Blogging Towards Sunday January 30, 2010

1 Corinthians 1:18-31 & Matthew 5:1-12

Blessed. That's what Jesus talks about in this week's gospel passage.  A blessing that isn't what we expect.  One that transforms our vision of what blessed means.  One that turns our world upside down, inviting us to see the world, each other, ourselves and God differently.  Paul in 1 Corinthians 1 talks about it in another way, what God is doing in the world (the Kingdom of God, or the Reign of God) is seemingly foolish to those we often consider wise, and yet this apparently foolish thing is anything but.  These scriptures, along with another one of the day Micah 6:1-8, point to what faith looks like when lived out and when we live into it.


The challenge in faith is discovering what the gospel means for us in day to day living and in our cultural context.  At first glance Christians don't seem that different than anyone else in our society.  And yet Jesus talks about something different - calling us to recognize those that our world rejects, despises and denies as blessed, fortunate and happy.  If we're living that way it should be visible.  I stumbled across a clever quote this past week while surfing the web, "a holy life speaks not with the tongue, but in the silence of actions." It's a way to get at what it means for us to follow Jesus - not just to respond to an altar call, or to acknowledge a spiritual nudging or awakening.  We're challenged to see the world differently, through 2 lenses, seeing what everyone else sees (human history, the struggle for justice, mercy and love) and to see what others don't see (that God is at work, every day, and that surely the peace of God will win out in the end).  Faith is more than following the rules, or a perfectionist moral legalism, or a nihilistic giving up on an unattainable pipe-dream.  It's refusing to live in a world that we can look around at with our eyes, for the belief that we are living into a world that we struggle to see.