Being Woke.

Matthew 5:1-12

January 29, 2017

I.

These days I have heard people say, when they want to indicate that someone has acquired a clearer view of things, that someone is “woke.”  To be “woke” means that one is no longer just sort of sleepwalking through life, unconscious of what’s really going on, going along with whatever, just blindly following the herd.  It means someone has been brought into a knowledge of the way things really are, as distinct from the way we think they are.

Coming to an awareness of God’s Presence and love means seeing the world anew according to wonder, mystery, goodness, wholeness, shalom or peace, justice, and freedom.  This is the Kingdom of God that Jesus preaches.  We see that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” as in Psalm 24.  We see that creation is declared “very good,” as in Genesis 1.  We see God’s goodness overflowing leading us to give thanks in all circumstances, as Paul says.  We see that the world is really overflowing with beauty and blessing.  

Instead of scarcity we see abundance.  Instead of survival of the fittest, we see how beings thrive when they cooperate.  Instead of winners and losers we see how God intends the world to be win/win for everyone.  Instead of superiors and subordinates, we see how God makes us all equal.  We awaken to a seemingly new world, one of bounty and grace.  We see that the “real world,” the one that God made and places us in, is actually permeated with joy and light.  We know God’s love at the heart and core of all things.     

We can sometimes experience analogies of this kind of broadening, opening of awareness, seeing a different truth, the actual truth, in our normal experience.  When I was in the 6th grade I got my first pair of glasses, and realized with a shock for the first time the brightness, the color, the clarity, and the beauty of the world.  I will never forget my first view of the highway in Wayne outside the optometric office.  It was a revelation.

My perception had been limited to the 18 inch bubble, which was all I, in my near-sightedness could clearly see.  Everything else was foggy and even dangerous.  In realizing that there is more to the world, it is like moving from inside a cave to the top of a mountain.  Maybe that’s why Jesus makes a point of going to the top of a mountain to deliver this sermon.  When we get out of our closed, small, limited framework and see from a broader, wider, and higher perspective, when we have a more panoramic and inclusive view of the world, when we see how things really fit together, we begin to become aware of the amazing, unconventional, extraordinary, wondrous, and demanding character of the life God gives to us.   

Coming into a relationship with Jesus Christ means suddenly realizing that seen through him our whole world looks different.  He is the corrective lens perhaps allowing us to see the world as God made it.  He shows us what is really there.  He calls us out of our blindness and paralysis, our of our self-imposed disabilities, and delivers us to God’s world of wholeness and healing, justice, peace, and love.

II.

The other thing I realized that day when I got my glasses was how little and how poorly I had been seeing.  The blurry, indistinct reality I used to know — and assumed was the only truth — was revealed as a lie due to my disability.  What I had aways assumed was real, wasn’t.  It is very humbling when we come to these realizations, these moments of clarity, when we manage to step back from and get outside of ourselves enough to perceive from a wider angle.

Any new perception of the truth is going to have this dual effect: in seeing a wider expanse of truth, goodness, and beauty, we also at the same time come to see how far off we have been.  Becoming aware of God’s love and life permeating all things automatically makes us aware of the corruption, shallowness, ignorance, and evil of our own existence.  Becoming aware of God’s truth automatically makes us aware of how we have been complacently mollifying ourselves with self-serving lies.  Becoming aware of God’s Light only shows how profoundly we had been languishing in darkness.  Seeing God’s greatness only reveals our insignificance and smallness.

Coming into an awareness of God’s goodness is usually pretty traumatic because it forces us to call into question our whole worldview, everything in which we placed our trust, all our assumptions, and everything on which we were basing our actions.  We have been living in lies and we have been doing massive damage to ourselves, others, and the creation because of it. 

When Jesus sits down to teach on the mountain, I think he is kind of saying, “Blessed are the woke.”  Because the qualities he lists here are what happens to a soul that has been suddenly faced with the reality of what Jesus is about and the truth which he embodies.  

Once we start to take his teachings, his actions, and his witness to the Kingdom of God seriously, once we are confronted with how far short and how far off the mark is our normal understanding of the world, once we realize how utterly different from what we think we know is God’s truth and God’s reality, we can only be thrown into a situation of brokenness, humility, grief, remorse, sadness, and shock.  We are jolted into an awareness of our own deep and comprehensive poverty of spirit.

Poverty of spirit means all our self-importance, all our self-righteousness, all our self-aggrandizement, all of our certainty, all our delusions of grandeur, all the imaginations of our heart that tell us how special we are, how right we are, how great we are, are simply blown away. 

To know this, to have this awareness and consciousness that Jesus calls poverty of spirit, to know how spiritually poor we are… Jesus calls this blessed.  Because to at least be aware of our delusion and ignorance and smallness is better than remaining in our clueless, unconscious, sleepwalking, blind, paralyzed state.

The first 4 of these blessings, or “beatitudes,” of Jesus have to do with this sense of humility, loss, shock, emptiness, and just being off the track.  They are what we feel when we see how profoundly we have been on the wrong track for all of our lives.

III.     

The question becomes, “Now what?”  So Jesus offers 5 more blessings, showing us what it means to emerge into this new world, this new life, he reveals to us.  He talks about mercy, purity of heart, peacemaking, and enduring persecution.  In all, he depicts a simple, non-judgmental, humble, unassuming, focused, and non-violent way of life.  Later in the gospel he will talk about losing ourselves, giving up all we have, taking up our cross, and generally emerging into a non-egocentric, selfless, generous, and open embracing of life.

This is how he himself lives, finally giving up his own life and pouring out his own blood on the cross for the life of the world.  He shows that we receive from God, from life, from reality, what we give.  When we are merciful we will receive mercy.  Indeed, practicing mercy is how we receive mercy.  It is a matter of being given mercy by God and then receiving it by passing it on to others.  We only receive what flows through us into the world.  We don’t receive to grasp, but only to give away. 

Purity of heart means an unadulterated oneness and unity of our vision.  God is One, and purity of heart is to realize that all are one in God.  We are not to be distracted or diverted into meaningless divisions and distinctions.  It is the realization, as Paul says so powerfully in Galatians, that there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, because in Christ we are all revealed to be one.  And we treat others as ourselves, because they are ourselves, sharing in the same humanity and creatureliness.  Purity of heart is an identification with all creation and all people.

This is itself the root of true peacemaking.  It is not a matter or bringing people together so much as encouraging people to realize the unity and togetherness they already share.  Being “woke” means seeing and living in what is really there, and has been there all along.  It means helping others to see what we see first by our actions and example.  A true peacemaker is one who knows and acts as if everyone is part of one divine family, because that is the truth.  A true peacemaker witnesses to a peace and justice that has always been established by God at the heart of all things.

 proceeding in our lives according to these blessings, these practices and values of Jesus, will place us in radical discontinuity with the way most people and the powers that run the world still think and exist.  We will be rejected as crazy, or as traitors, or as atheists, or as just eccentric and pathetic losers.  The consequences of living according to the truth is that those still blinded by their idols and lies will reject and even persecute us.

Get used to it, says Jesus.  Persecution is the only thing on this list that he mentions twice, in case we didn’t get it the first time.  

IV.

  

Finally, he assures us that the people who know these blessings of God have a great reward in heaven.  Do not imagine that he is talking about something that only happens after our bodies die.  In Matthew’s gospel, “heaven” is often a euphemism for God, whose name Matthew is uncomfortable overusing.  And to be “in God” is something that begins to happen here and now.  It happens when we get “woke” to God’s living Presence and reality all around, among, and within us.  The reward starts now in the joy, peace, and forgiveness we know in God’s “woke” community.

That is the community, the gathering of disciples, of people who walk in the light of God’s truth, who live in the real world by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking in humility with God, as the prophet Hosea says.  We do that by living according to these blessings of the Lord Jesus.

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