Matthew 5:1-12
As we moved toward this day of remembrance, 2020, I did a little personal remembrance, looking back on this year. Where have we come from in 2020?
About a year ago, in the last couple of months of 2019, I was feeling a sort of restlessness, a sense that something was burgeoning, getting ready to be born. As the world turned to a new calendar year, I felt there was light right around the corner.
I remembered that way back in the beginning of this year I was very conscious of what 2020 means to us. 2020 is perfect vision. I began this year thinking about that and with the intention of making 2020 a year of seeing clearly. To me this meant a kind of spiritual clarity. I was drawn to the idea of seeing where and what God is calling us to. What is God drawing us into?
On the first Sunday of this year, Epiphany Sunday, I said to you: Get ready to have your world rocked.
That was January. Then, a very short time later, the pandemic hit us and rocked us off our feet. At first it didn’t seem like much, but then we watched the numbers increase exponentially. The numbers of cases rising, the numbers of hospital beds filling, the numbers of the dead going well beyond anything we thought was possible in our modern scientific world. A world where we rely on immunizations and antibiotics and a vast array of pharmaceuticals to address most any problem. Here we had nothing.
Everything we thought we knew, thought we could count on, was up for question. Our world was rocked. But where was the light?
This text we read today from Matthew, the beatitudes, we are hearing for the third time this year. It comes up pretty often – if not this text then Luke’s version of it. Yet, no matter how many times we hear these words they sound strange to us –that is because they are strange to us. And yet, there are moments these words seem most appropriate to the occasion. Sometimes, rarely, we see these words of blessing in human form. We see them lived out. Once in a while, we see someone whose words and actions say: this is what the beatitudes mean. Watch what I do and understand.
Jesus was one such person, of course. He was the living and breathing model of the beatitudes. His life gave blessing to the meek, the mourning, the hungry and thirsty, the persecuted. He showed us this new way of seeing the world, a new way of being in the world – our world – a world wracked by pain.
It has been a year of grieving for us. 2020 has indeed rocked our world, not in any way we expected. My intention I set at the beginning of the year about seeking clarity of vision got very muddled. Suddenly, I had no time for meditations on spiritual clarity. I was reading and videoconferencing and phoning to figure out how to make the adjustments we needed to make.
Suddenly we were all isolated and afraid. Where was the light? We were living in a world overshadowed by death, thrown off balance, trying to learn how to do everything a new way, exhausted by the effort.
We were facing all kinds of grief. The grief of being separated from our family members because we couldn’t travel or because we all wanted to protect one another from the risk of spreading this virus. We were facing the grief of being separated from our friends because state restrictions mandated that we stay home except for essential outings.
We were facing the grief of having loved ones in nursing homes or assisted-living, and unable to visit them. Some were unable to comprehend all of it, not knowing why their family didn’t come anymore. There were the ones who were hospitalized with sickness or surgery, and our grief over being unable to sit with them, pray with them. In the worst cases, being far away knowing that a loved one was dying alone, making that sacred journey with perhaps a stranger by their side, perhaps no one.
And there was grief, all kinds of grief.
At first, we thought this would end soon, because we didn’t know how to imagine something like this stretching into the future without an end point. We had not lived through a plague before. We thought we could endure it if we had to, because God will give us the resources to get through it, but surely things would soon get better. Things would return to normal.
But, as you know if you have experienced loss before, on the other side of grief you don’t find a return to normal. Once you have passed through grief, you are in a new land, and need to learn how to live in this new land.
As we look back on the year, we have passed through we see that there has been much heartache. Some of us have grieved the loss of loved ones. All of us have mourned the loss of life as we knew it. Our world has been turned upside down. We cannot simply set it right again because we are seeing a change from the way things once were to a new way which has yet to fully emerge.
A new way that we can’t quite see yet what it will be.
To a certain degree it is our choice. We didn’t choose this pandemic. Who would? And I don’t believe God chose it for us. It is too cruel to believe that. But we remember that it is always in the cruelest, the hardest, most agonizing circumstances that God is with us most powerfully. When we are in the depths of grief, we may feel God’s gentle strength pulling us back to life. When our world is rocked to its core, God will offer us new vision to begin to see things in a new way. The choice is whether to accept this new vision.
Are you willing to receive this?
In this new way of seeing, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In this new way of living, blessed are the ones who mourn for they will be comforted. In the wreckage of this last gasp of the former ways of the world, on the threshold of newness, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.
The words of the beatitudes are not a promise to make things better, but they are a statement of how things are in the realm of God. How things are if only we can see it.
Go forward, beloved, into the new day that God has given us. Grieve as you must; mourn what you have lost but know that ahead of us is life. Do not be afraid of what is ahead, for God does not let us go alone. Let us follow Christ into this new way of seeing and living in the world.
