Hilton Head Island, SC – April 3, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 5:1-12; Luke 16:19-31
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” – Matthew 5:3
Blessings of the Poor in Spirit
Today we are beginning a sermon series on what have always been known as the Beatitudes. The word beatitude simply means blessed. And you can pronounce that word either “bless-ed” or “blest.” I say “bless-ed” when reciting the Beatitudes because that is how I heard them pronounced as a young child, and it has stuck with me that way ever since. But either pronunciation is correct, especially in 2016, when anybody can say anything any way and it will probably be OK, at least with somebody else.
I want to begin with some observations William Barclay made about the first twelve verses of Matthew, chapter 5. Willie Barclay was one of the most widely known and respected commentators on the New Testament in the last half of the 20th century. He was known all over the English-speaking world, especially by lay Christians, for his helpful way of interpreting scripture passages which might be familiar to everyone, but also whose meaning often confused or befuddled them.
In Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, the word for “blessed” is makarios. Makarios means “happy.” In English, the root word for “happy” is “hap.” “Hap” implies happenstance, and that certain things just happen. Some children are born brilliant because their parents are brilliant. It just happens. Some are born poor and stay poor, because their parents are poor; it just happens.
William Barclay made an important distinction about the Beatitudes in his introduction to the first verses of Mt. 5. He wrote, “(T)he beatitudes are not pious hopes of what shall be; they are not glowing but nebulous prophecies of some future bliss; they are congratulations on what is.”
At first glance, that observation seems preposterous. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek:” --- How can such people be congratulated, or how can they already be blessed if they are poor in spirit, or are in mourning, or are meek? Does that make any sense?
The answer, according to Dr. Barclay, is that everyone who is burdened by particular exigencies of life has benefits from God because of their burdens! And these benefits are not offered at some future time, and especially not in eternity; they are experienced right here and right now!
Let us investigate how that can be with respect to the first Beatitude. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Whenever Matthew uses the term “the kingdom of heaven,” he means what the other three Gospel writers mean by “the kingdom of God.” The disadvantage of calling the kingdom of God “the kingdom of heaven” is that it makes it sound like God’s kingdom exists only in eternity, meaning heaven. But in many places throughout the Gospels, including the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus implies that God’s kingdom also exists in the present. God’s kingdom has always existed on earth. Before there was any life on this planet, and before there were any species living on dry land, and before there were mammals or human beings, God’s kingdom was already found on earth. Presumably it can be experienced and understood only by human beings, but it has always existed everywhere and in everything.
There are two words in Greek that mean “poor.” The word penes describes someone who ekes out a living and is able to subsist on his own. He has enough to live on, but there is nothing left over. The other word is ptochos. It describes living in absolute, abject poverty. To be ptochos poor is to live hand-to-mouth, always to be unsure where the next meal shall come from, to live in the worst imaginable barrio or favela or slum. This kind of poor person has nothing; she or he is utterly destitute.
When Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God,” it was the latter kind of poverty he was talking about. It is the sort of impoverishment that is found in the most desperate neighborhoods of Mumbai, Lagos, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, or Mexico City. That kind of poverty is bound to make people “poor in spirit.” Not only are they very poor in outward appearances, they also are very poor internally, in how they think and feel and are.
And yet, says Jesus, such people are blessed, because “theirs is the kingdom of God.” They know they have no hope in this world, save God. God alone can uphold them. God alone can sustain them. God alone can keep them alive. They cannot do it themselves; they are far too limited in everything to be able to sustain themselves. People who are that poor know they are in God’s kingdom because they know that God is the sole source of their continued existence. Without His perceived presence in their lives, they have no doubt they would die, if not tomorrow, then soon.
A section of Kolkata (the former Calcutta) is called The City of Joy. Years ago the French writer Dominique Lapierre wrote a novel of that title. It told of three main characters but also many others who lived in the huge slum area of East India’s largest city which is called by the locals “the City of Joy.” The book did not paint a rosy picture of life among the extremely poor; it portrayed their lives as they are: crushed by a caste system which consigns them to their lowly station in life and by the never-ending poverty which threatens every day to end their lives by starvation or disease. Many of the people in the City of Joy are Christians in a large sea of Hinduism. Despite all their many disadvantages, they are grateful to God for the lives they have, and they know that without Him they would never survive.
We may believe that our lives are eternally in God’s hands, but we probably also believe that they are temporally in our own hands. We often tell ourselves, especially we who are Americans, “God helps those who help themselves.” Therefore none of us is ever likely to feel “poor in spirit” in the way Jesus describes that existential reality in the first Beatitude.
In other words, to be “poor in spirit” means both to be very poor and also to be poor in spirit. It means to be so weighed down by nearly insurmountable circumstances that people who find themselves in that situation realize they have no hope other than in God. Without His presence in their lives, they know that life would be hopeless.
Few of us have ever been truly poor in spirit. Or if we have been, it probably did not last long. Nevertheless, for people who usually feel secure and optimistic, life can take throw anyone temporarily into a spiritual tailspin, and they wonder when – or if – it will ever end.
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1833. He was a musical prodigy as a child, and began playing the piano and composing when he very young. However, things did not go well for him in Hamburg. It was not a city which particularly valued music or musicians. Brahms began to despair of ever having any success as a composer or performer.
When he was twenty years old, and was considering giving up music altogether, Brahms decided to make one last attempt to find someone who could advise him on whether he had sufficient talent to continue pursuing a career in music. He went to the home of Robert Schumann, another German composer. Schumann asked Brahms to play one of the piano pieces he had written. By the time he had finished five bars of the composition, Schumann excitedly said to one of his children who was in the room listening, “Go get your mother!” Clara Schumann was also, like her husband, a very gifted musician and pianist. For the 24 turbulent years of their marriage, they made it part of their life’s vocation to encourage young instrumentalists and composers. When Clara heard Brahms play, she knew, as did Robert, that a veritable virtuoso had come into their lives. They convinced Brahms to go to Vienna, where they knew his talent would be much more appreciated, and the rest became musical history.
While in Vienna Brahms received word that his mother had died. He never married, and perhaps for that reason he felt her death more deeply than others might feel the death of their own mothers. As a result of his sense of loss, and in order to recover from it, Brahms composed a German Requiem (Ein Deutsches Requiem.) It was the only Requiem up to that time to be written in German rather than Latin. It begins with the text of the second Beatitude, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The middle section of the seven-part oratorio is the best known: “How lovely is Thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts.” It is often sung by choirs as a long anthem. The seventh section has a text from Revelation 14:13: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth, that they rest from their labors, and that their works do follow after them.”
Johannes Brahms was desperately poor in spirit when he went to the home of Robert and Clara Schumann. They became God’s providential agents who lifted him out of despair and launched him as a very successful and renowned composer. But once again he was poor in spirit when he composed what to me is the most comforting and uplifting of all the Requiems of all the great composers.
Dorothy Day was a remarkable woman with a colorful and checkered life. She was born shortly after the turn of the 20th century and died in 1980. Pope Francis is speeding up the process by which she shall be named an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church. That says as much or more about the Pope as it does about Dorothy Day, because her complete life’s story is not material for what would ordinarily lead to the fast track toward sainthood, mainly because of the colorful and checkered parts. She was a brilliant student at the University of Illinois who dropped out after three years and moved to New York City. There she became involved with helping the poor and the down-and-out. Through the years she established over two hundred communities for very poor people all over the country. Her work for social justice and women’s suffrage earned her both plaudits and brickbats from many American Catholics throughout her lifetime and beyond.
Dorothy Day knew what it was to be “poor in spirit,” because she saw so many people in that situation, and willingly she adopted that style of life. She introduced the poor in spirit to the kingdom of God as she perceived it, and in so doing changed the lives of tens of thousands.
Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus is the only parable in which any of the characters was given a name. “Lazarus” is the Latinized form of the Hebrew name Eleazar. Eleazar means “God Is My Help.” In the parable, which you heard earlier, the rich man ate sumptuously every day, and Lazarus sat outside his door, hoping to get some of the scraps of food which the servants would throw out. The rich man didn’t object to this, or to Lazarus hanging out every day beside his door. His sin was that he simply didn’t even truly notice Lazarus. At the end of the parable Jesus said that both men died, and the rich man saw Lazarus far off in heaven. He asked Abraham to be allowed to go there with Lazarus, but Abraham said that was not possible. There is more to the story than just that, but that much of it suffices for our purposes.
Lazarus was “poor in spirit.” He was ptochos, so poor that he knew no one other than God could help him. And God helped him via the rich man, who didn’t even really notice him. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Lazarus knew that he was in the kingdom of God even before he got to the kingdom of heaven.
There are millions of refugees fleeing chaos and slaughter in western Asia and North Africa. Americans are confronted by almost none of them, because most of them are headed for Europe, and Europeans cannot ignore their plight. What shall ultimately happen to all these people remains to be seen. But whether they are Muslims or Christians, all of them perfectly fit Jesus’ description of “the poor in spirit.” Physically, mentally, economically, and spiritually, they are the most evident example of “the poor in spirit” in the world today. And theirs is the kingdom of God, because their circumstances are so desperate and bleak that they know that no one may help and support them, other than God. Desperate events can create divine epiphanies.
Middle class Americans have multiple advantages, but one of the disadvantages we have is that we are able to delude ourselves into thinking that we have succeeded in arranging a fairly stable life for ourselves by working hard and following the rules and being honorable citizens. Very few of us have ever known truly desperate days.
When Jesus lived in the region of the Galilee in the occupied nation of Judea during the first third of the first century of the Common Era, he did not spend much time with folks like us. However, in the first third of the first century of the Common Era in Judea, there was virtually no class of people like us. Either Judeans were very rich, like the rich man in the parable, or they were very poor, like Lazarus and most of the Judean peasants.
It is sociologically important that Jesus began his Beatitudes by saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” He was speaking about the largest segment of the society in which he grew up, not the smallest, like the very rich, or the middle class, of whom there were none. Jesus’ heart always went out first to the least, the last, and the lost.
People such as we are can deceive ourselves into imaging that we have made provisions to last us until we die, and then we shall gladly enter eternity to be with God and all the others who have gone on before us. But our reliance on ourselves is, in the end, a delusion. The Spanish have a very sardonic proverb; “There are no pockets in a shroud.” We cannot take any security or any securities with us into the kingdom of God. God alone can bring us there, and His intention to do that has nothing to do with anything we have done for ourselves, but rather solely with what He has done for us.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”