I want to talk with you
today for, oh, about fifteen minutes, on what it means to be blessed, because,
well, that’s what Psalm 128 is about.
“Happy
is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways// You shall eat the
fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well
with you” (Ps 128:1-2). OK, good start.
Fear the Lord and we will be happy.
“Your wife
will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like
olive shoots around your table.” Even better, follow the laws and you’ll
have a fruitful wife and children six feet tall at the least. And so it
continues with the blessing of children and, in turn, security, because that’s
what children were for life in that ancient world (and perhaps it isn’t so
different today). Walk in the way of the Lord and you will have these things.
OK, that’s a good starting point.
But scripture doesn’t end with the Psalms. In fact, the Bible actually offers
us two competing visions of blessedness. One is this idea found throughout the
Old Testament that good things come to those who are faithful—children, long
life, a beautiful spouse, the star on the basketball team; those kinds of
things. Bad things, therefore, come to those who are unfaithful—defeat, death,
eternal damnation. Even the counterpoint to this in the Old Testament—the book
of Job—which goes out of its way to show how ridiculous it is to blame sin for
bad things happening, ends the story by restoring to Job all the things he
lost, as if a new and better wife and kids makes up for the loss of his first.
This is how the Old Testament deals with blessing and it is limited.
We don’t really know how limited it
is, however, until Jesus appears on the scene and shows us a better kind of
blessedness. There’s this story in the Gospels, perhaps you remember it, where
Jesus is walking by a man born blind when his disciples ask him, “Rabbi, who
sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). What they
are really asking is: Jesus, on what can we pin this curse? So, it is with
great astonishment that Jesus responds in a way that does not honor the
blessed-cursed mentality we find in Psalm 128. Instead, Jesus says, “Neither
this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be
revealed in him.” (John 9:3). Then, Jesus does something that I wish he didn’t
do. Now, that’s awfully high and mighty of me because what I want Jesus to do
doesn’t count for a hill of beans, but I confess I still feel this way. I wish
Jesus didn’t heal the man from his blindness. He did. He told him to go and
wash in the pool of Siloam, and the man goes, does as he is told, and comes
back with his vision restored. But I wish this wasn’t the case because the
all-to-easy implication is that his blindness was still the product of some
cursedness and it is only in the physical healing of his sight that he becomes
blessed.
I don’t think this is true—and I
don’t think Jesus would agree with this interpretation either—because this
chapter, John 9, goes back and forth between speaking of physical blindness and
spiritual blindness until you’re not really sure which kind Jesus is talking
about anymore. As if, perhaps (wink, wink), what we consider physical and what
we consider spiritual are part of the same continuous fabric that encompasses
all of life. Finally, at the end of chapter 9, we have one of the most
underrated, powerful lines in all of scripture. “Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those
who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the
Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are
we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now
that you say, “We see”, your sin remains” (John 9:39-41).
OK,
that was a long tangent into John 9, but what I wanted to demonstrate is that
Jesus changes our focus from blessings and curses being earthy physical things
like eyes, and children, and land, to a more holistic, but no less earthy,
understanding of blessing as a state of being—what we might call “faith.” Jesus
changes our perspective from blessing as family and wealth and land to blessing
as faith. This Old Testament promise that the faithful will have children and
security is not negated by Jesus Christ; instead, it is perfected, so that even
if you are unable to have children, and even if your life is taken from you,
your faith blesses you with eternal life. This is critical, because of the
witness of the apostles and the other teachers of the faith. 11 of the 12
disciples, plus Matthias who replaced Judas, were killed for their faith. This
is not the kind of blessing of Psalm 128, but, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said,
“When Christ calls a person [man], he bids him come and die.”
So,
when Jesus embodies and combines the spiritual and the physical it is not
because the spiritual is preferable to the physical; it is that the spiritual perfects the physical. It’s not physical
seeing that is the Pharisees problem; it is the fact that they trust their
sight more than they trust their faith. And so it is for all of us today. It’s much easier to live as if our faith is of no
great importance, as if it is just another of the hundreds of things that makes
me me, and that philosophy works really well for those who have much because we
don’t have existential crises on a regular basis. But, eventually, you might;
in fact, you probably will. Something will happen: a loved one will die, your
marriage will fall apart, you will become addicted to something, or you will
face your own immanent mortality; and your default may be to fall back on the
blessing-cursing dynamic that pervades the Psalms because following Jesus is
much harder. So, you will ask questions like, “How can a loving God have
allowed this to happen to me?” or “What did I do to deserve this?” And of
course the answer is Nothing … but also
everything. You are a sinful creature from before you had your first
thought. You are perfectly imperfect. But up until now you haven’t cared enough
to consider your need of a Savior because that God that you held so tenuously
was conveniently supporting you in your comfort and security.
So,
now that the muck has hit the fan you are forced to abandon your false
narrative of a God who blesses you because you are such a good little boy or
girl, and then the worst tragedy happens, which is that too many decide that
the real narrative then must be that God is impotent, cruel, or not real.
I
want to be clear on why this matters. If you believe that God blesses you
because of how good you are you are completely right, but if you believe that
that blessing comes apart from dying, then you are completely on the wrong
track. This is perhaps the most dangerous belief in our exceedingly comfortable
world, because it leads us to isolate ourselves from every bad thing lest we
fall into the cursed realm of godlessness. This is the ideology that separates
us from the blind and the lame and the poor; this is the ideology that allows
us to believe we are spiritually, emotionally, and physically superior; this is
the ideology by which we slowly abandon our God for the god of me; this is the
ideology that is leading Christians into the worst possible place, which is not
resentment of the faith but apathy toward it. “Yeah, there’s a God,” we might
say, “As long as God doesn’t get in the way of me living my life.”
Who
could have guessed that Psalm 128 was so dangerous? You don’t hear me preach
much about the dangers of specific sins, because, unlike the generations of
church leaders before me, I’m not so terribly worried about dancing or playing
cards or loud music or even some of the vices that I do believe separate us
from God. I’m not so terribly concerned about those things because they are
like specks compared to the massive beast of apathy that is picking people off
one-by-one and leaving us with a church that is forever battening down the
hatches and retreating inward. It is sin that is killing our church but it’s a
much less sexy sin than the things my forebears preached against; it’s sin that
whispers that I am deserving, that I am all I need, and then, when the world
shows me otherwise, how dare my God
not give me what I deserve!
Never
mind that to get to this point a person has to stop believing in the God in the
form of Jesus Christ, who calls still, “Come and die.”
Sometimes
I think we need a revolution, because so many of us who are charged with
pastoring churches are sick and tired of hearing people grumble about things on
the periphery. This is not just happening here, and probably it’s no worse here
than other places, better even than many, but other places are not the standard
to which we hold ourselves. The standard is this call from Jesus: Come and die.
Yet, we’re worried about whether so-and-so is respectable enough to be part of
our church? Jesus bids us come and die, and we’re worried about whether our
church building is immaculate enough for visitors? Jesus bids us come and die,
and we’re worried about … fill in the blank.
I
recently had somebody ask me, in reflecting upon the future of Confirmation in
the church, what is the number one thing that I want from a person who is
confirmed into membership in the church. It took me some time to reflect on
what my answer would be, but then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I want
commitment. And I think that’s what Jesus wants, too. I don’t care much about
knowledge; I don’t care if you can pass a test. I don’t even care as much about
attendance in worship or going on mission trips or staying in touch with Sam or
me on a regular basis. What I want more than anything from members of the
church—and what I truly believe Jesus wants from all of us—is that we answer
the question, “Will you come and die?” with a resounding “Yes!”
Yes!
I will come and die to my belief that I am deserving of all the blessings I’ve
been given.
Yes!
I will come and die to the idea that I am a person who others should look up
to.
Yes!
I will come and die to the need to look to others for approval.
Yes!
I will come and die to the belief that others are less worthy than me.
Yes!
I will come and die to my wants and see what God would have me do.
Yes!
I will come and die physically—dead in the ground or scattered on the wind—and
that will be my testimony, not that I lived a great life, but that God in Jesus
Christ lived through me.
Yes!
That is what it means to be a Christ-follower.
Yes!
Yes! Yes!
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