Hilton Head Island, SC – April 17, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 7:24-30; Mark 12:41-44
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” – Matthew 5:5 (RSV)
Blessings for the Meek
In the past couple of Sundays I have had occasion to refer to children’s hymns. Today I want to refer to another one. The text, which was written by Charles Wesley, who was John’s brother (assuming you know who John was, but if you don’t, it’s okay), says, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild/ Look upon a little child/ Pity my simplicity/ Suffer me to come to Thee.”
The older I get, the more I realize I have long been laboring under a particular curse. The curse is that I can’t forget the words to hymns. And that includes horrible hymns as well as magnificent ones. “Put your snout/ Under the spout/ Where the Gospel comes out” is never going to make it into the Top Hundred of all-time great hymns. Nor shall “There is a fountain filled with blood/ Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins.” I may not remember every word of every hymn exactly as it was written, but I am unable to forget many of the most salient lines of the poetry. I also recall snatches of lyrics in countless songs. Sadly, I forget things I should remember, like names, for instance, or dates I set with somebody and wrote in my date book which I always carry with me, but sometimes I forget to look at the date book on a given day, and poof! --- I am hoisted yet again on my own daily calendar petard. The older I get I also am cursed by leading myself onto insubstantial tangents and from which I may not remember how to escape.
As I was saying, before you interrupted my line of thought, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” may be a dandy thought for little kids, but it is a huge perversion of the Jesus of history. Meek and mild Jesus was not, at least not as we understand meekness today. People who are meek and mild don’t get executed on crosses or any other horrendous means of extermination.
Therefore, in the third Beatitude, Jesus said something which, on the face of it, sounds absurd: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Why would he who was deliberately anything but meek say that the meek are blessed so much that they shall inherit the earth? And what does the word meek mean, anyway? And what did Jesus mean when he said that the meek “shall inherit the earth”?
There are nine Beatitudes, and for all of them I shall be relying on observations made about each Beatitude by the renowned New Testament scholar William Barclay. As I have ruefully noted several times through the years, I was unable to take Dr. Barclay’s New Testament course when I was a student at Trinity College of Glasgow University in Scotland, because I had not taken a required New Testament Greek class prior to matriculating at Trinity in the fall of 1962. But I consider it one of the greatest privileges of my life that I was able to sing in Willie’s Trinity College choir under the spirited waving of his chubby arms and pudgy fingers.
William Barclay notes in the beginning of his commentary on the third Beatitude that what we mean by the word “meek” is not what the New Testament Greek means when it translates that word from the original Aramaic in which Jesus spoke. But before we get into what the Greek word means, let us think about one variety of human beings who truly are meek in the ordinary contemporary sense of that word. I am speaking about children. Most children, up to age 5 or 10, are usually quite meek in the common understanding of the word. Some seem to be born assertive and strong-willed, but not so for the majority of children. It takes some people somewhere between the ages of 5 and 85 to decide who they are going to be, but between 5 and 25 most of us evolve into who we are going to be for the rest of our lives. For our first ten years or so, though, most of us are naturally meek in the usual understanding of that word.
Luis Zayas wrote a book called Forgotten Citizens: Deportation, Children, and the Making of American Exiles and Orphans. He and his fellow researchers describe the negative results when parents (especially fathers) are deported back to countries where they were born before they came to the US as illegal immigrants. He tells about Felicita, an 11-year-old whose parents are undocumented. She had a dream in which she was playing with her cousins, and buses came to round up the children. The others kids all had black hoodies, and they could hide their faces, but Felicita just had a pink sweater, and they took her to jail where her mother was, with her hands covered with blood. That is the dream of a genuinely meek person in the modern sense.
Then there was Virginia, a pre-schooler, whose parents also are undocumented. She often curled up in the fetal position in school. When she got to kindergarten, she stopped speaking because of her anxiety over her family’s troublesome legal situation. Psychologists call this condition “expressive aphasia.” Luis Zayas estimates there are four and a half million children in this country like these two young girls. If the youthful meek of the earth are to inherit the earth, or at least a small piece of the American dream, the American people are going to have to exercise more compassion for people who are powerless to control their own destiny.
According to Dr. Barclay, however, the natural meekness of children or child-like behavior is not what Jesus was talking about. In Greek, he said, the word for “meek” is the golden mean between excessive anger and excessive placidity. Those who are meek in that sense, said William Barclay, are always angry at the right time and never angry at the wrong time. To be truly meek, he wrote, is to be self-controlled. The meek know their own limitations, and they are able to forgive others for their limitations.
So how do people who are meek in that way inherit the earth? They do so because their moderated behavior has a positive effect on everyone around them. Their influence is greater than the influence of others because their motives are perceived to be unimpeachable.
There is a man currently on the world stage who perhaps manifests the biblical meekness described by William Barclay more than anyone else alive. He is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires and now Pope Francis I. The Pope lives modestly in a very small apartment in the Vatican, and is driven in a Fiat automobile so old it looks like it could have been in La Dolce Vita or La Strada. But the man is very shrewd in his ecclesiastical policies. He recently published a papal document on marriage called The Joy of Love, in which he urged the Roman Catholic Church to stop carping at parishioners for breaking church rules, instead encouraging the clergy to give support to imperfect people in imperfect relationships. Francis wrote, “I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral role which leaves no room for confusion. But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness.”
Specifically he said that priests should judge Catholic couples individually who have had civil marriages or have been divorced, rather than to condemn all couples in those situations. Heretofore such people could not receive communion. The Pope wrote, “It can no longer simply be said that all those in any irregular situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace…. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.” Francis I is determined to use his powerful influence, but clearly not as an ecclesiastical bully, nor to exercise the papacy as a bully pulpit. In so doing, he is inheriting the earth, not merely for himself, but for God and His Church. Viva il Papa’!
A few weeks ago we watched a movie on television called Longest Ride. It was about a young couple, Luke and Sophia. He was a bull rider from North Carolina (where you wouldn’t expect a bull rider to come from), and she was an entrepreneur starting a fashion design business. One night they happened upon a car which had crashed into a ditch. In it was an elderly man, played by Alan Alda. He was unconscious, and the car was on fire. Luke got him out of the car, and Sophia retrieved a box of letters on the front seat before they were incinerated.
When Ira (Alan Alda) recovered consciousness in the hospital, he asked Sophia how he had gotten there. She said they pulled him out of his car and called for an ambulance. After some wary hesitation, Ira asked Sophia to read a letter from the box. They were love letters which he and his wife Ruth had written to one another when they were Luke and Sophia’s age. By means of their growing friendship, Sophia discovered many parallels between her relationship with Luke and Ira’s relationship with Ruth, who later became Ira’s wife. There were periods of similar stress and separation between both couples, Sophia learned by talking to Ira and by reading the letters. In the movie there were many flashbacks to Ruth and Ira in their younger days.
Ira had been injured in World War II, and as a result of the injury they could have no children. But Ruth took one of the young students she was teaching under her wing, and for a couple of years Daniel lived with them as though he were their own child. But then his parents, who were addicted rednecks with few redeeming values, insisted on taking him back, leaving town, and they never saw him again. But in that brief period Ruth and Ira, but especially Ruth, had a profound effect on Daniel. She had become a highly accomplished and acclaimed artist, and she taught Daniel to paint. Later Ruth left Ira for a time to perfect her art. But she could not bear to live without him, so she came back home. Not long afterward she died, leaving scores of beautiful paintings as her legacy to Ira. In telling about Ira and Ruth’s sometimes stormy but always committed marriage, Ira said to Sophia, “Love requires sacrifice --- always.”
In the meantime, Luke had separated from Sophia, because he wanted to continue as a bull rider in big-time rodeo competition, and she wanted him to quit. Only when he continued was he able to complete his longest ride, and with that he was able to stop. When Ira died shortly thereafter, by his will all of Ruth’s valuable paintings were to be sold at auction, and the proceeds would be distributed later according to other stipulations of the will. There was an amateurish painting of Ruth, and no one knew who had painted it. With it Ira had directed in his will that the bidding was to begin. Luke knew Sophia had wanted the painting, and he made the only bid on it. The auctioneer immediately stopped the auction, announcing that Ira’s will declared that whoever bought that painting would be given all the other paintings, which were worth millions of dollars. Sophia was also in the auction room, but Luke did not know it.
Afterward, Sophia and Luke noticed on the back of the portrait of Ruth that it was the boy, Daniel, who had done the painting. Daniel was now a professor of astronomy at a prestigious university. In a letter attached to the back of the painting, he had written of Ruth, “She told me I could be anything I wanted to be.” Loved requires sacrifice, always, and biblical meekness was the essence of love for Ira and Sophia, and it became the unifying factor for Ruth and Luke.
The Russian composer Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky was an unusually emotional man. He felt things very deeply. After all, one of his symphonies is entitled Pathetique. When he was a child, his governess used a Russian expression to describe him; she called him a “porcelain child.” It suggested that he was spiritually delicate and unusually refined, but also internally strong.
When Tchaikovsky composed his Piano Concerto No. 1, he dedicated it to Nikolai Rubenstein, the famous Russian pianist. Rubenstein studied the score, and with insensitive cruelty told Tchaikovsky that he hated it. The confident composer was instantly crushed. Later, Tchaikovsky summoned up courage to show the concerto to conductor Hans von Bulow. Von Bulow was mesmerized by it. He led the Boston Symphony it its premier performance to enormous acclaim, and then later in London, with the same results. Now, more than a century later, the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 has become a standard work in orchestras all around the world. Tchaikovsky knew he had compositional talent, and he did not allow his initial severe disappointment to deter him. And thus did his biblical meekness go on to inherit the earth.
None of us is exactly like any of the others of us. We all possess a unique set of genetic abilities, learned abilities, personality strengths and weaknesses, psychological insights and blind spots, and spiritual power and timidity. God wants to bless all of us, not as we might become at our best, but as we are right now, every hour of every day. It is God who blesses the meek. He takes those who refuse to be pushed around but who also refuse to push others around, and he enables them to inherit the earth, so that they fit snugly into the world around them, and contribute to its improvement through their gentle but self-confident spirit.
Pat Present was one of the first people to attend The Chapel Without Walls with regularity. Early on she became a member of our board of trustees until ill health prevented her from coming to church much at all, and then, sadly, finally never again. She was probably misdiagnosed as needing to be in a local memory care unit. A few years ago one of her daughters took Pat to be near her in suburban Philadelphia in an assisted care facility.
Pat was born in England. She met her husband John on a ship going to America after the war. They were married, and spent most of their married life in Wilmington, Delaware, where they lived with their three daughters at 719 Greenwood Road. Pat had an increasingly hard time of it for the last few weeks of her life, and she was in considerable pain. But she never complained. I never once heard her complain about anything. She was always a lovely lady.
Last Sunday afternoon she lay in bed with a daughter on each side of her. She had a catheter in her. Somehow it slipped out, and the nurses had to clean her up and change the bedclothes. When they were finished, she quietly said to them, “Thank you for getting me ready for heaven.” It was so Pat-like for her to say that. Shortly thereafter she died. In a while the hospice nurse came to certify her death. On the official form, the nurse wrote the time of death as 7:19 PM, Sunday, April 10, 2016. To her daughter Claire, who called to tell me that she had died, it was a symbolic completion of a circle back to 719 Greenwood Road, Wilmington, where Pat had inherited a large chunk of that portion of the earth assigned to her. Pat could not be coerced into affirming anything to which she was truly opposed, as we realized from her service on The Chapel board, and as her many friends realized from her activity and presidency in the local League of Women Voters. Nevertheless she was biblically meek, Barclayan meek, and she inherited the earth, simply because she was Pat.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.