Wide Welcome

Well, good morning everybody. It's great to see you here. How many of you are glad to be in church today? What a beautiful service already. My name is René. I'm another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. And let me just start with this. If you are a mess today. If you feel broken, if you have failed, like maybe not even like, "Oh, yeah, I failed 10 years ago." Like last night you failed. You blew it. If you're lonely, if you're grieving. If sometimes you look around in church and you feel like you don't really belong. If right now you can't really relate to what's going on politically with the political authorities and you can't really relate to the religious authorities either. If you relate to anything I have just said, then you are going to love what Jesus Christ says today.

The Jesus way is what we call our summer series in the Sermon on the Mount. That's found in the Gospel of Matthew chapters 5, 6 and 7. And listen, I think God is doing something amazing through this series already. And I encourage you to just get involved with this all summer long. Grab a Bible, pick it up, read Matthew chapters 5, chapter 6, chapter 7. That's what's known as the Sermon on the Mount. And I think God is good. You're gonna see God in new ways. God is gonna change you in new and exciting ways.

Now the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus Christ's absolutely most famous talk. You could say it's the most quotable speech in human history. Jesus invented so many expressions in this talk that people still use today like turn the other cheek. You've heard that? Jesus came up with it in this talk, Salt of the Earth, Do Not Judge, Love Your Enemies, Our Father Who Art in Heaven, Do Unto Others, and Many Many Many More. It's like the most viral, most quotable TED talk anybody ever gave. The most quotable talk in human history. It's also the most influential talk in human history.

Once when he was asked, "Where did you get your ideas for non-violence?" Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Well, it was the Sermon on the Mount." Rather than a secular doctrine of passive resistance that inspired us. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred us. Yeah. There's a Harvard professor called Harvey Cox. He's an expert in human culture. And he said, "The Sermon on the Mount is," check this out, "the most luminous, most quoted, most analyzed, most contested, most influential moral and religious discourse in all of human history." It was Jesus' fifth symphony, his Mona Lisa, his masterpiece. And that's what we're going to be digging into with some depth this summer. Who's excited about that? I'm stoked. This is it. This is what it's all about.

And today we're going to dig into the introduction because Jesus Christ starts the greatest speech he ever gave, one of the greatest speeches, maybe the greatest speech in human history, with kind of a poem, a poetic riff. We call it the Beatitudes because the Latin word "biaté" for "blessed" starts each of these nine sentences as you are about to see. But some of these words that they're so familiar to us that the challenge any pastor faces when we're talking about this is to get you to feel the emotions people felt, to really understand at a visceral level what Jesus Christ was revealing and why it was so revolutionary.

So I want to paint a picture for you of the world that Jesus Christ walked into. All right? Two thousand years ago, what did the world look like? Well, the Roman military and political machine had taken over much of the known world. Nobody could stand against them, including in Judea where Jesus Christ lived. One historian, Tom Holland, says, "Think of it as the T-Rex. They were apex predators. The Roman army was the apex predator, the T-Rex of its day." And they kind of had the morals of apex predators. They lived by a code that they called the via Romanus or the Roman way. These are the values that they lived for, like glory and honor, force, what they called virility, manliness.

Basically, you know, you just kind of like do unto others before they do unto you. You know, love your neighbor more, like stab your neighbor in the back in order to get prestige. That's what they were all working for. The bottom line was to conquer was the greatest glory. To be conquered was absolute disgrace. And so these kinds of apex predator morals were what was dominating the world. And I would say that same mentality is kind of taken over our world today. I read an article in a magazine this week. The headline was, "Our culture is turning us into a bunch of hyper aggressive homicidal maniacs." Might have overstated it just a little bit, but maybe not too much.

Well, in Jesus' day, they faced a similar problem. The culture, as I said, was valuing and kind of predators and power. That's what they value. And when the T-Rex is stomping around, oppressing you, how do you conquer the T-Rex? Well, the natural thing to think is I need to out T-Rex the T-Rex. I need to out violent the violent people. What we need is a bunch of like velociraptors that'll get attacked the T-Rex. And so there was a rise in Judea, the Roman province of Judea where Jesus lived. And what you could call the zealots. Pardon me. Pardon me. And the zealots were a terrorist group really that constantly antagonized and harassed the Romans.

And what the zealots were hoping was they could keep the Romans on their heels until one day God would send his divine Messiah, the mega warrior and the Messiah. Well, that would be like a gigantosaurus on the scene. And he would just devour the T-Rex. He would smite the Romans. He would really show them who is who and what is what and out aggressive and out muscle and out manipulate all of the Romans. But of course, not everybody was into, you know, carnivore morals. There was another way, the religious way.

Now to explain what the religious way was in Jesus' day, the religious leaders taught, well, the reason that we're suffering under those apex predators, the reason God has not sent his gigantosaurus Messiah yet to eat them all up is this. It's because of you guys. You lot are all a bunch of losers. You're lazy. You're sinful. You're immoral. You're unholy. If you were just good enough, then the Messiah would come and smite the Romans. God is waiting until we're a holy nation and we're not. So it is your fault. And the message people heard from them, their sermons, basically you could summarize them as bad dog sermons. You bad, bad dog, bad, bad, bad dog. You got to be better.

And so what they did was they said the value are, here's the values that we're going to live by. You're going to keep the rules perfectly. You're going to be perfectly Orthodox. You're going to not fall out of line. And when you do all those things, then God will bless us and we'll have a better world because the Messiah will be here. And so to make sure everybody was as perfect as possible, they expanded God's 10 commandments into 613 regulations, 613, but they weren't done. They expanded those into 1,521 amendments. Like what? Well, one of the 10 commandments is to keep the Sabbath, which they interpreted as do not work on the Sabbath, but what's work.

Well, one of the amendments was women could not look in the mirror. Men could look in the mirror. But you know, women are so vain, so they can't look in the mirror. What does vanity have to do with keeping the Sabbath? Well, the woman, if you let women look in the mirror, a woman might be old and a woman might see a gray hair and she might be tempted to pluck out that gray hair and plucking out a gray hair is working. That would break the Sabbath and the Messiah wouldn't come. So no looking in the mirror for women. There were a total of 2,000 plus of these rules to follow.

Now let me ask you a question. How do you think it felt to live under that system? Here's a way to picture it. Raise your hand if you have ever played sports against somebody spectacularly better than you. Anybody ever done that? Like you play golf or you ski with or you go surfing with or or or play tennis with somebody who's like a thousand times better than you. Let me ask you this question. Is that fun? No, especially not if they're in your face about it. You just feel like an oaf. You just feel like you want to quit the bar so high for you. Like you never want to play that sport again. Well, that's what the Pharisees were doing to put the bar of spiritual expectations so high that the average man or woman on the street was saying, "This is out of my league. I may not even try." And there's a lot of that going around now too.

I read this week that Willie Nelson said that he was actually raised in a pretty strict Christian home. But very early he got into drugs and all kinds of other wildlife and he gave up on Christianity for life. Why? Well, I'm quoting him now. He said, "Well, I was doomed to go to hell by the time I was seven. I've been told that if you smoke cigarettes and drink beer you're going to hell and by seven I was gone. So forget it." And this is exactly how the people Jesus was talking to were feeling. Now, here's the thing. This is what was happening in Jesus' country in Jesus' time, right? Here's my options. I could be a predator or I could be a fundamentalist. Predator? Fundamentalist. Or I could just go do my own thing and drink myself into oblivion somewhere.

But what if I don't want to be a predator? And what if I don't want to be a fundamentalist? Well, against that psychological backdrop emerges the Jesus way, which is totally different than either of those other ways that were dominant in his culture. Now, here's a question for you. Is this totally irrelevant today? Do we still need the Jesus way today? Do those temptations still tempt us today? Absolutely. Right now in our culture people, I think, are becoming obsessed with both of those things, political muscle and maneuvering and status just like the Romans because they feel like this is the hope of the world to make this country, to make this world a better place. We need to do whatever we can to get power.

And there's also a rising spirit of fundamentalism and on the religious perspective, but also non-religious. There's fundamentalist mentality, kind of like, you got to keep all our rules perfectly, be perfectly, orthodox, don't fall out of line, better not question the checklist of approved thoughts and approved words. It's all for a better world. It's all for our coming utopia. So follow our rules. All of them are you are out. Right? And so into that psychological scene, which we can all identify with today, enters Jesus and people are heavily burdened by all of those things.

And Jesus shows up and at first, he's kind of the mystery man. He's about 30 years old when his ministry starts and things are starting to happen wherever this guy like walks, miracles, healings. And not just like people are healed of a stomach ache or a hangnail or something, like crippled people are walking, blind people are growing eyes, lepers are getting their clean skin back. And people are going, "Who is this guy?" And then he starts talking about kingdom. It's his favorite word, kingdom, kingdom, kingdom. What does he mean by kingdom? Is he raising a rebellion, kingdom of heaven? Oh, is he starting a new religion? He doesn't seem to be in a big hurry to explain himself.

But then one day the word gets out that Jesus Christ is going to explain things. He's going to go public. He's going to show what his kingdom is all about. And the Bible says multitudes, thousands and thousands of people say, "I'm going to show up to hear that talk." And they show up on a hillside outside of Capernaum and they show up with blankets and picnic baskets and yeti coolers. You know, they're ready for the day. They sit down and they're waiting and Jesus arrives. Oh, there he is. There he is. He's here. And a hush falls over the crowd. And he gathers his closest followers toward him and everybody else's leans forward and listens.

And the Bible says he sits down and that's the position of a teacher. And he opens his mouth and the first word out of his mouth. What do you think it is? Blessed. Already it's 10 times better than anything they've ever heard from the religious leaders or the Romans. All they ever heard was, "You're not an art class or bad dog." And Jesus goes, "Blessed." As Mark said last weekend, that's from the Greek word "makaryos," which can be translated "happy," but it means a bigger happiness than that. The Greeks use it to describe the divine bliss experienced by the gods above human circumstance. And Jesus says, "Blessed." And then he says it nine times in like nine sentences. "Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed." This is how he starts his talk. And the people are like, "Wow, this is something different."

But blessed are who divine bliss and favor are upon who? Like the connected, you know, the powerful, the pious as usual. Here's something they've never heard before. First thing he says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven." What's that mean, poor in spirit? Let's walk our way through these nine Beatitudes, and then we're going to quickly look at some three takeaway points today. Poor in spirit, well, there were two kinds of people on the crowd that day, right? There were the Pharisees and the Romans, and they were rich in spirit. The Pharisees were rich in spirituality, rich in piety, and the Romans were rich in reputation and power.

And then there was another group. They were poor in spirit. And those people knew they didn't have what it takes to be a part of you, those groups. They knew they weren't members of some spiritual honor society. They knew they weren't setting righteousness records every single week. They knew they had no power, and it was to those people that Jesus said, "Divine favors coming to you, to you who are bankrupt, spiritually bankrupt. I am announcing today the doors of my kingdom are wide open to you." To all of you who have already decided that you can't even measure up to any of the human systems, you've already bailed out of both of those, and you've bailed out of even hoping you could ever gain entrance into any kind of a kingdom or palace someday. Come on in, walk right in.

Can you imagine the impact of just this first sentence on people? They never heard anything like this. And they started to think, "Us? Is it possible?" It's kind of like, "Are you telling me somebody with my grades could get into Stanford?" Right? "Hars is the kingdom, us?" And he doesn't stop there. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." And "mourn" is the word used there in Greek for the most intense kind of mourning possible for a job loss or a loss of a loved one, and for mourning your own inadequacy. Like when the Apostle Paul said in Romans 7, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of sin and death?" Ever felt like that? When you're just sick of your own behavior. And sometimes you feel like, "God would never want me back, ever, not ever. You're mourning." And Jesus says, "Oh, well come on in, because I'll comfort you."

And in a land of predators, "blessed are the meek." Meek, that's the opposite of proud. And again, across the landscape that day, there were Pharisees and they were Romans, and they were proud, right? They were like, "I'm cool, I'm good, I don't need whatever Jesus has to offer." And there were the meek who said, "I'm so messed up." And Jesus says, "Keep leaning in, because blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." And what does that mean? That means to know you are messed up, but to want to be so badly changed, to want to be made right, to want to stop doing these destructive things, to want to be pure, to want to be sobered, to want to be holy. You crave it, you crave it, but you don't know how to get it.

And again, there were two sets of people there that day. The Pharisees didn't crave righteousness. Why not? By their standards, they were full. They weren't hungry. Jesus is saying, "Here's a feast," and they were like, "Oh, no thanks, I just ate." But there were other people, and they were so hungry, they wanted God so badly, but they just didn't know how to get there. And Jesus said, "If you're hungry, I can fill it." And then Jesus starts talking about the kind of soldiers that his army is going to have. He says, "Blessed are thou merciful, for they'll be shown mercy." Mercy? That wasn't a value among the Pharisees or the Romans. The Romans majored in vendetta. "You come against me, I'll destroy you." And the Pharisees majored in condemnation, right? I mean, that's kind of like was their gig. At least, you know, I got to point out the wrong things so that everybody can be holy, so the Messiah will come. Sorry, but you know, that's my job.

And Jesus says, "Here's my, some armies of demolition experts, mine's going to have mercy experts. And blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." And the key phrase there, the innovation, was in heart. The Pharisees were like, "Oh, no, it's about that. It's about what you do. It's about the outside. It's about the veneer. They were pure on the surface." But again, Jesus is saying, "Do you long to see God? Do you long to know God? Do you want God to experience God? You might not look the part. Might surprise your friends and your enemies to know that about you. But in your heart, you want to be righteous. You want to be generous." I mean, listen, why do you think Jesus spent so much time with a group that the Bible calls the tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners? Because they knew who they were. They knew they weren't part of the religious way or the Roman way. They were scorned. They were unloved. But Jesus knew something else about them. He knew that some of them hungered and thirsted for something better for God. And so Jesus didn't judge them on the outside the way that other people did. He's like, "That you will keep listening.

Blessed are the peacemakers." "For they'll be called sons of God, like God." What does peacemakers mean? Not just peace, wishers. You go out and you make peace. You're the first in the disagreement to forgive. You don't just wait till they say they're sorry. You could call it aggressive forgiveness. That's part of the force Jesus is raising for the kingdom of heaven. That's certainly not the Roman way, but that's the Jesus way. And he's going to talk more about all these things in the sermon on that. This is just the intro. And then he says, "Now when you live like that, not everybody's going to love it. In fact, some of them will persecute you for it. But blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you. Would people insult you, persecute you, falsely say all kinds of evil against you, slander you because of me, rejoice and be glad. Because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." You're like a prophet. You people who are hungering and thirsting for something more. You people who are willing to go to wherever you can go to be filled with God. You people who know that you're unrighteous, but you want righteousness. Yeah, you mean like the prophets before you. I mean, they'd never heard anything like this before.

Put these all together, these nine Beatitudes. What's Jesus saying? Well, John Orpurg in his new book, "Instrumental," writes about how in the year 2000, a couple of Silicon Valley engineers had an argument over the attractiveness of a specific woman. And as a result, they started an attractiveness rating website called Hot or Not. And this inspired a similar side at Harvard called Face Mash, which eventually got renamed Facebook. But within a week after being posted initially, Hot or Not was getting two million hits a day. And what it was all about is you posted a picture of yourself or somebody else that you took a picture of, and then people would read it. Is that person hot or not? Like this person got an official rating 8.3, hotness level, right? And everybody knew what was behind it. Blessed are the hot. Woe to the not. And of course, the irony is most people feel at some level they are not.

And what Jesus is saying in the Beatitudes is blessed are the not. To all the knots, all the misfits, Jesus says, "Welcome." Now let's bring this home. Did you notice something? Each of those nine Beatitudes had three parts, right? The blessing, blessed, the circumstance, you know, poor in spirit, grieving and meek and so on, and then the reward, the promise. You'll inherit, you'll see God, you'll be filled. Yours is the kingdom of heaven. And each of these three parts challenges you and me. Here's the take home.

The first part, blessed, happy, right? This has to challenge you to redefine happiness. If blessed are, you know, the meek of the poor in spirit and those who mourn, then happiness must not be like living the perfect Instagram life, right? If Jesus is right, then happiness is not about avoiding sadness or discomfort. You can't avoid them anyway, right? Everybody goes through them. So happiness must be about embracing them as the paths to growth that Jesus says they are, the paths to blessing.

You know, it's interesting that the biggest movement in psychology over the last two decades has been research into happiness, like scientifically research-based what makes people the most happy. And they've come up with some conclusions. Wouldn't you love to know what they are? Like, how can you be happier? What's the key to happiness? It turns out that actually pursuing happiness, trying to completely not ever be sad and just be super happy all the time is actually not the key. I could have shown you a hundred articles from psychology magazines and journals that basically amount to the same thing. Here's just a couple headline from psychology today, the importance of misery. Another journal. Here's the headline, misery, the secret to happiness. What in the world are they talking about?

Well, research shows this is science. Quote, those who suffer, who grieve, who go through loss, later experience greater joy than those who've never been through a great sorrow. That's funny. That sounds exactly like what Jesus says in the Beatitudes. When you accept suffering and you commit to bringing, now listen, religious people have twisted this in the past, right? You had the medieval monks were like, oh, suffering is the path, the blessing. Okay, I'm going to whip myself. That's idiotic. You don't have to do that because guess what? You're gonna suffer. So acceptance is about going, God is going to use this in my life.

So I'll never forget a conversation I had with a guy who teaches at Stanford and he also works as a psychologist at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital and his specialty is helping veterans, men and women who have psychological damage. And he says, I said, oh, you know what? What's something that like lay people, civilians don't know about your work. And he said, well, he goes, sometimes I get tired of hearing about PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome. He said, this is real and it's a huge part of my work. But he said, what nobody ever talks about that I see all the time in my work is what I call post-traumatic growth syndrome.

He said, so many of these people who've been through almost unimaginable trauma find that it actually moves them into a better life, a much more meaningful life, greater things. And that leads into the second challenge. The second part of the Beatitudes are all about circumstances, right? Bitter circumstances. So that part of the Beatitudes challenges me to reframe my circumstances, reframe my circumstances. Count yourself blessed if you have hit bottom because that's where you find God. If you know your ship is sinking and there's no help unless somebody comes and rescues you and you look up.

So remember I said there's two groups of people, the proud and the meek there. So you're, you're, honestly, I think every one of us has those two people inside of our hearts. Every one of us are proud in some ways and yet we're devastated and destitute in some ways too. And, and we got to be honest about those things in our hearts and what our internal monologue is. So let me ask you, does your internal monologue tend toward kind of, I got what it takes. I can make it happen. I don't need help. That's kind of the Roman way or the religious way in Jesus' day. Or is your internal monologue, I need you, Lord, I'm lost without you. Help. That's where you find Jesus.

Before a final point, I got to read you an email I got a while ago now on this point. "Dear René, I'm an inmate at the jail. I just finished watching your sermon video from this last week and you talked about us inmates. It's very refreshing to hear a church talk to those of us incarcerated in such a positive and encouraging way and I hope you still feel that way. He says, "Before I ended up in jail, I was literally drinking myself to death. I lied to God and my family about my excessive drinking even though I was quite apparent to everybody. I'd reached a point where all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die. I was totally hopeless alone afraid and yet I could not stop drinking." Now listen to this.

"Then in a moment of clarity, I prayed something like this, 'God, Father, forgive me of my sins and please put someone or somebody in my life to guide me.' Well, a few days later, I was promptly arrested by God's taxi service, the Santa Cruz Police Department. At first, I was very angry but as the days went by, I saw God loves me and he's doing this as my loving Father. I've rededicated my life and will to Jesus Christ and I'm being honest for the first time in a long while. I don't know what goddess is store for me but this I do know." And he quotes Romans 8, 28, "I'm absolutely convinced that nothing, nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable, absolutely nothing can get between us and God's love for us." Amen. That's it right there.

Proud people never have that moment of clarity but when you're desperate, you can receive grace. And so third, receive the promises. Again and again, Jesus says, "You'll be comforted, you'll be rewarded, you'll be given the kingdom of heaven, not you might be, you will be." These are promises from Jesus. Your addiction is not the end, your grief is not the end. Your suffering is not the end because Jesus Christ, his hearers don't know it yet but the way Jesus Christ is going to make all this come true is he is going to become so poor in spirit that he humbles himself to death, even death on a cross. And it's by his poverty and his sacrifice for us atoning for all of our sins that we're able to approach God and walk right into the kingdom of God not on our merits but on his. That is grace. Amen.

You could really summarize the intro to Christ's first recorded sermon this way. Jesus is saying welcome to those who never felt like you belonged. Welcome. Welcome to you. Welcome to you and welcome to you and welcome to you and welcome to you and welcome to you who slipped in during the middle of the sermon and welcome and welcome to Willie Nelson and everyone ever felt like Willie Nelson. Welcome the kingdoms here and it's for you. The Roman way was blessed are the powerful. The religious way, blessed are the perfect. The Jesus way, blessed are the desperate.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I have a feeling that we've got both desperation and pride in our hearts at all times and so God we say thank you for your welcome. Thank you for being so good and gracious to us and I pray that whether we look destitute on the outside or whether we look like we've got it all together on the outside, you see our hearts, you see both the pride and you see the need and I pray that we would lean away from the pride and lean into the need because that's when we lean toward you because you're so good to us. Thank you for your grace. In Jesus name. Amen.