Sermon — February 13, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s been a subtle change in the way people use the word “blessed” over the last decade. Ten years ago, if I asked someone how they were and they said “blessed,” I’d assume they meant they were grateful to God for the good things God had given them, even—maybe especially—the little things. “How are you today?” you might say to a taxi driver as you got into the backseat. “Blessed,” he might reply. Life’s not perfect. I’m not rich. But I’m blessed to be here, blessed that God woke me up this morning to spend another day driving people around.
With the rise of social media, “blessed” has acquired a new sense. In the age of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, where you can tag photos or videos with a word or phrase, “blessed” quickly became a cliché. Circa 2014, if you posted a photo of yourself suspended mid-air off the back of a yacht as you leapt into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, there was only one thing to say: #blessed. This kind of mock humility or gratitude could be especially infuriating. No no, it’s not bragging to post a photo of my incredible resort hotel room with an ocean view. It’s gratitude! It’s prayer! See: I’m blessed!
#blessed became such a cliché that as early as 2015 it had generated a harsh response from none other than Vogue magazine. “The #blessed hashtag,” writes columnist Hayley Bloomingdale, “is only acceptable when used ironically. Note: The #blessed hashtag used unironically (e.g., an image of a green juice with the caption ‘#greenjuice #cleanliving #lovemylife… #blessed #soblessed [several hashtags omitted]) is a clear indicator that you should unfollow that girl and avoid her in real life at all costs.”
Still, even today, you can find people unironically using the phrase “blessed” when they’re really showing off about how awesome their life is, and in fact—how awesome they are. It reflects a broader pattern, even a theology: there’s a certain strain of American culture and American Christianity that sees your success in attaining the pleasures of this life as a sign of God’s grace.
Jesus would be surprised to hear it.
“Blessed are you who are poor,” he famously begins, “for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you…” (Luke 6:20-22)
#blessed #soblessed
These “beatitudes,” these blessed-are-yous, are completely upside-down. Even leaving social media and the prosperity gospel aside, reasonable people wouldn’t see this as a blessed way of life. Poverty, hunger, tears; these are not the blessings for which we thank our God. Riches, fullness, laughter—these are not our woes.
It’s so difficult to wrap our heads around this inversion that people have come up with ways to try to make Jesus’ words make sense. Perhaps the most common response is to spiritualize them, and you see this already in the small differences between Luke and Matthew’s versions of these says. In Luke, Jesus tells the disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor… Blessed are you who are hungry…” (Luke 6:20-21) in Matthew, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” (Matt. 5:3, 6) and he adds several more: “Blessed are the merciful… Blessed are the pure in heart… Blessed are the peacemakers…” and so on. (Matt. 5:7-9) In this spiritualized version, It’s not about material poverty and wealth, hunger and fullness; it’s about spiritual hunger and spiritual poverty, yearning for God and giving up our pretenses to control. (But keeping the cash.)
Others have played with the sense of time in Jesus’ words. There’s a kind of cycle here that reminds me of the famous verse from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (Eccl. 3:1 ff.) “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh… [But] woe to you who are full now, for” — no matter how filling the meal — “you will be hungry.” Read this way, the Beatitudes become a commentary on the cyclicality of time, a reassurance that this too will pass—whatever this is for you right now, be it hunger or mourning or fullness or laughter. For better or for worse, all things come to an end.
To others these are both unsatisfying ideas. Luke’s gospel is, after all, the one with the most clear-eyed concern for the poor and the outcast. It’s in Luke that we find Mary’s words that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” (1:52) It’s in Luke that Jesus, in his opening sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth, proclaims that he has come to “proclaim good news to the poor.” (4:18) And so it should come as no surprise that it’s in Luke that Jesus stands before his disciples and bluntly says, “Blessed are the poor; for yours is the kingdom of God.” And to the extent that you are poor or hungry or reviled, this is a fantastic thing. Jesus smashes the prosperity theology of the culture of #blessed-ness. If you are poor, or hungry, or mourning, it is not a sign of God’s displeasure. No, “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” And if—this third school of thought wants to say—if this offends you but you are rich and full and happy, then that’s not Jesus’ problem. It’s yours.
So, all of these interpretations have centuries of tradition supporting them, and I encourage you to hang onto whichever one draws you closer to God. For my part, I just want to make two observations.
First: in Matthew’s gospel, this is part of the famous “Sermon on the Mount.” In Luke, we find it in the shorter and significantly-less-famous “Sermon on the Plain.” It’s delivered not from high up on the mountain, evoking the holy Mount Sinai from which Moses delivered the Law millennia before; but face to face, for “Jesus came down… and stood on a level place… and looked up at his disciples.” (6:17, 20) Jesus came down among us, not just in a metaphorical way in the Incarnation, but in a very literal way, and walked among the rich and poor alike, not with condemnation or with legislation, but with a compassionate heart and a healing touch.
Second: this isn’t a third-person description of categories of people as good or bad. It’s a word of comfort in the second person, face to face; and, to be fair, a word of warning. It’s not “blessed are the poor…blessed are the hungry…woe to the rich.” It’s Jesus, speaking to his disciples, to us, and our ecclesiastical ancestors, and saying, “Blessed are you, who are poor. Blessed are you, who are hungry. Blessed are you, who weep.” And “woe to you, who are rich. Woe to you, who are full. Woe to you, who are laughing now.”
The reality is, we’re always both at once. We are, as the Church has always been, a mixed body. And in fact, every one of us is a mixed body. I do not know a single person who is so #blessed that they are full and laughing and rich in every part of their life. And when we see someone who we think is, when we compare our lives with someone who really does seem to be living the dream, we have to remember: it’s a front. It’s an important front, sometimes. We need to keep ourselves together somehow. We don’t actually want to answer every person who asks how we’re doing with the whole truth. But I would be shocked if a single person came up to me after this service and said, “Greg: my life is perfect. I have no pain. I have no tears. I have no hunger.” If that’s you, please tell me! I would love to know! But I’ve never seen it before in my life. Rich or full or cheerful as we may be, we are all poor, or hungry, or weeping, too.
A few years ago I went to a conference and picked up some materials from a booth being run by a group that offers “strategic missional consulting” for local churches. And you can type in the address of your church and get a detailed demographic breakdown of the local area, with Census statistics and marketing demographic breakdowns and a free 45-minute phone call where they walk you through it; and then try to sell you the full consulting package for, like, ten grand.
And after walking me through the details, the priest-consultant on the call asked me a question that came from a few decades of ministry: “Tell me: What’s hunger look like in your community?”
And I said: “Well, you know, it’s a pretty affluent area of the suburbs, but there’s actually a pretty big refugee community here, and there are a lot of elders living on fixed-incomes with pretty high property taxes, and I go to this monthly meeting of human services providers and I’ve always been surprised to hear how busy the food pantry is and…”
And he said, “No, no, no. Tell me: What’s hunger look like in your community?”
We are all sometimes full and often hungry. We are all sometimes laughing and often weeping. And I know that I’m just falling into that same trap of spiritualizing away the very real material point of this text, but we are all, however rich we may be, somehow poor; and, in this country, relative to the human condition writ large, however poor we may be, we are still relatively rich.
What’s hunger look like in our community? What’s hunger look like in this church? What’s hunger look like for you, rich or poor, hungry or full, laughing or weeping; for you, as one of those blessed children to whom Jesus has promised the kingdom of God?
For “blessed are those,” whoever they are, “who trust in the Lord,” says the prophet Jeremiah, “whose trust is in the Lord.” (Jeremiah 17:7) Amen.