Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying: “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, for they will inherit the earth. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

We’ve all heard that experience is the best teacher. Some of us have stories confirming that to be true… but maybe others don’t agree with the age old adage. For example, experience is the best teacher doesn’t seem to hold up well with most if not all of the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful. These are not characteristics or situations our culture celebrates.

Afterall, there’s no scholarships for those who show mercy or are gentle and content! There are no greeting cards that say “hooray, you're mourning!” And if you’ve ever been or felt poor in spirit, felt like you were in despair and totally hopeless toward your inner life: your thoughts, feelings, confidence, and you beg God to help because you are completely unable to help yourself, if you’ve felt that way, did it feel like a blessing?

I think of the neighbors of the church I served in Glendale, AZ. By neighbors I don’t mean the families in the houses surrounding the church, but our neighbors who slept on our campus under the bushes out front or in the breezeways. Most, if not all, struggled with addiction, and with undiagnosed or unmanaged mental illness. Many had lived on the streets for years, some more than a decade.

As I got to know them, I listened and heard their feelings: despondent, helpless, begging God to help break their addiction, for the system to work, to feel loved. They were poor and spiritually poor, but I'm not sure I’d called or they would call themselves blessed.

Maybe Jesus is wrong on this one, maybe these things, these beatitudes just aren’t right and true. If that’s the case, Jesus can chalk this one up to inexperience: he just doesn’t know any better, he doesn’t know the way the world works yet. He hasn’t experienced how the merciful get screwed over, or the one’s who fight for justice don’t see the fruition of their efforts,

or the peacemakers pale in comparison to the violence of this world.

Afterall, he’s still young… What is he? 29? Maybe 30? Heck, this is his first sermon!

And coming from a 29 year old about to have a child, I feel very confident that there certainly is more I don’t know or haven’t experienced compared to what I do know and have experienced. If experience is the best teacher, then maybe Jesus needs a little more.

But that’s not the case. Jesus is speaking from experience, it’s just not included in the part of the text we read today. Just before Jesus climbed the mountain, he had been off in Galilee, and Jerusalem, and beyond, where he’d been “curing every disease and sickness among the people.” As he traveled, people brought the sick and the lame, people with all sorts of diseases and demons, pains and paralysis.

And we have to remember, that to be one of these people in the time of Jesus didn’t mean you were just sick: you were an outcast, viewed as a terrible sinner who deserved their plight.

You were poor, likely unable to work, and forced to the margins of society. These people were the poor in spirit, the meek, and the mourning.

These were the people who hungered and thirst for justice because they’ve been starved by injustice. After calling his first disciples, these are the people Jesus goes to; Not the rich in spirit, not the joyful, not the ambitious, but the opposite.

If experience is the best teacher, no wonder Jesus preaches with such potency. And if experience is the best teacher, no one knows or has lived these beatitudes more fully than Jesus himself. He’s the poor in spirit who cries out in abandonment asking “why, God?!”,

the one who mourns a world full of oppression and sin, the meek one who put all people before himself, the one who hungers and thirst for justice in every land, the giver of mercy to the least deserving, the pure in heart who sees God’s will and does it, the peacemaker who overcomes death not with violence but self-sacrifice, the persecuted and reviled One who willingly went to the cross. Like my neighbors in AZ, I, and most people, wouldn’t call that blessed.

Which is precisely the point. In the beatitudes, Jesus isn’t just describing reality, he makes reality. When Jesus speaks, the Word creates what it declares. In other words, The beatitudes are promises, promises to all who find themselves in these situations. You are and will be blessed. Not because of what you have done or didn’t do, but because of what Jesus has done, is doing, and will do through the cross.

In that way, those who are poor in spirit, persecuted and reviled, they are blessed because Jesus is there beside them and makes it so. My neighbors in AZ, they are blessed because Jesus promises to be there with them. And it’s not blessed as in lucky, wealthy or successful, but blessed as in favored by God because that’s where God is at work. Hopefully, there is some comfort in knowing that no matter how helpless or desperate or mournful you feel, Jesus has felt that too. And we see that most clearly in Christ crucified.

Now I want to be clear. These beatitudes are not imperatives. They don’t command you to become poor in spirit or meek or mournful as if that would save you. They aren’t goals you can check off. On the cross, Christ became all these things, each beatitude for you, giving you grace. So the beatitudes are not demands, but a warning and a promise. A warning to potential disciples back then and to followers today.

Picture yourself on that mountainside and it’s as if Jesus is saying:

“because you follow me, because you will speak and act and live in ways different from the culture around you, you will find yourself poor in spirit, meek and mournful, hungry and thirsty. You will be merciful and people will take advantage of you. You will attempt peace and you will be a lonely voice. It will be hard. You’ll feel pain, maybe even despair. But I promise, you’re blessed because I am there with you”.

As followers of Jesus, heed the warning and trust the promise.

Know it won’t take very long and we won’t have to look very hard, till we find ourselves in these situations, like: mourning the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols; hungering and thirsting for justice for our black and brown siblings; acting meek by refusing to take part in violent and unjust systems; making peace in our own families and communities.

May experience be the best teacher and may you be blessed.

Amen.

Matthew 3:13-17
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Questions about my name have followed me my whole life. “Cogan? Wow, that's a unique name! Where does it come from? Or, what does it mean? Is that a family name? Or my personal favorite, “How'd your parents come up with that?” I’ve become quite fond of this interaction and some of us have already had it! As for the questions, I have no idea the name's origin or nationality, or what it means. It’s not a family name. And if or when you meet my parents you should ask them how they came up with it or why they plagued me with this practical joke for my whole life.

Shakespeare, by way of Juliet, quipped, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Meaning a name is nothing more than what we infer upon it, the emphasis we give it. And while there is certainly truth to that, in our culture we give enormous emphasis to names and even more so titles. Titles impress, they grant authority, respect, sometimes even honor. We work hard to get these titles!

Maybe their letters before or after our names, or a phrase: Dr, Engineer, Mother, Teacher, Director. Often we hide behind these titles or names that we’ve been given or claimed. We place our identity in them, thinking we will find affirmation out in the world through them.

I’ve thought a fair amount about this considering I soon will gain two new titles, pastor and father; both for which I’ve yearned. But even knowing all that you do about me, my name, my soon to be titles, you don’t really know me. You don’t know what kind of pastor or father I will be.

And if you judged me just by name you’d think “Idk… he must be kinda weird”. We assume much, but really we can’t know a lot about a person from names and titles alone. I think the same is true for Jesus and why the story of his baptism is so revealing.

Thus far in Matthew, Jesus is given a few names and titles: Jesus, meaning Yahweh is salvation, the Messiah, meaning the anointed, Emmanuel, King of the Jews. Talk about some impressive names and titles, can you imagine the pressure?! Yet, up until now, Jesus hasn’t done anything. Everything has happened to him: he was birthed, named, visited, taken to Egypt, and brought to Nazareth.

Jesus may have names and titles, and we can (and do) assume much about him because of those, just as the people of Matthew’s community did. But Jesus has yet to act or do anything himself. What kind of Messiah will he be? How will Yahweh’s salvation come from him? In what ways will he be God with us? And how do we, as readers or hearers of this story, know that these names and titles are right and true? I certainly don’t believe all of the things that happen in my dreams… do you?!

It’s as if the author of Matthew knew these questions would arise at this point in the story. And right on time, Jesus came to John at the Jordan. It’s really an odd event if we think about it: why would Jesus, the anointed, need baptism? And if John’s baptism is one for repentance of sins, why would the sinless Jesus need it? These questions are interesting and important and the early church wrestled with them fiercely. However, by focusing solely on such questions we risk missing what this baptism tells us about Jesus.

John, by his question, takes the position as the less important person when Jesus arrived. But Jesus flips the script, adamant that he was to be baptized by John. “for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” The “for us” links John and Jesus together as partners in carrying out God’s saving plan. Jesus chose to work with John, this mere mortal to bring about God’s will.

And then this most miraculous scene unfolds as Jesus came out of the water, he saw the sky open to heavens, the Holy Spirit falling in dove form upon him, and then God spoke not only to Jesus, but to John and the others gathered, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”. Now we can begin to hear and see more clearly who this Jesus is and the ways in which he works.

God did not speak of names and titles, but of Jesus' identity: child of God, beloved. And perhaps even better, God affirms, nay celebrates his identity saying, “with whom I am well pleased”. Jesus did nothing to earn this: he had done no miracle, no feeding of thousands, no teaching the crowds, no healing the sick. The only thing he did was get baptized, revealing to us the way Jesus works. Not with power or force, but in humble obedience Jesus joined with John so that he would bear the sin of all those baptized.

Think of all the names and titles you bear: some you love and some you don’t. Some you were given and some you claimed. Some you earned and for some you yearn. And yet, these names, these titles… they do not define you whether you want them to or you don’t. They don’t give affirmation as to who you are. Only baptism does that... because in baptism God claims you as God’s own and gives you not a name or a title, but your identity.

Above all you are a beloved child of God… and because of Christ, God looks upon you and says, “with you I am well pleased”. You did nothing to earn that. In fact, there’s nothing you could do. God freely gives it to you and we call that grace. And is there anything more that we could want? than to know who we are and whose we are… to be celebrated by the One who created us… to be loved and redeemed by the humble and obedient Servant who, as the prophet says, brings light to the nations, who opens the eyes of those blind to suffering and oppression, and who will establish justice in the earth.

Not only does God give us our identity but also our mission. Just as Jesus chose to work with John so also In baptism God chooses to work through us; the lowly, weak, sinful humans that we are because that’s who composes the body of Christ.

We, you and I, have mutually chosen to be partners in mission together, of which I am thrilled. Before that, You all chose to be partners in mission and have done incredible work. Yet most important is the fact that Christ chose you as a partner in mission. And together we are tasked with the mission of the humble and obedient servant: to bring light to the nations, to open the eyes of those blind to suffering and oppression, and to establish justice in the earth.

Over the next few weeks and months, I will learn your names and your titles. But more than that, I want to know who you are: how you experience God in your life, what your passions are, and the ways you feel God at work in this community.

And I am confident we will move forward in this mission we share, not because of our names or our titles, but because of our shared identity. I am confident because God has called us in righteousness, taken us by the hand, and kept us. God is doing new things: in your life, in this community, and in the world.

Together, we will discern, act, and give praise to the one whose name is the Lord. Amen.

"Experience, the Best Teacher"

"What's in a Name?"