Poverty of Spirit

​Our Gospel reading for this morning is probably the best loved part of the greatest sermon of all time, the Sermon on the Mount. Like everybody else, I love this reading.
 
But I also find Jesus’ “beatitudes” challenging, starting with the very first one, Jesus’ blessing of “the poor in spirit,” meaning the humble.
 
Celebrating the poor in the spirit sounds good. But as best I can tell, we in the United States don’t really believe that the humble are blessed. Certainly we don’t admire the humble. Our heroes are the people who are most beautiful, or richest, or most successful, or most powerful. But Jesus is telling us that we have it exactly backwards, that the people who are truly blessed by God are at the other end of the spectrum, the people at the bottom.
 
A possible reaction to our passage, to Jesus blessing the poor in spirit, is to assume that Jesus means the people at the bottom of the heap will eventually be blessed in heaven. In the meantime, here on earth, we want the most talented people to take care of our problems. We want strong and confident leadership, not someone genuinely humble.
 
But I am pretty sure Jesus is telling us that we should aim to be poor in spirit now, and that we should celebrate people who are poor in spirit, people who really do follow Jesus’ example, that is, people who don’t try to dominate others but rather lead with humility and self-sacrifice. I think Jesus is telling us that true poverty of spirit is in fact the best way to truly solve problems.
 
I found an example of what Jesus is saying in an extremely unlikely place, in Njal’s Saga, which is a true story about Vikings in eleventh-century Iceland, the period when Iceland became Christian.
 
As you probably know, the Vikings were violent, and super-macho, and had a keen sense of honor. If you publicly insulted a Viking, it was expected that he would attack and perhaps kill you. If you harmed a Viking in some way, and especially if you killed someone in his family, which happened a lot in the 11th century—he was not just allowed, but actually honor-bound to kill someone in your family as payback.
 
Then, of course, someone else in your family was honor-bound to kill him or another person in his family. And so it would go, on and on, one killing leading to another, and another, and another, in a brutal and never-ending cycle of violence.
 
Njal’s Saga is the story of one revenge killing after another in a cycle that spun so far out of control that it engulfed all of Iceland. Virtually every important family got caught up in a feud that was the medieval Icelandic version of the Hatfields and McCoys.
 
Over and over again, would-be mediators tried to stop the violence. A few times, it almost worked. And then someone would act out, and the cycle would begin all over again.
 
The violence climaxes when a group who became known as “the Burners” burned down a large farmhouse, killing everyone inside.
 
Surviving family and friends tried filing a formal legal case against the Burners. Thanks to legal trickery, it looked like the case would fail and the Burners would get away with their crime. So, predictably, the injured family attacked the Burners, right in the middle of the hearings.
 
Enter Hall, one of the first Christian converts in Iceland. Hall and his son led men into the battle in an effort to separate the two sides. They succeeded, but only after ten people had died, including Hall’s own son.
 

Everyone retired for the night. But they were coming back the next day, and everyone was bringing their weapons with them. It looked like Iceland’s legal institutions were collapsing and that civil war was inevitable.
 
But when they reconvened, Hall, the hero of the previous day, called for everyone’s attention. Hall said he might well be the least important and impressive man in the entire Assembly. That is the statement of a man who was poor in spirit in a culture that valued strength and violence.
 
Then Hall pleaded with the combatants to make peace. And, as a gesture of good will and a first step in peacemaking, Hall promised that he would not seek revenge or any form of compensation for the death of his son, even though his son was one of the few people at the Assembly who was entirely innocent in the quarrel.
 
Clearly, Hall really believed that the poor in spirit were blessed and that the poor in spirit could be the most effective peacemakers.
 
Remarkably, Hall’s appeal worked. Everyone was so impressed with Hall’s humility and with the fact that Hall forgave the people who had killed his son even before they did anything to atone for it, that people on both sides agreed to settle their disputes. And then people on both sides came together to offer Hall what compensation they could for his son.
 
At least for the moment, the cycle of violence was broken, not by force or violence but by a humble man surrendering his own rights.
 
Hall embodied Jesus’ beatitudes in eleventh century Iceland. What would it mean for us to do the same in twenty-first-century America? We need people like Hall at the national level. And, if every Christian took seriously what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, we would have more leaders like Hall.
 
That may be too much to hope for. But at the very least, we can aim for following Hall’s example in our personal lives, for being the kind of people Jesus blesses in our daily interactions.
 
I think about a disagreement I witnessed here at Saint David’s several years ago. People were proposing different cost-saving possibilities. We had to decide which to do, and things got a little heated. I don’t remember what we decided, just that it all worked out. But I remember thinking afterwards that we were disagreeing, with some heat, about strategies that would save us something like $100 over the course of a year.
 
We always want to save money, but $100 on of a budget of $150,000 is not worth getting worked up about. Our heat came not from the importance of the issue but from the fact that our egos got engaged.
 
I say again, this episode was no big deal. But I think what might have happened if we had all paused to remember Jesus’ words in our passage, if we had all decided that instead of trying to win the argument we would compete to see who could be the most poor in spirit, if we had all acknowledged that we didn’t really know for sure what was the best course and then thought together about what to do rather than arguing about what to do.
 
At a meeting of the clergy earlier this week, before he heard anything about this sermon, our very own Terry Hurlbut said he was going to take on kindness as a Lenten discipline, that he was going to try to be a little kinder each day all through Lent. We can all check him on that!
 
But what if we all made the same commitment? What if we all committed to living a little more like the people Jesus blesses in our reading?
 
So, here is my invitation to you. The next time you find yourself getting irritated with someone in your life, pause to ask yourself what poverty of spirit would look like for you in that moment. Try to model the behaviors that Jesus blesses in our reading. And see what happens.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.