Micah 6:6-8
Saint Matthew 5:1-12
Saint Matthew 5:1-12
If you work in a community where the civic mantra is: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” and you are the quarterback of the hometown team that lost their last game by 17 points you might want to lay low for a while. That is what I would advise Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers if he had asked me.
He did not.
Instead he went on his girlfriend’s podcast and took a private family squabble public. Apparently, the rift was over (You guessed it!) religion. If you guessed correctly don’t let it go to your head. There were really only two choices for a famous family squabble that boils over into the press – religion or politics – so you had a 50/50 chance of being right.
Here is what Rodgers said in rejecting the faith of his family.
“”Religion can be a crutch," Rodgers said. "It can be something that people have to have to make themselves feel better because it’s set up binary. I don’t know how you can believe in a God who wants to condemn most of the planet to a fiery hell,” Rodgers went on. “What type of loving, sensitive, omnipresent, omnipotent being wants to condemn his beautiful creation to a fiery hell at the end of all this?”"1
I was a little puzzled reading that. Who is he what he talking about? What made him believe that the life of faith only offered the choice between black and white, right on wrong, and that there were no grey areas? Where did he learn that faith was like football where there had to be a winning team and a losing team? What caused him to think that God only liked winners and rejected losers?
Why would he think less of God than he does Packers fans who no matter what the score of the NFC Championship game will still be there next year not only cheering them on but, if it snows, shoveling out the stadium for $12 an hour.
Rodgers may have things backwards for what he is articulating is not the way of God but the common wisdom of this age.
“Blessed are those who have lots of money in the bank, for they will be free from worry.” “Blessed are those who keep looking over their shoulder watching their rear, for nobody will ever get the jump on them.” These are little everyday statements about the way things work in the real world.2
Those are the mantras of those who don’t need to use religion as a crutch because they are winners! Jesus doesn’t seem to be talking to them. He is talking to the rest of us who know in one way or another that we need something more in our lives and desire, deep down in our hearts, to be blessed.
Don’t think just about those disciples on the mountaintop or the crowds that gathered to hear these words for the first time think about how we are hearing them just now.
Then and now, those who stand out as heros of their own destiny take the bull by the horns and let nothing or no one stand in their way. Who you are as a person really does not matter as long as you get the job done – unless you are one of Jesus’ disciples. The "nature and character of true discipleship [is] radical and thoroughly contrary to the values that seem to galvanize our imaginations and, often, our lives.”3
Every sermon and commentary I have read this week has mentioned how the word “Blessed” can be translated. The Greek word makarioi can mean blessed, peaceful, happy, but it really means something much more deep than those emotions. “Rather than happiness in a mundane sense it refers to the deep inner joy who have long awaited the salvation promised by God.”4
Have you seen much of that around lately?
One of the things I’ve noticed this past week is what a joyless town our nation’s capital is. This joylessness is a bipartisan thing. The face on the screen is always angry and the faces that surround them are usually scowling. Somebody is always enraged about something.
Gone are the days of the energy of Theodore Roosevelt or the optimism expressed in darker times than these of his cousin, Franklin. The “happy warrior” attitude of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey is gone as is the idealism of President Reagan. Joy can be a bipartisan thing too.
When we allow our divisions to get in the way all sense of inner peace is gone. That is what is happening to the Rodger’s family, our nation, and even Saint Paul’s church in Corinth.
First Church Corinth was a troubled place. These folks could fight over everything! They fought over big stuff and little stuff. They had big community dinners before the Eucharist where some ate so much there wasn’t anything left over for others and some even got tipsy. They bragged about who baptized them. Was it Pastor Cephas? Or Pastor Paul? They even fought over whether women’s head should or should not be covered in church!
It clearly wasn’t a positive place and my guess is that when they talked about their fellowship the conversation was not uplifting. I’m sure very few people went away thinking to themselves, “I really want to get involved there.” More likely they backed off wondering, “Why would anybody want to be a part of that?
Before I settled down here I did pulpit supply which is how our relationship got started. It was great fun and very revelatory because there was always one person in the congregation who couldn’t think of one kind thing to say about the place.
I enjoyed preaching at one church which was near my house. The pastor was doing a great job, the music was excellent, and the people were really cool, except for one woman.
She waylaid me the minute I got in the building as was greeting people with my usual: “Hi! I’m Dave! I’ll be your pastor du jour today!”
She couldn’t wait to tell me that the best days of that church were far behind them. Most of all, the woman didn’t like what “she” (meaning the pastor) had done to their chapel.
(By the way, clergy can always tell when they are dealing with an unhappy member of the laity because they forget our names and only refer to us in the third person.)
Then she added: “This church will never be like on the day when the King of Sweden visited. The church was packed! The streets were crowded! There were lines around the block!”
While I was over this conversation that had turned into a diatribe I went away wondering when the King of Sweden made his grand appearance. As with everything else I “Googled” it and it turns out that His Majesty Carl Gustaf XVI was in Chicago in1967 to celebrate the opening of the Swedish American Museum on Clark Street in the Andersonville neighborhood. “1967!” I yelped, “That was over a half-a-century ago!”
The last good thing this woman could say about her church happened four-score-and-ten years ago!
This lead me to wonder how I tell stories about the church. When I talk about the church do I only talk about the things that have gone wrong?
When I am sharing memories with others — especially with others who are unchurched – do I speak about the good things we are doing or is the only story that they hear is the one of the time somebody said something to someone and they walked out never to return again?
Are my words about the tough times or the good times?
Do my words hurt the body of Christ or do they heal it?
And, what is most important, Saint Paul would remind us as individuals do my words help or hurt the team.
This is something that Aaron Rodgers can relate too. It is certainly something that every sports fan can relate to especially on Super Bowl Sunday. To give Saint Paul’s metaphor a modern spin. No quarterback would say to an offensive lineman, “I have no need of you.” He would be pulverized on the next down!
No member of the defense would say we have no need of a good offence. It’s hard to win a football game when you have scored nothing!
No member of the offence would belittle the efforts of a defense. And, as every Bears fan knows, no team should try to do without a good field goal specialist.
No, every good team like every church, has to realize that we need each other. We are all a part of this body of believers that the Spirit of God has called together in this place. We are all a part of that group of people who knows our weakness and come here out of a hunger and thirst for God’s presence.
We are like those people who first heard these words come from Jesus’ lips. We all long to be blessed with the sense of deep joy, satisfaction, shalom that God can give.
It comes when we realized that as a church, as a nation, as families we need to stick together. Enough tough times will come our way without our creating more.
We all have troubles and troubles to spare without exploiting the shortcomings of one another. There have been dark moments in all of our lives but if we keep returning to them, rehearsing and rehashing them, then the darkness just might close in all around us.
Even so, even with all of poor choices we are known to make, Jesus calls to live as one of the blessed. And a good way to start would be to see each other as part of God’s team whose motto is as old as the words of the profit.
For us, winning is not the only thing! The only thing that matters is that we “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”
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1. Kelsey Driscoll, “Aaron Rodgers's Comments on Religion 'Hurtful' to Estranged Family: 'Basically a Slap in the Face'.” AOL.com. AOL, January 23, 2020. https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/01/23/aaron-rodgerss-comments-on-religion-hurtful-to-estranged-family-basically-a-slap-in-the-face/23907363/.
2. William Willimon, “On the Way to a New World.” Pulpit Resource 30, no. 1 (January, February, March 2002): 21–24.
3. Christopher Holmes T., “St. Matthew 5:1-12. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture.” In Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, 1:223–24. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2019.
4. Donald A. Hagner, Matthew (2-volume Set---33a and 33b). Vol. 33a. (Grand Rapids, , Mi: Zondervan, 2017.) p. 95.
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