Russell Wilson,
the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, created a minor stir this
week—nothing as serious as deflated footballs, mind you, but a minor stir
nonetheless—when he said that God prepared his team to win, that God wanted him
to go back to the Super Bowl, and that this is “my season for Grace &
Favor.” This is about as normal as sports clichés get, but, given our focus on
the Beatitudes this week, I felt like maybe it’s the perfect intro into
blessing.
Blessed are the
poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the
merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted and the reviled. That’s
a pretty long way from “Blessed are the Seahawks.”
For those of you
who attended the event at Maria on Wednesday where Ben Hylden spoke about his
experience I’m going to expand on some of the themes he talked about, but you
should all know a little of the story. Ben was a high-schooler who was an
athlete first, and a family member and Christian far after that, until a
terrible accident and the repercussions of it pushed his life in an entirely
different direction. One of the moments that hit me in his talk was when he
decided he was done playing basketball, which was a decision he made not
because he absolutely could not play anymore but because it just wasn’t worth
the risk. He felt that God did not save him from his accident to play
basketball, but for something much better.
Now, there’s
nothing wrong with giving God credit for what we have or what we achieve, but
there is a subtle line between doing that out of humility and doing it out of a
different kind of arrogance—a Christian kind of arrogance that transforms the
language of “I did this because I’m great” into “I did this because of my great
faith”—and Russell Wilson’s comments probably strayed somewhere in that latter
direction. So people rightly bristled. It’s a question of humility. To be
humble requires more than giving God credit with your words, since that can be
just as arrogant as claiming credit yourself. To imply that God blessed me because of my faith and
because of my hard work is a humble brag par excellence.
Jesus proclaims that
the meek and the poor and the merciful are
blessed; not that they will be blessed in the end but that in their very nature
of living out humility they are blessed by it. It’s not that the poor receive
wealth, or that God is going to bless them by changing their situation; it’s
that the suffering they endure in this world is mirrored by a divine reality
where everything is flipped upside down. Blessed are you when you are
persecuted, when you mourn, when you are lying half-dead in a ditch, because
God can do something with a person half-dead; a person who understands their ultimate
limitations, a person who understands it’s not about them. A good deal of the
draw of Ben Hylden’s message was that image of him lying half-dead in the
field, that juxtaposition of an athlete with all the physical tools to achieve
great things against the harshness of a world where our bodies are vulnerable,
where all things will someday come to an end, and for some it happens more
immediately than anybody would expect. That strange paradox is where Christianity
finds its home, because it’s not the great things we do that define us but the
great things God does through those who are the least, the last, the littlest,
the lost, the lonely, and the dead.[1]
It’s one thing to
tell a story about a great team who has all the advantages. It’s another to
talk about underdogs—David vs. Goliath or the Miracle on Ice. But both of those
are still just stories about achievement—expected or unexpected. The story that
matters above all else is more an underdog story; it is a story of death and
resurrection. Ben’s story was about more than healing; at times it felt like he
was only an underdog who defied odds, but then he would come back to a place
that was deeper and more soulful. To be a Christian is not to overcome
impossible odds; it’s to die and rise again.
So the meek are
blessed in their meekness; the poor blessed in their poverty; because each of
them is closer to the knowledge of their complete dependence on something
greater than themselves. The more you turn away from accolades not because it’s
the “right” thing to do but because humility is itself a blessing, the more you
discover that Jesus knew what he was talking about. You keep your mouth shut
not only because people don’t want to hear you talk about yourself; you also keep
your achievements to yourself because the moment you open your mouth you admit
your dependence on a thing that will only disappoint. Your achievements will
come to an end, and if you live so deeply in that world that it’s the most
important thing, then all you have left when it is gone is to look back on the
glory days, wishing they could return. But it’s all a shell of a real thing.
None of it is fulfilling.
It’s
difficult to explain, especially to young people, that the happiest day of your
life is not the most important. Understanding that distinction takes
wisdom. Whether it’s a wedding or a state championship, or even the birth of a
child, it’s not happiness that persists; it’s something much deeper. Most of
our cultural messages tend toward the idea that happiness is what we’re after,
but the honest truth is that happiness is not enough. Underdog stories are not
enough. It’s not even enough to give God credit openly for our achievements,
because there is a part of us that will always do even that with a kind of
selfishness and arrogance.
Blessed are the
meek in their meekness… for they will inherit the earth.
Have you ever
stopped to think about that? The meek will inherit the earth. Garrison Keillor
is fond of saying that, yes, the meek will inherit the earth, but so far all
they’ve got is Minnesota and North Dakota. But even here we elect people
who we see as strong figures, and we bemoan our terrible sports franchises, and
we complain about the ways the economy is not serving us in particular, and we
just generally do all sorts of things that show we are more than meek. It is incredibly
difficult to imagine a world inherited by the meek. Every time a politician
admits he or she doesn’t know they get lambasted for lacking decisiveness. We expect
our leaders to play the game, pretending they know everything, feigning
strength. Humility is weakness. Meekness is the opposite of what you want in a
leader.
This is part of
what the temple elite hated in Jesus. This wasn’t the vision they had for a
Messiah either. But the key is in that phrase “they will inherit the earth.”
What does Jesus mean? Will the meek take over from the proud and the strong? Will
the way everybody thinks about power change? I don’t think so. See, throughout
the Beatitudes Jesus is painting a wider picture. He says “their reward is
great in heaven,” which we tend to interpret as “they will one day go to
heaven” but, in the context of Jesus’ victory over death, what it more likely
means is that the one who reigns over heaven—in other words, God—values
humility over pride and meekness over arrogance. After all, the meek will
inherit the earth; not only a spiritual reward but a physical one, a tangible
one.
Here, early in his
ministry, Jesus is setting the table for a different kind of vision. He is
coming not to remove us from the world but to cleanse the world from this
veneer we call sin. He isn’t coming to take us up to heaven; he’s coming to
bring heaven down to us. He’s going to do this on the cross, and then he’s
going to do it again when the world is over, and then—right then—it will be the
meek who rule. It will be the humble, and those who are mourning, and those who
are persecuted—the bullied, the friendless, the people we scoff at. They are
given the new heaven and the new earth. They are the ones who reign in the
place that Ben Hylden described; that deeper reality that is here with us. It’s
not that this is only a someday promise. It’s also a today promise. We need not
look forward to the end of the world, looking for signs and heavenly portents.
It is here all around us in this thing we call living. Your end of the world may be coming today, or tomorrow, but
it is most assuredly coming.
So what to do?
What to do?
Well, Jesus says
to repent, which is the ultimate act of humility. It’s taking a good long look
at yourself and admitting all the ways that you don’t add up. It’s imagining
yourself lying half-dead in a ditch and thinking, “I could have done so much
more. I could have been a better son or daughter, parent, Christian…”—you name
it. It doesn’t take so dramatic a moment. It shouldn’t. But we live our lives
mostly in the world of efficiency where we are measured by what we achieve and
quantified by statistics. Meekness and humility have little place there. So,
like Russell Wilson, we bring God into our achievements; we attempt to live our
faith in that world of prestige, but it ends up sounding hollow. Worse still,
it sometimes sounds like braggadocio.
This isn’t an
underdog story. You didn’t achieve things because of your faith. God doesn’t
influence football games, or test scores—at least not because God likes to
favor people with strong faith. Instead, this is a resurrection story. God
takes those who are dead—the losers—and transforms the rules of the game. So,
the honest truth: if you want to hear about God those reporters should be
talking to the losers, but not the Packers. Not even the Vikings (though that
would be getting closer). No, they should go to the ones who don’t even make
the team, who fail at the game entirely. They’re the ones who must tell us
about God’s work in the world. But we mostly don’t ask: they make us feel
ashamed and uncomfortable. They might say things we don’t like. They might
question what is most important.
Maybe it’s not
winning. Maybe it’s not happiness. Maybe it’s meekness and humility. And maybe
those who have it and do succeed will never tell us about it, so maybe we’ll
never hear that story. They won’t claim to be an underdog, because they know
it’s not enough. We’ll never know they were dead but now live. That’s why Jesus
had to say it for us: Winning? You think that’s it? No. Blessed are the meek,
the reviled, the ones lying half-dead in a ditch, because Jesus is coming. The
rules of the game are flipped. More than underdogs, we are dead. Stone-cold
dead. And if you believe that there is a promise to the dead, then we can start
talking about what it means to win.
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