Micah 6:1-8 Ps. 37:1-18
1 Cor. 1:18-31 Matt. 5:1-12
Lectionary Link
What if someone asked you, How are you feeling? And you reply: My spirit is feeling really poor. I'm in mourning. I feel like I have no place or ownership on earth. I am often without enough to eat or drink. People are persecuting me and saying awful things about me.
And that person said in response: "Well then, you are really lucky, and not just lucky but blessed." And because you are blessed you should always be a peacemaker. And you should have pure motives about everything. And you should always be merciful. Because if you do these things, you are even more blessed.
In America, we generally think to be blessed and fortunate means that we are wealthy, have more than enough to eat and drink, own property, to be lucky that we don't have life situations which cause us to mourn, and to have pride of spirit, and to be publicly popular with people affirming us and giving us praise.
And if one can live the blessed American dream, from such privilege one can be a peacemaker, determining our own terms of peace. And we can feel like our motives are pure and right because living the American dream is the good motive.
And so we pose the question. How are the beatitudes really relevant to the life experience of American Christians?
And were the beatitudes written for people in situations like American Christians? And about the only thing we can say is, yes, but it pertains more to Americans who have been historically oppressed by persons who call themselves American Christians.
The words of the beatitudes pertain more to the indigenous people pushed off their lands. The words of the beatitudes pertain more to the many slaves who were brought to our country as the chief product of the American colonial economy. The slaves were the involuntary work engine of our country as well as being the chief economic commodity.
Oppressed people, in order to survive have to learn how to survive without being killed. They have to learn how to live with as much of their own communal dignity while living in ways that comport well with their oppressors. In our country, we find that the slaves who found a refuge in the message of Christ did true Christly living more than their Christian oppressors.
Can we not see how the beatitudes were perhaps composed for an oppressed population who did not have economic or social power in the Roman Empire?
But for many centuries Christianity has been altered by being the stated belief of people in empires with power and influence. As Christianity has become empire religion, it has lost the actual practice of the beatitudes, except for the people who have been subjugated and oppressed by Christian empires.
How do those of us who are the recipients of the power and wealth positions afforded by being in the ruling classes of Empire Christianity, adopt, adjust, apply the teachings of the beatitudes in ways that might be worthy of Jesus of Nazareth who spoke the words of the beatitudes?
It is true that both oppressors and oppressed people need to experience spiritual transformation, but those who reside in places of privilege need significantly different strategies.
People of privilege need to confront their actual poverty of spirit, seen in the cruelty which individually and socially has been inflicted in our names upon oppressed people. Until we can recognize with deep mourning the cruelties of empire religion, we will not have the poverty of spirit to know God's realm. We cannot be meek until we give all we have to the poor to prove that God and not us owns all the earth and is always already giving it back, but not on our terms but on the divine terms which specify the distribution of enough for everyone. We cannot be filled in knowing God's fullness until we have seen the futility of placing many other objects of desire as the idols of our life. We cannot define being merciful as handing band aids of charity when our system of economics has caused widespread poverty. We cannot be called peacemakers who want peace only on our own terms. We need to let those who have been oppressed state the conditions of what peace would mean. We must be willing to be unpopular and be spoken against when people of power and privilege denigrate empathy to a mocked "wokeness." Empathy is the golden rule of treating others they way we want to be treated, meaning that we are sensitive to racial and cultural identities and gender identities. We must be willing to be unpopular when people in power try to suppress the truth about our history of subjugating other people. The beatitudes for people who enjoy social power means "unpowering" our social egos and learning to approach others in their preferred befriending ways.
As Americans, we should consider the words of Jesus as coming to significant political effect in our founding documents. We were to be a nation of equal justice under the law, and the continuous application of that equal justice as we become aware of our failures in equality toward indigenous people, people of color, women, and persons on non-binary places in the gender continuum.
It is wonderful to have the witnesses of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who united oppressed people in beatitude movements of non-violent resistance. But how much better it would be that American Christians lived as non-oppressors fulfilling fresh applications of liberty and justice for all? And such liberty and justice for all would indicate the will of heaven being done on earth. Amen.
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