Today is The Feast of the Presentation but the congregation that I serve will read The Beatitudes and not the story of the baby Jesus and Simeon and Anna. We won’t read them yet they are linked. The Presentation is a story about who Jesus is and the Beatitudes are a story about who we are and that’s what Epiphany is all about. Jesus is revealed by Simeon and Anna to be the awaited for Messiah, the one who would change the world and make things right. Jesus reveals in the Beatitudes just who God’s sees as “blessed”, one with honor, one with worth and it is a surprise, at least in Jesus’ day and maybe ours as well. Jesus lived in an honor/shame society. That means that if you were wealthy or at the top of the societal rung then you were favored by God, you had honor. On the other hand you were covered in shame and had no worth in the eyes of God or society if you were poor, which were exactly the folk that Jesus was talking to here in the Sermon on the Mount. Simeon said that Jesus would be “a light for revelation…and glory to your people Israel.” That light and that glory was to shine on the ones who truly had God’s favor, the unexpected blessed ones of God. What does it mean today? What does it mean for us? We don’t live in an honor/shame society. In Jesus day those with honor lived a righteous and upright life for the most part. Today is seems many of those with “honor” do exactly the opposite. While we don’t live in an honor/shame society, how do many people view the less fortunate among us or to what regard are those who really follow Jesus held? What it means for us is to realize that to be blessed is to be loved by God. It means that what we might think is right just might not be so, think of the people Jesus called blessed and their standing in the societal pecking order of the day. It means that just because our life is good that it is not necessarily an indication of being God’s “Blessed”. To be blessed by God is to have worth. All of God’s creatures both great and small have infinite worth because God’s values us, not because of what someone else says or thinks about us. God’s blessing does not come in material possessions but in being loved by God. That blessing gives you hope and life and value and the responsibility of letting others know just how worthy they are because they are one of God’s “Blessed”.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 12:17:09 +0000