And he began to teach them…

After Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit of God leads him out into the wilderness where he fasts for 40 days and 40 nights. By the end, he is hungry and the tempter comes to tempt but Jesus does not succumb to temptation. Then, he begins his ministry, traveling town to town teaching and healing in the synagogues. He calls his disciples along the way to “follow him” and they do.

Matthew tells us great crowds followed him – the crowds came from all over. On the East side of the Jordan River from Judea in the South to Galilee in the North and on the West side of the Jordan River from the 10 Palestinian cities of the Decapolis, and says Matthew, they came from even beyond the Jordan.

Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain. It isn’t that he just realizes they are there or that they just are arriving. This crowds has been building – everywhere he goes more and more people are following him. Jesus sees the crowds. He sees their need. He sees their hunger. He sees their struggle. He sees their desire.

And he goes up on the mountain. Tradition has it that he was near Capernaum, which Matthew tells us was his “home base” throughout his ministry. Just West of town there is a ridge of hills called Eremos, which means “solitary.” Jesus saw the crowds and went up on the mountain, not to address them, not to see them better, but for some solitude. And there he sat down. Sitting down is the traditional position of a rabbi for teaching, and his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth, prophets open their mouths, those who speak for God open their mouths, and he made a royal proclamation. It has been called by some the Magna Carta of the Christian Faith. Jesus lays out the fundamental principles of the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is not like the kingdoms of this world. The indicators of power and success are all reversed. It is like everything has been inverted. It is so different from the way we live our lives that it is hard to grasp in words. It has been described as the upside down kingdom. When Nicholas was little instead of saying something was inside-out, he called it outside-in. Jesus’ teaching was so strange, the concepts so foreign, that it made the disciples, and the crowd that overheard, and us as we overhear through Matthew have to pause and try to figure out what he is talking about in the same way I had to really pay attention to realize what Nicholas meant when he called something outside-in.

It certainly sounds strange to us. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the merciful, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are persecuted…The same sermon is recorded in Luke, with some variations. So, this is likely not a sermon that Jesus gave more than once over the course of his ministry. So what does it mean? And what is Jesus trying to teach us to do? How is Jesus calling us to live?
The word that we translate “blessed,” and that is translated in Latin as “beati,” where we get the title Beatitudes, in Greek is Makarios. “Mak” means long or large and “karis” means grace. Makarios literally means “God makes large his grace.”

Jesus began sharing with them the indicators of Makarios – life in the expanse of God’s grace. Even when a person doesn’t feel happy or isn’t experiencing good fortune, a person is blessed when they live in relationship with God.
Over the next several weeks we will try to overhear what Jesus was teaching the disciples about being blessed. And we will have to keep reminding ourselves what being blessed really means. In the some translations of the Bible “makarios” is translated “Happy” instead of “Blessed.” Sometimes we equate blessing with happiness.

I googled “how to find happiness” this week. You know, I found 19,600,000 results. It is a popular topic. Yet, it seems that happiness is elusive. The more we try to find it the harder it is to find.
According to the General Social Survey, a large-scale project that has been tracking trends in American life by surveying randomly chosen Americans every year since the1972, there has been almost no change in American happiness levels.

Ruth Whippman published a book last year about our culture and her experience as it compares to her experience living in Britain. Ruth’s husband had always been an Americaphile. So, when he was offered a job in California, he jumped at the chance. Ruth was a documentary filmmaker in London, and when they moved she became a stay-at-home mom with their then 2 year old. She describes her experience, “A few months in, desperate for adult conversation, I am sidling up to anyone and everyone — moms pushing swings next to me in the playground, the dry cleaner, the man in front of me in line at the grocery store, and a range of random local contacts scratched together for me by friends back in London. Oddly, the same topic comes up time and time again. Happiness….Before moving to America, I didn’t really give a whole lot of dedicated thought to whether I was happy. Like most people, in any given day I will experience emotions and sensations including (but not limited to) hilarity, joy, irritation, ambivalence, excitement, embarrassment, paralyzing self-doubt, boredom, anxiety, guilt, heart-stopping love, resentment, pride, exhaustion, and the shrill, insistent buzz of uneaten chocolate somewhere in the house.

It’s hard to pin one definitive label on all this clattering emotional noise, but I’m confident that if you add them all up and then divide by the number of emotions (or whatever other formula they use to calculate the statistics in all the research studies on happiness that I start to notice in the press), then you reach an average falling squarely into the box marked contentment.

But the more conversations I have about happiness, and the more I absorb the idea that there’s a glittering happy ever after out there for the taking, the more I start to overthink the whole thing, compulsively monitoring how I am feeling …”

Jesus is not teaching how to achieve a state of euphoric happiness. Jesus wasn’t giving a talk on how to be happy. He sees the crowds. He sees us. He sees our need. He sees our hunger. He sees our struggle. He sees our desire.

And he begins to teach…”God expands his grace for the poor in spirit. God expands his grace to comfort those who mourn. God expands his grace for the meek, those who seek righteousness, are merciful, are pure in heart, and are peacemakers. God expands his grace for those who are persecuted for righteousness sake or on account of Christ Jesus.”

This is where a life of discipleship begins. To gather around Jesus and hear his words on the mountaintop, and then to head down the mountain into the valleys of this world to meet the realities of daily life and needs with the teachings of Jesus reverberating in our deeds. Rev. Dr. William Quick says of the Beatitudes, “As we [live these teachings], we shall discover the secret of real happiness: to be used of God rather than to use God; to comfort rather than to see comfort; to give love rather than to ask for love.”

And we realize that the Kingdom of God is not upside down or outside in, but right side out after all.