Be Filled:
Sermons on the Beatitudes
Arthur Lee McClanahan
Abingdon Press
Nashville
Copyright information
Introduction
God's greatest gift to humankind is Jesus Christ. Jesus saves us from the "powers and principalities" that seek to destroy us. Jesus even saves us from ourselves, especially as we say "yes" to God's "yes" to us through Jesus.
Jesus' mission is very clear. He came so that "everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16). His ministry came alive around preaching, healing, emancipating, and teaching (Luke 4:18). Jesus came offering the gift of an abundant, full life, which could be more completely realized within a community of people who were "God's people" (1 Peter 2:10).
Paul describes the people of God, those bold enough to call themselves by the name of their risen Lord and Savior, as a body, inseparably interdependent and aware of the joys and sorrows, hopes and despairs, triumphs and tragedies, and estrangements and reconciliations of one another. As members of this living presence of the living Lord, people were dependent upon one another, a fact acknowledged in the Acts of the Apostles, "All who believed were together and had all things in common" (Acts 2:44).
Even more than being devoted to one another, the earliest believers professed their loyalty to and dependence upon Jesus Christ, for it was, "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). The people of God, throughout the ages, have acknowledged that their lives, from the very first moments, are precious gifts from God, that God attends to their needs, that God stands by, even in the midst of disobedience, that God seeks out those who are lost, and that God rushes to embrace the repentant one. From the establishment, rejection, and reestablishment of the Covenant, to the glorious care in the Garden, to the tender reconciliation of the humiliated child, the story of the people of God is vividly painted with the hues of dependence upon the Creator.
Jesus was a master teacher. The Gospel of Matthew takes shape around that premise. The curious and the devoted gathered at his feet to learn the genuine truths of life. During the special moments that took place on the grassy slope by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus taught the abiding, assuring, reassuring truth of God for the people of God. Through the Sermon on the Mount, the people of that day, and through the Gospels we in our day, receive a positive, transforming, and energizing model for living. The Beatitudes offer exciting possibilities and new understandings of what a blessed, graced, and consecrated life can be.
Jesus' deeply sensitive insight into the living and thinking of his contemporaries is evident in the Beatitudes. He knew that the people were enticed by temporal standards that were quite the opposite of what God designed when the first human was called, "very good." Jesus' encouraging word highlighted the contrast between the everyday life and the eternal life. The usual and ordinary standards were set aside in favor of purer, God-centered norms. The rewards of the divinely inspired life were articulated with precision and simplicity. And, to enhance the clarity, Jesus told his hearers that they would be "blessed" as they lived in the way he advocated and espoused.
The Beatitudes provide the essential, core-building blocks for life. They provide a vital discipline for the ordering of our days. These blessings, offered by the Master, embrace us with an uncompromising tenderness.
And it's just at this point, embracing a community with uncompromising tenderness, that the preacher stands. Harold Bosley, my mentor, provided that word to me during the days of my youth. He described the task of the preacher in urgent terms. In one conversation he suggested that a preacher's mission is to be as focused in bringing God's Word to today's world as would a "dying man to dying people."
Ralph Sockman, one of America's premier preachers, had an instinctive and compelling ability to link the timeless truths of the Bible to the timely transitions of the day. He, too, taught me the urgency of bringing the assuring word to today's believers.
Jesus sat on the rolling hillside of the Sea of Galilee and drew the hungry community to him. He wanted them to know that even in the midst of ridicule and rejection, there is confirmation and celebration. And so, in embarking on the journey through the Beatitudes, it was my hope to usher my friends of first the Sayville congregation, and then later the Fairfield Grace community of faith to a place where they could meet the Master and find the core meaning of his blessing. We all need to be transported from the phone calls, the agenda planners, and the supermarket checkout lines to the rest-giving "ahs" and "ah-has" of the Sermon on the Mount.
The beautiful brevity of the Beatitudes fills us up when we wind down. The compassionate embrace, challenging encouragement, and contagious energy of this compact message sets us free to manage, even to transcend the demands of our days. In short, in these few words of Jesus, we find the Way from the one who said, "I am the way and the truth and the life."
Blessed Independence
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. " (Matthew 5:1-3)
The altar table is an amazing piece of furniture. It's massive, and yet, delicate. It supports the candles—which remind us that the "light of the world," Jesus Christ, is present with us when we worship. It cradles the Bible, the Living Word of the Living Lord. In fact, it serves the same function today that the Ark of the Covenant did for the wandering Hebrew people thousands of years before the coming of Jesus Christ. The Ark was a large wooden box that contained the Tablets, the Word of the Lord that Moses brought down from his encounter with God on Mount Sinai. God's preserved word is right here, right now, too.
Preparing for our worship time together, I considered moving the table. However, moving the altar is definitely not a job to be done alone; it takes at least two people! True enough, I could struggle and move one side of the altar forward slightly—and then move the other side an inch or two ahead, until it's in just the right position. The task would be much easier, however, if someone else would grab the other end and slide the table forward. That's the point of what we're suggesting.
It's okay to be dependent. It's much healthier to be dependent. It's much more fulfilling to be a part of a community where you can reach out to someone else rather than go it alone.
This notion of the "okayness" of dependency is the key to the Beatitudes. It's like an old video game titled SHAMUS The leading character is an electronic detective who enters a room, moves through a maze—and so on. Each player's goal is to get the little key that unlocks the next level. Opening the lock permits the crime fighter to move on—and when that happens, the point tally skyrockets!
The key to opening the lock of the Beatitudes is to understand the first one: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." These words are found in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, which contains the largest collection of Jesus' teachings. Between each of the five major sections of instruction are historical narratives. Matthew offers us one of the first "how-to" guides of scriptural enlightenment for personal fulfillment and complete happiness.
"How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. (Matthew 5:3 NEB)
The New English Bible translates the beginning of each of the eight Beatitudes with the words, "How blest are those ...." Other versions read, "Blessed are those ...." and "Happy are those ...." I suspect that if we really want to get to the heart of this, we wouldn't settle for the first feeling tingled by "Happy are those." A conventional definition of happy suggests a very comfortable emotion. We need to know that Jesus is saying something much more profound. He is observing how fulfilled it's possible to become, how complete, how close to God we can move when we live up to the