MT 5: 1-12                                                            The Rev. Dr. Patricia Ramsden

1/30/11                                                            First Presbyterian Church

            One of my favorite lines from “Fiddler on the Roof” goes like this:  Tevya, a faithful Jew, is praying to God.  Everything has been going wrong and now the Russian army is forcing them from their homes. Tevya looks up to heaven and says, “God, I know we are Your chosen people, but please couldn’t You choose somebody else once in a while?”

That’s how I felt when I read the beatitudes this week.  “God, I know you say these things are a blessing, but, please, can’t you bless someone else for a while?  I don’t think I can take much more.”  I mean listen to the list:

Blessed are you when you’re at the end of your rope.

Blessed are you when you have lost what is most dear to you. 

Blessed are you when people put you down, throw you out, or speak lies against you because of your faith in God. 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and those who are persecuted.

Saying that all these things are blessings seems completely, totally, irrational.  And they are not at all what I have in mind when I say “God bless you.”

I want God to give you all the good things in life.  I want your life to be filled with laughter and love.  I want your dreams to come true.  I want God to bless you the way I want you to be blessed.  I want you to live a fairy tale life with no problems, no grief, no pain.

But God doesn’t do fairy tales.  He does life as it really is.  And in real life, people lose the ones they love the most.  They lose their jobs.  They become desperate. 

In real life, people are diagnosed with cancer and dementia. They fight against addictions that threaten to destroy them.  They struggle to pay the rent.  And God meets them --- and us --- there in our real lives. 

The Beatitudes remind us that being blessed by God does not mean we should expect life to always be perfect.  It does not mean that we will somehow escape all the tragedies that happen to other people just because we are people of faith.  As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” 

But there is in the life of faith what Max Lucado calls “a stubborn joy” --- a joy that refuses to bend in the wind of hard times – a joy that we can hold onto in the face of pain – a joy that lends us a sense of peace that defies our tragedies – a joy that comes “through the back door of our hearts.”  It is a joy that no person and no circumstance can take away.

What rings true to me about the Beatitudes, what rings true about the life of faith, is how very real they are.  God does not deny the hard times of life.  He transforms them.   God moves into our darkness with light, our mourning with comfort, our despair with hope.   And that gives us the courage and strength we need to take even the worst that life can hand us and allow God to use even it for good for ourselves and for others. 

As you know, my friend Helen has just gone through her third bout of cancer after fifteen years of being cancer free.  She thought she had beat the odds when the odds came back to bite her back once again.  This was not a blessing.  It was not what God wanted and yet God helped her transform it into a blessing one more time. 

When she was “at the end of her rope” she was more aware than ever before of God’s strength and love in her life.  Throughout her surgery, her chemotherapy, her radiation, she rediscovered how strong in spirit and body she really is. 

She felt again the unfailing presence of God and she was able to use her experiences this past week for good, when a parishioner asked her to go with her to the hospital as she met with her own team of cancer specialists, just like Helen and I had less than a year ago. 

What was meant to be a tragedy was somehow, in a way we can’t understand, transformed by God.  Now, Helen would be the first one to tell you that she could not have gotten through all of this on her own.  She did it with God, through God.

But let me make this clear:  it was not what God had originally planned for Helen’s life.  God never desires us to face these kinds of tragedies.  He never sees them as “good” things and He never proposes that those who pass through suffering are somehow better Christians because of their pain.  Never. 

Rather Christ is telling us that we must be willing to let God work through both our joy and our pain, through both the good times and the bad. 

And so the Good News I have for you this day is that

·       when you're at the end of your rope you’ll discover God is there to help you tie a knot and hang on

·       when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you, you will be embraced by the arms of a God who loves you.

·      And when your commitment to God provokes persecution, when people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you because of your faith, that very persecution will drive you even deeper into God's kingdom.

When life is more than you can handle, when you do not think you can go on, you will know God’s presence in a way that is deeper than the deepest sea and you will find that “stubborn joy” that counts you as one of the “blessed.”