Sermon - 1/29/23

21 min•0 تشغيلات•0 مفضلات

Religion

الوصف

Grace to you and peace from God our parent, Jesus our Savior, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Ahh yes, the Beatitudes, one of the passages of the Gospel that everyone seems to have heard and many love it. A nice passage providing hope for the future, even possibly for after we die and are joined with the saints in the heavenly kin-dom. A passage letting us know that even if things aren’t all that great here on Earth, that they will be much better once we are with God. Or is it? Is this what it is about? I think there is a lot more here. Just like much of Jesus’s life and preaching, Jesus was being counter-cultural here. He was going against everything that society, religion, and government was telling people. Wealth, religious piety in high positions in the church, power, strength, fighting for what they thought was right, forcing people into their ways, happiness - were all things society, then, and still today, values as a whole. In other parts of the Gospel, John the Baptist and others tell people to repent, which means to turn around. They were being told - “Hey - you are going the wrong way - you are on the wrong path - turn around!” They were being told that they were living their lives not as God intended. In today’s Gospel, the message changes to tell us which people are blessed. As Pastor Ellen very nicely explains in her study guide for today’s readings, “Jesus begins his message, the inaugural address of his ministry, by saying, “Blessed.” Now, the Jewish people really knew their Hebrew scripture and they knew the Psalms. They knew that the great Law Psalm, Psalm 1, begins with exactly the same word, blessed. You see, Psalm 1 begins like this, “Blessed is the one who walks not in the way of the wicked but in the way of the Lord.” And ashar, the Hebrew word for blessed, really means something like ‘You are on the right road.’” So we are switching from telling people that they are

المبدعون

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