“Come Blessed, Go Blessed”
Rev. Janet Wootton, Ph.D.
January 30, 2005
{text: Micah 6:1-8, Psalm 15, Matthew 5:1-12}

We share together in the Congregational way of being Christians.  Though we may do things slightly differently, I’m going to take some things back with me from here to British Congregationalism, we honor together our freedom in faith, our faith in Jesus, in this pilgrimage through this life. And, if I don’t see you again, I’ll see you in heaven. As we journey together, our journey is not only towards heaven but also through this life.

These are the lectionary readings, but if I’d chosen readings for this Sunday, I couldn’t have been more pleased with the call that comes out of these readings.  We begin with the prophet Micah in court, and we have God calling the people of Israel into court.  In Britain in a court case, you’ll have Regina versus whoever the person is on the other side.  But you won’t find the Queen there in court, oh no, it will be her representative, all bewigged and gowned and ready to do justice. 

In the book of the prophet Micah, you have God’s self in the courtroom and the courtroom is mighty indeed because God calls on the hills during foundations of the earth to hear this hearing.  The courtroom is the whole world, the whole created order and in Paul’s letters he is waiting to hear what the judgment will be.  God pleads with the people.  Does God need to plead?  Well, God pleads here.  And the words are extremely moving and as I read them in preparation for this service, I found myself moved.  “What have I done to you?” he says.  “Remember the things that I’ve done.  I’ve given you these wonderful leaders and this time.  Surely you can remember these things and remember the things that you had with me,” says God.  So the case is made, not God standing there and saying, “You are wrong and I condemn you” but saying, “How can you condemn me?  Look at what I’ve done for you.  Remember what I have done.  The relationship we had together.”  And what can the people do then but hang their heads in grief and sorrow.  And so we have the response of the people.  Well, I’ve come before God then.  How can I come before God then when I’ve forgotten all the things that God has done for me?  We have forgotten the great things that God has done for us.  Shall I come with sacrifices, with rivers of oil and with loads of animals and even, horrifyingly, my first-born child?  Any sacrifice just to get back that relationship with God.  And God says, “You still don’t get it, do you?  I don’t want those rivers of oil; I don’t want your first-born child for sacrifice.”  This is what the Lord requires of you, to do justice, kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. 

That in a sense is all any of us want, I think.  At my own islands, in the situation in Northern Ireland, a decade or more ago, when we were still killing each other with bombs and there were bombs in my city of London and terrible things were happening, what did people want?  They wanted justice.  Right the things that have been done wrong.  They wanted mercy because justice is a harsh beast and it’s tempted by forgiveness.  And then all we want in life is simply to walk humbly with God, just allowed to live.  Not to be in battle with each other but simply to walk that walk with God.  And if you go there now, it’s still a bit edgy; the peace hasn’t come in all its fullness.  Once that Good Friday agreement was signed and we were on the road to peace, businesses began to flourish.  People began to be able to go to school again and begin a normal way of things.  It wasn’t perfect but we could take up that walk with God.  Remember what it was like when apartheid fell?  And there you had formalized justice and mercy in the truth and reconciliation commission, which I think, was brilliant.  And if you go to South Africa today with the Theological Commission, you’ll find that although the peace is not perfect, yet there’s a sense in which those communities can walk together, both the black and the colored and the white, if only they will learn more to do, they can make that walk with God because there’s been justice and there’s been mercy.  And don’t we pray for that in Iraq now?  Beyond this day, I don’t know what time it is in Iraq now.  I know we’re six hours ahead in London so it’s the end of the day in Britain now so it must be a few hours further along in Iraq. And the voting has taken place or is finishing taking place, but what about that.  We gave thanks for the voting taking place today.  There needs to be justice.  So many hurts over the years of oppression.  So much to be healed.  So much of it tempered by mercy so that people can walk that walk with God. 

Micah stood in a long tradition of prophecy going back through the generations, prophets calling out for justice and for righteousness.  Think of Amos and Hosea, and God said, “I don’t like your festivals, your songs drive me balmy.”  (That’s not quite what he said but if we think that by the beauty of our worship and by getting things just right that that’s the way that leads to blessedness,) God says no, you don’t understand.  Let justice roll down righteousness like a stream.  These are the things that God wants.  God does delight in our worship but God delights when that worship leads to justice, mercy and a humble walk with God. 

Think of Isaiah.  Isaiah and Micah are contemporaries and you can read them back and forth.  A lot of their prophecy is very similar.  Isaiah in chapter 58 says, “You’re doing all this fasting.  Never mind your songs and your feasting.  All this fasting and you think you’ll find blessedness in all this self-humiliation and all these things.  This is the fast that I require.  Take care of those who are in need.  Take care of those who are in bondage.  This is the true worship of God when our worship together issues forth in reality in our day to day lives.”  Isaiah 61, when the prophet stands up and says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he sent me to give good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to those in prison, healing for those who need it.”  Now you start to recognize this.   Because Jesus set himself firmly in that same prophetic tradition.  He stood up one Sabbath in the synagogue and he quoted those words from Isaiah. He took the scroll from the prophet Isaiah and he stood there and did the reading.  “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.  For he sent me to proclaim good news to the poor,” and he put down the scroll and he looked at the people and he said, “It’s just come true.  Today, in your hearing, those words have come true.”  He not only stands in the prophetic tradition, he not only speaks the same words but he also embodies those words.  In Jesus we find that true blessedness which comes in hearing and doing those prophetic words. 

We turn now to Matthew, chapter five, and the beatitudes.  And I want to take a look at it from a particular perspective.  It is from the perspective of an Asian liberation theologian, Dion Jian Carr.  He’s a wonderful Indian theologian who I think is living in America but with his roots in Indian tradition.  He asks us to look at the beatitudes in a new way.  I was always brought up that I had to look at the beatitudes as if I was poor in spirit.  The poorer I was in spirit, the more blessed I became.  He asks us to look at these in the light of the more prophetic tradition.  It seems clearer in Luke’s version of the beatitudes where you only look at the side that is poor and poor in spirit.  This is in Luke, chapter six and following.  It says, “Blessed are the poor for yours is the kingdom of God.  Blessed are you that hunger now for you shall be satisfied but woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation.  Woe to you who are full now for you shall be hungry.”  So on one side is the poor, the genuinely poor, those who are genuinely mourning.  And what does Jesus say to us then if we are satisfied, if we are the rich, if we are the wealthy?  But in Luke’s Gospel it is nothing but woe, we have had our fill, our day has come and gone.  In Matthew’s Gospel, this reading of the beatitudes is blessedness too.  Jesus turns to the poor in spirit and says to them, “You who mourn, you are blessed.”  He turns to us and says,  “Blessed are you.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail, to see right done.  Blessed are those who are merciful.  Blessed are the pure in heart.  Blessed are the peacemakers.”  And what Dion Jian Carr suggests to us is that Jesus is offering to us the blessing that is there for the poor and the hungry and the dispossessed.  Because it is quite clear in the prophetic writings that God dwells among, that God’s message comes from those who live on the margin of society, the poorest and dispossessed. 

And we found that in Union Chapel, we started a homelessness project. At first we just wanted to respond to the masses of homeless people that were around us in that part of London.   We wanted to do something.  Well, we sat down with our Bibles and we took a year to study the circumstances around us and the provision that there was.  We wanted to be these good people, these people with their wonderful homes, who could reach out a hand to the poor and therefore offer them something good.  What we found was that God actually likes dwelling among homeless people.  When David wanted to build a temple for God, God said, “I like living in a tent, thank you very much!”  And I would remind you of the day when you lived in a tent and wasn’t it lovely?  We find that when Jesus spoke to people very often he said to them to stay in their fine and comfortable houses but this time he said to them, “Come, follow me away from your settled lives into the margins, to live without a settled abode.”  And so we found that homeless people had be rather different.  People would look down on them and say, “Aren’t we good, doing things for you!”  Sit with them, and say let’s learn together.  This was blessedness.  We found blessing in sitting along side those people who were on the margins of society.

Just a couple of years ago we were in Argentina and I know that the NA has been helping the Congregational Christians of Argentina and walking with them.  We visited the shantytown and we visited the place where people have almost no home.  They live in a plywood structure on the bare earth.  The children, where if it weren’t for the handout of bread at church on a Sunday, would have nothing to eat week’s end to the next.  Being with those people was an amazing thing.  And as they handed out the bread it seemed like communion.  The American people who were with us said, “This is communion, isn’t it.”  And when I went there on my own and they handed out the bread and the rice, those people from the shantytown came with a bag of rice and gave it to me saying, “This is for the homeless people in London.” That was fantastic.  And when I took it home and said where it had come from, one of the homeless people went out and came back with a fifty-pound note.  I didn’t ask where it came from; I didn’t want to know. At that time, you couldn’t get money into Argentina.  So I sent a book and I put the fifty-pound note in the book and I wrote a note that read, “I hope you enjoy the book and its contents.”  They found the fifty-pound note.  But there was the poor of the world out to help each other.  Jesus teaches us to sit with the poor of the world and there to find blessing.  We are blessed if we come into the presence of the marginalized and the poor and it is our duty now as a global community to sit alongside the people of Iraq from now onwards. 

All this week I’ve been talking about feminist theology in various different ways, in various different places.  This is where feminist theology lives.  It lives among the poor and the marginalized.  Speaking about women and children who are abused within the church context, and yes I know that men are abused and boys, but the overwhelming majority of people who are abused mentally and sexually are women and girls.  I’ve been speaking about my trip to India where I’ve seen posters up that pproclaim, “Why are only 36% of live births in this country female when the proportion should be about 51%?”  Why? Because they kill girl babies and they abort girl fetuses if they can.  And that whole community is going to be skewed by the lack of live female births.  This is where feminist theology lives, it lives among the people who are killed, who are abused, who are hurt, simply because they are female.  It lives among the people who are not allowed to fulfill their own potential simply because they are female.  The highest jobs are just not available for them; the best churches are just not available for them.  So feminist theology lives among these theologies.  It’s not isolated.  It’s not out there on its own. 

When we sing, it’s because we forgot to sing about Miriam all these years.  We sing about women ministers and we haven’t done that for years and years.  When we talk of God, which is there in scripture, it is hidden for years and years and we simply want to be alongside each other.  It’s simply part of that prophetic call.  This is the call of the Micah and the prophets.  It is the call of Jesus our savior.  What does God require of us?  How do we find true blessing?  We do so when we sit alongside the whole human race.  The poor and rich sit alongside each other.  And the black and the colored and the white sit alongside each other.  When women and men sit alongside each other, the human race is made whole.  “Then,” said Jesus, “our hunger and our thirst for justice, to see right prevail, our longing to be peace makers and to find that to build peace in our communities, then these things shall be satisfied and we shall come blessed. And we shall taking that blessing out into the world.”  This is the message to you and to me.  You have that blessing in your hands here now in the presence of Jesus and the presence of each other.  As we have come blessed, now go blessed in the blessing of Jesus Christ, our teacher, our redeemer, and our savior.  Amen.