With Live Coal

Over the last several weeks, we have been studying the Beatitudes. Matthew tells us that Jesus, seeing the crowds, went up on the mountain. Remember, it isn’t that he just observes that there is a crowd following him. Jesus sees the crowds. He sees why they have started following him. They are hoping, seeking, desperate enough to leave their homes and the security of the familiar, to not know where their next meal will come from. The crowds that followed Jesus were made up people with wounds, the least and the lost. Jesus sees their need. He sees their hunger. He sees their struggle. He sees their desire. And he responds by drawing away and sitting down with his disciples to teach them. As we overhear what Jesus is saying to the disciples about these people in the crowd, I wonder if the disciples were overwhelmed by what they saw. In response to all this need, Jesus teaches that you would be surprised who is blessed.

Remember we said we would have to remind ourselves what the word we translate “Blessed are those” means. Makarios – “Mak” means long or large, Karis means “grace” – Makarios – God makes large his grace – God’s heart envelopes those – blessed are those who:
1. Are poor in spirit: God makes large his grace, God’s heart envelopes those who are spiritual beggars, who are at the end of their rope.
2. Blessed are those who mourn – in the valley of the shadow of death – whether loss of a loved one or a dream – when someone or something we love dies, we are drawn to a thin place where the boundary between us and God is diminished and we know God’s presence and love.
3. Blessed are the meek: those whose strength is under God’s control, whose life is lived under God’s authority.
4. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right relationships with God, with all God’s children, and with creation.

And this week, we turn to the next two Beatitudes, both of which require us to dig into the meaning of Jesus’ words.

When Jesus talks about giving and receiving mercy, he uses a Hebrew concept, “Hesed.” In the Old Testament it appears 246 times, usually describing God’s relationship with humanity, us. Attempts to define hesed have filled scholarly articles, often it is translated “mercy” but hesed can also includes the concepts of “righteousness,” “grace,” “kindness,” “steadfast love,” “loyalty,” and “devotion.” When I took Hebrew, to standardize my translations, I translated “hesed” as “loving kindness.” What hesed means, that is so hard to get at with one word, is empathetic action “seeing the way the other person sees and feeling what the other person feels and acting on their behalf in response.” Old Testament scholar Dr. Sinclair Ferguson writes, “Mercy is getting down on your hands and knees and doing what you can to restore dignity to someone whose life has been broken by sin (whether his own or that of someone else).” Jesus says we are blessed, God’s makes large his grace and we are close to God’s heart, when we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and eyes and circumstances and respond on their behalf for their good – not out of pity or obligation, but out of love.

Rev. Mary Moore learned the blessing of hesed while she was serving a large, affluent congregation as the assistant to the pastor over pastoral care when Barbara took to appearing at her office door. Barbara was a member of that very large, very affluent place. But Barbara was neither affluent nor large – short enough to be easily overlooked. The bank was about to take Barbara’s childhood home, the house in which she and her 10-year-old son, Jeffrey, lived. The treasurer of the church kindly gave her advice and offered to speak to the mortgage people, who went on and foreclosed anyway. And for a time, the church grapevine had it that, she and the boy lived in her tired old blue Chevrolet, eventually moving into the grand sounding Jesse Jackson Townhomes, a public housing project filled with the crack of guns and cocaine, so dangerous that Barbara could not allow her child to go outside to play. The place might as well have had a sign over its entrance: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Or perhaps: Having abandoned hope, enter here. But Barbara did not-abandon hope, that is. Over and over during those long months, Rev. Mary Moore would look up from her desk to find Barbara in the doorway, her short, round body fixed there, often with her taller pasty-faced child looming over her right shoulder.

– “Jeffrey needs shoes for school, and I don’t have the money to buy them. Will you help?”
– “I don’t have the money for car insurance.”
– “I don’t have the money for gas.”
– “Jeffrey’s not going to have any Christmas unless you help.”

Rev. Moore recalls, “We gave her just exactly what she asked for, layer after layer of Band-Aids as our own selves became overwhelmed by her persistent need and our impotence in the face of that. We just plain came to dread the sound of our normally cheerful receptionist as she announced tiredly, “Barbara’s here.” Once again on the threshold, until one day a member of the staff came to the pastoral care priest and me and said, “Let’s stop messing around and really help her. It’s going to take a lot of money, and you know as well as I do who is going to say we’re crazy. But we can live through that.” He brought us up short. He brought us on into the room where the healing touch of our Lord awaited, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Those words came back to us, but, now, up close and personal. Barbara enrolled in nursing school, living in a furnished apartment donated for the time it took her to complete her education, driving a car provided by another parishioner, her tuition and day-to-day expenses taken care of.

Rev. Moore says, “I don’t have the faintest idea where Barbara and her son, Jeffrey, are these days. I do, however, remember how she said she would tell the story called “God Helps,” the chapters and chapters of mercy that came by way of her conviction that God would see her desperate need, would care about her, would cause her life to be re-ordered, and in fact, had brought her through the door into the place where God had chosen for that to be done.”

A straight-A student and only a step away from receiving her cap, Barbara announced, “I want to come speak to the vestry at its next meeting.” She did come and stood there before the church’s leaders-the rector and the 12 rich business people and the civic movers and shakers. She stood erect in her white uniform, a stethoscope around her neck and told her story of the eking away of her life and of the miracle of her new life. And most especially of its purpose. These are the words that every person in that room believed then as we wept together, and remembers now-most especially what she said last: “Thank you for helping me when I could not help myself. Because of you, I am going to be able to help others. I want you to know this. Every single time I touch a person for healing, this parish will touch that person with me. You will be right there.”

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Rev. Adam Hamilton, who pastors the largest Methodist church in America, says that the Beatitudes are overwhelming – they are so countercultural and transformational. Is it really possible to show God’s hesed, loving kindness, mercy to everyone?

Remember last week, I said that “Satisfaction comes from God to those whose passion in life is to know him in the struggle to be like him in the world (John Piper, “Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness”).”

And we do that one step at a time, asking ourselves, “What is the next right step?” As I thought about Barbara’s story, I kept coming back to the member of the staff came and said, “Let’s stop messing around and really help her.” And Jesus’ teaching, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” reverberates in my thoughts.

I don’t know about you, but when I am faced with the hard work of mercy, I want to object like Isaiah did when God called him. Charlie read it for us this morning. I want to say, “Woe is me! I am lost, I have unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, and I see who you are, O God, and I know there’s a gap, and not just a little gap, it’s a gaping chasm. The chasm is so deep and so dark, there is no way I can take the next right step toward you.”

God calls the prophet Isaiah to proclaim his message the Southern Kingdom, Judah. Israel, the Northern Kingdom, has fallen to the Assyrians and the Southern Kingdom teeters in its shadow. God’s people have rebelled and dealt corruptly, and they think that their relationship with God is still fine because they observe the rituals. They come to worship, they make the sacrifices. Their hearts are not pure, their motives are not singular.

And Isaiah says, “I am unclean and I live in a land of unclean! I can’t proclaim your word to them. I have seen your holiness!” Then a seraphim flies to the altar of God and picks up a hot, burning coal with tongs and flies to Isaiah and touches it to his mouth, cleansing his lips, purifying his heart, so that he is able to speak for the Lord.

The Beatitudes are overwhelming, and when we study them, we will realize that the chasm between us and God’s Kingdom, where God’s will is done, is dark and deep, but even though it is true that we are people with unclean lips living in a land of people with unclean lips, we do not fear taking the next right step toward it because God cleanses our lips and purifies our hearts. Thanks be to God! Amen.