Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [Proper 4], rcl yr a, 2023
MICAH 6:1-8; PSALM 15; 1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-31; MATTHEW 5:1-12

Blessed

Near the end of the original Ghostbusters movie, in best scene of the whole film, a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man terrorizes New York. The reason this happens is that the main characters are asked not to think of anything, because if they do think of something, that’s the form that the Big Bad in the movie will take. Of course the harder they try not to think of anything, the more impossible it is not to think of anything, and so someone inevitably thinks of something. And Ray thinks of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, resulting in a giant, white, puffy man made out of marshmallow stomping all around Manhattan.

It’s an example of Ironic Process Theory, which you may recognize if I said “don’t think of a polar bear,” which makes you inevitably think of a polar bear.

But Ironic Process Theory isn’t just about trying hard not to think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or of Polar Bears, though. It can work in other ways. Coming out of COVID—a time of great stress and anxiety—has led some of us to try really really hard to just relax a little a bit. But the result of all this trying so hard to relax has lead to the opposite outcome—in trying so hard to relax we just make ourselves anxious and stressed about one more thing: we get stressed and anxious about trying to relax!

Sometimes in trying to do something, we get the opposite results.

Ironic Process Theory—trying hard to do something, and getting the opposite results than intended, came to mind this week as I read the Beatitudes, the “blesseds” of our reading from Matthew, and how sometimes when we try to do something right, we get the opposite of what we wanted.

I thought of the ways in which we’ve criminalized drugs for the sake of justice. But what we really ended up doing was to make criminals out of people who wouldn’t have been criminals, creating an underclass of desperate people that wouldn’t otherwise have been so desperate, it also meant that drugs on the street have become toxic through illicit, amateur, and often exploitative production. And so in an attempt to do justice, what we’ve ended up with is injustice; a hunger and thirst for righteousness has led to greater opportunity for sinfulness. We could speak too, of the many many times we’ve gone to war in order to bring peace, only to create more violence, and less peace.

I find myself here, too, but not in a good way. I know I’ve demanded peace or justice in ways that can be perhaps overly demanding, or sometimes with anger—in a way that has led not to peace or justice, but to injustice and conflict, breaking or endangering relationships when my hope was exactly the opposite.

In so many ways, in striving for the good, we create its opposite; and sometimes, it might’ve been better not to have tried at all.

This is just one way that the beatitudes can be challenging to keep. They can feel impossible even, especially if we think of them as some kind of an ethical program, or as a list of rules. Liberal Protestants, I’m afraid, don’t typically come out well here. When we don’t live up to the demands of the Beatitudes, when we bring about strife and injustice rather than peace and justice, or when we are prideful rather than meek, or unforgiving and demanding rather than merciful, we throw up our hands and say, “we were meant to fail, so we could have recourse to God’s grace and forgiveness.”

Other times we stress ourselves out in trying so hard to be good enough, to live up to the standard. To not suck, but to be better. Or even worse, we expect others to live up to this standard—again ending up with the irony of perverse results—in expecting other people to be meek, peaceable, merciful, pure in heart, or to seek justice, we ourselves act in such a way that curses, and does not bless: we ourselves become resentful, we burn bridges, we unfairly judge others for their failings, we become deceitful. Sometimes the solution is really to stop trying so hard—because in trying so hard to bless, we curse.

But what I’d suggest, though, is that the mistake we make is bigger than trying too hard, bigger than the curse that comes with expecting so much of others. Because in the first place, the Beatitudes are not really about me, or about you, trying to keep up with some exemplary moral standard, impossible or otherwise. To make the Beatitudes about keeping ourselves, or expecting others to keep, some exemplary moral standard is to separate the vocation of blessedness from the person describing blessedness.

To hear in the Beatitudes “you suck, be better,” is to separate the work and person of Christ. And what happens when we remember that it is, in fact, Jesus saying these words about what blessedness looks like, and that he is speaking first about himself—that it is Jesus who is poor in spirit; that it is Jesus who mourns; that it is Jesus who is meek; that it is Jesus who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, that Jesus is the merciful one, Jesus is pure in heart, and that Jesus is the peacemaker.

Jesus is the blessed one, Jesus is the one who speaks the divine blessing into being in himself, the divine blessing of all things made new, the divine blessing of God’s future in Jesus, the divine blessing that is Jesus himself.

And so, for the moment, give this a try: dispense with the moral reading of the New Testament, as if the New Testament was mostly about us as individual people not sucking but being better, and read as if the New Testament, and even the Beatitudes, are first and foremost about Jesus, the Blessed One.

And as we do so, we come to very different place, where the pressure to be good people is markedly lessened because we can look to God in Christ to have already accomplished all good things for us, including being the Blessed One who gives the blessing  of a poverty of spirit that lands us in the kingdom of heaven; the blessing of comfort, the blessing of a kind justice, the blessing of righteousness, the blessing of mercy and of the vision of God, the blessing of being called as God’s own children.

That’s not to say that we would not find these blessings in the present—quite the opposite. The Blessed One blesses us by inviting us to be his body, the church. And the Holy Spirit has poured this blessing into our hearts, making the blessing of the Blessed One real in the present, real in the church, real in the body of Christ.

And while we will be hard pressed to find ourselves as individuals able to make visible all the divine blessings listed here in the Beatitudes—indeed as individuals we often fail to make these blessing visible—you will find in the church people called to bless, called to be a blessing, members who by the goodness of God, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, are poor in spirit; others who mourn; you will find the meek in the church; you will find people who hunger and thirst for righteousness; merciful people; the pure in heart; and peacemakers.

People who can be all these blessings without even the irony of perverse results because they are sharing the blessing not of themselves, but sharing the blessing of the Blessed One—of those who have died and risen with Christ, that we might together be in Christ, and by the blessing he already is, and by the Holy Spirit who brings to bear Christ’s holiness upon us—we are, in the church as a whole, equipped to bring all that blessing to bear on one another in the church; and to to others for the sake of the world God loves.