Matthew 5:1-10, Micah 6:6-8
Rev. Rebecca M Heilman-Campbell
Let me brag on our “In the Middle” Sunday School Class, our 4th – 8th
graders. For the last three weeks, like you, they have been learning about the
Beatitudes. We read through each Beatitude and arrived to the second to last
one, the blessing we are looking at today. And in the translation we used for the
“In the Middle” group, the Beatitude goes like this, “Happy and blessed are
those bullied while doing God’s work; the Realm of God belongs to them.” After
asking the children to put all the Beatitudes in order, this blessing, today’s
blessing, really sunk in. Casey Field, capitalizing on this teacher training, brilliantly
asked, “why is this one Beatitude sticking out to you? Have you ever been
bullied?” Everyone in the class raised their hand. This suddenly became the most
relatable Beatitude of the bunch. I mean, who here has ever felt bullied at one
point in their life? It’s so relatable.
So we dove into that one Beatitude, picking it apart. And just when we
thought bullying would be the most relatable thing about this Beatitude, we were
wrong. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for
theirs is the realm of heaven. The word, “realm,” from the “realm of God,” “the
kingdom of God,” became a real hit! When asked which do you think is the
easiest Beatitude to follow, with a totally serious face, a 4th grader pipes up and
says, “I’d say the realms.”
They’re not wrong. In theory, living into the Realm of God, the Kingdom of
God sounds mighty fine. Idealistic, even. In practicality, it’s one of the hardest
theological concepts and actions to grasp. We asked the children, “What other
realms do we know about in modern movies and books?” We imagined the Lord
of the Rings, Thor, the Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones,
Minecraft – all sorts of movies and books with alternate universes. What about
God’s realm? God’s universe? What about the kingdom that God rules? What
does THAT look like? This is a harder question to answer.
Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, describes Jesus’ sermon
on the mount as “the beginner’s guide to the kingdom of heaven.”1 For nearly
nine weeks, we have been learning about the Beatitudes, but for what purpose?
Not for intellectual pleasure or time well spent on a Sunday morning. No, we
don’t stop with this Beatitude today. Levine goes on to say, ”…the rest of the
Gospel [of Matthew] becomes the Sermon in action.”2 Which means the rest of
the days before us, here, becomes the sermon on the mount in action.
Can you see now why the 4th through 8th graders decided to hold a food
drive as a response to the loss in SNAP benefits? They understand that God
doesn’t come down to make the Kingdom of God happen with a snap of God’s
finger. We are the ones, with God’s help, who bring the Kingdom of God to life.
In the words of Pastor Mike Glenn: the beatitudes invite us to “mind the
gap”.3 In each Beatitude, the first part of the phrase, Jesus calls us to pay
attention to what is. For example, today’s beatitudes’ the first part is blessed are
those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Jesus names that right
now there are those who are being persecuted for doing good and they are
called beloved because of their pain. And then in the second part of the phrase,
Jesus calls us to pay attention to what will be. Like in today’s Beatitude, Jesus
says, “for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” Throughout the Beatitudes, Jesus
paints a portrait of the world as it is and then God’s kingdom, “the world as God
1 Levine, Amy-Jill. Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven (p.8). (Function). Kindle
Edition.
2 Levine, Amy-Jill. Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven (p.8). (Function). Kindle
Edition.
3 Levine, Amy Jill, Sermon on the Mount, p. 8
made it to be.”4 So we can read the first part of each Beatitude as “beloved,”
those that Jesus is blessing and the second part, the call to action to “be-love”,
the embodiment of our faith. In other words, Jesus proclaims God’s love here and
now, and he shows us how to embody the love of God’s reign.
Biblical Scholar Anna Carter Florence writes that church should be like a
repertory theater company: we live in community and study the same texts again
and again. Like a rep theater, we rehearse God’s story over and over – reading
Scripture, wrestling with God over its meaning, and discovering anew how to
embody God’s love on the world’s stage. Carter Florence’s approach to
rehearsing scripture begins with the simple instruction that would delight many
English teachers: focus on the verbs.
In her book, Rehearsing Scripture, there is one delightful story of Carter
Florence challenging her students to reenact Genesis 3. The story of Adam and
Eve trying to cover themselves by sewing fig leaves. It took her students over an
hour to sew the fig leaf loincloths together and the end product was laughably
ineffective. She writes, “Sometimes it takes a literal reenactment of the verbs to
show you what’s really going on. In this text, it’s the fig leaves that get most of the
attention, as nouns often do. They’re glossy and showy and provocatively placed,
and so well known that they’ve become their own figure of speech. But the text
gives us a verb to go with ‘fig leaves,’ and that takes the image in a completely
different direction. Now, they’re more than a cover-up. They’re evidence of the
futility and absurdity of the whole concealment enterprise: sewing fig leaves
together so you can make loincloths?! That’s about as pointless as teaching ants
to turn cartwheels, and every bit as ludicrous. Yet it shows us how far human
beings will go to cover up their fear and shame, how they’ll attempt ridiculously
impossible things, like sewing fig leaves together. The image is supposed to
make you burst into laughter, and then, on second look, tears.” (26).
4 Alary, Laura. Make Room: A Child’s Guide to Lent and Easter
Friends, when we look at the verbs, we have a completely different outlook
of the story. We now see how the story is being embodied, lived out. Can you see
yourself doing the action? Instead of imagining the nouns, what if we practiced,
rehearsed, reenacted the verbs? Take Micah for example. The prophet Micah
poses his rhetorical question after the Israelites have offered up everything to
God, even their first born. Micah asks, with maybe a sigh in his voice, what does
the Lord require of you? Micah then graciously provides us with three pivotal
verbs: do, love, and walk. Bear with me through this grammatical exercise as we
parse this verse. The first two verbs – do and love – are paired with direct objects:
do justice and love kindness. These pairings matter. The Rev. Dr. J Herbert Nelson
reflects that we well-intentioned humans usually flip the verbs…we end up loving
justice and doing kindness. We admire justice from afar while resigning to simply
practicing kindness…But Micah’s original ordering calls us to embody justice and
to love, to admire, to value mercy. And when we get to our third verb – walk –
Anna Carter Florence would proclaim: adverb alert! Micah includes a significant
modifier: walk humbly. When we do justice, love kindness, how do we need to it,
by walking humbly with our Lord. As we rehearse this passage, as we live as God’s
children, we don’t swagger across the stages of our lives getting it right every
single time. Micah invites us to recognize that most days, even our best efforts to
do justice and to love kindness will fall short…And so Micah lays it out there: do
justice, love kindness, walk humbly. It’s not a two-dimensional command that rests
on the page; God is inviting God’s people to action, to rehearse together what it
looks like to live as God’s people in community. Micah 6:8 is an invitation to try
and try and try again to live as God’s beloved children.
And so here we are…here we are…On Friday, 600,000 North Carolinians
finally received their SNAP benefits after weeks of back-and-forth arguments,
leaving many shaken and worried of how they might feed their family… during a
month where we traditionally celebrate food. We’ve rehearsed, beloved. We’ve
gathered, heard, rehearsed God’s words for weeks, months, years for many of you
It’s time to reenact those words. So go and do justice, love kindness, walk humbly
towards the Kingdom of God. It’s confirmed that ICE is in Charlotte as I speak,
meer miles from here, and while they may not affect many of us in these pews,
Nations Ford Elementary School, a mission partner of over 20 years, has a 97%
Latino student population. Already, there have been raids in areas around the
school. Fears are heightened and families, children, will be affected in ways we
may never imagine. We’ve rehearsed, beloved. We’ve studied these texts over
and over again. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly towards the Kingdom of
God. Cold weather is upon us, making life significantly harder for those who used
the warm streets as refuge from shelters. We’ve rehearsed, beloved. Do justice,
love kindness, walk humbly towards the Kingdom of God. In cities all over the
United States, people are putting their bodies on the line for the sake of
goodness and righteousness. We’ve rehearsed, beloved. Do justice, love
kindness, walk humbly towards the Kingdom of God.
We have looked at two texts today that aren’t one and done, let’s check this
off the list of Scripture to study this Sunday! We come here every week rehearsing
the Gospel in these pews by reading scripture, wrestling with God over its
meaning, and now how are we going to embody God’s love on the world’s stage?
Jesus stood on that mountain top, teaching to his disciples then and teaching it
to us now. God recognizes the hardships of the day which we all can identify with,
and called us beloved and then invited us with verbs to go and be love. If we
were just supposed to hear this lesson and then move on, not giving it a second
thought, Amy-Jill Levine said it best, “then we [should] toss the rest of the
Gospel, or the rest of the New Testament, into the Sea of Galilee.” We’ve
rehearsed, beloved. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of
righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. And so go, do justice, love
kindness, walk humbly towards the Kingdom of God.
Pray with me.
Loving God, we believe. Help our unbelief. Amen.