much. And that’s why so many people enjoyed watching Martha Stewart go to jail, bring here down a couple of notches. And that’s why there is little compassion for Conrad Black right now, for most people it’s not whether he’s guilty or not, he just needs to be cut down to size, thinks a little too much of himself.
Jesus tells us that we are to show mercy to everyone not those who fit our preconceived idea of someone needing mercy, but to everyone even the tall poppies. I mean let’s be truthful, we would really prefer to select our own recipient for our mercy, wouldn’t we?
One memory I have from my teen years was when two Moncton Police officers, Corporal Aurèle J. Bourgeois and Constable Michael O’Leary, were kidnapped after stopping a car for speeding. The passengers of the car then took the two officers into the woods, made them dig their own graves and shot them, dead. Maybe you remember that, it was 1974. Their killers were eventually arrested and sentenced to life without parole. But what I remember most about this incident was the outpouring of sympathy to the families of the murdered policemen. In a period of two days over a million dollars was raise for a trust fund for the families of the two officers and this was in the seventies when a million dollars wasn’t just walking around money. The people of New Brunswick responded with mercy, but how many of us would have passed a bum on the street during the same period of time without giving them a quarter, because they didn’t meet our criteria for needing any mercy
Not only do we want to choose who we show mercy on but we also want to be merciful only when we can afford it. Like we’re always ready to give away the sleeves to our vest, aren’t we? As my contribution to world hunger I will give away every brussel sprout that will ever be served to me in my life time.
We also would like to be merciful when it makes us feel superior to the one whom we show mercy to. Gerald Mann a Baptist preacher in Texas tells of being on an airplane when a black man got on. Mann tells how he secretly hoped that he wouldn’t sit with him because he had work to do and didn’t want to be disturbed. I understand that, when I fly I’d rather have an empty seat next to me then a person regardless of their colour, unless they were like purple because I’ve never actually talked to someone who was purple before but that’s a whole different story. The black man went to sit down next to one man and the fellow said, “I don’t want no coloured folks sitting with me.” so the black man moved back down the aisle and went to sit with a lady but she moved her purse into the empty seat beside her. Well Rev. Mann took all of this in and stood up and said in a loud voice, “Sir, I would count it an honour if you would join me” “Forget it” said the black man “I don’t need no charity” and he moved down the plane and took another seat. How come? Because as Gerald Mann put it “He wasn’t rejecting my mercy because he was angry at all whites: he had read me like a book. He knew I was only trying to show what a grand, generous and merciful fellow I was.” How often have we done that?
And we prefer to show mercy to those who haven’t hurt us and can’t hurt us if they’re forgiven. It’s easy to be concerned about criminals and their living conditions when they’ve never hurt us or our loved ones, but it’s not mercy. When Sirhan Sirhan was on trial for murdering Senator Robert Kennedy, Kennedy’s widow Ethel pleaded with the Judge not to pass the death sentence, that’s mercy. Now mercy isn’t such a romantic notion is it. Because mercy has to be tied to forgiveness without any strings attached even if they’ve hurt us, sorry especially if they’ve hurt us. And it has to be given to the good guy and the bad guy alike.
Blessed are the merciful in itself this teaching conforms to the teachings of the New Testament, through out the teachings of Christ, Paul and James we are reminded of the importance of forgiveness in our lives. In the Lord’s prayer we pray, Forgive us our debts how? As we forgive our debtors This is a conditional statement as well as a relational statement. Our forgiveness it says is conditional on our forgiveness of others. If we don’t forgive then we won’t be forgiven, ouch. Along with it being conditional it is also relational, that is to say that our forgiveness is relative. So the manner in which you forgive others in your life is the manner in which God will forgive you. Reluctantly, bitterly, disgruntled.
Now that isn’t just based on one scripture either Matthew 6:14-15 “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But
now remember that wonderful and deep concept we’ve learnt about Biblical exegete, after the but comes the truth. But, now the truth, if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins. That’s a pretty heavy statement.
You say “Denn you just don’t know what I’ve been through, I just can’t forgive” what if God said that about you, “I just can’t forgive”? James 2:13 There will be no mercy for those who have not shown mercy to others. But if you have been merciful, God will be merciful when he judges you.
The Bible always seems to be able to lay it on the line, funny that.
Another aspect of mercy is simply giving the other guy credit for being every bit as human as you are. When someone hurts us and we want to hurt him back it becomes easy if we can think of him as an other, an enemy, as someone who is not like us. When we separate people from their humanness we become capable of anything. That’s what the Americans did with the blacks, it’s what the Australians did with their Aboriginals, it’s what we did in Canada when we took away Japanese Canadians homes, business and freedoms during the second world war. It would have been very difficult to do that to another Canadian or a neighbour, so we made them Japs, and nips and geeks and it was no problem. It’s what we do with abortion today, it’s hard to kill babies but anyone can remove foetal tissues or terminate a pregnancy.
The question remains though how does having mercy make you happy? Well the opposite of mercy is hate, and hate eats you up and destroys you inside. When you hate you haven’t got time for anything else. And you certainly haven’ got time to enjoy life and to be happy. Throughout history we see what happens. When Saul begins to hate David his entire life’s focus changed and he lost his happiness, his family, his kingdom and eventually his life.
How many of you have read the story of Moby Dick? You know the story of how Captain Ahab lost his leg to the great white whale and how his entire life was consumed with tracking down Moby Dick and destroying him. Well it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to discover that the real victim isn’t the whale it’s the captain. In the end hatred destroys everything, the whale, Ahab, his ship and his crew.
And so God’s word says Matthew 5:7 God blesses those who are merciful, why? for they will be shown mercy.
Matthew 5:8 God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God. Blessed are the pure in heart, another warm fuzzy one. Once again we have another of those thoughts which at least on the surface would appear to correspond to our accepted religious norm. A man is happy if he is morally spotless, if he is perfect and without fault. But if that is the case then that can’t be the meaning of this beatitude because as Paul tells us in Romans 3:10 As the Scriptures say, “No one is righteous— not even one. and again in Romans 3:23 For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. So if the prerequisite for happiness is moral purity then no one will ever be happy. Others maintain that this deals with purity of motives, what our intentions are but then again how many of us ever have totally pure motives?
It is seldom that we do even the noblest task out of totally wholesome motives. Our support of World Vision may very well save a starving African, but let’s not kid ourselves the warm fuzzies that we get from doing good certainly deserve their share of the credit as well.
The word that Jesus used in the original language was Katharos and it has several different meanings, aren’t languages fun. The first meaning was simply clean, like clothes that had been washed, it was also used in referring to corn that had been winnowed and sifted and cleansed of all the chafe so that all that was left was corn. It could also be used to mean metal that was unmixed with any alloys or impurities.
Kierkegarrd stated “Purity of heart is to will one thing” The one thing that we are to will is the Kingdom of God. The follower of Jesus Christ has to be single minded in his endeavours, everything he says, everything he does, every move he makes should be directed toward bringing in the Kingdom of God.
This has to be reflected in every area of our lives. Too often people compartmentalize their lives, this is church, this is work, this is school, this is family, this is play. To the person who is pure in heart everything is tied into the kingdom of God. And so at work we work as if Jesus Christ was our immediate superior and we bring a little bit of the Kingdom of God. When we go to school we learn as if Jesus was our teacher, when we play we play as if Jesus was our playmate. In our families we reach out and touch the lives of each member for the Kingdom of God. Parents your child has one overriding need in his or her life. And it’s not education, and it’s not housing and it’s not food or the right clothes or all the opportunities you didn’t have. The one thing that your child needs from you is an introduction to your saviour and everything else comes second.
Because bottom line is that it doesn’t matter in the end whether they make straight As or Straight C’s what does matter is whether or not they are a part of the Kingdom of Heaven. And so this beatitude calls for, no demands self examination. Is our service given from selfless motives or from motives of self display? Are we serving God with unmixed emotions, are we serving the one true God or does He have take his place with our god of family, our god of education, our god of careers and our god of material things? Only you can answer that question, but it is a question that needs to be asked.
Adam and Eve were given the entire garden for their enjoyment. Everything was theirs to do with as they would, except for one tree, and that was there to remind them that God was the creator and that God was in control. The tree was there so they would be reminded of the fact that the Garden wasn’t supposed to become their god. And they were promised perfect bliss and happiness as long as they kept everything in perspective and in the right order.
But the moment they ate of that fruit, they substituted their love for God with love for the garden. And things turned sour, they experienced shame and covered themselves, work was no longer creative fulfilment but instead it was sweat and toil and a curse. They animals they had named and lived in harmony with became a threat to their very existence. Childbirth was not longer joyful participation with God in the creation process but now became a painful, anxiety ridden event.
Why? Because they had lost their single mindness. Because as Adam told Abel, “your mother has eaten us out of house and home” Purify your hearts, set it on one agenda and that is the Kingdom of God. And when we do that Jesus says in Matthew 5:8 God blesses those whose hearts are pure, why? for they will see God Let me make a very deep and profound statement, “You can only see what you can see” Did you get it? Did you write it down? Let me repeat it for those who got lost in the pure wonder of it all. “You can only see what you can see”
When I look into the sky at night I see stars, a whole bunch of little lights. But when Angela looks into the sky she see different planets and constellations. Why because she has researched some of that stuff and it interests her and she knows what she’s looking for. If you were to put an art critic and a novice into a room together full of art the novice would see a bunch of pictures, but he expert, he can see a Rembrandt over here and a Da Vinci there and a Picasso over there, why? Because he knows what he’s looking for. When you look for God with a heart that’s pure, then and only then will you see him, and that’ll make you happy.
PowerPoint is available for this message, email me at denn@cornerstonewesleyan.ca
