“Thou Shalt Be Blessed”
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Some of us here this morning are old enough to remember when copies of the Ten Commandments were posted not only in Sunday School classrooms and church sanctuaries but also in public school classrooms and on county courthouse lawns.
Right?
So here’s a question for you: Does anyone remember ever seeing—anywhere—public displays of the Beatitudes?
No?
Why is that, do you think?
And why is it that, while the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that requirements that the Ten Commandments be posted in public schools were unconstitutional, over the past couple of years some state legislatures have considered and partially passed bills requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom?
Why, do you think, does no one demand the public display of the blessings of Jesus?
And while we’re at it, why is that the parking lot of the church I drive past every Sunday morning on my way here, the huge parking lot of a church that proclaims unbelievers will suffer eternal damnation—why is that parking lot full to overflowing every week, while our own, much smaller lot is not?
I can’t help but wonder if the answers to all these questions don’t have something in common. So when the Ten Commandments appeared in our lectionary readings for today, it felt to me like a good opportunity for us to consider what these well-known, if too-little understood sayings have to say to us about God, Jesus, religion, life, and the spiritual journey. Time won’t allow us to go into too much detail, but maybe beginning to think about these things will make us want to explore them more deeply.
And still, before I get into that, I want to say a couple of important things:
First, I will not be suggesting at all that the Beatitudes are “better” than the Ten Commandments. They are two very different things coming at different times to serve different purposes. More important even than that is that we must not fall into supercessionist thinking, the extremely harmful belief that the teachings of Jesus replace Jewish law, theology, and practice. This kind of thinking and teaching is antisemitic and has led to the untold suffering of our Jewish siblings over the past 2,000 years.
Second, while I take primary responsibility for bringing the Beatitudes into the conversation, some of what I have to say here today will draw heavily from a book by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr called Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.
With that understanding, let’s turn to the Ten Commandments.
Before they were reduced to a morality code, a set of “thou shalt nots” to tell other people how to behave, the Ten Commandments were a much-needed guideline to help the Israelites learn how to live together. They had just been liberated from at least 200 years of slavery in Egypt, suffering under Pharaoh’s worship of power and wealth.
Before any commandments are given, God wants the people to know and remember that God is their emancipator. God is their liberator. Pharaohs and kings will come and go; other nations will seek to crush and oppress them; but God will always be with them, and their freedom comes from God. Don’t worship anything or anyone else, the first commandments say, because only I will hear your cries and deliver you, again and again. I love you and will not forsake you.
Beyond that, the commandments establish a new system of governance. Freed rom Pharaoh but without any structure or homeland, the commandments provide them with guidelines for how to stay free, how to create a beloved community in which relationships are honored, property is respected, and humans are encouraged to become so much more than what they can produce.
The commandments form a foundation for a new way of living and being. First, they say, honor the God who liberated you. Second, don’t be defined by your work; don’t be fooled into thinking that everything is up to you. When you honor the sabbath and keep it holy by not working, God will provide and your soul will be freed and refreshed. And, third, love your neighbors by treating them with dignity and respect.
That’s it, or perhaps that would have been it if the Israelites, like everyone since, hadn’t shown themselves to be so good at forgetting God’s good gifts, mistreating their neighbors, living in fear, and thinking money and power would save them.
But it was humans and human institutions, not God, who turned the Ten Commandments into a straightjacket, reducing religion to an instrument of individual behavior control, a collection of rules and things we must not do.
God knows that was the defining feature of the religion I grew up with.
And God knows rules and commandments have their place. If you’ve ever been blessed enough to raise a child or train a dog, you know that in the early stages of life most beings need structure and clarity, safety and security, order and control. There’s nothing inherently wrong with rules; in fact, we need all those do’s and don’ts to be able to discover and become who we are. We actually need external rules to help us develop our personal and communal values; we need to have developed a fairly strong and healthy ego before we can freely surrender some of our ego for the sake of love and relationship.
But rules and structures, certainty and binary thinking become problems when we care more about them than we do about loving God and loving others. They become problems when people, institutions, systems, and entire cultures get stuck in that limited and limiting stage of development; when we worship striving, success, power, reputation, and wealth more than the liberating God who is love; when religious, political, and cultural powers use them to control and oppress other people.
This is what Richard Rohr calls the first half of life, or the first journey. Unfortunately, he says, ours is “a first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned with survival, success, and defending ourselves against anything and anyone we feel threatens our safety or status by being different. Thus the proliferation of laws and structures to limit and control education, tools of economic and political political power, and the lives of people of color, women, queer folks, immigrants, non-Christians, and others.
It is as if white, heterosexual, evangelical Americans have said, “Thou shalt not read, learn, think, love, or live any differently than me.”
But there’s so much more to life than do’s and don’ts. There’s so much more to the life God wants for us than power and control. Unfortunately, we’re sometimes our own worst enemy in growing up and moving beyond. Because discovering the life that truly is life, experiencing communion with God, and building beloved community with others requires getting over ourselves somewhat. It requires being open-hearted and flexible enough to let ourselves be transformed—not only by the joys of love but also by the pain and suffering of failure, loss, brokenness, confusion, and vulnerability.
I’m beginning to think that this is something of what Jesus means when he says we have to be willing to lose our life in order to find it.
Richard Rohr says “the way up”—that is, the way to fuller, more meaningful life with God and other people—is very often “the way down,” the way of struggle, exploration, change, and growth, the way of being honest about our faults and weaknesses, the way of of giving up our narrow and closed ways of seeing and being for the broad and open the ways of love, compassion, and generosity.
The Beatitudes speak to this, telling us that blessing and goodness and knowing God come from what seem to be unlikely places and situations: from humility and grief, from tenderness and a passion for justice, from a willingness to forgive and a pure-hearted devotion, from a commitment to peace and a willingness to pay the price for doing what is right.
This is what Rohr calls second journey or second half of life. This is what Jesus is summoning us to when he says, “Follow me.” Move beyond simple, surface things and go deep. Be real. Know yourself to be blessed. Know yourself to be free. Know yourself to be beloved.
Follow me, Jesus says, and thou shalt be blessed—again, and again, and again. Now and always.
