You Are Blessed!

We are beginning a series today on a passage from the Bible called the Beatitudes. 

The Beatitudes are the introduction to a famous sermon of Jesus’ called the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus outlines his theology for his disciples.  It’s a sermon, not for the occasional churchgoer, but for the disciple.  For the one who has already decided to be a follower of Jesus.   Does that describe you?  Have you moved beyond the observer stage to being a follower of Jesus?  Then the Beatitudes are for you. 

You Are Blessed!

Matthew 5:1-16

            Which one of the following would you choose:  Would you rather be “immediately happy,” “enduringly content,” or “incredibly rich”? 

            Some of you might remember a sermon that Ed preached a couple of years ago, in which he quoted an informal survey that was done by a psychologist.  In a single day, the psychologist asked 108 people to choose one of those three options that I just gave you.   Which one did most people choose?  86 chose “enduringly content,” 19 said they wanted to be “immediately happy,” and three chose “incredibly rich.” 

            I think that most of us sense this, even if we’ve never put it into words, that contentment will do more for us than a big balance in our bank account, or a quick happiness fix.   If we are deeply content, our relationships will be healthier, we’ll do better at our work, and we will be physically healthier as well. 

            What we call contentment is very like what the Bible calls being blessed or blesséd. 

            Blessed is somewhat of an archaic word, one that shows up in prayers and pious phrases and of course in the Bible, but it doesn’t necessarily communicate the depth of its meaning in our everyday conversations.   We need to use some updated words to capture its meaning.  One of the words that some of the newer Bible translations often use instead of blessed is “happy.”  And happy is one of the synonyms.  In our contemporary usage, though, it’s hazardous to use the word happy for a couple of reasons.   One is that happy is a feeling word.  And happiness as a feeling, comes and goes.  Charlie Brown was sitting at Lucy’s psychiatric help booth one day, pouring out his heart:  “One day I feel good,” he said, “The next day I feel bad.  I have too many ups and downs.  I think I’m suspended from the bungee cord of life.”  (story file, 14.3.7)  And that’s what happiness feels like.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  It’s like the small child at Christmas who is ecstatic over the gift that she opens, and immediately plays with it and breaks it.  She moves quickly from ecstasy to a flood of tears.   At the root of the word happy is “hap” which means chance.  Happiness as a feeling is dependent on hap-penstance.  If what happens is good, we’re happy, if what happens is bad, we’re sad. 

            Blessedness is a kind of happiness, but it’s happiness that goes way below the surface of what’s happening at the moment.  It goes to the very core of our being and stays there.  It cannot be taken away by circumstances or change or loss.  It is a part of who we are.  It’s deep, abiding contentment that cannot be taken away.

            The question of course is, where do we get this great stuff?  Where is the factory outlet that will sell us this great product?   

            Neil Warren, the psychologist who ran the survey I mentioned earlier, says that the secret of contentment lies in discovering who in the world you are and mobilizing your courage to be that person.  (13)   So, you don’t just go out and get contentment.  You grow into it. 

And that’s what the Beatitudes are really all about.  They will lead us to that wonderful state of being called blessedness, by helping us to understand who we are, and helping us to have the courage to be that person.  The challenge is that there are a whole slew of people trying to tell us who we need to be, and trying to tell us what will make us truly happy.   The way Neil Warren says it is this:  “Life involves a battle for who’s going to be in charge of our lives.  All kinds of insecure people would like to take control of our decision making, of our very personhood.”  (10) There are of course the blatant commercialists, who try to tell us we will be happy if we buy their product, yet they are simply trying to manipulate our feelings so that we will help their profit margin.  But they are not the only ones trying to control us.  Our spouse, our kids, our friends, people we work with.  When we let others control us, they somehow feel more powerful, more secure.  But doing that robs us of who we are, who we are meant to be and keeps us from having blessed contentment.  We must strongly resist being taken over by someone else’s decisions.  Stand firmly in each moment seeking to make wise and good decisions for ourselves.

If we let circumstances or other people define who we are, then we begin to lose touch with reality. We no longer really know who we are.  It’s like what happened with two cows standing in the pasture munching grass, and one looked at the other and asked, “Have you heard about the new mad cow disease going around?”  The other cow answered, “What do I care?  I’m a helicopter.”  (story file, 14.3.7)     

Are you taking charge of your life?  Or letting the winds of change along with the whims of others make you what you are?   Remember, taking charge of your life is not the same thing as being in control of your life.  Things will happen to you that you cannot control, situations will change, you will experience loss.  But these things do not need to define who you are.  Because there are some things you can control. You can control how you respond, you can control what your attitude will be, you can control your own decisions and choices and behavior. 

Here’s where the Beatitudes can help us, if we’ll let them.  The Beatitudes are descriptions of Christian character.  They tell about the core values that Christians need to have.  We’ve talked about core values before,  so you’ll remember that core values are not simply the things we say we believe.  They are the values that we actually live by.  The Beatitudes speak of attitudes that will help us when we encounter trouble, and characteristics that we need to intentionally build into our lives.  

Over the next several weeks we are going to pick apart the Beatitudes to see what each one has to teach us, but what I want to say from the outset is that we need to swallow them whole.   It’s not like spiritual gifts, where you have gifts of teaching and someone else has gifts of encouraging, somebody else is a prophet.   Not everybody has the same gifts, no one has all the gifts.  But the Beatitudes are about character, and it’s a whole fabric, not just a remnant.  Those who mourn, the poor in spirit, the peacemakers are not several different people.  They all describe various aspects of the Christian life for all of us. 

The core values in the Beatitudes lead us to contentment.  They also pull us against the grain of what the world teaches.  In the Beatitudes we discover that Jesus is calling us to an alternative lifestyle.  The world we live in does not agree with him that the meek are blessed, for instance.  The world does not tend to treat peacemakers kindly.  We will need to work hard to understand how to embrace these character qualities in the face of the great pressure that is exerted on us from all sides.  It will not be easy.  Nor will it be a quick fix. 

            In fact it’s going to be an impossible task if we try to achieve it on our own.  You probably already know this from experience.  For, while most of us really want this deep and abiding sense of contentment, what we pursue is often something very different altogether.   That’s because we are happiness addicts.  And it’s so easy to get a fix instead of working toward real contentment. 

            People who are addicted to happiness can’t see below the surface reality.  Or perhaps they don’t want to.

            A flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles made an unscheduled stop in Sacramento, and the pilot told the passengers that they could get out and stretch their legs while waiting for the plane to be ready to take off again.  On this flight was a blind man, with his Seeing Eye dog.   The pilot, came to the man and said, “Keith, we’re in Sacramento for almost an hour, would you like to get up and stretch your legs?”  Keith said, no he was fine but maybe his dog would like to stretch his legs.  So, the pilot, who happened to be wearing dark glasses, took the Seeing Eye dog off the plane and walked into the airport.  There was a sudden hush among the people in the gate area when they looked up and saw this pilot, wearing dark glasses with a seeing eye dog.  People scattered.  They not only tried to change planes, they also tried to change airlines.  (story file, 15.11.1) 

            So often we are like the people who thought they saw a blind pilot.  We only see what is happening on the surface, and we don’t like it.  So, we run from our pain, our fear, our loss. 

            The Beatitudes will allow no such thing.   They will not fix the surface realities so that we can feel happy.  They will take us through the pain, through the fear, through the loss, all the way to blessed contentment.