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Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
January 29, 2023 | 10:00 a.m.

A Most Vexing Word

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 15
Luke 6:20–26

In 2018, the Harvard Business Review posted online a list of several words it suggested are widely misused by the general public (Ross and Kathryn Petras, “9 Words and Phrases You’re Probably Using Wrong,” Harvard Business Review, 16 October 2018). Among them were words like utilize, which, if you think about, rather sounds like the verb “use” with a Ph.D. Also listed, were phrases like statistically significant, often employed to make some scientific findings sound more important than they actually are. But one word that struck me on the list was moot, as in moot point. Now, as the article noted, many of us begin by spelling the word incorrectly—m-u-t-e—as in silent, unable to speak, when in fact the spelling is m-o-o-t. But there’s more to its misuse than the arrangement of letters. The article noted that “even spelled right, moot is tough to use correctly. . . . The meaning of moot is ‘open to debate’—which is the time-honored definition of moot.” It goes on to say that by the mid-1800s, moot began “to mean something not worth debating or even talking about because the point had no practical worth or value.” HBR concludes the entry with this: “although language purists argue about it, our advice: Choose another word.”

But sometimes no matter how contested or enigmatic a word’s meaning appears to be, there is no way to choose another. There is no way around utilizing—or should I say using—it. Perhaps there is no better illustration of this than the word blessing.

On its surface, blessing sounds rather straightforward—like a generic thing you should definitely want, even if you’re not quite sure what it is. Yet in as many times and ways as the word is uttered in the books Christians regard as scripture, blessing is a most vexing word. It covers a multitude of purposes and motivations, sometimes contradictory, across many different times and places.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, we are reminded that God initiates blessing, and it covers every living creature and all human beings. It extends across time to the Sabbath—making it holy and set apart. Later we come to see blessing extend to particular persons and families. We are told that through Abraham and Sarah all the world’s nations will be blessed. And yet blessing also appears to be something conferred between people. Aaron, the brother of Moses and priest of the Israelites, offers what are now classic words: “May the Lord bless you and keep you.”

But blessing is not always a straightforward honor. It apparently can be wrested by someone through cunning as when Jacob wrestles with an angel in the depth of night, refusing to let go, the fearful patriarch says, until he gets a blessing. This, of course, after he stole the blessing of his brother Esau from their father Isaac, who apparently meant it as an inheritance of material prosperity. Blessing is not only a bargaining chip between human beings; it can even be conferred upon Godself, as when the psalmist joyfully exclaims “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” Or when the ancient Sabbath prayers of Judaism begin the dusk of Shabbat and the setting of the table with the words “Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu malech ho’olam”: :Blessed be you, O Lord, ruler of the universe.”

No wonder we are left asking: What exactly is a blessing?

But the mystery spills over into everyday life. Witness the person sitting beside you sneeze, and we issue the simplest and most universal riposte: Bless you. (Incidentally, this comes to us from a time when, as medieval Europe was contending with the deadly bubonic plague, people offered blessings at the first sign of potential illness.) However, ask any Southerner who has heard someone utter “God bless your heart,” and they’ll tell you it can be just as much an underhanded insult as it is a felicitous compliment. Approaching someone last week I found doing back-breaking work, manual labor, I uncovered a more recent variation. When I asked how they were doing, they responded, “Blessed by the best.”

No wonder we are left asking: What exactly is a blessing?

In both Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, blessing becomes the centerpiece of an extraordinary set of teachings that come from Jesus. As a teacher, Jesus employs a wide variety of styles and tools to get the point of discipleship across to us who would be followers. Parables, commandments, aphorisms, quick-witted sayings and prophecies. In the context of the Sermon on the Plain, as it’s called in Luke, Jesus chooses blessings, or beatitudes as we refer to them. Placing himself on the level ground with rugged Galileans, Jesus lifts up to them and us all a portrait of what makes for faithful discipleship. And these blessings appear like modern-day advertisements. If you want to know what ideal citizenship under God’s reign looks like—well, just look at whom Jesus is blessing.

We are a society awash in ideals. Standards of wealth, intelligence, beauty, and strength that seem impossible to attain or sustain for very long. And all those ideals tell us who in this society, and many societies throughout the globe, are among the blessed: the recipients of prosperity, the holders of honor, the winners who take all.

Blessed are the celebrities with the most followers on their Instagram account projecting an image that isn’t quite their true self.

Blessed are those who sacrifice themselves to the altar of ambition, for the accolades they win will look shinier than all the friendships they have lost by attaining them.

Blessed are the ones who have the most side hustles to eke out a living while they keep smiling through pain: don’t worry, says the world, your time will come.

Blessed are the ones who never stop to talk about grief, pain, or death. Because if we don’t talk about it, perhaps they will never happen upon our lives.

There is something a bit irresistible about these ideals, because they seem to be half-truths, which appear effective by shallow standards. Even our belonging to a religious tradition does not leave us safe from their temptation. I remember the first time I journeyed abroad as a representative of the Church. We were in the country of Guatemala, visiting resilient Christians in a very harsh political and economic climate. We came back to share what we had learned with other congregants, and with a kind of relief in the timbre of our voices, we kept saying we learned how blessed we are. I found the thought difficult to suppress, but then began to ask myself troubling questions: Did I have to travel 3000 miles across a continent just to learned I’m blessed? Did an entire community need to be impoverished just to teach me I’m blessed by my abundance?

This might be what my society is teaching me, but is it what God wants from me? To be blessed in comfort because my sisters and brothers are wasting in poverty and insecurity?

It is for such questions, perhaps, that Luke provides not only blessings, but woes or—as I like to refer them—warnings for the rich, the comfortable, the satisfied, and those seemingly impervious to pain.

And so I think Luke’s beatitudes cause us to spend a lot of time tossing and turning over whether we are among the blessed or the cursed in Jesus’ estimation. The gospel words put our status under the reign of God in question. And Luke lays out the costs. Perhaps our societal success turns into a burden through the eyes of Jesus. There is a temptation here to ask whether we are measuring up to the ideal that Jesus sets and, as Pastor Shannon suggested to us on Dr. King weekend, to ask how maladjusted we are to the ways of an unjust world. How well adjusted will we be to God’s vision of shalom, of peace with wholeness?

And so we wait it out, looking at the beatitudes as future prophecy, anxiously awaiting our reckoning with Jesus. Luke’s warnings keep us on our toes, and you know, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve got to stay there awhile. But maybe there’s more to blessing than wondering whether we are its recipients or not.

If we think of each of the Gospels as taking us on a journey through the contours of Jesus’ life, the beatitudes come on the upclimb, whether we receive them on a mount as in Matthew or a plain as in Luke. As a result, all this teaching is leading to something. Soon, in Luke’s Gospel, we will experience in rapid succession, Jesus’ healing and feeding ministries. And in chapter 7 Jesus will send out the twelve and in 8 will send out the seventy-two to heal, forgive, and free the captives.

If the beatitudes foreshadow those coming events, then perhaps one way to understand the blessings, and even the warnings, is not simply as prophecy telling us where we will end up or an ideal to tell us whether we measure up. Maybe the beatitudes are a kind of commissioning—a sending us out into the world with instructions to sanctify, to honor, to esteem, to bestow material well-being on those who have been dismissed, dispossessed, and forgotten.

There is something of this sense in the Aramaic versions of Jesus’ words. Archbishop Elias Chacour from Jerusalem uncovers it in his own translation of blessed from the Syriac-Aramaic, a derivative of the language Jesus spoke. He found that the original word was ashray from the verb yashar. Rather than being a passive kind of blessed, Archbishop Chacour says, “it’s more like setting ‘yourself on the right way for the right goal; to turn around, repent; to become straight or righteous’” (Elias Chacour, We Belong to the Land). Put another way by Walter Bruggemann, a blessing becomes “an act, gesture, or word whereby one person transmits the power of life to another.”

Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit Catholic priest who lives and works in community with those who are poor and many former gang members in Los Angeles, tells of a young man named Louie he worked with who, after a difficult day of work, asked him for a blessing. He came to Father Boyle’s desk, bowed his head, and Father Boyle placed his hands on Louie’s shoulder.

Louie’s birthday being two days previously gave Boyle an opportunity to tailor his blessing to the season. He said, “You know, Louie, I’m proud to know you, and my life is richer because you came into it. When you were born, the world became a better place. And I’m proud to call you my son, even though”—and he didn’t know why he decided to add this part—“at times, you can really be a huge pain in the. . . ” I think you can fill in the blank.
And Louie looks up at him with a smile saying, “The feeling’s mutual” (Greg Boyle, “The Calling of Delight: Gangs, Service, and Kinship,” On Being with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org).
What exactly then is a blessing?

A blessing can be many things, but in this moment I believe we desperately need it to be something that we offer each other, one human being to another. A message conveyed through our bodies that we are each of great worth. That the world really is better with us in it, especially those who have been despised and discarded.

The choice then is ours. We can either choose to be agents of such blessing or agents of woe. In and through our hands is the power to pass along not our private favor, not our society’s misguided ideals, but to pass along God’s blessing. Or we can pass along great woe. We can cause others to lament. We can look at the disturbing news coming out of Memphis that officers sworn to serve and protect decided to offer not blessing but to lay hands on another human being and through their violence offer only woe and endless burden to a mother who now mourns, a family which now grieves, and a community which now counts itself unjustly among those who weep. But lest we absolve ourselves of responsibility and say, “Not I, Lord,” do we not in a myriad small ways uphold a way of life, a disordered rank of values, that lifts up some lives to blessed and others to be tracked, bound, and condemned without cause?

I spend little time now in the purgatory of fear and doubt, wondering whether, by the happenings of my life or the way I adorn myself, I qualify as one of Jesus’ blessed ones or not. Instead I wonder with awe and a good deal of trepidation whether my life and our life together is going to create blessing or be the cause of woe for someone else. I ask that question as I consider our new neighbors seeking asylum next door at the Selina Hotel or those I encounter facing untimely grief or battling persistent illness. I ask it as I ponder those now living or those in generations yet to come.

Yes, I like you might feel faulty and inadequate to bless lives in a society and world that feel so irreparably broken. But may we be buoyed by the reminder poet Jimmy Santiago Baca offers us when he writes:

What is broken God blesses,
Not the perfectly brick on brick prison
But the shattered wall
That announces freedom to the world,
Proclaims the irascible spirit of the human rebelling against lies, against betrayal, against taking what is
not deserved.
(Jimmy Santiago Baca, “What Is Broken Is What God Blesses”)

Go now and shatter the wall of contempt. Shatter the wall of denial. Shatter the wall of indifference. Shatter the wall of inequity. Shatter the wall. And then may you know what it means to be among the blessed. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church