Jerry Spivey asked me one of those get-to-know-you kinds of questions this week.  He wanted to know my life’s ambition.  That’s a tough one.  Maybe not for some people.  But, for me, that’s tough.  I grew up in a culture where self-aggrandizement of any kind was frowned upon and ambitions were simple and close to home, down to earth.  Most people didn’t think too much beyond the current price of cotton per bale.  Unless you were a banker, wearing a suit for anything more than a funeral or Sunday morning church was seen as pretentious.  We called lunch dinner and dinner supper and mostly entered each other’s homes through always-unlocked garage doors.  Front doors were never for anything more than wreaths when someone died or decorating at Halloween.  Ambition was a luxury of the famous people we read about in the Parade magazine that came with the over-stuffed Sunday paper we read after our chuck roast and potato lunch, or dinner, if you will.  Ambition was never a word that fit comfortably in my vocabulary.  When Jerry asked me my life’s ambition I had to crawl over a whole pile of Parade-like memories to get to it.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are plenty of things I’d like to have or accomplish.  I’d like to have a cabin in New Mexico someday, north of Taos maybe, where it’s just cool enough to keep the fireplace going night and day year round.  Watching the aspen green and yellow flip-flop from season to season, I’d love to just write till Max Lucado hears my footsteps coming up fast behind him.  I’d like to see Switzerland someday but I’d settle now for Boston, just once, on a cheap fall foliage tour.  I’d like to weigh what I did in eighth grade again.  But, then again, I’ve got plans for this weight. 

I’m still waiting for Coach Niles, the meanest football coach I ever knew, to say, “Great block, Schmucker!” instead of, “Schmucker, you’re out!”  He’d warned me that if I didn’t make the block this time he’d pull me.  So, I really tried.  I coil-springed of all my energy back down as far as it would go in my hundred pound frame planning to uncork it on the defensive end across from me.  But, when the ball was snapped, I came off the line like a pop-goes-the-weasel clown and fell flat on my face, prostrate to the west, toward the sunset, where my athletic career was already headed, at thirteen.  Isn’t it strange how you can still taste the dirt of face-in-the-ground shame over thirty years after you spit it out?  When is Coach Niles ever going to tell me I’m good enough to play for him?!  More than once I’ve overheard his voice when I started to attempt other things, and just shrunk back.  Every now and then, especially this time of year, I still wish I could suit up just one more time and prove something to that guy.  I’m finally big enough to play eighth grade football now.  I’d like just one more shot. 

I’ve got a long list of likes and wants.  But, when Jerry asked me this week my life’s ambition I found myself sorting through all of those likes and wants like so many old mateless socks in the back of the bottom drawer.  Socks that should have been discarded a long time ago.  And, the only pair I can find has fit me since childhood, it seems, before memory serves.  My life’s ambition, I finally confessed, is to be able to stand in front of a mirror one day and say to what is staring back at me, “you’re o.k.” 

To know in a place so deep no one can take it away from me that I don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore ever.  That I don’t have to power block for Niles or tackle Lucado.  That who I am and what I have to give are good enough right now on their own.  That, especially with God, I’m o.k., as is.  I mean, I know I’m saved, for eternity.  I just want to know I’m o.k., right now.  That’s my life’s ambition.  What’s yours? 

Matthew’s gospel records Jesus teaching what we know of as the Sermon on the Mount.  It’s timing in the gospel at the very beginning, as well as its content, ought to tell us something.  This is fundamental.  This is what we need to know first.  This is taking us back to the very roots, the initial culture, if you will, of what it means to be Christian.  Everything else Jesus will ever say or do from this point on in his ministry can be traced in one way or another back to this sermon.  It is so fundamental to everything he believes for himself and for us that Jesus even ends the sermon later by saying that this is the foundation.  If we don’t build everything else we do on this, there’s no need to do any building.  It will all be washed away in time unless we start here.

And, though you might expect him to start by talking about missions or evangelism or tithing, his first subjects are about things like anger, sex, adultery, money and murder.  All we need now is a butler.  He’s talking to people who don’t know how they’re going to feed their family tomorrow.  He’s talking to people whose trust has been betrayed.  He’s talking to people who are disappointed to the point of disillusionment in those they were counting on for spiritual leadership.  He’s talking to people fighting a losing battle with the urge to sleep with someone they aren’t married to.  He’s talking to people whose anger is so out of control it’s about to become a six-letter word, m-u-r-d-e-r.  This is the stuff of life where most people live.  This is the kind of preaching you do when you’re talking to hurting people who don’t need more weight added to the burdens of the heart they are carrying that are heavier than a middle-schooler’s backpack.  These hurting people need hope.

Which may tell us something about why Jesus “sat down” when he started to preach.  Rabbis did that in his day, of course.  They sat down, they didn’t climb up, as into a pulpit.  But, I think Jesus had read his audience well.  He knew what he saw when he looked at the crowds and he peered all the way through their eyes to their hearts.  These people had heard Jesus preach what they were already calling “good news.”  They hadn’t missed the fact that when Jesus touched sick people they got better (Matthew 4:23).  Word was getting around and hurting people from all over the place were following him just for the chance to listen when he stopped to say something.  And, he started with these words, “blessed are the poor in spirit . . . those who mourn . . . the meek . . . those who hunger and thirst . . . the merciful . . . the pure in heart . . . the peacemakers . . . those who are persecuted.” 

“Blessed,” the word Jesus uses nine times in these twelve verses, means happy.  Not winning the lottery happy.  Like the lady who won the $18 million lottery eight years ago.  Got a college building named after her.  Had famous people wanting to eat dinner with her.  The same lady who is now filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.  It’s almost poetic.  $18 million in eight.  She’s gone through it all with a little help from her friends.  Jesus isn’t talking about that kind of happy where you finally win the lottery and have to spend the rest of your life worrying that you might lose it all or someone might take it all away from you.  Not that kind of happy.  But, staring-at-yourself-in-the-mirror-knowing-you’re-o.k.-in-a-place-no-one-can-steal-it happy.  The kind of happiness that only God can give and no one take away.  That’s how Jesus starts the sermon.  It’s at the beginning.  It’s fundamental to everything else he’ll say. 

The kind of happy, perhaps, that lives in a woman I read about this past week from Savannah, Georgia.  Mother of five children on her way to pawn her television for $60 so she can pay the electric bill, she sees a bag fall out of an armored car on the road just ahead of her.  She stops, picks it up.  It’s a $120,000 bag.  She stuffs it under the seat in her car.  Goes to work.  Four hours later, she stops to have a word with her pastor.  They call the police.  She gives the money back.  The armored car people think she’s a hero.  She won’t have to worry about her electric bill, at least for a while.  (Russ Bynum, “Mother of Five Returns Armored Car Money,” Associated Press via AOL, September 7, 2001)  But, my guess, she’s not the kind who does much worrying.  She knows this Sermon of Jesus too well.  She’s more interested in the happiness he gives than the kind that falls out of the armored car you’re following on the luckiest day of your life.

The kind of happiness Jesus is talking about when, oxymoron-style, he links happiness with mourning and meekness, peacemaking and persecution, mercy and poverty.  No one but Jesus could ever do that and make it work.  But, this is where he starts.  And, it’s where he wants us to start.  God, Jesus is telling us, doesn’t start the conversation by describing grace as a reward for excellence in religious achievement.  As a Pulitzer Prize for someone who finally writes The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Christians.  He starts the conversation of grace by saying that God comes to meet us, and bless us, in our mourning and grieving, losing and dying.  Grace and happiness are not the end result of having achieved, Jesus says, one of ancient legalism’s modern cousins.  They are fuel for the journey with which God wants to gift us at the beginning, just as he did his own son at his baptism, at the beginning.  He comes to us, as we are, where we are, to say, “Trust me, you’re o.k.” 

Not just “you’re o.k.”  To stare into a mirror and chant, mantra-like, that you’re o.k. to yourself is an exercise in futility.  It’s psychological self-propaganda that always goes in one ear and out the other and keeps you buying the next self-improvement gadget on late-night T.V.  To just hear, “Trust me” is to fail to finish the gospel sentence.  “Trust me, as in Jesus, you’re o.k.” is to start and finish the gospel.  In trusting him, we’re as o.k. as we can ever and only be.  As we trust, we come to know.  To know that grace is ours now, as we are, the way we are.  We don’t have to earn it or win it, just accept it.  Jesus gives it first, up front, to hurting people who can’t figure out how to live life so they can then figure out how to live without hurting anyone anymore.  Or trying to beat anyone else out anymore.  Or blow the guy across the line away so the crowd will cheer and make them feel o.k. for winning, at least until the next game, when it starts all over again.  With the world, we’re only as good as the last game, the last deal.  With Jesus, we’re o.k. before we walk on the field.  That’s why he comes to bless us and asks us to trust that blessing before we take the first step.  

In the process, he’s going to ask us to do something very difficult.  He’s going to ask us to rethink what we’ve believed all along.  What we’ve believed, in some cases, because it got passed down to us and we gave it a free pass into our hearts without asking for proper I.D.  “You have heard that it was said,” Jesus will say more than once.  You’ve been told things are one way with God and with life and with others.  You’ve heard other voices.  “You have heard that it was said,” Jesus says, “But I tell you.”  “You’ve heard other voices, like Coach Niles.  But, I say to you . . ..”  Other voices have told us life is one way.  Other voices we’ve heard and sometimes just overheard, like Mary Karr says she heard growing up in deep southeast Texas.  Voices from across the hall that kept her awake all night.  Voices she overheard while her alcoholic parents duked it out not knowing, or perhaps, not caring that children are sometimes so influenced by what they overhear their parents say that they can’t hear anything else, even what God says.  Voices, from across the hall, Karr says, that, at age eleven had her “growing into a worrier, a world-class insomniac, what one friend would later call a grief-seeking missile.”  (Mary Karr, Cherry, Viking Press, 2000, p. 60)

It’s to the grief-seeking missiles among us, the worriers, the world-class insomniacs, the people staring into mirrors unable to hear the voice of grace about what they see because of what they’ve overheard others say for so long, it’s to the people who are angry and afraid, people oversexed and under-loved, to people who are so disappointed in their church they don’t know if they can sit through another sermon, it’s to those people Jesus comes to say a word about what it means to be truly “blessed,” happy, for real and forever.  To people in process but not yet perfect Jesus comes to say, “trust me, you’re o.k.” 

A good friend of mine bought a house when he was first starting out.  All together, he lived in that house for nine years including the time when he married and his wife moved into it with him.  When they went to sell the house, a plumber was called as part of the inspection process.  For nine years, Fred just assumed that old houses had poor water pressure.  You’ve heard that it was said.  He’d just learned to live with the fact that it took an hour to fill the washing machine or that he had to work up a sweat taking a shower trying to get wet enough to suds up.  He just assumed it had to be that way, you’ve heard that it was said, until the plumber came.  The plumber had been outside for a while.  When he came back in he told them that someone had all but turned the water off at the main valve controlling the pressure for the house.  So, he turned it back on.  Fred didn’t have the courage to admit to him that he’d just bought the house that way and didn’t know it could be any better.  You’ve heard that it was said.  But, for four days before they moved out, Fred and Dolores had more water pressure than they knew how to handle.  They washed clothes just for fun and had to learn all over how to take a normal shower, now that they had pressure.  Except for four days out of nine years they’d lived with so little when they could have had so much. 

Most people who claim to be “saved” live lives full of all kinds of hurt and only hope to see grace someday when they die.  They want to hear God say to them when they leave this world, “Well done, faithful servant.”  They’ve just written off their lives now as the miserable price they must pay to get there. 

My life’s ambition?  I just don’t want to come to the end, to the last four days, only then to discover the blessing of God that was really mine all along.  When it comes to grace, most people live with so little along the way when they could have had so very much more.  I just don’t plan to be one of them.  I want to sit at Jesus’ feet now and hear him say to me, “Trust me, you’re o.k.”  How about you?