Somewhere Mark Twain observes that the sections of the New Testament giving him the most trouble are not those he cannot understand, but rather the sections he can. And George Bernard Shaw echoes Mark Twain when he remarks that “Christianity would probably be a good thing if it were ever tried.” They may be on to something. “We will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it” says Charles Caleb Colton. There’s the nub of it. The Christian life is not so much a matter of doctrine, dogma, systems of belief, ideas and world views: it blossoms as an expression of our lives, a quality of being. It reflects a certain radiant style, a quality of joy, a tilt of disposition anchored in the Eternal. Christian faith opens us up to treat others with respect and compassion. It handles the pressures, stress, temptations and necessities of our present age with serenity and courage unshakable even through the worst life can do to us.

I believe each of us deeply yearns for a quality of life like that. I believe most of us seek it everywhere but in the grace and release of the Gospel. And so, as our lives fill up with self-help formulae, chemical resolutions and barrages of “be good to yourself” urgings, let us take a look at another description of life liberated, joyous and strong—bracing, releasing, transforming us what’er befall amid our human enterprise.

Where, then, do we discover clues to this promised quality of life? Indeed, what hints does the Gospel provide enabling us to live more closely attuned to the pattern of our Lord? A few moments ago we read a lesson from the Gospel of Matthew we call “The Beatitudes.” Talk about hints to the Christian life! Those Beatitudes provide a crystalline description of life rooted and grounded in the grace of the only security sticking with us through life and death: the all-embracing, undergirding love of God we know through Christ Jesus.

And that affirmation of our faith and hope bears the crux of our understanding the Beatitudes as hints to the nature and character of our life in Christ. First—and absolutely primary, vital!—the Beatitudes tell us what life can be like when we reorient ourselves, our loyalties and allegiances, surrendering our lives to the gracious purposes we see through the life of Christ. The Beatitudes illustrate what life can be like when we get ourselves off our own hands and into the sovereign hands of the living, acting, transfiguring love of God in Christ.

Now, reorientation really means a whole new world for us. This surrender to the sovereignty of the God of Jesus Christ creates a fresh arena for our lives. Let me offer an analogy. September 11, we know, changed your world and mine. We perceive, we feel in our viscera dramatic variation in our global context, our national and perhaps personal identity. Geography changed: the oceans which used to isolate and protect us from the conundrums and conflicts of Europe and Asia, evaporated. We find ourselves on a shrunken planet, closely bound to others who hate us, tied tightly to those who penetrated the barriers of trust and security shattering an innocence we mistakenly nurtured and can never regain. But the change opened a window on the fact and reality of global interdependence; it confronted us with polities, cultures, religious loyalties, national interests, personal identities we could no longer read about in armchair comfort and couch potato curiosity; we now recast budgets, reevaluate allies, and redefine international priorities. According to this morning’s New York Times, we add words like “Ground Zero,” “weaponize,” “daisy cutter,” “theoterrorism” to our dictionaries. Indeed this week the President shook hands with those who aim missiles to explode in Copley Square, backed with our own missiles directed at Tieneman Square or downtown Pyongyang. The sovereignties turned inside out: enemies of our enemies became instantly our friends; our friends are miffed; the world changed and our behavior changed with it.

Just so with the arrival in our world of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Testament testifies to an event bearing catastrophic impact. We confess Jesus as Christ, not simply an itinerant Nazarene stumbling along the dusty roads of Palestine. Jesus comes as decisive historical presence qualitatively changing human existence. A teacher he is, but more than that. A prophet he is, but more, much more. Do we see in him an image of bodies healed, souls mended, futures blown open? Indeed! Jesus, as Christ, bears healing, mending, future renewal—now! Does Jesus point toward a community where resentments dissolve and hostility dissipates, a community where mercy, kindness and justice suffuse human encounters? Jesus embodies that kind of world among us—now. Does Jesus promise a city where race, culture, neighborhood, creed and gender no longer pit us against one another, but where, rather, everyone serves as diverse components in forging a whole and reconciled community? Yes! Indeed, the design for the common life of our city emerges from the love and hope incarnate in the life and death of Jesus. He breaks through into our history, not simply as a brilliant moralist, a religious genius, an original prophet, another Socrates, Moses, Buddha. No, Jesus breaks through as the harbinger of a new age, a new world, a new quality of life. Matthew is convinced Jesus bears the gracious, healed, reconciling, transfigured human future of God among us—now!

Wow! Now, finding ourselves citizens of this new setting, this new ethos, this new realm ruled by the grace and peace of Jesus Christ situated amid this old world of ours, the Beatitudes become descriptions of our moral life in Christ’s new world. They illustrate the life we live when our allegiance shifts from the situations and conditions now ruling our lives to the outgoing, risky, brave and daring love of Christ, a love consecrating itself to the healing and well-being of others. You see, just as new behavior issues with the crisis of September 11th, so does new behavior break forth when we pledge allegiance to the domain where Christ holds sway.

Take that first beatitude, for instance: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That sounds almost like an ethical demand. It appears as a behavioral hoop. It looks like a moralistic “should do,” an ethical “must do,” a prerequisite to considering ourselves Christian. Not so. That Beatitude describes our posture before God when we surrender our lives to Christ’s new realm. It declares simply that like the economically impoverished, like the poor in material things who have nothing to lean on, no goods to prop up their lives, no cash to hide their desperation, the poor in sprit come before God with nothing. They come —dare I say it?—we come with no claim of success in business, academia, politics, salary schedules. . . no nothing. The poor in spirit come before God with no claim to rectitude, brain power, fame or accomplishment. We acknowledge—dare I assume it?—we acknowledge but one vital need: to be filled with the spirit enabling us to consecrate our lives to turning the human race into the human family. We stand before God with nothing—zero, zilch, zippo—but a desperate eagerness to participate in the triumph of kindness. We let go of every claim to special identity except as Christ claims us for humble and gracious service.

You see, to be poor in spirit is not a demand. It is not an imperative. It is not something we are under obligation to live up to, a moral challenge we are supposed to meet. To be poor in sprit is simply the way it is alongside Jesus Christ.

And astounding! Alongside Christ we will not only be poor in spirit, we will at the same time know the realm of heaven. Yes, the realm of heaven! Pie in the sky? Golden streets and angel music? Not on your life. The realm of heaven is not some vague afterlife beyond the clouds up in the wild blue yonder; but a new reality, a new community, a fresh network of relationships marked by mutuality, solidarity and service. It breaks in on us even as we come before God with nothing but open hearts and hands.

You see, living in the realm of heaven means we are no longer ruled by the sovereignties of this world tearing us apart, stressing us out, eating us alive, worrying us to death. It means we gain our full humanity; we are saved, sustained, empowered, enabled, renewed, recreated, not by our income or our job, our gender or our race, not by our designer clothes, our power-food diet, our esoteric therapists. We are saved not by our bank accounts, graduate degrees, zip codes, vanity plates, our Caribbean vacations, our children’s achievements, the success of our spouse, our national citizenship, our religious affiliation, the connections we claim, the books we read, the whisky we drink, the perfume we daub, the SUV we drive, the jeans we wear, the man who comes into or the woman who gets out of our lives. Nothing this world offers as a key to value and self-worth provides anything but illusion, fraud and seduction to fruitless striving. No, insists the New Testament—the Beatitudes—the key to health, to wholeness, to integration, to coherence—the key to our full humanity—lies in rendering ourselves open before the gracious empowering spirit of the crucified Christ, allowing Christ finally to rule our lives and shape our identities. “Blessed: deeply, profoundly joyous, God-embraced and supported—yes blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the realm of heaven.”

And what about those other Beatitudes? How do they surface in our lives? Their expression hinges to a great degree on the first. They reflect what life is like when we surrender to the sovereignty of Christ’s new realm. Listen:

Our first loyalty being to Jesus Christ, we mourn for a broken creation riddled with illness, hostility, wars and rumors of war. We weep over the injuries we inflict on one another. We grieve over untimely death and are sickened and saddened by the tragedy of the world. But yes—yes!— alongside Christ we find comfort and consolation by One who himself suffers and knows we suffer too.

Or again, walking alongside Jesus Christ we are meek. No, not whimpering, tail between the legs, compliant milk-toast wimps, but men and women able to manage and transform suffering, to walk the second mile, to absorb humiliation without resort to vengeance. We possess a serenity impossible to ruffle, embitter or enrage. We conquer with kindness and live assured—everything to the contrary—assured of God’s deigning the triumph of kindness.

Yet again, shoulder to shoulder with Christ, we hunger and thirst for righteousness. We know of our inadequacy to right the world all by ourselves. We do not labor under any illusions of our own gifts and talents. We starve for the nourishment of fairness, the feast of justice, the cuisine of peace, the rich tonic of reconciliation, strengthening us to bear up under the worst, slaked and satiated by the vision and vitality of the promised, graced community.

And yes, walking with Jesus Christ, surrendering to Christ’s realm, we discover ourselves merciful. In a world riddled with getting even, paying the piper, calculating this, weighing that, hairline-deep in litigation, blowing the enemy out of the water, driving the opposition to the wall, mercy is the order of the day. We experience mercy in our own lives from the forgiveness and openhandedness of Jesus Christ; and we offer mercy to others, exercising the very character of God.

Of course, even again, loyal to the gracious realm of Christ, we find ourselves pure in heart. That does not mean we are prissy or prudes. It surely does not mean we hide from the corruption and scandal of the world or harbor a harsh, narrow, moralistic approach to life. Purity of heart goes deeper than hearing, seeing and speaking no evil. Purity of heart means, rather, we live without dissimulation before or diversion from the healing, reconciling will of our God. It means we stand with integrity, our whole persons committed and loyal to the world Christ Jesus creates among us. Standing and surrendering—what we pray coinciding with who we are—enables us to witness those healing, redeeming promises of God come to fruition.

And yes, those who surrender to the realm of Christ will know the joy of peacemaking. To be sure, that is bringing together two parties in conflict, but it is more. Peacemaking entails reaching out, identifying and empathizing with and reconciling the alienated, the marginalized, the outsider. It means moving through and across dividing lines, embracing the estranged, the enemy. It means standing beside those who are afar off and walking with them into new and rekindled community. Such activity assumes intimacy, closeness, a warmth and trust only a child of God might exercise.

And we dare never forget, insists this revelatory offering: by surrendering to Christ we incur the disbelief, cynicism, mockery, laughter, and resistance of the world. Look around and see what really counts. It is money, prestige, power. It is sound bites, F-16s at the ready, credentials marking our status, stock options determining our value. To believe and to act in ways different from Boylston and Federal Streets, the State House or the White House turns values upside down—and if we press our loyalty to God as far as Jesus did—Gone!—like Jesus! Fool for God that he was; the world of achievement, success, pride, get-rich-quick- complacent religion and imperial politics dumped him. And it will happen every time. Expect it!

O friends, I have not just delivered a catalog of what we will do as we live the Christian life. I have offered hints as to how the Christian life unfolds. Should we take the plunge, we will discover ourselves the living truth of these illustrative hints, and perhaps add some of our own to Matthew’s luminous list through our own experience, a consequence of your following Jesus.

Not long ago I read of a venerable Eastern patriarch trying to deal ecumenically with the Roman Catholic Church. I have forgotten exactly his home country or his exact title, but do you know what they called him? They called him, “Your Beatitude.” What a great title! I believe that title can belong to every Christian. It is simply a matter of self-surrender, a venture of letting Jesus Christ take charge of our lives. Dare we really try it? I guarantee that if we do, Christ can make your life— Christ can make my life—nothing less than a courageous, radiant, deeply joyous Beatitude.

Scripture Reading
Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“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 the peacemakers, for they will be called children of 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, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.