Welcome to my sermon archives.
This weirdness means that God is here. God is doing things, whether you are ready for them or not. God will surprise you, and God will use you to surprise others, and in recognizing God at work you will find salvation. If you were looking for anything clearer, like a sign that you should go this way instead of that way, or plant this crop instead of that crop, or worship in one place or another, that’s not what’s happening now. God is here. That’s what it means.
While the Dunning-Kruger effect essentially lies to you about the state that you are in, these statement, often called the Beatitudes, tell the truth. Life is hard. Following Jesus is hard. Anyone who says it’s not is trying to sell you something. But I think most of us are here this morning not because we have escaped the hardness of life, but because we have experienced it, and we know that there’s blessedness in the midst of it. We know that what Jesus says is true.
I hope you have some people in your life who are easy to love, but if that’s all you’ve got then you may have Kondo-ed your life too carefully. I’m not sure you can actually follow Jesus if you don’t have any people that you don’t like in your life, because so much of what Jesus tells us to do, and to be, is about how we respond to people who are hard for us to love. That is a critical piece of how we practice our faith.
