Sunday, February 2, 2020 | 8:00 a.m.

Blessings and Requirements

Matt Helms
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Micah 6:1–8
Matthew 5:1–12

God has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you . . .

Micah 6:8

I don’t know about you, but often when I hear the Beatitudes—these blessings from Jesus that were just read—my mind drifts back to when I first learned about them in my Sunday School classes growing up. I was somewhere in the neighborhood of fourth or fifth grade, and I remember being utterly confused by the list: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”; “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”; “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Like all fourth and fifth graders, I couldn’t help but interrogate the reality of what was being said. After all, asking pointed questions is a gift of anyone that age. How could poverty, mourning, or humble status be a blessing? What did Jesus really mean by that?

As I got older, I began to rationalize this passage as meaning these blessings would occur way off in the future. It was mentally easier to wrap my mind around God and Jesus eventually addressing the hard realities of poverty, mourning, and social class, because it was clear to me that those realities were not a blessing at all. But after a while, particularly as I entered high school and had mission trips that got me out of the bubble of my hometown, I began to wrestle with why God and Jesus were even taking their time at all. What was the point of waiting to address those deep issues in the here and now? What good was a faith that only focused on the future rather than engaging in the present?

Before long, I found myself disenchanted and disillusioned by these Beatitudes—not angry with Jesus for saying them, but angry because I didn’t feel like we as the church were engaging with them, finding ways to be blessings in the lives of those who needed them. More than anything, I was angry with myself for not doing more. I spent a lot of time at church, both after school and at worship on Sundays, but I didn’t feel like I was making any sort of a difference. As time went by, I struggled with my faith—wondering why it was that I had spent so many hours in worship over the years if it wasn’t leading to helpful changes in the lives of others. It felt like there was a disconnect between what I was saying and learning about at church and the very real human need in my community. Somewhere along the line, I felt like my faith was hollow, an empty ritual that my parents continued to bring me to each week. “Where was God in any of this?” I wondered, “And what was God really calling me to do?”

Our first lesson from Micah 6 this morning is wrestling with a similar question. Written in the latter stages of the eighth century BCE, the prophet Micah was prophesying in a time of prosperity for the Southern Kingdom of Judah, but that prosperity was not equally felt throughout Judah. As the biblical scholar Philip J. King put it, “Wealth, invested in the land, led to the growth of vast estates and the collapse of small holdings [within Judah]. The shift in economy increased the gap between the rich and poor. Furthermore, many priests and prophets viewed their ministry like a business rather than a vocation—and they acted accordingly. . . . The common good was being usurped by self-interest.”

Knowing this background, the powerful words of Micah 6 take on an even more resonant quality. In verses 6 and 7, Micah rails against the practices of burnt offerings and anointing with oil. It should be noted that these practices likely served as a money-making enterprise for local temples, as they sold the animals to be sacrificed. “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?” Micah sneers at a those who view that sort of ritual as their sole responsibility and requirement. “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Rather than try to see and feel God’s presence through ritual sacrifices, Micah was demanding that people recognize, see, and feel God in their everyday lives—both in their daily interactions with their neighbors as well as in the relationship that they were cultivating individually in their humble attempts to follow God.

I wish I had known more about Micah while I was in the midst of my crisis of faith, because I wasn’t aware that this wrestling with ritual and practice has been going on in the church for millennia. Instead, I foolishly assumed that I was alone in questioning what I and the church were doing to help make a difference, and I even more foolishly chalked up my weekly attendance at church into the category of empty ritual. But thankfully I had an experience the summer of my senior year of high school that helped me to change that view—one that came on a mission trip that my youth program took into the Appalachian Mountains.

Our youth group routinely went on building trips in that region, doing everything from repairing porches to building wheelchair ramps to repairing shingles on roofs. I treasured this time, because I felt like it was one of the few times in my life when I was actually making a positive difference in someone else’s life—it was my chance to give back. But on the second day of this trip, a day when we were supposed to be building an elderly gentlemen’s porch, I ended up getting into an extended conversation with this man about his life and history. I’m embarrassed to say that I kept trying to get out of it—after all, I had work to get done! I wanted to finish the porch, to feel good about my contribution, and to feel like I had done something. And at the end of the day, the work didn’t get done, and I was upset about it. I hadn’t been able to do what I had wanted to do.

But later on that night, during our closing worship and devotion time, the always important and quintessential youth mission trip question was asked: “Where did you see God today?” In that moment I realized exactly where I saw God: I had seen and heard God all throughout this man sharing his life story; of being so open with a stranger about his struggles and about his desire to learn more about us and the church that we had come from. His desire for deep human connection was also a reminder of the divine spark in each of us and triggered memories of Jesus in Matthew 25 telling the disciples that they would see him in a stranger’s guise. I had been so focused on wanting to help him in my own particular way that, left to my own devices, I would have missed out on all of that—of being connected to him and his story on a deeper level and of seeing Christ in him rather than just assigning him to a category of “someone who needs help.”

While that mental transformation didn’t happen immediately, I began to realize that my desire to help others was perhaps more selfish than I would like to admit, and the thing that helped me get to that place of transformation was the very ritual that I had been constantly dismissing for the past year: it came in a time of worship, reflecting on God’s presence throughout the course of that day.

After that trip and that experience, I began to try to pay closer attention to the presence of God in people around me, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t very good at doing it during my everyday life. Honestly, I’m still not very good at it. I need worship. I need the practice of centering my heart and mind on God, of listening to voices other than my own, and of reflecting on the places I saw God throughout the week. Far from serving as an empty ritual, this practice of worship, I began to realize, filled me with hope and inspiration to go out and do the very work of transformation that I had foolishly thought I could do on my own.

Paradoxically, perhaps one of the best ways to know and feel the divine presence of God is to engage deeply with our, and others’, humanity. I think that’s what the prophet Micah was getting at in his command to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. I think we so often miss recognizing God’s holy presence in our interactions with others because we are constantly having to learn and relearn how to see and experience that presence. But perhaps that’s an important piece of what Jesus is training us to do in the Beatitudes: to think and see and feel theologically in ways that we are so often oblivious to.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”; “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”; “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” While there are some verbs in the future tense in Jesus’ statements, it should be noted that the Greek word for “blessed” (ma-kar-ios) is a noun, not a verb. Jesus’ words aren’t just pointing to blessings to come on a future day. That blessing is part of each person’s very identity—a past, present, and future reality.

In some ways, it’s no wonder that the Beatitudes are the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ reinterpreting of the Law is important, but the most important thing about us is our identity as being blessed and beloved by God. That is the view we express every time that celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism, and it’s a reminder of the grace that God has given freely to each of us.

While I once cynically wondered “Where was God in any of this?” these days I’m trying to remind myself that God is in all of it—even in the places of deep hurt and need and pain in our world. We may not be in the practice of recognizing the divine presence of God in one another, but I believe that Jesus is asking us to do just that in the Beatitudes.

So how can we live our lives in ways that recognize that blessing in our brothers and sisters? How are we being called to invest in others’ needs, not as a way to feel good about ourselves but as a way to acknowledge the divine presence in one another?

Our faith is much more than just a series of blessings and requirements. It is an invitation to see ourselves and our neighbor as beloved children of God and to live from that promise. So may it be so. Amen.