One of these days, I'll post something slightly more personal, I promise. In fact, I've even worked a little on a new post that should be ready soon. In the meantime, we braved the icy mess this morning for our Youth Sunday service at Hinton Avenue. It was a wonderful, warm, Spirit-led time of worship, and the youth did a great job leading us in it. Below is my sermon from that service, titled 'One of These Days'.

1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: 3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5 "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 6 "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 7 "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 9 "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
--Matthew 5:1-12

One of the greatest resources I draw from in youth ministry here at Hinton Avenue, maybe the best one of all, is the rich and restless experience I had growing up in my own youth group. We belonged to Salem United Methodist Church, a little country church that was full of history and families and stories, but hardly had the money to pay the preacher, let alone keep additional people on staff to direct custodial and music and youth ministries. So, for most of my formative years, I had my Mom as my youth director. This meant that most of our programming happened during the summer, when she wasn’t teaching school, and that most of our budget came out of her pocket. The group was much smaller and more local than the group we have here. We pleaded with the church to put up the money to send us to a district youth retreat once a year, and we were lucky if we got to go to the next town for a two-day mission trip, let alone traveling across the country for a weeklong immersion in missions. Youth ministry looked different there, but it had at its heart the same goals that we do: helping young people find their voice within their church and community through programs of fellowship, discipleship, and outreach, and along the way encouraging them to be boldly and unashamedly the gifted and zany people that God had called them to be.

One of the ideas that we have borrowed directly from that group is the sort of Youth Sunday service that you’re a part of this morning. At our church, each time a month had five Sundays, that fifth one was designated Youth Sunday, and it was something that the entire church got excited about and looked forward to. I understood it as a great way of communicating with the congregation some of the things that the youth were up to, and of allowing those youth the opportunity to lead the church in its worship life and begin to claim this time and this space as their own. And so, during my very first meeting with Edward a couple years ago, this was one of the programs we put into place and have continued to grow over the past couple years.

The services we had back at Salem looked more or less like what we do here. The youth group would get together a couple weeks beforehand to pick out the readings and hymns and other elements of the worship service, and then each of us would sign up to lead a different part of the service. On Youth Sunday, we would be in charge of the entire service from the opening responses through the gospel lesson, and then the pastor would come to deliver his sermon and send us home with the blessing.

That’s how it always happened. Always. And so I thought I was just being really funny when I joked that, one of these days I was gonna do the preaching for a youth service, knowing full well that I would never, in a million years be able to do that. Well, for whatever reason, my mother and I apparently got on different pages one of the times I made that joke, and she decided it would be a good idea to tell the pastor himself, the Reverend Mark Craig, of my intentions to deliver a Youth Sunday sermon one of these days. Needless to say, that conversation put into motion the wild and holy chain of events that brought me through training as a lay speaking minister, serving as the lay supply pastor of a tiny Methodist church called Mt. Gilead inside Pocahontas State Park, and on here to become a part of the creative and exciting ministry happening at this church.

In preparation for this first sermon that I was going to deliver on Youth Sunday, the pastor had me spend an entire week reading through the Bible, identifying the passages that spoke most clearly or passionately to my heart and thinking about what I saw in them that I might share with the congregation. Now, at 15, I was by no means a great scholar of sacred texts or theological treatises, but I did exactly what he had told me to, and poured through my Bible like I never had before. And when we met in his study the next week, I knew that I had found the most beautiful, thought-provoking, original passage of scripture the world had ever known. I had selected the words of Jesus from Matthew that Lina read for us a few minute ago. And I was confident that he would quickly award me the gold star for Bible study and give me the right pointers that would allow me to put together a brilliant sermon in an hour or two.

But he didn’t. Instead, when I showed him the story I had picked out to preach from, his eyes just got a little big, and he said, “Oh, David, these aren’t just any sayings. These are the Beatitudes. They are complicated and profound statements of the Christian faith. This is tough stuff. People write books on this chapter; scholars spend their entire lives examining the nuances of the language Jesus uses here and all the possible meanings it might carry for the communities of that day and our day.” He told me that he had been in the ministry for 25 years and that he still shied away from preaching the Beatitudes, because there was just too much there. He could never find the words to show people how radical a call for personal and social transformation Jesus makes when he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers.” Blessed are all the ones that the world has turned away and kicked aside, for in them the God of the entire universe is pleased to dwell.

He encouraged me to choose another text because this one is at once too familiar to us and wholly unknowable to us. It’s the sort of thing we find on Christian bookmarks or hanging on posters on the walls of our Sunday School classes, but when we really think about it, we don’t often have a clue what it’s talking about. My pastor told me not to preach the Beatitudes because they were too hard---for me and for the church.

I’ve thought about that story a lot since then, especially during this time in the liturgical calendar, when we’re right on the cusp of entering into Lent. It is as we prepare to journey away from the season of light and joy that is Epiphany and into the more solemn time of repentance and confession that is Lent, that we hear these words. These words that remind us so powerfully of who God is and of who we are. I’ve thought a lot about Reverend Craig’s suggestion that I not peach the Beatitudes until I’m better able to understand them. And I’ve decided that he was right. And wrong. He was right that these words of scripture capture the heart of the gospel in ways that are bigger and more profound than any we know. He was right that I don’t understand enough about the promises or the challenges that Jesus is offering us here to say anything that would do justice to the grace we hear in his teaching. He was right that it would be far easier for us to consider a passage, say, where we learn that if we work hard or are nice to other people, or love God very much, then we will be blessed.

He was right about all those things. And that, my sisters and brothers, is exactly why we need to keep telling the story of the Beatitudes. We need to proclaim, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” because we’re not yet living our lives and structuring our communities in ways that open our eyes to our own poverty---and to the richness of those around us. We have to be reminded that, “Blessed are those who mourn,” because too often we behave as though death has the final word. We must not forget that the meek will inherit the earth, lest we become too proud to serve as vessels for God’s Word of hope and love to reach those who need to hear it the most. We continue to shout with all the energy and sincerity we can muster that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, will see God and have their hearts filled with all good things, because that is what we believe. You see, the kingdom of God is an upside down, topsy-turvy kind of place. It’s not a place that is always secure or comfortable. It’s not a place that’s ever easy or affluent. Disturbingly, it seems sometimes more like a dirt road than a golden highway, more like a gritty folk song than a melodic anthem. It’s a place, says Jesus, where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, where the children of God are not the ones who can field the largest armies and win the most battles for God, but are the peacemakers, praying silently over the cities and towns and villages of this world or speaking out fervently against injustice and inhumanity wherever it presents itself.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of God,” we say, with a not-so-subtle touch of irony. After all, Christians in many places today, including America, are as safe and as powerful as any religious group has ever been. But when we read these holy words, we remember that we are here today in large part because of the courageous women and men of faith who were not so safe and not so powerful, yet were willing to give themselves up, even to the point of death, that the name of Jesus might be praised. And we know that in a way beyond our comprehension, we are connected to these people, their story is ours, and so we keep telling it.

One of these days I’ll have the wisdom and the ability to articulate most clearly what this scripture is all about. And one of these days, you’ll have moved on toward Christian perfection to such a degree that the vision Jesus puts forward in this Sermon on the Mount will be embodied in the very breath of the community. For that matter, one of these days, we’ll begin to take seriously our prayer that, “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” and we’ll stop living like the values and rewards of this world ultimately govern us. One of these days our eyes will be truly opened, and we will know, in the depths of our being, that the mourning and the persecution and the famine that we see around us will not have the last word. You see, as people of faith, we know the end of the story. The end of the story is not culpability in the Crucifixion; it’s participation in the Resurrection. The end of the story is not the world order as we see it now, or even as we wish it to be; it’s a peace that passes all understanding and can come only from the Prince of all peace.

One of these days we’ll believe those idealistic, dare we say naïve?, dreams of Jesus. And on that day, we won’t really need sermons on the Beatitudes; they will have become as near to us as the beat of our heart, as the most deeply held of our personal and communal convictions. Until that day, we trudge on, through the ice and the snow, joining together in this place where our grandmothers worshiped, telling the story of a Savior who taught that the world is not as it seems. And we trust that even into our ineloquence, the One who is making all things new, who is reconciling all things to himself, will breathe the life abundant.

Thanks be to God!