Made Perfect in Weakness 11/5/17 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Matthew 5:1-12

I recently read a story about an obscure saint named St. Clement Hofbauer. He lived in Vienna and in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century, he was moved by the Spirit to care for children whose parents had died in all the strife and violence of that terrible time. He was out begging for donations one day when he came upon three men sitting and playing cards. He went up and asked them if they would like to contribute to the cause, and one of them stood up, cursed him, and then spit in his face. Without showing any anger, Clement quietly took out his handkerchief and wiped the spit off, and said, “Well, that was for me, sir. Now how about something for my orphans?” The man was so dumbfounded by his gentleness that he gave him all the money he had on him.

Our faith history is filled with stories like that, some more extreme than others. During an especially brutal persecution of the church in the third century, Roman soldiers apprehended the pope and seven of his deacons in the catacombs. The emperor summarily executed the pope and six of the deacons, and then demanded that the last remaining one, a man named Laurence, give him all the church’s treasures . . . or suffer an even worse fate. Laurence then led him to some of the sick and poor people that the church fed and supported, and said, “These are the treasures of the church.” Enraged, the emperor roasted him alive on a gridiron. His aim was to destroy the church; Laurence’s witness inspired the church and helped keep it alive.

Blessed are the meek. That doesn’t go down so easy. In fact, the first four beatitudes we heard today might well make us gag: Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . Blessed are those how mourn . . . Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That is generally not what we aspire to: we don’t think of poor, grieving, meek, and hungry people as being happy. But the word we translate as “blessed” here — makarios — means just that, “happy.” According to Jesus, the way to be truly happy is to be vulnerable and in need. Obviously this flies in the face of all conventional wisdom. So many people spend their lives trying not to be poor, grieving, meek, and hungry. We acquire money, status, and power to avoid that. When there are holes in our lives, we try to fill them with as soon as we can, with anything we can: possessions, drugs, busyness, achievements, whatever. We try to present a strong and confident face to the world. We are conditioned to look down on those who are needy, giving them either pity or scorn. In our culture, there is very little room to be vulnerable. That would make losers. That would make us weak. But we could sum up the first four beatitudes by saying, “Blessed are those who are weak and know it, for they will be given strength. Blessed are those who are empty and know it, for they will be filled.”

Filled with what? With God. One of the saints in my life was a priest, named Tom, who went on to become a bishop and quite prominent in the church. He was a strong and visionary leader: people admired and revered him. But I got to know him through years of personal conversations, as a mentor and a friend. He has since died, but what moved me about him was how open and vulnerable he was. He put on no airs. He talked candidly about his failures and shortcomings. He was very upfront about being a recovering alcoholic and how that had shaped his life. He was a gay man who came out at a time when many people disapproved. He needed friends and said as much, always looking to stay connected to people who mattered to him. He was kind, but could be moody and difficult. He was just himself, but he was himself in Christ: a gifted, flawed, imperfect, and needy man through whom the Holy Spirit flowed abundantly. When I was with him, I felt close to Christ. He wasn’t really a great preacher, but when he preached, you knew God was working. In fact, he exemplified what the Apostle Paul talks about when he says that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, that when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:9-10). That is what Jesus teaches in the beatitudes: when we are incomplete, God completes us and makes us whole; when we are empty, God fills us; when we are weak, then we are strong. 

That, by the way, is what makes the last few beatitudes possible. Once we allow God to complete us and fill us, then we can be merciful, we can be peacemakers, we can even suffer persecution and mistreatment like the saints I just told you about at the beginning of this sermon because we are not relying on our own strength, but on a power infinitely greater than us, on a God who shows us how much she loves us by flowing through us — just as we are.

It is too easy to think of saints as heroic figures who achieve great feats of spiritual prowess. It is too easy to think of saints as being super human or, worse, inhuman, people we cannot even relate to. But according to the beatitudes, “saintliness” or “Christ-like-ness” is readily accessible to anyone and everyone. We don’t have to go to church multiple times a week or pray for three hours every day or fast for a month or go off to live in the wilderness somewhere. In fact, if we did that, we might think we somehow achieved some special status by our own strength and determination. And we would just be avoiding the great truth:

We only need to be ourselves, the easiest and the hardest thing of all. Easy because we don’t have to try to feel incomplete or vulnerable: we already are. Hard because we fight against that. But if we are honest with ourselves, we are naturally poor in spirit:  we don’t possess every gift; our strength is limited; we are broken and we mess up and we get hurt; and we long for a fulfillment, a wholeness, we cannot achieve on our own. Admitting all that is the first crucial step in following Christ and allowing the Spirit of God to fill our lives.

Our spiritual goal, then, is not to deny our humanity and try really hard to be saints; our great task is to be fully human and discover the saint within us. Practice being yourself in the presence of God: admit your needs, your hurts, your sins, your longings. Accept that God loves you fully as you are. And be open to God giving you strength in the midst of your weakness. Trust that. Look for that. Jesus didn’t just teach this, he lived this. And Jesus lives in us through the Holy Spirit. St. Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. So be fully human, like Jesus. Let yourself be loved and filled by God, like Jesus. If you do, then whether you own the title or not, you are a saint. And every saint is a blessing to the world.