“Beats and Beatitudes”
6.
What Are You Hungry For? What
Do You Want to Drink?
Micah
6:1-8
First Presbyterian
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For our summer series of sermons, we
have been calling up the “beat generation” that reached its zenith in the
1950s, though enjoying a comeback today, as a window into the Beatitudes of
Jesus. It is an appropriate
connection since Jesus himself was a “beat” in his own time and because the
“beat” writers, like Jack Kerouac, claimed that the “beats” were on a
spiritual quest for something akin to what is expressed by the beatitudes.
But it occurred to me this week that, deep into summer now, you may be
missing Mary Oliver, so I begin today with one of her poems called “Matins,”
the Latin word for “Morning Prayer”:
Now we are awake
and now we are come together
and now we are thanking the Lord.
This is easy,
for the Lord is everywhere.
He is in the water and the air,
He is in the very walls.
He is around us and in us.
He is in the floor on which we kneel.
We make our songs for him
as sweet as we can
for his goodness,
and, lo, he steps into the song
and out of it, having blessed it,
having recognized our intention,
having awakened us, who thought we were awake,
a second time,
having married us to the air and water,
having lifted us in intensity,
having lowered us in beautiful amiability,
having given us
each other,
and the weeds, dogs, cities, boats, dreams
that are the world.
(“Matins,”
from What Do We Know, pp. 51-52)
Mary Oliver is not too far, I think,
from what Jesus intended to convey in his beatitude that says that “those
who hunger and thirst after righteousness are blessed, for they will be
filled.”
Righteousness is one of those fancy religious
words that means “right-relatedness.” To
be righteous is not to be “holier than Thou.”
It is does not mean that we qualify for a gold medal in some spiritual
Olympics. It means that we are
rightly related to God as evidenced by our being rightly related to the
world around us. Righteousness is,
as Mary Oliver says in her poem, a kind of union with God via a sacred and holy
communion with all creatures, beings, and elements.
This “righteousness beatitude,”
among other things, keeps us from spiritualizing religion.
All through the Bible, we are told that the kind of religion God wants of
us is religion that inspires us, as the book of Micah puts it, “to do
justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.”
Good sermons, moving music, and eloquent prayers mean nothing to God
if they do not lead us to engage the world, as
Isaiah 58 pictures God asking the
people if they think the kind of worship God desires is comprised of pious
prayers, elaborate rituals, and a façade of holiness in the sanctuary.
And then, without waiting for an answer, God declares that the worship
God favors is for us to stop participating in the injustices that break down so
many peoples’ lives and then to minister hope not only in our chapels but also
in the streets. The worship that is
pleasing to God is worship that gets us rightly related to those whose
circumstances are different and more desperate than our own.
Matthew 25 offers a compelling if
inconvenient portrait of the judgment of the nations of the world by picturing
the Lord sitting as a king upon a throne separating out the nations that will
survive the sickle and scythe of history, saying to them, “Come, you who
are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty
and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was
naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in
prison and you visited me.” Now
listen to what Matthew writes next: “The righteous will answer him
(because they have been walking humbly with God), ‘Lord, when was it that we
saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?
And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and
gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited
you?’ And the king responds,
‘Truly, I tell you, as you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you
did it also to me.’”
Blessing comes when we are
rightly-related to those who share our community and our world with us.
Jesus says, “Then you will be filled.”
Isaiah, in chapter 58 again, has God saying, “When you are
righteous, when you are rightly related to the world around you, then
your light shall break forth like the dawn and then your healing shall
spring up quickly.” Mary
Oliver says it like this: “…we
are awakened, we who thought we were awake, a second time…”
And
The “beat” writers were unanimous
in their claim that the material world is a mirror of the spiritual world, that
social problems are a reflection of underlying spiritual conditions.
So, for example, they would say that the current crisis over food in the
world also serves as a metaphor for the hunger of people everywhere for a social
order that feeds the soul as well as the body, that satisfies the hunger and
thirst for righteousness about which today’s beat-i-tude of Jesus refers.
The material and spiritual are inextricably linked.
We all know that what we eat and drink
– our nutrition – affects the way we look, the way we feel, the way we act.
It affects the quality of our lives and even our life’s longevity.
The beats would tell us that the same thing is true spiritually as
materially. They ask us what we are
hungry for, spiritually speaking. What
do we want to drink? Do we have an
appetite for righteousness, for right-relatedness with all others and
with the world, is what the beats and Jesus want to know.
The bread we are about to eat and the
wine that we shall drink is the way that Jesus continues to remind us that the
future of the world depends on people like us hungering and thirsting for
righteousness. This sacrament of
Holy Communion is no private spiritual ritual or retreat intended to make us
feel good or religious. It is,
rather, our radical and revolutionary commitment to continue to be (to use the
title of Jack Kerouac’s signature novel) “on the road” toward the
complete and comprehensive coming of the
“Blessed are those who hunger and
thirst after righteousness,” Jesus
said, “for they will be stuffed.” The
Greek word that is politely translated as “filled” really means
“stuffed.” Stuffed with the
abundance of joy that only comes from doing justice, loving kindness, and
walking humbly with God, that only comes from being rightly related to the
world and to the people to whom we are called and given.
What kind of a person do you want to
be? What kind of a church shall we
be? Most important, what kind of a
world shall we have? It depends on
what we have the stomach for. I ask
again: do you have an appetite for righteousness?
For what are you hungry? And
what do you want to drink?
Amen.
©
Copyright 2008 First Presbyterian Church