Installation of Pr. Sheila Michaels, Lutheran Campus
Pastor
White Earth Tribal and Community College
January 29, 2017--Epiphany 4/Year A
St Columba’s Episcopal Church, White Earth, MN
Matthew 5:1-12
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
So let me begin this afternoon with a confession. For most of my 35+ years of pastoral ministry
I avoided preaching on this beloved passage that marks the beginning of Jesus’
Sermon on the Mount.
Although I’ve always loved reading the Beatitudes—it’s preaching
on them that has been a stretch.
And with good reason!
These verses, after all, are already part of a sermon
delivered by Jesus himself. Who am I to
create a sermon based on a sermon by Jesus?
What could I possibly add to or clarify in what Jesus has already
uttered?
How could a Minnesota farm-boy possibly dare to preach
a sermon based on a sermon by Jesus? That’s just ridiculous!
What’s more, the Beatitudes have always seemed to be
calling us to some kind of moral crusade or a course of self-improvement.
Too often we hear these verses and imagine them
calling us to transform our lives. We
have the sense that Jesus is saying to us:
“Don’t just sit there: do
something!” Be more humble, practice
mercy, make peace…and much more..
And for Protestant Christians that is always dangerous
place to be—whenever the good news of Jesus comes off like good advice from
Jesus.
So for most of the time since 1981 when I was ordained
I simply “ducked” whenever this gospel lesson popped up in the lectionary…..until
two preachers[1]
wiser than me opened my eyes to what’s going on here in the first twelve verses
of Matthew 5.
One of these wise preachers suggested that the
Beatitudes aren’t so much a strategy for moral improvement as they are Jesus’
own “I Have a Dream” speech.
The Beatitudes are Jesus’ “I Have a Dream”
speech. Ponder that for a moment—perhaps
with Martin Luther King’s soaring speech in the back of your mind.
The Beatitudes are not about self-improvement or
“making this a better world” as much as they are a chance to hear from Jesus,
very early in his ministry, a vision of how God sees the world and all of us—both
now and in God’s future.
The Beatitudes are framed, not as demands, but as promises
throughout, promises of what is and what shall be, in the tender
compassion of our God.
What does Jesus see as he looks out over the
crowd?
Jesus sees a graced, gifted, blessed life where others
see only pain, heartache, deficit and loss.
Jesus sees poor souls seemingly bereft of riches….
Jesus envisions sorrowful mourners, humble nobodies,
hungry hearts….
Jesus looks at the profoundly sincere, the makers-of-peace,
the persecuted….
…and all around them Jesus bestows, Jesus promises a
circle of God’s blessing.
Those whom this dying world ignores, bypasses, even
curses—all of them are blessed by God, blessed to be blessings.
And
this isn’t something we need to do anything about.
This is something that Jesus’ hearers, including you
and me--this is simply who we ARE in
the mercy of God.
“I have a dream,” Dr. King announced….and then in soaring
rhetoric that still captures our hearts he shared a vision not of what he hoped
might happen if everybody finally got their acts together….but rather, he
shared a vision of what God was already up to, what God was surely bringing
about: a future in which all God’s
children would sing—with one voice—“Free at last, free at last, thank God
almighty we are free at last.”
That, or something very much like it, is what Jesus
was doing when he sat down on a mountainside and delivered this sermon. Not a strategy for moral action, but a
panoramic vista on the future that God in Christ is bringing into our lives and
our world, even now.
That’s the first fresh thing I learned about the
Beatitudes a while back…and the second new insight I received came from a
preacher who said this: in the
Beatitudes, Jesus intentionally focuses on all the “breakage” in our lives.
Not just here in these twelve verses, but throughout
the Bible, God is always dealing with “breakage.”
It
is, in fact, second nature for God to take the breakage in our lives and
transform it into blessing. What else
should we expect, after all, from the One who took the breakage of the Cross
and transformed it into the blessing of Easter?
This is, I think, a profound word for you, Pastor Sheila,
as you are installed as Lutheran campus pastor for the White Earth Tribal and
Community College.
You are already a key bridge-builder and healer in
this unique community of learners who bring all the joys and gifts, along with
all the challenges and heartaches of young people today.
Today we publicly name you as pastor within this
college, remembering that pastors are instruments through whom God gets close
to us, close especially to all the breakage in our lives because of what Martin
Luther called sin, death and the power of the devil.
Pastors are persons called to see and not ignore all
the “breakage” in our lives.
Pastors, in
the name of the crucified and risen Christ, pronounce God’s surprising,
undeserved blessing upon us, precisely in our brokenness.
So, when all our sources of security are broken open, we
realize how “poor in spirit” we truly are.
When all our hope for heaven on earth is broken open, we
become people who can only “hunger and thirst for [God’s] righteousness”
As we name the hope that is in us—a hope that runs
right up against the grain in this world—we’re broken open in the act of
suffering, being persecuted for being out of line with the world.
Each of these beatitudes begins with some experience
of brokenness….a brokenness that opens us up to God who delights in filling
that brokenness with blessing.
When we’re most keenly aware of being broken, bereft,
at the end of our rope—like those whom Jesus addressed in his Sermon on the
Mount--here is what God in Jesus
Christ says to us:
You are blessed.
You are the apple of God’s eye.
You are Jesus’ joy and delight.
You will not be disappointed.
In God’s good time—in the future that God alone holds
in the palm of his hands—in that future your
future is disclosed, for the sake of God’s beloved Son, Jesus Christ.
It would be so wonderful if blessings came in a less
painful way. We wish God simply doled
out blessings the way Ed McMahon used to pull up to some unsuspecting soul’s
house, scrambling out of the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes prize van,
with an over-sized check for a million dollars.
But in God’s Kingdom, it doesn’t work that way. In God’s Kingdom we are broken open, so that
God has space to redeem and restore and bless.
Blessing enters in most readily, clearly and unmistakably wherever there
is “breakage” that opens up room for blessing, thus making everything and
everyone new, in Jesus Christ.
But even that is not the end of the matter.
The same preacher who taught me about “breakage” in
our lives went on to say that God’s blessings are always “leaky.”
God never blesses any of us in such a way that we just
hang onto that blessing and hold it in, purely for ourselves.
No, blessings by their very nature tend to “leak”—to
leak out of our hands, into the hands of other broken ones, all around us….
…and in fact, that’s exactly why God put us here: to leak God’s blessings to us so that others
might hear Jesus’ own “I Have a Dream” speech…and in that way, be blessed forever.
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
[1] I think the first of them was David Lose,
and I know the second of them was
Martha Stortz who spoke to the ELCA Conference of Bishops some years ago.
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