The wrong recipe

Scripture:

Matthew 5:1-12

Preached 02/02/2014

1 cup butter, softened. 1/3 cup powdered sugar.  ¾ cup corn starch. 1 cup sifted flour.  Cream together the butter and sugar, then stir in the corn starch and flour.  Drop by spoonfuls onto a pan and bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.  Melting moments.  They were the cookies my Grandma Schroder used to make for us at Christmas.  They were delicious.  And as the name implies, they had this really special, melt in your mouth kind of texture.  Since my grandma always made them, I never had to, until after she died.  And Christmas came and I just needed those cookies to be set out on the buffet.

So I set out to make them.  I pulled out an old recipe card, with her tiny, almost illegible handwriting, spotted with years worth of bits of butter and sugar that had flown from the mixing bowl as my grandmother lovingly made these treats for us.  I followed the recipe exactly.  And my dough was a mess.  It was soft, almost like a thick cake batter, and definitely not something I could shape into any semblance of a ball to bake.  Clearly, the dough needed to be harder.  The fact that there was no egg in this cookie had to be a mistake.  And only 1/3 cup of sugar for all this dough?  That had to be wrong too.  I stared at the dough in the mixing bowl.  This recipe, these directions I had, just couldn’t be right.

I imagine the disciples may have felt the same way as they listened to Jesus give this beginning section of what we refer to in Matthew as the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus’ ministry had just gotten started.  He had gathered his disciples and apparently quite a crowd of followers.  And now that he has them all gathered, he gives them a recipe. 

Did you catch the recipe the first time?  Here it is again: Be poor in spirit. Mourn.  Be meek, or perhaps better stated, remember your part in God’s larger vision.  Hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Show mercy.  Be pure in heart, perhaps better stated, be sincere.  Make peace.  Be persecuted and reviled.  That can’t be right.  Jesus says blessed.  Blessings to the point that God’s way of life is established on earth. God’s way of life is the cookie we’re going for here, and this blessing stuff would be the intermediate step, the dough that happens before the cookie and after the ingredients. And this blessing “dough” is looking very strange.

Clearly, to transform into God’s desired way of life on earth, the dough needs to be harder.  It can’t be this soft, mercy, peace, meekness stuff, right?  Those ancient followers were looking for a military king type leader who was literally going to tear apart the oppressive structures of power with force.  And where’s the egg? You know, that thing that’s going to bind all these followers together and then raise them and us up, victorious above everyone else?  Instead we have mourning, and being poor in spirit, pulling them down. And the dough definitely needs to be sweeter- we definitely need to be happy right?  But this dough has us being persecuted and reviled?  No thank you.

Sorry, Jesus, but your recipe and this dough it makes just can’t be right.  And we haven’t even really gotten to the strangest part yet.  Jesus doesn’t get to it, in this sermon.  But Paul does, in his letter to the Corinthians.  This Jesus guy, who is supposed to be the powerful, victorious and triumphant savior, gets killed.  And it’s not just any death.  Jesus dies an excruciatingly painful death and humiliating death, reserved for the lowest of the low.

So now Jesus isn’t even around anymore.  Like me, trying to make my grandmother’s cookies, we as followers of Jesus can’t even ask him about this recipe to his face any more.  So we have a choice, the same choice I had with those cookies.  We can go with what we think needs to happen.  We can try to make the dough harder, or add an egg or some sugar because we just know that the recipe and the dough we have in front of us just can’t be right.  Or we can go with the recipe, the directions, that we have.

I’ll be honest.  The very first time I attempted to bake my grandmother’s cookies, I went with the first option.  I went with what I thought needed to happen.  The dough was too soft, so I put it in the refrigerator overnight.  And when I came back, the dough was definitely harder.  It had actually morphed into something super crumbly, but I could roll some of it into little ball-like lumps.  And I baked those lumps.  And you know what happened?  I had ruined that dough.  I only managed to get a few cookies out of that entire recipe of dough, and the ones I got just weren’t right.  Even though the dough was crumbly, the cookies were not.  They definitely didn’t melt in my mouth, and they didn’t take my back to memories of Christmas cookies past.  And when we, as well meaning as we are, insist that this dough Jesus directs us to make is wrong and we have to fix it, we do the same thing.  Again, as well intentioned as we are, we ruin the dough of God’s way of life coming alive on this earth. 

When we insist that violence and force are the only options, and that we always have to resort to them, or that we have to be the biggest, strongest, and most powerful, we crumble apart God’s kingdom before it’s even baked.  It needs to be shaped with the power of mercy, peace, and meekness.  When we insist that we have to be puffed up and victorious, we miss that holy room for God that we can only make when we are humble, when we are poor in spirit, and when we mourn.  It is in those times of emptiness that God fills us up.  And when we insist on sweetness—instead of accepting the bitterness of persecution, exclusion, even revulsion of others—we ruin the dough again.  Because when we insist on sweetness, for example insisting that we must be happy, or healthy, or wealthy, we miss God’s presence in reality, where we all feel sad and get sick and not all of us are going to be rich.

I made those cookies a second time.  I followed the directions exactly.  And my dough was a mess.  It was way too soft and I couldn’t make it form into a ball so I just put soft little blobs onto the cookie sheets and put them into the oven and prayed.  And they came out perfectly, melting in my mouth and tasting just like I remembered.  My wisdom, my wise plan of putting the dough in the fridge, had just been foolishness.  My wisdom, insisting that I knew what dough was supposed to look like and forcing it to look that way, was just foolishness.  Wisdom and cookies as they were intended by the author to be only came and trusted, hoped, and prayed, when I let of my preconceived notions and let myself be guided by something I didn’t fully understand.

God’s way of life on earth—that cookie we’re attempting to make—works the same way.  We can’t force it to look like we want it to look.  We can’t make it tougher, or puffed up, or sweeter without ultimately ruining it as we distort it into our own well-intentioned but misguided creation. Be poor in spirit. Mourn.  Remember your part in God’s larger vision.  Hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Show mercy.  Be sincere.  Make peace.  Be persecuted and reviled. This is the strange dough that makes up God’s intended way of life on earth.  Hope.  Trust.  Go with God’s wisdom and pray, and these cookies God promises us will come out beautifully in the end.