Westwood Presbyterian Church

April 27th, 2008

197 Browning  Boulevard, Winnipeg, Manitoba  R3K 0L1

REV. PETER BUSH's SERMONS

Matthew 5: 6

 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness

     Before we dive into this morning’s beatitude we need to understand that we who live in North American culture have created a world view that the writers of the Bible would find completely ridiculous. You see we have separated public and private – I have a public life which is completely cut off from my private life – home and leisure time take place one place – work and voting and engaging in public life take place in another place. For the writers of the Bible there was no such separation. Public and private overlapped, co-existed, were intertwined.

     And we have further segmented our lives so that faith and religious matters are placed in the sphere of private life, and faith should stay there. Jesus and the writers of the Bible would find that view completely ridiculous – they understood that a person’s faith commitment would impact all of their life – in fact had to affect all of their lives – if it didn’t then it was very hard to figure out how the person could claim to have a faith.

     To be blunt the early Christians had it right – there can be no separation between private and public – there can be no separating faith from the rest of life. Why have I gone on this tirade in the middle of series on the beatitudes – because we can easily misread the beatitudes if we hear them speaking only to the narrow reality of my personal faith. When Jesus spoke the beatitudes he was not thinking only of people’s personal spiritual life – he was making statements about life – all of life – public and private – he was saying something about the way the world – the whole world is supposed to be – and someday will be.

     These are not nuggets to build my personal spiritual life on – these are truths for all time and all places for all of life.

 

     Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.

     Hunger and thirst are physical desires – are about the physical appetites. There is a view that assumes that Christianity seeks to suppress the appetites – seeks to say that the physical appetites are wrong. For example: the monks ate little, held their physical appetites in check. And we could pull out a bunch of other examples of this same thing. But in this beatitude Jesus talks about hunger and thirst – and we quickly want to jump in and say – but hunger and thirst for righteousness (which is a spiritual thing) – and you see we have just done the same thing – stepping away from the physicality of hunger and thirst and spiritualizing them.

     Jesus invites us to have appetites – just to have an appetite for the right things. Jesus is saying that our appetites are so powerful, they need to be directed towards the right stuff or else we will get pulled off course – focused on stuff that is not worthy of being the focus of our appetites. We hear this refrain from Jesus when he says “Don’t worry about what you will eat or what you will drink – God has taken care of those things – no, your task is to seek God’s righteousness.” So it is not that Jesus is saying “no” to our physical appetites – instead Jesus is saying our physical appetites are so powerful they need to be aimed at stuff that is really important.

     We see this miss-directing of appetites in our society all the time. When we get beyond the issues of food in the fridge – look at how we have turned our appetites towards things that matter little – pleasure, comfort, respectability. All things that we think will feed our appetite but instead distract us from what we should actually be hungry for – righteousness.

     Steve Bell, the Winnipeg singer and song writer, has a song with the line, “Why do we hunger for beauty?” Our hunger is to be directed towards things hat are worthy of throwing ourselves into completely – things that are worth making the center of what drives us.

     Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for the things that matter – that don’t get pulled off course by superficial, and unsatisfying things that can never address the real hunger. And what could be more important than God’s coming kingdom – for isn’t that the answer to all of our hungers.

 

     Jesus invites us to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness – to want it so badly it is a physical need in us.

     To hunger and thirst for righteousness means that we don’t have it yet – we don’t hunger for something we already have. And at this point some of us start saying – but last week we were challenged to be content with who we were – and now the passage is saying we need to be hungry (discontent) until we have more. Would you make up your mind?

     I don’t think that Jesus is contradicting himself – the call to contentment with who we are is the call to say “God has made me with gifts and abilities and he will provide me with what I need to keep body and soul together – I can be content with what I have.” The call to hunger and thirst for righteousness is not so much about me as it is about God’s kingdom – it is not so much about my goals as it is hungering for God’s goals. Being content with who God has made me and given me – means that I can pour myself into seeing God’s kingdom come – God’s will be done.

 

     So what are we hungering and thirsting for – for God’s kingdom to come – for the coming of peace and justice and transformation in our world. We hunger for the world to become what God made the world to be.

     Satisfying that hunger comes in two parts. Part is throwing ourselves into seeking to bring the changes that our world needs. Throwing ourselves into clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, walking with those who grieve, bringing liberty to those who are oppressed, and speaking the good news to those who can find no hope. And all of that grows out of this hunger in us for a better world – for a world that acknowledges that God’s kingdom is the only answer to the deep and profound problems of our world.

     There is no denying the fact that this beatitude invites us to act as agents of social justice in our society, to act as people who bring light and hope to the dark, depressed places in our world. So there is an aspect here of – “We can make a difference” – a can-do attitude.

 

     There is a second part of this – we know that the things this world needs are beyond our ability to answer. We realize that in many ways all our hard work is not getting us any closer to the kingdom of God – yes, we can point to places where things have got better – but when we look in other places things are getting worse. And all the time we are getting hungry and hungry for righteousness – hungry and hungry for God’s kingdom.

     Because the world will not become the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ until he returns in awesome power and great majesty. Only then will our hunger be truly satisfied.

     That then means our hunger will not be satisfied this side of Christ’s return when he brings the kingdom in all its glory and awesome majesty – absolutely right. That should leave us with two questions – first, does that then mean that we will need to live now in a constant state of hunger and thirst – yes, it does. God’s blessing in this beatitude is for those who see that the world should and can be a better place – the blessing hear is for those who know that the victory has not be realized – the blessing is for those who are not willing to settle for anything less than the kingdom of God. Just as this beatitude asks us to set our appetites on the things that really matter, not being distracted by things of secondary value – so this beatitude asks us to not settle for less than the kingdom of God. Anything less is not enough – anything less than righteousness is not enough – that is part of what Jesus is saying when he says that our righteousness must be greater than the scribes and Pharisees. You see the great danger for the Christian church – for Christians – is not choosing between right and wrong – between good and evil. Those choices are clear – we don’t struggle with them. No the danger for the Christian church and for Christians is that we are prepared to settle for less than the whole kingdom – we say “Close is good enough.” That we don’t remain hungry and thirsty for the kingdom in all its glory and accept but a portion of what God wants for us.

      We are called to remain hungry for the kingdom – thirsting for its being revealed – anything less is not enough.

 

     That should lead us to the second question – if the kingdom is what we are hungering for – and if the kingdom will only be fully revealed when Christ returns – doesn’t that make us so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good? Doesn’t that kind of focus on Christ’s return distract us from the needs that are present right now in our world?

     Absolutely not – we have images of the coming kingdom – pictures given to us in scripture – it is a banquet table where all are fed, it is a place where tears are wiped from every eye, it is a place the deepest desires of our hearts (our most profound hungers) are fed. That is no abstract, pie in the sky, way beyond the blue picture. It is a concrete, speaks to the hard realities of our life, kind of vision.

     But those who are it the trenches – who work hard for the kingdom – who in their hunger for its coming strive to make it happen – they know that all our hard work, all our striving, all the money and goodwill will no be enough. That does not mean that they quit working – because they work in the expectation that God’s kingdom will some day come in all its glory. In our hunger for the kingdom – we are invited to be the advance party – the first agents of the change. Knowing all the while that the best is yet to come.

 

     Larry was someone who hungered and thirsted for the kingdom. Larry lived a hard life, his mother and he were abandoned early by his alcoholic father and so Larry’s mother found work as a cook to logging and mining and exploration crews. It was a tough life. Larry became a diamond driller, a job he threw himself into until he injured his back and could no longer work. At that point Larry had a faith crisis.

     That is when Larry came into my life, he showed up in a course I was teaching on the life of Jesus. He wanted to know who this Jesus was, and especially what Jesus had to say about the poor and the oppressed and the way things should be. Larry had a unique way of saying the word “theology” – it came out “theorology”. Every time he said the word – it reminded me of the great danger of talking “theory” instead of reality. Larry was willing to talk about what Jesus said and did – about what the great teachings of the cross and resurrection and Christ’s coming again all meant – but they had to be more than just talk about distant past events – they had to speak to Larry’s profound hunger for the kingdom to come. And that kingdom was spiritual – yes – but it was going to be revealed in concrete ways of the hungry being fed, tears wiped from eyes, the broken healed.

     Larry died over 10 years ago. He has seen the kingdom of righteousness that is coming – he knows it is no theory. And I am sure that with bated breath he is waiting to see kingdom fully revealed in our world.

 

    Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.