Matthew 5:1-12
February 6, 2011
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
A long time ago, when I was in seminary and completing my clinical pastoral counseling requirement, I spent a summer as a chaplain at the Tewksbury State Hospital in Massachusetts. Most of our patients there were elderly. That was before the days when we had a name for a disease called “Alzheimer’s.” We were told that the patients were suffering from senility and frequent bouts with dementia.
I still remember one particular patient who wasn’t as old as the others. She suffered from a long case of sleeping sickness. She was originally engaged to be married but fell into a sleep that she didn’t wake up until she was elderly and her finance had long ago started living his own life. My job was to help this woman understand reality. She was no longer engaged. Her fiancé was married and had his own family. She needed to get real and face reality.
We were trained to work with these people in something called “reality therapy.” Reality therapy was pioneered by the psychotherapist, William Glassier.
In reality therapy the therapist does everything possible to drag a demented, deluded, or simply confused person back into reality. Many of our patients came to us not knowing their name, or where they lived, or very much about the facts of their lives. So it was our job, in all of our interactions with the patients, to keep driving them into reality. Every time someone from food services brought in a tray of food, each time a nurse visited, and each time we entered the room as student chaplains, we would say something like, “Good morning Mrs. Jones? Can you tell me what day it is? Who is the president of the United States? Where are we located now?”
This reality therapy often proved quite effective with the elderly patients. Some of them had been the victims of well-meaning relatives and friends who, when the person had become confused, played along with them, failed to correct their confusion, and thus made them even more confused.
As for us student chaplains, we were dedicated to “reality.” So I would enter a room saying, “Mr. Smith, how many children do you have? Who is the governor of Massachusetts? What is your room number?”
Reality therapy was all the rage then, and I am sure that it did some good. But after a couple of months of this, I began to lose faith in reality therapy.
One old woman said to me, “You’ve got to be at least 20 years old, maybe a bit more. If you are so darn interested in who the governor of Massachusetts is, why don’t you find out for yourself and quit bothering me.”
Another said in response to my incessant reality question—and I thought her response made good sense—“I am 92 years old. I feel that, well, the location of this building, the name of the state, and even the day of the week are completely irrelevant to me.”
I could see her point. It wasn’t that she was living in a perpetual state of “unreality” and delusion. It was rather that she lived in a different reality from mine, a reality that demanded a quite different response on her part. When I was recording my conversations called “verbatims” with these patients, they spoke about life and world events that dated back decades before I was even born. It was a different reality than I was familiar with.
“Reality therapy” assumed that we already knew what was real, that reality was fixed, final, and an uncontested fact. Now, as I get closer to those elderly years myself, I’m not so sure.
What is Real?
If you were to drive pass a college campus, you might see a sign that reads, “We prepare you for the real world.” It’s quite a claim for a college—we prepare you for the real world. One of the difficulties with the sign is that it implies that we have some sort of working consensus on just what the real world actually is. It implies that the real world is a fixed, agreed-upon commodity, rather than a highly conflicted notion. What is the real world?
In the internet, there is now a program called Second Life where you create an avatar of yourself and you live in a virtual world. Here in this computerized existence, you can do things you can’t do in this world like flying. Some people predict that in the future, we will be able to work in this virtual world to earn a living instead of the world that we can see around us today. After a while, it may be harder to distinguish between the virtual world and the real world.
In a Confucian oriented community, we often think that reality consists of surviving and suffering and that we’ll eventually escape this world to a different world in time. The psychoanalysis guru Freud said that reality is these obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers that determine one’s fate. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously declared that reality is “solitary, hard, brutish, and short.”
How do you understand reality? Your view of reality is going to determine how you act. How you live in the world is related to what sort of world you think we have.
Most of us are practical, utilitarian people. Most of us live on the basis, not of some grand high, sounding creed, not on the basis of the directives of scripture, but simply on the basis of “what works.” “What works” is a function of what sort of world we’ve got. When a computer is obsolete and doesn’t work in today’s environment, we send it to e-waste. It’s no longer a part of our reality.
I say all of this because I find, in my experience, that the primary accusation against the Christian life is that it is “not real.” The Christian way of life simply does not match up with the facts.
Someone says, “I think sometimes the non-violent way of Jesus makes sense, but it doesn’t really match up with the real world.” “Well, all that Jesus stuff is okay, but sometimes you have got to get real.” Have you read the morning paper lately?
Our annual theme for 2011 is “Who is my neighbor?” Some of you have implied that theologically we should be good neighbors but you have also said to me, “Get real, Pastor! Are you serious that you want us to go across the street and knock on people’s doors whom we don’t know?”
Some of us can still remember the night when the bombs started to fall on Iraq. President Bush being an Episcopalian had met earlier with the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. The bishop had urged President Bush not to bomb Iraq, to give sanctions a chance, to work through diplomacy to settle our differences. Basically, President Bush told the bishop that sometimes, as a President, you had to face up to reality.
The bishop, urging restraint, came off looking rather wimpish. Mr. Bush, who had earlier been accused of being a wimp, came off looking practical, pragmatic, and realistic.
Now, many years later, Mr. Bush is long out of office with the future of Iraq still in question. It’s enough to make one ask, “Who defines what’s real?”
Sermon on the Mount
Now you can imagine why I have all of this on my mind for this Sunday. Few Scriptures are as “unreal” as today’s “sermon on the mount.”
Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who mourn. When someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him your left. If someone wants your coat, give it to him. If someone commands you to carry his burden for one mile, go the second mile. When you give a gift to God, don’t show off. Don’t store up your savings on earth where thieves can break in or moth and rust consume. Don’t worry about what you wear or what you’ll eat. Don’t judge others when you are not willing to see that you are at fault. Go across the street and get to know your neighbors.
We think this sounds like a recipe for being a wimp or a full-time “door mat” for the world. In the real world, if someone hits you on the right cheek, and you offer the left, then you end up with two bruised cheeks. If you agree to carry someone’s burden for two miles, then these people usually ask you to carry it for ten. If you don’t put your treasures in a safe place and lock your front door, your new flat-screen TV won’t be there when you come home from church. In the real world, the meek gets taken advantage of. Those who are wronged and persecuted get a lawyer.
So what is real?
If this world is only a veil of tears, and life in this world is merely solitary, hard, brutish, and short, then there is no end to the mourning. The best we can hope for is to get real good at grief.
But Jesus promises laughter to those who mourn, blessedness to those who are victims of injustice, triumph to those who do not repay evil with evil, wonderful news to those who stand up for peace.
So how is this world of Jesus more real than the world that we live in? It’s real because Jesus saw a new world coming. Jesus himself was a sign of that new world, the first outbreak of the reign of God, a signal that, by the grace of God, reality was making a fundamental shift.
When Jesus begins this sermon, he speaks in the future tense. The whole world that he describes is not here yet, not in its fullness. There is plenty of the old world around for people to think that it is the only real world there is.
And yet in the sermon, Jesus switches from the future tense to the present tense. He tells us what to do, here, now, if we want to be part of the new world that is coming. He gives us the privilege of being a beachhead, a first wave of that new world. Every time we forgive, or do not return evil for evil, we show our citizenship in this new reality. Every time we turn the other cheek, we act out non-violence. Every time we meet a neighbor across the street from us, we are living out a new reality of the beloved community. A little piece of the new reality becomes visible in you.
Some of you have heard me explained why I am a vegetarian today. When I studied the Scriptures and see that God’s original plan in creation is for his people to eat what grows out of the ground, I am trying to live out that original reality. And when I read the prophets and see that when Christ returns to reign in the world, the peaceable kingdom will become reality. So every time I eat, I am living out the new reality of all of God’s creatures coming to God’s mountain in peace, justice and reconciliation. I hope and pray that a little piece of this new reality of Jesus’ call for discipleship becomes visible in me.
So if all of you were patients at Tewksbury State Hospital in Massachusetts who suffers from time to time with dementia in its worst form, and I am the student chaplain conducting reality therapy on you, I would say. “What day is it?”
You say, “Today is Sunday, today the whole world shifted on its axis. 2000 years ago, God began a new real world upon the old world.
I would say, “Where are you?”
You say, “I am a member of the Body of Christ known as the First Chinese Baptist Church that has faithfully and courageously preached good news for over 130 years and are still becoming ever more faithful to carrying out the mission of our Lord.”
I would then ask you, “Who are you?”
You say from your heart, “I am a sinner, a forgiven sinner, a sinner being redeemed, a beloved child of God who, little by little, is becoming the person God created me to be.”
I would say, “Who is your neighbor?”
You would say, “They are the people who I don’t know yet but since our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to save them as he saved us, we need to meet them and fellowship with them in Christ’s name.”
Let’s get real with the new reality and the “not yet but definitely coming reality” that Jesus Christ is Lord in our lives and in the world.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, give us the grace and the vision to discern the outbreak of your reign in the world. Make us eager for more than that which currently passes for “reality.” Give us the power to resist those who would have us accept, adapt, and adjust to the present world; help us to rebel and to embrace the world that comes with your advent into the world. We ask this in the hope and the expectation that you make all things new, that you continue to create and recreate so that your will is done on earth as it is in heaven, so that your kingdom comes. Amen.