Would you like to win the lottery? Well, there IS a way of giving yourself the same 50/50 odds of winning that you would have in an ordinary coin toss. In a few easy steps, here is what you do:
-- Take the $2 and ten seconds it takes to fill out a Powerball lottery ticket.
-- Now spend 12 hours every day doing nothing else but buying and filling out lottery tickets.
-- Do this for the next 55 years. By the end of that time, you will have spent $2 at least 86 million times.
-- And this, my friends, is how you increase your odds of winning the lottery. Follow these simple steps and you give yourself a 50/50 chance.
We've all known people whose biggest ambition in life is to get ahead, whether through luck, personal effort, or some combination of both. I know someone, for instance, who married a woman who convinced him that their main goal in life should be earning a million dollars by the time they both reached the age of 30. You probably know how this story ends. Together they owned and operated a body-building business in a major American city. The trouble was, they started acting like millionaires before they actually were millionaires. They bought a big, fancy house. They gave their preschool children everything, including expensive clothes and $50 haircuts. Then the Great Recession came. They went bankrupt, his wife ran off with another man who was richer than he was, and he had to raise his kids alone until he married his second wife. It was a hard lesson learned.
Today we celebrate the great feast day of all those people -- whether world-famous or largely unknown -- who made the reign of God their top priority in life. Instead of luck or personal effort or some combination of both, they relied on the grace of God to get them where they were going.
And one beautiful thing about setting your heart on the reign of God is that you always take others with you when you go. Think about it. No one goes to heaven alone. It's not a place you enter single file with no regard for who's ahead of you or who's behind you. You don't get there by disappearing into an anonymous crowd and pushing your way through it. Nor does heaven begin with a private meeting between you and St. Peter at a pearly gate or you and Jesus on a billowy cloud. The late Edgar Cayce put it this way: "You'll not be in heaven if you're not leaning on the arm of someone you have helped."
Here is another beautiful thing about setting your sights on the reign of God. Even when your physical strength and vigor start ebbing away, every moment of your life can still be a moment of helping others. Simply living your life in a graced way, whatever your limitations, can and does inspire those around you. We all know sisters at the court and center who are -- simply in themselves -- blessings to those around them. They cheer up the people who care for them and the people who come to visit them. They're grateful for every little favor they receive. They ask you how you are doing -- and honestly want to know your answer. They ask about your family. Their days of giving active service as teachers or nurses or administrators or social workers may be over, but not their days of living the spirit of the Beatitudes.
Some of you may have heard of the Bible translation called The Message. It was done by a Presbyterian minister educated in the ancient languages in which the Bible was first written. Reverend Eugene Peterson wanted to put the words of the Bible into ordinary everyday conversational English for his parishioners. He explained his motives in this way: "When Paul of Tarsus wrote a letter, the people who received it understood it instantly. When the prophet Isaiah preached a sermon, I can't imagine that people went to the library to figure it out. That was the basic premise under which I worked. I began with the New Testament in the Greek --- a rough and jagged language, not so grammatically clean. I just typed out a page the way I thought it would have sounded to the Galatians."
Anyway, here is what Reverend Peterson came up with for his modern English translation of the Beatitudes. If Jesus were with us today, speaking in a human voice in our own language, here is what he might say. As I read from this translation of Matthew's Gospel, think of our sisters at the court and center, and think of yourselves:
3 “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
4 “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
5 “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
6 “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.
7 “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.
8 “You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
9 “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.
10 “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.
11-12 “Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.
SOURCES
Adam Piore, "How state lotteries deliberately exploit people's dreams," The Week. http://theweek.com/article/index/248934/how-state-lotteries-deliberately-exploit-peoples-dreams
"Eugene H. Peterson," Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_H._Peterson
Matthew 5:1-12, The Message, Eugene H. Peterson, trans., Bible Gateway. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%205&version=MSG
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