Unitarian Universalists revere a Jesus who serves as a mentor and model, not a supernatural savior.  His saving act is not death and resurrection, but a helpful, hopeful message summed up in a list.  Like the Jewish Ten Commandments, or the Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles, Jesus gave us Eight Blessings, called the Beatitudes, as a guide to living

            Happy Easter, everyone.

            For Christians, today celebrates the day that Jesus rose from the dead following his crucifixion, proving that abundant life is possible for all who avail themselves of the spiritual path Jesus opens for us.

            For non-Christians, Easter is one of several spring holidays, offering a version of abundant life based not in the immortality of a single life, but in the eternal renewal of life, as season turns to season, and the fruits of one year become the seeds for the next.

            As a faith emerging from Christian roots, we are connected to the stories and holy days of the Christian faith.  But our Unitarian Jesus is not a supernatural savior, working miracles on our behalf, but a human teacher and role model, showing us how we may create lives of spiritual health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the planet we share.  

            Because Easter is about a resurrection we doubt, offering a salvation scheme we don’t feel we need, some Unitarian churches this morning will ignore Jesus entirely, or speak of the Easter story only as one more spring-time metaphor of new life emerging from seeming death.  But as a faith with Christian roots, it feels false to me to offer an Easter-less Jesus.  Instead, I thought, what if we used Easter this year as an occasion to look at the Jesus Unitarians believe in:  the Jesus who lived and taught.  Not, the Easter of what he accomplished for us with his death, but the Easter of what we are left with when the teacher has died.

For us, Unitarians, who revere Jesus as a teacher and model, what did he actually teach?

            I have one more intention for this morning.

            Next week, I will begin a series of sermons looking at the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism.  The seven principles are a statement written in 1985 but connecting back to earlier, similar statements, that is meant to define the shared core of our faith.  The Seven Principles exist officially as Article II of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is currently under review and may be changed by a vote at the UUA General Assembly this June.

My idea is to look at each of the seven principles over seven weeks, and link each one to some kind of action that our congregation takes to live out that principle in our work with our neighborhood partners and the wider world, thus lifting up not only the principles but also the fifth of the five tasks of interim ministry that we’ve been looking at throughout this year, the interim task of making connections to resources beyond our own congregation.

            More about that next week, but in thinking about the wisdom teaching of the seven principles, and thinking about how to enter into the wisdom teaching of Jesus for Easter, I recalled the first words of Jesus’ first sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, which begins with eight blessings, the Beatitudes.  Eight short statements that define the religion of Jesus, the way the seven short statements of our Principles currently define the faith of Unitarian Universalism.

            Here are the beatitudes, the eight blessings of Jesus, from the Book of Matthew, Chapter 5.

“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 be shown 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 because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Eight blessings.  Each blessing followed by a reward.

            But those whom Jesus names as blessed don’t seem very blessed, do they?  In many cases, those Jesus calls blessed we would call suffering or even cursed.  The word “blessed” simply means happy, or fortunate.  What does it mean to call the poor or the meek, or those who mourn or the persecuted, “blessed”?

            Is Jesus just being contrary, as he sometime is?  Or do his blessings point to a deeper meaning (as I think they do), a meaning that provides a guide and summary to all of Jesus’ ministry?

            First, consider what Jesus is doing.

            The beatitudes are the first words of Jesus’ first sermon:  the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  And his first sermon is called the Sermon on the Mount, because of where Jesus preaches it.  Jesus is surrounded by a crowd of followers clamoring to hear his message.  In order to be seen and heard, he climbs above the crowd up the side of a mountain, and then from the mountain, his disciples before him, the crowd beyond him, he begins to preach, first by giving a list of basic principles of the perfected spiritual life as he understands it and urges on his followers.

            Clearly this is meant to mimic and model another religious teacher who goes up a mountain and comes down with a list:  Moses and the 10 Commandments.  Jesus and the eight beatitudes.  And our UU list of seven principles.

            That Jesus begins his ministry modeling Moses is certainly deliberate, or at least a deliberate choice of Matthew wanting to present his story of Jesus as an echo of Moses.

            Jesus’ religious mission is founded within the context of the Jewish faith, and in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, who critiqued an expression of the Jewish faith that they felt had become stultifyingly rule-bound and focused on outward appearances and ritual behaviors, rather than inner qualities and humanitarian behaviors.  Jesus means to refresh his Jewish faith, to lead it back to the form of spiritual work that eases the real suffering of real people in the real world.

            Jesus doesn’t mean to refute the 10 Commandments, or any of the Jewish teachings.  He means to refocus the followers of his Jewish religion back on what he sees as its essence.  He offers his ministry not to replace Judaism, but to refine it.  The Beatitudes are his first expression of that mission, which then carries him through the rest of his life.

            So when he begins, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” he is saying that the society which is ruled by the highest and best spirit available to human beings is peopled not by those who are proud of themselves, and sure of their worth, and confidant of their superiority, but rather, by those who see the enormity of the spiritual task of being truly good.  People who see the distance between their actual selves and the enlightened, holy person they wish to be, and thus approach the spiritual journey with humility.  It is the poor in spirit who see truly how far they have to reach.  It is the poor in spirit who are willing to acknowledge a perfection greater than the little goodness they have achieved so far.  It is the poor in spirit who are able to humble themselves, and thus enjoy a life in which greater joy, greater love, greater kindness and human connection becomes available to them, because they are willing to be ruled by a standard higher than their own conception.

            It seems odd for Jesus to say, “Blessed are those who mourn.”  How does mourning make us happy or fortunate?  And for Jesus to offer the reward that those who mourn will be comforted seems perverse.  Isn’t it the comfortable that are blessed?  Couldn’t I just have the blessing of comfort without having to suffering the sadness of mourning?

            But Jesus says that the blessing is in the mourning.  How can that be?  What does mourning do for us?

Think of a time when you have been in mourning, for a loved one, or for an oppressed people, or mourning for the health of the planet.  Did you feel inside your mourning an opening up of your compassion?  Did you feel a deeper connection with a larger community beyond yourself?

Our periods of mourning, while difficult, remove the blinders of our lives that keep us from seeing the hardship and challenge of life, in our own lives, and in the lives of our loved ones and neighbors and strangers around us.  We see more truly when we acknowledge the suffering of life.  And when we see truly, we receive the comfort of living the real human life.

The reality of suffering is one of the four noble truths of Buddhism.  Those who avoid mourning, therefore, the self-satisfied and comfortable, are living a kind of willful repudiation of the common human reality.  The ones who mourn are the ones who see clearly, the ones who are fully connected to their own lives and the lives of others.  There is comfort there, in knowing that we are included in this shared human condition.

            “Blessed are the meek,” is Jesus’ third blessing, “for they will inherit the earth.”

            Jesus here, is critiquing those who think that positive change will come through authoritarian forms of strength, and force, and even violence.  Social change doesn’t come through oppression, he teaches, but through persuasion.  It is through quiet persistence, compassion, and invitation, that lasting social change occurs.  To be meek is to follow the path of non-violent resistance.  The method of change itself creates the world we seek.  Thus, the meek inherit an earth that the violent will never know.

            “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”  TO be hungry and thirsty is not a blessing.  But Jesus’ teaching is that our passion for a world of peace, liberty, and justice for all, should be a spiritual longing as strong as is our physical need for food and water.  And Jesus promises that our justice work is not in vain.  We will be satisfied, he says.

            “Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus says, “for they will be shown mercy.”  Though we strive for justice, justice alone is not enough.  Justice alone is too calculated, too cold.  Justice alone trades an eye for an eye, pain for pain, damage for damage.  We want justice, but justice tempered with mercy, so that mercy can end the ceaseless cycles of retribution.  The spiritually healthy don’t demand justice on those who have wronged us, because strict justice would simply wrong others the way we’ve been wronged.  The spiritually healthy grant mercy, because we hope to move beyond cycles of injustice, and we recognize the need for mercy for our own mis-deeds as well.

            Blessing number six:  “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”  The phrase, “pure in heart” connects again to Jesus’ mission of refining the Jewish faith.  Many of the Torah commandments have to do with what are called, “purity codes.”  These are descriptions of certain kinds of life events that make a person, “impure” usually having to do with bodily functions like food and sex and illness and so on.  The purity codes describe how to ritually make oneself “pure” again.  Jesus means to say that these kinds of bodily purity rules miss the spiritual point.  What’s necessary is to be pure in heart, pure in intention.

I’m thinking again of Buddhism and another list of spiritual basics, the “Eightfold Path” and the Buddha’s emphasis on right action, right livelihood, right speech, and so on.

Jesus is talking about replacing a physical definition of cleanliness with a moral cleanliness that is closer to God’s true interest.  Again, this isn’t Jesus talking against Judaism, rather he is asking his followers to lift up a different strand of Judaism; a strand such as the Prophet Micah preached when he asked, “What does the Lord require of you?”  And Micah answers, not sacrifices and rituals but, “To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

            “Blessed are the peacemakers,” seems clear enough.  Though by peace-making Jesus means not those who merely live in peace for themselves, but those who voluntarily enter the places of conflict in human life and reconcile the divided.  These people, Jesus said, are “children of God” or workers of holy purpose.

The final beatitude is a strange one.  Jesus proclaims, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.”  It does not feel like a blessing to be persecuted.  And if taking this beatitude as an instruction on how to earn a blessing, it might lead one to strive for persecution as though the more you could get others to condemn you the better.  But Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of self-righteousness.”  He says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.”  It is being good, and kind, and just, and merciful, that makes one blessed, not being arrogant and proud about how good and kind and just and merciful one is.

The clue to this interpretation of “blessed are those who are persecuted” is that this eighth blessing concludes with the same reward that is attached to the first blessing, the only time in the eight blessings that the same reward is repeated.  The reward is, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” for both those “who are persecuted because of righteousness” and for those who, “are poor in spirit.”  It is the ones who recognize how far they have to go, not the self-satisfied that are blessed.

For persecution to be a blessing, we must see that our sense of righteousness is not complete.  We aren’t as perfect as we think we are.  Our righteous sense deserves to be challenged.  We should be thankful to those who call us out for the times we fail to live up to the highest, those who question our strategies, those who keep our work focused not on our own confidence that we’re so right about everything, but on calling us back to work that eases the real suffering of real people in the real world.

I said the Unitarians regard Jesus as a teacher and as an example of how one can live a life that creates spiritual health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the world around us.  The eight blessings of the beatitudes are an outline of the message Jesus taught and lived until the day of his death.

We are to be humble:  “poor in spirit.”
We are to “mourn” with the real sufferings of the world.
We are to be meek in the strategies we use to encourage others to grow and change
We should pursue righteousness with a hunger and thirst akin to physical hunger and thirst.
We should temper justice with mercy
We should strive for inner purity and beware that outward shows of cleanliness can mask inner corruption.
We should live not merely peacefully, but as makers of peace.
And even as good as we are, we should thank those who call us to be better.

This Easter, this spring, as many cultures celebrate a new year beginning, as we see new life springing up all about us, as we are given, once again, the gift of life for another year, stretching out before us, for as long as we may have it…

Let us strive to resurrect our own dull spirits.  Let us emerge from the dark tombs of fear and hopelessness into the light of new creation.  Let us recommit to live again by the principles that lead to the rewards of health and joy, comfort and fulfillment.

You are blessed.  Live your blessing.  Be a blessing.