Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields:
Jun 05, 2022 |
Beatitudes for Pride
| The Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson
Beatitudes for Pride
Hear from the Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson preaching for our Pride Evensong service.
Today's readings are:
Psalm 150
Romans 12:9-18
Matthew 5:1-12
From the Gospel of Matthew this evening we have been given the beatitudes from the great Sermon on the Mount. I love the Sermon on the Mount. Everybody loves the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if we aren’t careful, many of us have heard the Sermon so many times that it can almost sound like an abstract checklist to us: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. It can sound like we are hearing a set of policy statements by Jesus, or a set of ideas, or worse yet hearing a politician’s list of talking points.
Sometimes, to escape that deadening familiarity, I like to try to imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to look out at those who were listening to him speak, and what it must have felt like for them to listen to him and meet his eye. Catching the eye of Jesus as he says “Blessed are those who mourn” is just a fundamentally different experience than hearing Jesus’s abstract ideas about mourning or about seeking righteousness.
To be in that group around Jesus listening, with the disciples or with the crowd from which he has just come, is to have, I think, a deep experience of one’s own blessedness. And I have to believe that Jesus spoke these words not to make an impression on his disciples, not to teach someone a lesson, but because he was moved by the grace and the beauty of those people he loved. In their awkwardness and in their folly and in their hunger, he loved them. He spoke from his heart. He didn’t so much explain to them that they were blessed. He blessed them deeply in that moment.
It seems possible to me, too, that Jesus was moved to narrate his own experience here as one who was himself outcast and downtrodden. I think he saw himself in the eyes of the poor and the lowly. He told us that if we were looking for him, that’s where we would find him. So we could think of the beatitudes as a kind of homecoming for Jesus, a moment in which he himself is resting in love, at rest right in the place where he belongs. You are blessed, he says to them, and in that moment he is one with them just as he is one with God. I can almost imagine that this moment of homecoming and belonging gave him a vast sense of patience. His vision of us from high on that mountain is maybe part of what allows him to let us be who we are, let us take our time coming to him. He sees the blessedness we can’t begin yet to express ourselves.
It's a paradox, but probably not an accident, that the ways of being that Jesus describes in this sermon on the mount can be ways of getting cut off from other people. Poverty of spirit, like physical poverty, can make you excluded from systems of justice, isolated in grief, everyone around you speaking evil of you and persecuting you for no reason. Or you are forgotten: too meek to push your way to the front of the line, looking to make peace where all is war and destruction and peace is just a laughable afterthought, dismissed from the beginning as a peacemaker. Trying to practice mercy in a merciless environment. What friends do you have? Jesus recognizes himself I think in this awful isolation. that threatens us at every moment.
There he is, the very love of God incarnate, one day to be executed like a criminal and abandoned by his friends. Jesus knows about isolation and exile, and he knows that there is a particular beauty, a particular healing, in looking into the eyes of the poor and the meek and those who long for justice, and being one with them. Knowing that in his gaze they are one with God, that he is the meeting place between human frailty and divine life.
The awful isolation to which we willingly subject an outsider is just swept away in his loving gaze. The doors open and the walls come tumbling down.
Now that loving gaze that we feel coming from Jesus is also the gaze of the church if we are really being the church. That knowing look of union is the church’s work. It’s one way to describe what the sacraments and the word of God and the life of the church are all doing: they are teaching the world its blessedness in the eyes of God. The church is gazing on all who suffer, on all who are cast out, with the eyes of Jesus, teaching all of us our blessedness, our beauty, our pride.
That’s the work of the church. Sadly, there are at least two things we know about this work of the church, we in the LGBTQ+ community. One: we know that the church is shockingly broken, shockingly unable to show us our beauty. Yes, the Episcopal Church has, after a lengthy controversy, and with some wonderful leadership, come around to a place of witness, and we can be grateful for that and for the good work of other denominations. It feels so good to gather like this.
But it has to be said that as a whole church, as Christians, as the body of Christ throughout the world, as the historical bearers of the word and the sacraments, we are still much more apt to trample on a queer or transgender kid than we are to mirror their great beauty. We still represent a faith that doesn’t want to see itself in that particular form of lowliness. It would be so much easier for the average Christian to imagine that a young transgender person doesn’t exist than to look and see ourselves in them. And a certain number of Christians will go to great lengthas to make it clear that transgender kids need not exist. Christians are still refusing that vision. Or worse, Christians are deliberately and often cynically targeting the queer and trans communities for persecution.
So that’s the first thing we know in our communities: how the Church is broken. The second thing we know is that as queer, non-binary, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, gay, and allied people we are and have long been a powerful force that calls the Church simply to become itself. We are here, we have argued, we are queer, we are fabulous. We are much more than a subgroup or the latest in a long line of “issues” to be faced. We are not a theological dispute.
We are a mirror in which Jesus sees himself reflected. Who needs to be more beautiful than that? Jesus sees himself in our vulnerability, in our growing fear of isolation and persecution. Whenever we are targeted Jesus sees himself. When we mourn, when we thirst for justice. When jobs and relationships and wedding cakes and safe housing and acknowledgement in the classroom and basic human respect are unavailable to us because we are just too queer. In those times—and yes, those times are now—in those times we are bright reflections of the blessed face of Jesus. And if the church wants to know Jesus, the church needs to know us. Never forget it: if the church wants to be the church it must know you.
Of course the sorrow of missing out on that wonderful exchange of blessing doesn’t stop with just us and Jesus. We know that it’s not just us. We know that there are injuries from wealth and poverty and colonialism, harm done by categories of race and ability, forms of brutal discrimination all around and also everywhere within our own communities--intersecting and overlapping and sometimes competing ways that we just refuse to see Jesus where he sees himself. And yes, we know about the violence in our streets and the rot in our government and the constant dread about the future.
But on a day like this, when we can gather in pride and love, when we can hear ourselves described as blessed and we can believe it for a moment, when St. Martin’s throws its doors open and declares that you and I belong here--that’s when we know that we have a powerful gift to share with the church and with the world.
That look of love that Jesus casts on us, knowing that look, is something we have to offer to other Christians. To come here today to celebrate our pride by praising God with prayer and music and community is to start some very good work in the world. We are here together this evening learning how to do the work of the church, how to turn to the world like Jesus does, how to catch the eye of the one who needs to be seen, how to recognize Jesus in that one, and how to say it over and over in a loving exchange:
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
Amen.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
Psalm 150
Romans 12:9-18
Matthew 5:1-12
From the Gospel of Matthew this evening we have been given the beatitudes from the great Sermon on the Mount. I love the Sermon on the Mount. Everybody loves the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if we aren’t careful, many of us have heard the Sermon so many times that it can almost sound like an abstract checklist to us: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. It can sound like we are hearing a set of policy statements by Jesus, or a set of ideas, or worse yet hearing a politician’s list of talking points.
Sometimes, to escape that deadening familiarity, I like to try to imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to look out at those who were listening to him speak, and what it must have felt like for them to listen to him and meet his eye. Catching the eye of Jesus as he says “Blessed are those who mourn” is just a fundamentally different experience than hearing Jesus’s abstract ideas about mourning or about seeking righteousness.
To be in that group around Jesus listening, with the disciples or with the crowd from which he has just come, is to have, I think, a deep experience of one’s own blessedness. And I have to believe that Jesus spoke these words not to make an impression on his disciples, not to teach someone a lesson, but because he was moved by the grace and the beauty of those people he loved. In their awkwardness and in their folly and in their hunger, he loved them. He spoke from his heart. He didn’t so much explain to them that they were blessed. He blessed them deeply in that moment.
It seems possible to me, too, that Jesus was moved to narrate his own experience here as one who was himself outcast and downtrodden. I think he saw himself in the eyes of the poor and the lowly. He told us that if we were looking for him, that’s where we would find him. So we could think of the beatitudes as a kind of homecoming for Jesus, a moment in which he himself is resting in love, at rest right in the place where he belongs. You are blessed, he says to them, and in that moment he is one with them just as he is one with God. I can almost imagine that this moment of homecoming and belonging gave him a vast sense of patience. His vision of us from high on that mountain is maybe part of what allows him to let us be who we are, let us take our time coming to him. He sees the blessedness we can’t begin yet to express ourselves.
It's a paradox, but probably not an accident, that the ways of being that Jesus describes in this sermon on the mount can be ways of getting cut off from other people. Poverty of spirit, like physical poverty, can make you excluded from systems of justice, isolated in grief, everyone around you speaking evil of you and persecuting you for no reason. Or you are forgotten: too meek to push your way to the front of the line, looking to make peace where all is war and destruction and peace is just a laughable afterthought, dismissed from the beginning as a peacemaker. Trying to practice mercy in a merciless environment. What friends do you have? Jesus recognizes himself I think in this awful isolation. that threatens us at every moment.
There he is, the very love of God incarnate, one day to be executed like a criminal and abandoned by his friends. Jesus knows about isolation and exile, and he knows that there is a particular beauty, a particular healing, in looking into the eyes of the poor and the meek and those who long for justice, and being one with them. Knowing that in his gaze they are one with God, that he is the meeting place between human frailty and divine life.
The awful isolation to which we willingly subject an outsider is just swept away in his loving gaze. The doors open and the walls come tumbling down.
Now that loving gaze that we feel coming from Jesus is also the gaze of the church if we are really being the church. That knowing look of union is the church’s work. It’s one way to describe what the sacraments and the word of God and the life of the church are all doing: they are teaching the world its blessedness in the eyes of God. The church is gazing on all who suffer, on all who are cast out, with the eyes of Jesus, teaching all of us our blessedness, our beauty, our pride.
That’s the work of the church. Sadly, there are at least two things we know about this work of the church, we in the LGBTQ+ community. One: we know that the church is shockingly broken, shockingly unable to show us our beauty. Yes, the Episcopal Church has, after a lengthy controversy, and with some wonderful leadership, come around to a place of witness, and we can be grateful for that and for the good work of other denominations. It feels so good to gather like this.
But it has to be said that as a whole church, as Christians, as the body of Christ throughout the world, as the historical bearers of the word and the sacraments, we are still much more apt to trample on a queer or transgender kid than we are to mirror their great beauty. We still represent a faith that doesn’t want to see itself in that particular form of lowliness. It would be so much easier for the average Christian to imagine that a young transgender person doesn’t exist than to look and see ourselves in them. And a certain number of Christians will go to great lengthas to make it clear that transgender kids need not exist. Christians are still refusing that vision. Or worse, Christians are deliberately and often cynically targeting the queer and trans communities for persecution.
So that’s the first thing we know in our communities: how the Church is broken. The second thing we know is that as queer, non-binary, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, gay, and allied people we are and have long been a powerful force that calls the Church simply to become itself. We are here, we have argued, we are queer, we are fabulous. We are much more than a subgroup or the latest in a long line of “issues” to be faced. We are not a theological dispute.
We are a mirror in which Jesus sees himself reflected. Who needs to be more beautiful than that? Jesus sees himself in our vulnerability, in our growing fear of isolation and persecution. Whenever we are targeted Jesus sees himself. When we mourn, when we thirst for justice. When jobs and relationships and wedding cakes and safe housing and acknowledgement in the classroom and basic human respect are unavailable to us because we are just too queer. In those times—and yes, those times are now—in those times we are bright reflections of the blessed face of Jesus. And if the church wants to know Jesus, the church needs to know us. Never forget it: if the church wants to be the church it must know you.
Of course the sorrow of missing out on that wonderful exchange of blessing doesn’t stop with just us and Jesus. We know that it’s not just us. We know that there are injuries from wealth and poverty and colonialism, harm done by categories of race and ability, forms of brutal discrimination all around and also everywhere within our own communities--intersecting and overlapping and sometimes competing ways that we just refuse to see Jesus where he sees himself. And yes, we know about the violence in our streets and the rot in our government and the constant dread about the future.
But on a day like this, when we can gather in pride and love, when we can hear ourselves described as blessed and we can believe it for a moment, when St. Martin’s throws its doors open and declares that you and I belong here--that’s when we know that we have a powerful gift to share with the church and with the world.
That look of love that Jesus casts on us, knowing that look, is something we have to offer to other Christians. To come here today to celebrate our pride by praising God with prayer and music and community is to start some very good work in the world. We are here together this evening learning how to do the work of the church, how to turn to the world like Jesus does, how to catch the eye of the one who needs to be seen, how to recognize Jesus in that one, and how to say it over and over in a loving exchange:
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
Amen.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
