After four weeks of telling stories and talking about Beatitudes, it finally occurred to me that I haven’t addressed the timeless preaching question, “So what?” regarding the Beatitudes.  What’s so big about blessed—or happy, envied, spiritually prosperous, blithesome, joyous, fortunate, glad or supremely joyful (as the Amplified New Testament has it)?  We’re going to come up with an advertising campaign for Beatitude Living this week during our mid-week activity.  Does asking “What’s in it for me?” make Beatitude Living something to accomplish, earn, acquire, possess?

We have to answer this question, “So what?” on two levels—the personal and the communal.  Richard Rohr expresses the personal implication of Beatitude Living in a way that is offensive at first blush.  We’ve heard the sanitized, Biblish version all our lives, but the way Rohr says it is shocking.  You may wonder if I can get away with saying this from the pulpit.  God is seducing us.  Rohr sounds off-color when he suggests, “God is after our body, our spirit.”  Except that Jesus insists on this level of commitment to discipleship in the gospels, and Paul affirms it in his letters to the early church—body and spirit.  In Rohr’s words, following Jesus means recognizing that “God is continually finding ways to draw close and to get inside, to become one in intimate ways that always threaten us and in the very same moment delight us.”  Our Maker is “on the make.” 1
           
Put in that light, living the Beatitudes is the way we respond to God’s seduction of us, how we make ourselves available to the fabulous, intimate, life-giving, passionate love affair God has in mind for and with us.  The personal-level answer to “What’s in it for me?” of Beatitude Living is involvement in the love affair that gives meaning to our lives by bringing us close to Jesus.  It’s the affair that tells us that who we really are is not limited to what happens in the here-and-now.  2
           
Oh, easy for her to say.  Isn’t she a professional Christian?  God’s not a picky lover.  Here is what cracks me up, what fills me with mirth and incredulous joy.  Even though God is hot for all of humanity, God never seduces in general.  God isn’t one those skuzzy boys you knew in high school, the ones who took it as a personal mission to kiss every girl in the school, racking up conquests for the sake of winning.  God seduces us in particular, and is relentless and passionate, personal and irresistible about it. 

The best example I know of love affair with God is Francis of Assisi.  Francis spent his youthful years as the town cut-up, the ring-leader of all that was fun and frivolous and decadent.  But God relentlessly pursued him, until Francis discovered he was deeply, head-over-heels, joyfully, intensely in love with God.  As Francis fell for God each day, he discovered Christ intimately present in all of creation—in birds, wolves, sun, moon, water, fire, the most disgusting of human beggars.  This presence of Christ was so intimate and so real to Francis that, despite choosing to live in incredible poverty, suffering near-constant pain and illness he was filled with joy.  Despite living in person the last two Beatitudes—shunned by his old friends in town, dissed in later years by the order he founded, actively persecuted by his own father—despite this, Francis’ love affair with God so filled him with mirth that he was called the Clown of God. Francis personified Beatitude Living nearly as perfectly as Christ himself, and he models what it means to be blessed. 

The fruit of Francis’ life is why “blessed” keeps showing up in Jesus’ Beatitudes.  Blessed is how the poor in spirit possess the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed is why the state of mourning is itself comfort.  Blessed is how the meek inherit the earth, how the hungry and thirsty for righteousness are filled.  Blessed is because mercy causes mercy, why persecution for the sake of Jesus is so very sweet.  Blessed, because God is Love, Lover, Beloved. 

The implication of the love of God is that it’s “so powerful that no one can just sit on it.  It is bound to express itself.” 3  Which is where the Beatitudes move from the personal to the communal.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer examines the community implications of the Beatitudes in his book, The Cost of Discipleship.  For him, Beatitude Living is discipleship, but it must be lived out in community.  Literally paying the cost of disciple-ship with his life, he died in a Nazi prison camp.  Remember the seduction of God?  God desires us body and spirit.  Martin Luther King, Jr said, “If you haven’t discovered something that is worth dying for, you haven’t found anything worth living for.” 

Former missionary kid and mountain climber, Greg Mortenson, found something worth living for when he nearly lost his life, after an unsuccessful attempt to summit K-2 in the Himalayas.  Stranded and lost, he is taken in and nursed back to health by a remote village in Pakistan.  Seeing the primitive conditions under which the village children try to learn, and in gratitude for his life, Mortenson promises to return and build a school for them.  He works as an ER nurse, saving every penny not required to literally keep body and soul together, returning to the village the next year with the money to buy materials.  It takes another two years, 580 fruitless letters to potential donors, and a world of learning for him about Muslim culture, before the school is built.  One thing leads to another, and ten years later, Mortenson, no longer a mountain climber, wages peace in Pakistan and Afghanistan by building schools, one at a time.  He has built a community that spans the rural Muslim cultures of Pakistan with the affluent U.S.  It’s an incredible story of unconscious Beatitude Living, and you can read it in Three Cups of Tea.

You don’t have to rattle off the Beatitudes by heart to live them, but you do need to know that they are not commandments.  What they are is self-surrender.  Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit.  Sounds like surrender to me.  Beatitude Living is not about getting it right.  It’s about surrender to our passionate Lover-God.  We have the wrong idea about perfection.  God is powerful and sovereign, so God could have created humans without flaws—self-sufficient, complete, not a thing out of place.  But then, we wouldn’t have been “human,” and God is so powerful, so sovereign, so passionately loving and merciful, that “perfection” from the divine perspective means embracing and incorporating the flawed and imperfect in us. 4

I am told that tribal rug weavers—from the Southwest United States to the Eastern tribes of Armenia and Pakistan—traditional rug weavers always incorporate a flaw in their design.  The pattern is perfect except for one intentional flaw woven in, a flaw which is both humility and worship.  It’s not a mistake. You are not a mistake.  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 make fun of you and give you a hard time, when they stand in your way and hurt your feelings.  Blessed are you when you are punished, for Christ’s sake.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.  Which you, God’s own beloved, already possess.  Surrender to that gift.