Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter
all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be
glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

[Matthew 5: 3-13]

When I was a little girl, I would sometimes play imagination games. One of my favorite games involved walking slowly around my house while looking down into a mirror that I held at waist-level in front of me. This created a fascinating optical illusion. I was looking down, where the floor should be, but I was seeing the ceiling. Doorways were not openings but low walls to be stepped over. Light fixtures stood up like fire hydrants. It looked like I could skip over the vast open expanse of the living room ceiling but inevitably I would run into a coffee table that was nowhere to be seen in my mirror. But in spite of bruised shins and stubbed toes, I found great delight in this game. I liked looking down but seeing up, because it enabled me to see my old house in a new way. In my upside-down house, furniture disappeared, and I could stroll across the ceiling to sit on a chandelier. Life in an upside-down world is filled with all sorts of exciting possibilities.

In a way, Jesus was handing out mirrors to the crowd on the hillside in Galilee when he taught the Beatitudes. After all he was looking down at those who lay flat on their backs on the bottom floor of the world’s house of success, but he was seeing them standing tall and proud up on the ceiling of God’s coming Kingdom.

That was what was so shocking about Jesus’s Beatitudes. Jesus had compiled a list of candidates for Kingdom that no one with common sense would even think to vote for, much less "rejoice and be glad over." What was so blessed about the meek or the mournful? Who could be happy about hungering and thirsting for righteousness or being reviled and persecuted? In ten short verses Jesus redefines the ultimate good, and displays portraits of Kingdom people (known to the world as victims, dreamers, dupes and fools).

"Here take a good look," says Jesus. "These are the chosen people, those who will have the good fortune to see God. These are the blessed, the lucky, the happy people who will win in the end because winning was the last thing they ever thought possible. It is without a doubt a list of losers by the standards of the world:

Merciful losers who forgive their adversaries only to be stepped on again and again

Pure-in-heart losers who are gullible enough to believe whatever someone tells them, even to the point of donating their life savings to crooks

Peacemaking losers who step into the middle of a fight and get whacked from all sides.

In the Beatitudes Jesus declares these losers are God’s favorites, not those whom the world calls successful, but those who can’t even get in the race.

Jesus is speaking in paradoxes again and most of us don’t know what to do with the paradoxical message of the Beatitudes. They have become so charming and domesticated – like a lovely Christian poem we can needlepoint and hang above the mantle – that they have lost their shock value for us. Or we turn them into Christian commandments for us, and work and worry about being meek enough or pure enough or persecuted enough to qualify for the Kingdom.

But Jesus is not talking in "shoulds" and "should-nots" in the Beatitudes. He is simply describing the people who are already qualified for the future Kingdom. This is not legal language, but gospel language, language of hope and promise that the way things are now is not the way things will always be. That those who hold stand-by tickets will be seated up in first class by the end of the flight.

I suspect how we hear the Beatitudes depends a lot on where we are sitting now in this world. They sound different from the top than they do at the bottom, different from the front than they do from way at the back. Up front with the religiously successful and self-satisfied, they sound like fighting words. Where is your hunger and thirst, you well-fed Christians? Where is your humility? And why isn’t your soul drenched with tears?

But to Christians who sit on dirt floors in Africa, or in a trailer park church of Mexican migrant workers, or with any of those victims, dreamers, dupes and fools who sit way at the back of life, the Beatitudes sound much different. "Hush," they say, "Dry your tears, little children. Even though someone else holds the keys on earth, the gates of heaven are open wide for you, and the first face you’ll see will be God’s."

Yes, we don’t really know what to do with the Beatitudes. We can keep on treating them as so much beautiful sentiment and never really hear their shocking message. We can ignore them, as many have through the years. We can use them to measure our own blessedness. We can use them, as some have done, to justify revolution.

Or we can simply use them in the same way I used to use that mirror, to turn our world upside down and help us see exciting possibilities. We can walk through life looking down: looking down at the poor, the sorrowful, the persecuted, the foolish, the simple-minded, the hungry. Upside down in the mirror of gospel, we can see them not as people to be pitied, but as chosen ones who have something to teach us about faith. We can see that those who hunger and thirst are not just empty, but are pursuing worthwhile appetites for God. We can see that those who suffer for their faith are really happy because they have something worth suffering for. The peacemakers are not pie-in-the-sky dreamers, but visionaries who heal discord with their tranquility. And the merciful are those who simply share the overflow of something they have received from God. Upside down in the mirror of the Beatitudes we will really be looking up and seeing the coming Kingdom.

Things may look disconcertingly unfamiliar in that mirror. But that’s the way Jesus saw things all the time; that’s the way Jesus wants us to see them too. We will be looking down, but seeing up—just like Jesus, who after all is the only one who really knows which way is up.

Amen

Reverend Annalee Lakey
our student minister

Our thanks to the IPoint Midi Gallery for the Hymn
"Fruits of the Spirit"