The Fourth Blessing

When I was in college, my favorite time was Sunday evenings. This is when the campus would come together for a service called Koinia, when we would sing and pray and read scripture together. We had chapel services throughout the week when we would hear sermons - this was a different worship space, a time to simply pour our hearts out to God. And it was in this particular setting that I was introduced to worship songs, like the one that kept coming to mind this week - Hungry. “Hungry, I come to you, For I know You satisfy I am empty but I know

Your love does not run dry. So I wait for you. So I wait for you.”

Jesus is speaking of this type of hunger in today’s portion of the Beatitudes. The type of hunger that isn’t necessarily physical, but a deep longing after God. But Jesus is also speaking to people who knew what it was like to be physically hungry - because middle class folks in this area of the Middle East, knew what it was like to be one meal away from starvation in some cases. Think of the woman who gave her last few coins to the temple, or the prophet Elisha who told the woman who had just a small portion of oil left to trust in faith to pour it in order to sell it to protect her sons from being sold into slavery.

Some folks in America know that type of hunger. The deep hunger and thirst that can be felt in one’s bones. Not knowing where or when your next meal would come. But there are also folks on the other side, folks who give into cravings more than hunger. All too often we use hunger to indicate not a deep need, but instead to indicate that we want more - that we have not yet had our fill. 

Water was the same thing. We are blessed in most cases to turn our our facets and to have water come out. It is plentiful. We don’t have to put much effort in being able to drink it. But it wasn’t that way back in the time of Christ. People had to work for water - traveling to wells, often several times a day, to draw the communal water. There are lots of countries around the world where this is still true - water, the source of life, took a lot of effort to get. It was considered precious.

Yet, here is Jesus saying that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who yearn for righteousness, like those who yearn for food or water in times of intense need. Jesus is essentially asking what are you hungry for? Are you hungry for God?

Righteousness is such a particular thing that Jesus is speaking about - the word he uses literally means living God’s way. Do we hunger to live a life for God? 

The truth is that the way we think and act and live overflow from who we are deep within. When we are in right relationship with God, it overflows, church.

Some of you know that I am an avid tea drinker. I like just about all of it. Loose leaf. Tea bags. My friend even found me something for Christmas this year called tea drops - which is essentially pressed tea. When I am truly in a tea drinking mood, not just rushing to have a cup before moving on to the next thing, I will set out my tea cup and saucer. Do you remember those? The little cups that sit under the fragile cups. What are they for? A varsity of things - to set your tea spoon or biscuit on, but also to catch any of the water that may over flow from the tea cup. When the cup is so full, it spills over onto the saucer. 

Friends, that is what righteousness like. When we are deeply connected to the heart of God, hungry and thirsting after God’s way, then it is going to overflow out of us and splash on to other people. 

Another image of righteousness can be found in Psalm 1. Psalm 1 is one of my favorite Psalms and it has this image of a tree planted by a stream of water, drawing life from it. It presents life and the choices in it as something relatively simple, you are either righteous or wicked. Good or bad. Accepting wisdom or rejecting it. But life is rarely that simple and choices are not always clear.

When I read this Psalm the image that captures my imagination is the tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in due time. Life is full of hard choices, but when it comes time to make those choices what are you rooted in? Where are you drawing your life source from? Who is advising you? I once surprised a group of college students I was mentoring, telling them for me rootedness was not so much about memorizing scripture, but having a well worn Bible. A Bible tattered from years of reading, so much so that the scripture has sunk into your heart. When I need to make a decision, I don’t often recall chapter and verse, but I can recall stories that I find meaningful at that particular moment - stories that I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t read them time and time again and that wouldn’t necessarily be helpful if I only memorized a few lines from it. 

Are we rooted in God’s Word and God’s heart, friends?  The Psalmist tells us that either we will be rooted or we will blow away like chaff. Either we bore fruit of groundedness and security in the Lord, or destruction. In the context of this part of the Beatitudes, I would add that we either seek after righteousness or we seek after fulfilling our own cravings.

At the first church I interned at, I led a couple of Bible Studies and book studies. The first book we explored was Soul Craving by Pastor Erwin McManus, who essentially said that we in our human nature have cravings - the question is are we craving God. Do our cravings connect us deeper with God or do they can distract us along the way. 

A little bit further into the Gospel of Matthew we find Jesus talking about some of the things that can distract us. And at first glance they seem like really good things - what we are going to eat, what we are going to drink, what we are going to wear. The problem emerges when we put so much focus on worrying about these things that we push God to the side. Jesus ends this part of teaching with a line you may have heard before: Seek first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

When we put God first, when we seek God’s kingdom first, when we hunger and thirst after righteousness, we are saying that we want to be part of something that really matters. Something that changes hearts and lives. But here’s the thing about this type of hungering and thirsting - its not temporary. When we seek after the righteousness of God, we are doing it for the long hull. It’s an indication that we want to grow closer to God ever single day. 

But when we make that decision and take the first steps towards it, it changes us as well. It changes the way we seek after God. It even changes the way that we pray to God. Especially when we realize when we seek righteousness, this right relationship with God, at all times, not just when it seems convient to us or when things are going well. 

Friends, how badly do you want righteousness? What could change within us and within this world, if we were a people who hungered and thirst for righteousness alone? Amen.