Sales Pitch
A Sermon on the Beatitudes
(Matthew 5:1-12)
by Jared Slack
For the People of First Austin:
a baptist community of faith
On the Fourth Sunday following Epiphany
January 29, 2017
Let us pray,
Now oh Lord, as we
allow the light of your words to shine brightly and honestly into our lives,
may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts here in this
place be pleasing to you our rock and our redeemer. AMEN.
“You should try and
make it about stewardship.”
This passing comment made in the middle of staff meeting last week
is the surprise marching order Griff gave me as I was looking ahead to
preaching this morning.
Now, while at first this little addendum seems entirely innocent,
you should know that it came some 3 weeks after he’d already gotten me to agree
to preach on this day… a day, that up to this point I’d actually been looking
forward to.
You see, today’s crop of scriptures is celebrated by more than a
few commentators as brimming with possibilities as they represent some of the
most heavy hitting, well known passages in all the Bible.
Earlier in our service, Griff read the prophet Micah’s iconic,
words calling us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. We
could have chosen to meditate on Psalm 15 and its invitation into a life of
goodness and charity in the faithful presence of God. Or we could have learned
a lesson from the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians about the
power of the Gospel shown to us through the seeming foolishness of the cross.
And just now, from Leigh we’ve heard some of Jesus’ most important sentences
taken from the most famous sermon he ever preached.
I’ll confess to you, a few weeks ago, I actually found myself at
moments naively smitten, with a grin on my face and warm fuzzy feelings in my
heart towards our great pastor, and all-around good guy, Reverend Doctor Griff
Martin who so generously and graciously handed over this potential soft ball of
a Sunday where I get to engage with endless options and avenues for sermon
writing.
But then last week he slipped in that I should “try and make it
about stewardship.” a phrase that could easily sit atop any list of phrases
that NO Pastor ever wants to hear.
And I’m sure you’re all well aware without me telling you this,
but I’m not exactly your best option to be the poster child for a campaign of
any kind, let alone the leadoff batter in a church’s stewardship drive.
That’s a job best fit
for someone with a far fancier wardrobe and a far less cynical outlook.
Having worked with Griff only a few months now, I’m beginning to
think there’s a real good possibility that he finds a sort of secret pleasure
in complicating my life… because, to be honest with you, there’s probably
nothing more life complicating than putting me behind a pulpit with stewardship
as my message.
But alas, here I am today to give this a real shot, your
quintessential Millennial, or at least somewhere in the near vicinity of being
a Millennial, with little to no attachment to institutional memory and a pretty
potent aversion to anything resembling nostalgia and thinking about how things
used to be way back when… here I am to talk to you about being stewards of this
place we all call home.
I was talking about all this with Rod Machen this past Wednesday
night and he reminded me of a story from Pete Rollin’s book, The Orthodox
Heretic, about the nature of institutions and the their rituals….
There was once this
wise teacher who would go to the temple every evening to pray with his
disciples. And by the temple there was this stray cat that would wander in
every evening and disturb those gathered to pray and disrupt the peace. So,
each evening before prayers the wise teacher would tie this cat to a tree
outside before entering.
Now this wise teacher
was quite old at the time and passed away only a few years later. So his
disciples continued to tie the cat to the tree each evening before prayers.
Well… eventually, the
cat died, too.
So some of the
disciples immediately went out and bought a new cat so that they could continue
the ritual. After a hundred years or so the tree died and a new one was quickly
planted so that the cat (by now the 18th generation cat) could be ceremoniously
tied to it each night.
And over time they saw a need to form a committee that would
manage the daily cat-tying responsibilities, another one was put together to
oversee important tree maintenance and upkeep, and then another committee was
tasked with putting together the annual fund-raising campaign meant to ensure
that for years to come there would big beautiful trees and enough rambunctious
cats to tie to them.
Now of course, I’m not comparing what we do here at First Austin
to cat wrangling, but you have to admit that there’s something about this that
sounds eerily familiar, right?
How through years and
years of rituals and routine we can so easily lose connection with the deep
story of why we do the things we do… so we settle for a safer narrative of just
keeping the lights on, the ship afloat, and doing things because that’s just
the way we’ve always done it.
And for me, what this inevitably does is it morphs the real deal
of calling ourselves to be faithful stewards of a place and people into a
sanctified “sales pitch” of sorts. A flashy kind of spiel about all the things
that our church has to offer and all the resources it takes to keep it all
going in hopes that you’ll respond in kind with an appropriate to you and your
family financial commitment.
You see, I come from a generation that takes quite a lot of pride
in our ability to pretty quickly sniff out when someone is trying to sell us
something, and the second we catch on that you’re giving us a sales pitch of
any kind, is the exact same moment that we promptly and resolvedly tune you out
and possibly walk out the door never to be seen again.
Because like many of you, we know all too well the gimmicky nature
of our world, full of quick fixes and empty promises of solutions to life’s
difficulties that it just so happens can be paid for with money or a
membership.
Which makes me think that had I been there that day listening to
Jesus preach on the mountainside that I might have turned a deaf ear when he
began to rattle out his litany of promises.
Because like many of you, I know all too well the stark contrast
between the world you and I currently live in and the version of the kingdom
that Jesus is trying to sell.
The beatitudes paint a picture of the world where the poor receive
an inheritance, where the hungry are satisfied, where those who mourn are
consoled, and the pure in heart get to see God.
Now I'm only 34, but I’ve been around long enough to see firsthand
that in our world… the merciful get trampled by the merciless, those who mourn
find themselves debilitated by their grief, the purest among us eventually
walk away from God, the people who earnestly hunger and thirst for what is
right in this world literally just hunger and thirst, and refugees get turned away
at our borders.
Which might be why Jesus’s words of blessing are more important
than ever, simply because of just how seemingly impractical they are for a
world where the only blessings being given out are to those who succeed at the
expense of others. Where being poor in spirit, peaceful, merciful, and meek
gets you nothing and nowhere in a culture grounded in competition and fear.
But equally so even though when we look out into our world and see
that things out there are the exact opposite of Jesus’ vision in the
Beatitudes, you and I know something deeply true and deeply beautiful… that
these words of Jesus describe for us the present reality of what can and
certainly does exist in this beloved community we call First Austin.
Because in a world hell bent on only blessing the strong and the
powerful, we get to be the place that hands out blessings to the weak and the
unwanted.
The Beatitudes don’t serve so much as a description of how things
will be in the future, but instead as our very own marching orders for what we
are working to create right now amongst us… they are a prophetic declaration
for how things MUST BE in this place and wherever it is in this world that you
and I exist on a daily basis.
In Jesus’ words, we receive a much needed clarification of the
calling of First Austin to be a “blessing community.” To be a church that sets
this identity at the center of our mission. To be a place and a people who
stubbornly and resolutely stand against the tide of a world that reserves blessing
for an exclusive, elite group, to be a prophetic voice of welcome to the
powerless in a world that only wants us to admire the strong.
Here at First Austin, we are the heralds of the kingdom that is
coming. We are living, breathing, walking around in this world Beatitudes and
together, you and I, are creating together, dreaming with one another, and
making manifest this kingdom of Jesus… one upside-down, against the norm of our
world, blessing at a time.
Together we get to support a place where those who’ve reached the
end of their resources, who can’t sustain hope on their own, the forgotten and
discarded of our society are remembered and cherished.
Together we’re creating a home for those who mourn and weep over
the hurt in our world, where those who are keenly aware of the chiasmic
difference between the way things are right now and the way God desires them to
be are comforted and cared for.
Together we are standing strong against any rhetoric that seeks to
politicize through fear the welcoming of the immigrant refugee into our
communities.
Together we are a safe haven where the marginalized and easily
cast aside are given a seat at the ever expanding, ever embracing table of God.
Being a faithful steward of this community, of First Austin, is an
act of planting yourself in the ever-flowing, ever-moving stream of Jesus’
vision for our world not because doing so will result in blessings of your own
or because I can guarantee that you’ll be giving to a winning cause but because
you and I both recognize that the present challenges of this world and the
rampant disregard of what is right and good are far too severe and seemingly
insurmountable to do anything less.
Being a steward of this place means hoping against all present
circumstances and defying all the odds stacked against us to create a place
where the hungry, the merciful, the peace making, the doubting, the
disbelieving, the lonely and left out, the ones that no one notices and no one
speaks up for, the unimpressive, the underemployed, the burnt out, the put
down, the non-traditional, and the ones who really aren’t all that sure if the
church is the right place for them can and will be blessed… because come hell
or high water, we’re going to be the place that proves that it’s possible.
These Beatitudes of Jesus welcome us to stop settling for things
as they’ve always been, but instead to pony up to the table and bravely walk
towards making Jesus’ hopes and dreams for our world into a tangible, reach out
your hand and touch-able reality.
And that might be the best I’ve got to offer for our stewardship
campaign… just a list of blessings and promises that seem way too good be true
that are as dangerously impractical as tying a cat to a tree and then me asking
you to reach deep and live generously.
So for better or
worse, that’s my pitch. AMEN.
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