+This morning I want to talk with you about relationships. You see, our Christian faith is all about relationships:
God’s relationship with us, our relationship with God and our relationships with one another.
We were built to be in relationship and when our relationships suffer---the one we have with God, the one God has with us, and those we have with one another, so does our well-being.
So relationships, honest, mutually respectful relationships, are vital to us and to our God.
God longs for us.
And, God longs for us to long for God.
God wants to be in relationship with us.
It’s clear to me that God’s never wanted to be some task master sitting on a throne—distant from us. Nope, since time began, God has reached out to us through a variety of messengers—hoping that humanity would respond in kind.
But, each and every time, no matter how engaging the messenger, no matter how clear the call, we turned away. Read through Hebrew Scripture to hear, again and again, how we have rejected, turned our backs and failed to hear God’s calls to us.
If you ever doubt God’s love for us, read through the Bible---how often have we rejected, ignored or rebelled against God’s love? And yet, God keeps reaching out for us.
Why?
Well I think---and this may seem crazy to you---that God doesn’t feel whole, or complete unless engaged with us in a relationship.
God wants us to want God.
And, at our core, I think we want God.
We want to be in relationship with the Divine, we want to accept God’s never –ending astounding and overwhelming love for us...
The problem is, we get distracted, derailed and lost along the way.
And that’s where this morning’s readings from Micah and Matthew come in-- they both offer us pathways back to God.
The prophet Micah wrote during the 7th century BCE. He was disgusted by the rich and powerful violating their covenant with God. He was concerned about injustice and inequality and longed for the rulers to turn back toward God. The excerpt we just heard is Micah’s outline of all the ways God had been rejected, plus his road map for how to change course, recalculate, and resume a positive relationship with God. Moving toward, instead of away from, the Divine.
Today, here and now, Micah’s words still resonate:
“What does the Lord require of you
BUT to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
What does God want from us? To act justly, to be kind and to walk alongside----be in relationship with---God.
And you know what? When we do that—when we act justly, when we do unto others as we would have done unto us, when we love our neighbor as ourselves, when strive for justice and peace among all people, when we respect the dignity of every human being---when we do that, our relationship with God flourishes. And when it flourishes, we are one step closer to bringing God’s kingdom here on earth. And, my friends, that is the point. It is the goal, it is our mission.
Which brings me to our reading from Matthew. Let me set the stage---- Jesus’ ministry is in its early days—John the Baptist has been arrested and Jesus has called his first few disciples. Together Jesus and his followers are travelling through Galilee and with every stop, more people join their group. At the end of one long day, Jesus gathers his disciples and gives them what in modern day parlance would be called a stump speech. He needs them to know just what he—and this movement---was all about. So, in what ultimately takes up three chapters of Matthew’s gospel, he teaches us the fundamentals of our faith in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. Before he gets into the specifics of the sermon he gives us a soundbite through these straightforward 9 verses known as the Beatitudes that we just heard.
Jesus highlights all the people who are blessed in the eyes of God----
The poor, the persecuted, the reviled.
Now, does he mean we must be poor, persecuted, and reviled to be blessed?
Does he mean if we are rich, lauded, and loved that we aren’t blessed?
No.
What he means is that we must be engaged and in relationship with all people, regardless of their social economic status, their politics, their upbringing, their belief system, their immigration status, their sexuality, the color of the skin or the name they use for the Divine. What he means is to be in relationship with God, we must be in relationship with each other. Not just the people we are comfortable with, not just the people with whom we agree, not just the people we like.
But everyone.
Because when we’re in relationship with each other, when we look each other in the eye, even when---especially when---we disagree, we are welcoming God’s kingdom to come. When we do this we become the conduit for the Light and Love of God, as given to us through Jesus Christ, to infiltrate this world, one relationship at a time. And that, my friends, is all God wants.
Amen.
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