Mercy Me!

The grace of God is a river that flows through us. Those who think they can be recipients of the grace of God without being gracious to others do not know God. The apostle John wrote: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

Shortly after speaking the beatitudes, Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. In that model prayer he instructed us to pray for forgiveness from God. He immediately added this elaboration: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Jesus was not advocating a “tit for tat” principle of divine reciprocity. God is not mean-spirited. Jesus was presenting a divine principle. Mercy is like breathing. You can’t breathe in without breathing out. We are unable to receive mercy without being merciful. If we have received mercy, we will naturally give mercy. That is the rhythm of the spiritual life.

Near my previous church in Pennsylvania, a culvert under a road became blocked. The conduit was not able to receive water in or send it out. The blockage caused great damage to the road and adjoining property. The human soul is a spiritual conduit. An unforgiving spirit obstructs the grace of God and causes great damage.

I have known Christians who are unforgiving. They believe they have been forgiven by God, but they are unable or unwilling to forgive others. That is a spiritual impossibility. The forgiven soul forgives. The unforgiving soul is unforgiven. That is not punishment from God; it is a spiritual principle.

The forgiveness of God transforms the soul with a spirit of forgiveness. When we experience forgiveness we are unable NOT to forgive. It is our new nature. It happens naturally without trying. That is how mercy works.

When we do not forgive those who sin against us, we remain bound by the unforgiven sin. It is not just our own sin that can keep us from God. Sins committed against us can also keep us from experiencing the grace of God. Mercy unblocks the soul and allows grace to flow. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” 

The Hunger Game

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” Righteousness is such an awkward term. It sounds pious and moralistic. Who would aspire to be righteous? It sounds like a virtue that a cloistered monk or nun would aspire to, but not the ordinary person.

The word is badly misunderstood. Let me explain it. It means “to be in right relationship.” That is something everyone can identify with. We value relationships. In a spiritual context it means “to be in right relationship with God, oneself, others and creation.”

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” He is talking about people who hunger for true spirituality - for a true understanding and experience of God and oneself. This translates into peace and harmony in interpersonal relationships and lifestyle.

There are few who hunger for righteousness like a starving person hungers for food, or thirsts for it like a dehydrated person thirsts for water. Most people treat spirituality like a game to play on weekends. This is no game - just like the Hunger Games, portrayed in Suzanne Collins bestselling books, were no mere games. This is a matter of life and death.

There is a saying: “If you want to find God, yearn for Him like a drowning man yearns for air.” The psalmist sang: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

That is all it takes. There are no methods to employ or spiritual techniques to learn. There is no secret wisdom or knowledge to be gained. There are no essential rites or practices. All that God desires is a heart that yearns for him. Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.”

All it takes is sincere intent. Jesus says later in the Sermon on the Mount, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”

When one desires God more than anything else – more than silver and gold, more than air and water, more than love and happiness - then the door to the Kingdom opens. Blessing pours out, and one is filled. “My cup runneth over.” Everything is right. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

Unmasking Meekness

Meek. The word sounds weak. It rhymes with geek.  (Sounds like a rap song, albeit a meek one.) Meek conjures up images of the kid who gets bullied at school. We know how that story turns out. Browbeaten into suicide, becoming a schoolhouse shooter, or the CEO of a tech company. None of these sound like a path to spiritual blessedness.

Yet Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” What does meek really mean? It describes the one whose sense of self is not worn like armor. The meek have not crafted the heavy masks that most people wear.

As we physically grow as children, we also grow a persona. It is the personality mask we wear in our social interactions. Actually we have a collection of masks. We are different people depending on whom we are with. I am different with my wife, with my children, with my siblings, in the pulpit in front of a congregation, or with my ministerial colleagues talking theology.

I am a man of many roles. I am legion. There are endless variations on myself that I can display. It is hard to keep it all straight. It is all an elaborate socio-psychological charade. Those who learn to play the game well are successful in life – in career, friendships, marriage.

Some people never learn to play the game of social interaction. They feel like outsiders – as if someone forgot to issue them life’s instruction book. They feel awkward and vulnerable. Because their masks are thin, they feel like people can see who they are, and can use that against them. These are the meek.

The positive side of being meek is that they can be themselves. When you are maskless, you can see the world more clearly. The problem with masks is that they keep slipping down and blinding us. We forget to take them off occasionally and remind ourselves who we really are. We start to believe we are the roles we play.

Consequently most people forget their true face. They have forgotten who they are. They are lost in the game. They are immersed in a fantasy world of their own creation. When that happens, the world can become a self-made hell of lies and deceit.

The meek remember who they are. They remember what the world looks like without a mask. They remember they are created in the image of God, that they are mirrors reflecting the glory of God.

When God looks at the meek, God sees himself reflected. When others look at them, they see God reflected also.  The creation looks into the meek soul and sees its Creator reflected. All creation bows before them, for they are creation’s rightful heirs. The meek inherit the earth.

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Art by Anne C. Brink. She has a series of works on the beatitudes here.

Blessed Mourning

Grief is one of the strongest emotions of the human psyche. If you have experienced it, you will never forget it. If you have not experienced it, you will. It is the natural psychological response to loss.

It can be a deep and profound loss, such as the death of a spouse, child, or parent. It can be the loss of anyone or anything we love - the end of a marriage, the death of a pet, moving from a home, losing a job, or deteriorating health.

Grief feels like a deep, open, painful wound. It is a soul ache. It is a void in the soul. It is vast emotional emptiness. Some people die of grief. We say they die of a broken heart. There is medical evidence to suggest this is literally true. The psychological stress of grief can increase heart rate, blood pressure and blood clotting, which can raise chances of a heart attack.

A recent news article about mourning stated, “A ‘perfect storm’ of stress, lack of sleep and forgetting to take regular medication puts mourners at increased risk in the days after losing a loved one. Scientists showed that after a significant person's death, heart attack risks increased to 21 times higher than normal within the first day, and were almost six times higher than normal within the first week.”

Grief is deadly. Yet in the beatitudes Jesus calls mourners blessed. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Mourning does not feel like a blessing when we are in the middle of it. And nothing seems to bring comfort. But Christ’s words reveal a deeper truth.

Mourning gives us access to a deep part of ourselves, which is normally hidden from our sight. It is a wound that lays bare the spiritual heart. It opens a window to the soul. It is a “window of opportunity,” which stays open only for a while. The window gradually closes as time progresses. This window holds the blessing.

Mourning reveals our innermost being. It exposes us to God… and God to us. In the presence of God is comfort. That is the blessing. It shows us the transitory nature of life; that truth, when experienced deeply, is a blessing. 

We can medicate away the blessing out of fear of pain. We can emotionally suppress it, try to avoid it, or deny it. We can wallow in grief, which only sucks us into the depths of darkness.

Or we can let the mourning mourn. Let grief do its work. Let it bring us into the depths where the Spirit dwells. Let it bring us into the presence of God.

In mourning, a part of us dies with the one we have lost.  In this partial death, we can partially experience life beyond death. That is blessing. Eternal life now. The Kingdom of God within us. In dying we live. That is the blessing of the mourning.

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Mourning Woman by Egon Schiele. 1912. Oil on wood.

The Eight-fold Blessing

The Sermon on the Mount is the greatest sermon ever preached. The opening words of that sermon are known as the Beatitudes. They are the greatest part of the greatest sermon.

Last Sunday I preached a message on all eight of the beatitudes. Due to time constraints, my treatment of them was necessarily sparse. They deserve a much closer examination.

So I thought I would devote a blog post to each beatitude. Just so we know what scripture we are talking about, here is a link to a translation of the beatitudes. They are found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five.

 

The blessedness, which Jesus is referring to, is the Kingdom of Heaven. Other gospels call it the Kingdom of God. This is not a future existence in a heavenly realm; it is the present awareness of God now. It is Kingdom Consciousness. It is the awareness of the Presence of God.

The first one reads: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I am not going to weigh interpretations of this beatitude offered by sages and scholars over the ages. I will just give you my own. Jesus is talking about spiritual poverty.

It has nothing to do with being materially rich or poor. It is not about being spiritually rich – either in spiritual gifts or in spiritual qualities. Just the opposite. Jesus is saying that one must give up everything - even spiritual things - and become spiritually poor.

Jesus is not offering a trade – giving up material things in exchange for spiritual rewards. He is talking about giving up all rewards, even spiritual rewards. Francis of Assisi once said that he was willing to give up heaven for the love of God. He was poor in spirit.

The apostle Paul says that Jesus “emptied himself” and “made himself nothing.” Paul said this was what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

Religious people are looking for something. They are looking for salvation. They want meaning and purpose in life. Spiritual seekers are seeking something - enlightenment, liberation, peace, an end to suffering. People are willing to give up a lot in exchange for spiritual riches.

Jesus tells us to give up the search for spiritual riches too. We must be poor in spirit. We give it all up. We even give up ourselves. That is what the Cross represents – the death of everything. We hear this poverty in Jesus cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Only when we give up all, does the blessing come. The Kingdom of Heaven appears, and it is ours! “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

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Art is Sermon on the Mount by Laura James

Unself Portrait

One of the qualities of the spiritual life is unselfishness. It is defined as “the quality of not putting yourself first but being willing to give your time or money or effort, etc., for others; generous or altruistic.” That definition is not bad, but it focusses on behavior.

Behavior comes from something deeper. We act out of who we are, or at least who we understand ourselves to be. We tend to see ourselves in terms of individual personality. Our personal sense of self is nurtured and groomed from childhood. The individualized self is the unquestioned assumption behind all we think and do.

The problem is that it isn’t true. That is not who we really are. It is who we have made ourselves to be. We have made ourselves in our own image. We are “self-made” men and women. Our true nature is called in Latin, imago dei. According to Scripture we are made in the image of God.

This concept of the “image of God” has been the subject of much theological debate. But it is really quite simple. We are the reflection of God. We are earthen mirrors designed to reflect God back to Himself and to others. We are a looking glass into eternity.

The gospel of Christ is meant to remove all that clouds the mirror (our “selfishness”) so that God’s image may shine forth. We die to self so God may be seen through us. That is what Jesus meant when he said that we have to lose our selves to gain eternal life.

Jesus told us to deny our selves, pick up our cross, and follow him.  That is what the apostle Paul meant by being “crucified with Christ.” The Cross of Christ crucifies us. We die with Christ to be raised with Christ in new life. This is unselfishness.

When someone asks me what my favorite scripture verse is, I quote Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” This is my “life verse.”

    

Christ is my life. I am not my self. Neither are you. We are not who we think we are. When we give up who we aren’t and embrace who we are, we become who we were meant to be. (That’s a tongueful!) We are created in the image of God to be conformed to the image of Christ. When we are not ourselves, we are revealed to be who God made us to be.  

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Art is “Self-Portrait in the Mirror” by Konstantin Somov, 1934

Baptismal Synchronicity

In December my wife and I attended a Christmas party for Baptist clergy and spouses at Camp Sentinel in Tuftonboro. We were sitting around the roughhewn wooden tables munching on Christmas fare and getting to know each other better.

A pastor from Wolfeboro asked where I was from. I said I was originally from Danvers, Massachusetts. Because this was a Baptist gathering, I added that I was baptized as an adult at the First Baptist Church in Danversport.

Another minister at the table replied, “Me, too!” It was John Babson, a minister serving as a chaplain in the Lakes Region. I had gotten to know him recently, and I had even invited to preach in Sandwich on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

We began to compare the details of our baptisms. We were not only baptized at the same church, we were also baptized by the same pastor, in the same location, in the same year! It turns out that we were baptized at the same time! Two people were immersed in the Danvers River on that July day in 1973 – he and I.

He recalled more details of the occasion than I could. He remembered me as a large, bearded young man with long hair. (It was the seventies, after all.) He said when I came up from the water I “looked just like Jesus.” My memories of him were vaguer, but I recall another man about my age being baptized that day.

Here we were forty years later, both Baptist ministers serving in the same area. Someone at the table commented on the chances that two young men baptized in a small church at the same time would become ministers.

Even more unlikely is the fact that we are still in active ministry after all these years. Most ministers don’t last that long. Statistics show that 60% to 80% of those who enter the ministry will not still be in it 10 years later, and only a fraction will stay in it as a lifetime career.

This providential encounter at a Christmas party has made me think back on my baptism. I was meditating on it during a worship service recently while we were on vacation in the Florida Keys. The gospel lesson for the day was on the baptism of Jesus.

As the preacher preached, my mind drifted. (I am sure that does not happen to anyone listening to my sermons!) In my imagination I returned to my own baptism. It was the turning point of my life. John Babson said I reminded him of Jesus emerging from the baptismal waters. I don’t know about that, but I know Christ was present at that beach.  

With summer sunbathers watching, two young men professed their faith in Jesus Christ and were immersed at a public beach. Spectators likely thought it was a curious sight, but they have long forgotten it. We have not forgotten. We are still disciples of Jesus and ministers of Christ after all those years.

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Art is Jesus Baptism 3 by Chris Cook. Here is his site.