In the Monty Python movie "The Life of Brian" (I am not advocating seeing this movie) Jesus goes up on the mountain side to teach the people. There is a huge crowd gathered around him. In fact, the crowd is so vast that the people who are on the outer edge of the gathering cannot hear what is being said and must ask others what the master has said.
As Jesus pronounces what have become known as the beatitudes, one of the characters in the movie, desperate to know what Jesus is saying, asks a man who is ahead of him the crowd: “What is he saying? What is he saying?”
The man checks with a person in front of him, who in turn checks with someone else and then the message is relayed back, “The Master says ‘Blessed Are The Cheese Makers.’”
From there a theological debate ensues about the importance of cheese makers in the Kingdom of God, and whether Jesus literally means “cheese makers,” or could his pronouncement of blessing equally fall upon all producers of dairy products.
I have titled my sermon today "blessed are the cheese makers" as a way of reminding us how often we get wrong what Jesus has said. Further, I want us to explore what we think in terms of what it means to be blessed.
On a recent visit in the hospital, I boarded an elevator, and stood next to a woman. “How are you today?” I asked. She replied, “I am blessed!”
“Really,” I said. “How so?”
“God has been so good to me,” she said. “I have a wonderful husband, three terrific kids, a nice home, and I just got a brand new car!” Then, just before departing the elevator, she reiterated her initial comment. “I am blessed because God has been so good to me!”
What does it mean to be blessed? What does it mean to be favored by God? And what does it mean to be among those who are cursed with troubles and woes.
The response of this young woman seems to be in line with our modern American philosophy of success. Those who succeed are the ones God favors. The ones with good health, a happy family, a nice wardrobe, a luxurious home, a new car, and the large investment account – these are the blessed. Meanwhile, those who struggle with illness, broken homes, tattered clothing, and extreme poverty – these are the cursed and the afflicted.
The only problem is that this is not what Jesus taught about the nature of being blessed.
We are all familiar with the “Sermon on the Mount,” as it comes to us in the Gospel of Matthew. Luke’s account is vastly different. It is not that Luke contradicts Matthew, but rather that he gives us a different point of view of Jesus sermon.
To begin, in Luke, the sermon is not set on a hillside where Jesus can look over the top of the crowd and hand down the word from on high to those who are beneath him. Rather Luke sets the sermon on a plain, a level place, where a large crowd has gathered and pressed in upon him. ON the plain Jesus moved among them, touching them, healing them, curing their afflictions, and teaching them about the ways of the Kingdom of God.
Next, Luke’s list of those who are “blessed by God” is a bit more graphic and tangible. And there is one more thing that Luke does that Matthew doesn’t. In Luke’s version of the message, Jesus not only speaks about those who are blessed, but he also announces a series of matching curses or woes:
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Woe to you who are rich now for you have received your consolation.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Woe to you are full now for you will be hungry.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on the account of the Son of Man.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
Think about these words. What do they say about our aspirations? What do they say about our dreams? What do they say about our rushing out to buy lottery tickets so that we might win the big one? What do these words say about the value of our sorrow, our pain, and our hunger?
Let us take it a step further. What does this list of blessings and woes say about what God is about? What do they say about where God is, whom God blesses, and who God is for?
Let’s face it – these are disconcerting words. In them, God reverses all our expectations. In these words, God comes to us and says, “Everything you thought you knew is wrong!”
In these words from Luke, God turns everything upside down. I am glad, because when God turns something upside down, God is really making it right side up.
Here is what I mean!
I need to know that God understands my pain, my poverty, my despair, my sin, my fear.
I need to know that God is with me the way that I really am and that God’s grace is still sufficient.
I need to know that the secular image of joy, success, happiness, and prosperity is a false image of blessedness.
I need to know that God is beside me, where I live, on the plain, on the level, where I am sick and in need.
I need to know that I can touch Jesus and be touched by him right here and right now; where I struggle to do what is right - and where I fight to retain my faith.
I need to know that it is okay to not have all the answers, to not understand all the mysteries, and to not be joyfully confident for God to care for me.
I spoke to Leigh Ann Cambell this past week about her experiences caring for her ailing mother.
She told me how blessed she felt to be able to take care of her mother. She told me how she had been inspired by her mothers strength of character while facing so much agony and imminent death. She shared how privileged she feels to be there with her, to see her mother smile what might be one of her last smiles. She said being there was a gift. Not a gift from her to her mother (though it certainly is that), but a gift from her mother and God to her. She feels blessed to be able to take care of her dying mother.
Think about it. What she describes the experience of caring for her dying mother, she uses words like “blessed” and speaks of it as a “gift.”
“I have a chance to love my mother. I have a chance to give back to her some of what she has given me. I feel blessed to be about to do this!”
Do you feel blessed today?
Think about your answer before you reply.
If your answer is, “Yes, I feel blessed because…” and then you begin listing the stuff that makes you feel happy, then look out. Jesus says that such things are a false source of happiness. They are temporal. If you have them, you already have your reward.
Beyond that – if you think that your possession of stuff somehow proves that you are more important, more obedient, more loved, more highly favored, or more “blessed” than those who do not, you are highly mistaken. Do not believe that lie – else your stuff might become your only reward.
Jesus points beyond the stuff. You see, the problem with “stuff” is that it usually distracts us from what is really happening in the world around us. We begin counting on the stuff as being the substance and source of happiness, but it is not. Stuff is just stuff. It can never take the place of God, and its presence and abundance in ours lives cannot biblically be equated with Divine blessing.
Where do we experience God’s power seen most often in our world? It is seen when we reach out to help somebody in need.
Ask Leigh Ann Campbell where she has seen God recently. She will tell you it was in the face of her dying mother.
Where do we experience God’s presence the most in the world? It is not in the good times, the easy times, or the times when we are blind to the pain within us and around us. Rather, the best chance to experience God’s presence is in those moments of personal brokenness when somebody reaches out and touches us and says, “God is with you. God understands. Jesus has been where you are. He had his doubts, uncertainties, and fear. He had no home to call his own and no friends he could really count on. He wept and cried and got angry too and God the Father was with him in all those times, strengthening him and giving him the victory – and God will do the same thing in you by grace through faith.”
My friends, God can work with us. God can accomplish something for us, and in us, and through us, when we are open to him in our need.
What God cannot deal with because we do not let God deal with it is our plastic smiles, our blithe ignorance, our self-righteousness, and our couldn’t-care-less attitudes toward those who are in need around us.
Happiness – blessedness – is not found in wealth, in three square meals a day, in mindless laughter, or in the good opinions that others may have of us.
Blessedness is found is surrender. Blessedness is found in letting go. Blessedness is found in knowing that that God really cares about those needs and that God is really present with us to meet those needs.
Blessedness is found in knowing that God will vindicate all those who cling to Him in the midst of those needs – cling to God and not to the god of material success, or the god of self-reliance, or the god of blind happiness.
Blessedness is found in trusting in God and in doing the works of God, the works of loving, caring, healing, sharing, and forgiving.
Blessed are the cheese makers - for theirs is the kingdom of God.
Perhaps there is more wisdom in this mishearing of Jesus’ words than in the distortions that we see in the world around us today.
Blessed are the cheese makers who do their best for one one-hundredth of what baseball player receives and the factory workers who share their jobs rather than taking overtime.
Blessed are the single moms who struggle to feed and clothe their children and to teach them self-respect, and the lonely widowers who weep and who visit those who have suffered the same kind of loss as they.
Blessed are the daughters who nurse their dying mothers rather than leaving them to strangers and the fathers who spend time with their children instead of spending extra time at the office getting ahead.
Blessed are those who are rooted in faith and who share what they have, materially and spiritually, with others.
Blessed are those who know their need, and who trust in God, and follow in God way, for they are like trees planted by streams of water. Their leaves do not wither - in all that they do they prosper. Amen.
