The Lord is King, the Lord was King, and the Lord will be King forever and ever.
The ancient collection of Jewish conversations, the Mishnah, compares Rosh Hashanah to Psalm
33, 13-15.
The great King Adonai looks down from heaven.
He observes all humanity.
From his dwelling place he gazes on the inhabitants of the earth, and he who fashioned the hearts
of all, who discerns all their deeds.
Tonight is a time to remember the kingdom of heaven.
Tonight is a time to look inward, to place our King on the throne of our hearts.
So tonight for our message today, I'm going to begin a series that will continue on tomorrow
and then throughout the fall on the Sermon on the Mount.
So if you have a Bible here, Ken, maybe you could pass some out, some of the Tree of Life
versions there.
And I'll introduce this while Ken's getting those.
He could pass those around.
Our theme last year, the Etzchayim Hi, it is a tree of life, is coming to a close.
And we are launching a new strategic theme for this year, 5784.
And wow, I just want to say we have done some terrific things last year from planting our
two trees of life out in front, an act that is imbued with symbolism for tomorrow, to
our daily Jewish living teaching series, launching the hospitality team, running our Etzchayim
retreat last spring.
Well done, Ruach Israel.
Our new theme is our Ruach Israel voice.
Our Ruach Israel voice.
And there are two parts that we're going to emphasize this year.
First, our inner voice.
What qualities do we need to nurture and cultivate for our community to be a strong voice for
Yeshua?
And the second part is about sharing our message with our people.
We have an important message that Yeshua has commissioned us to bear witness to within
our Jewish people, and this year we want to make some steps in that direction.
We have some new initiatives that I'm really looking forward to this coming year, and we'll
share about those in the weeks to come.
But tonight, we'll begin one of them, a new teaching series on the Sermon on the Mount.
And there'll be some memorizing the Sermon on the Mount coming up soon, I think.
Gary said he would do a dramatized version of it.
Reina is writing a song.
So anyway, we'll do all kinds of things with the Sermon on the Mount this year.
Now personally, the Sermon on the Mount has a very special place in my heart.
Most of you here have heard my story of how I found Yeshua, or perhaps how he found me
while I was hiking from Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail.
But there's a part that I don't usually share.
After walking over the backcountry mountains in Maine for a month, I crossed into New Hampshire,
and I got sick and set up camp by a rushing river north of the White Mountains.
And I found a nice flat rock in the middle of a river where the water was shallow.
And there, with the water swirling around me, I opened my Bible and read for the first
time the Sermon on the Mount.
And it was as if the words lifted off the page and went into me and made themselves
a home somewhere deeper in my soul, somewhere that I didn't know was there.
The following day, I continued hiking south, and at a clearing in the White Mountains,
I felt Yeshua calling me deep within, and I said, yes.
And I remember his presence welling up within me, bringing such healing and warmth to every
area of my soul.
And I felt that his presence changed me on the inside, a change that I could feel happening
in real time, as if the kingdom of heaven was now closer somehow.
Now it's interesting, when Yeshua teaches about the kingdom of heaven, he doesn't teach
us about a distant land that is removed from the lives of the disciples.
And he doesn't often even teach about what the kingdom of heaven looks like, or what
life will be like in the kingdom of heaven.
A few places, perhaps, but most often he fervently invites us to seek the kingdom of heaven with
everything that we have here and now.
And the way that we seek the kingdom of heaven is not in theological abstractions, and in
spite of what many people think, it's not found simply by a checklist of worthy deeds
for entry.
Yeshua teaches us that he is the entryway.
And when we find him, the kingdom of heaven begins within us right away.
And then he shows us how to live that life here on earth, our voice.
Now of course, the Bible did not call the Sermon on the Mount the Sermon on the Mount,
the Latin Vulgate in the late 4th century first used the name.
Amy Jill Levine in her commentary retitles the Sermon on the Mount to, A Beginner's Guide
to the Kingdom of Heaven.
I like it.
So we're going to begin with the section famously called the Beatitudes.
Of course, Yeshua didn't call it that either, but we'll get there.
Or beginning in Matthew 5.
Now when Yeshua saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and he sat down.
His disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and he began to teach.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
And blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
Now these are often called the Beatitudes because Beatitude is a Latin term for blessed.
The Greek term Matthew used, makareos, can be translated blessed maybe, but also happy,
fortunate, even rich.
Now Yeshua wasn't teaching in Greek, so there are a few other Hebrew possibilities.
Let's look at them.
One possibility is Baruch, blessed.
Jeremiah 17, Baruch, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord.
Psalm 118, Baruch, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
But another possibility is in the Hebrew word, ashrei, which means happy or fortunate.
So think of Isaiah 30, verse 18, ashrei, happy are those who wait for the Lord.
Rabbi Pinkus Lapid feels that ashrei is the best option.
When Jewish scholars of the second century BCE translated the Torah into Greek, we call
this a Septuagint.
They translated the word ashrei here in Isaiah with the same word that Matthew uses in Greek
in the Beatitudes, makareos.
Now Matthew usually quotes the Tanakh from the Septuagint, so do you see it's likely
that this was the idea that he was trying to communicate.
In the Siddur we pray ashrei traditionally three times a day.
Ashrei, o'shvei, veitecha, o'dhado luke, seila.
Ashrei are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise.
Now happy in English doesn't quite capture ashrei.
There really isn't a translation for ashrei.
Neither does blessed.
Happy might feel too light and trivial to be linked with grieving a loss and mourning
or the difficulties of poverty.
And blessed, though it captures God's provision and his favor, sort of leaves us with this
sense of theoretical spiritual things that might come in the distant future.
Rabbi Russ Resnick says in his book Divine Reversal, this scripture isn't speaking so
much of a blessed future in the life to come or an ethereal blessedness of the super pious,
but of concrete happiness here and now through an active relationship with God.
And Yeshua isn't describing some ideal state of sainthood or future reward, but the condition
under God's authority today, which we can experience if we have the faith and vision
to follow Yeshua.
Now the DBL dictionary defines ashrei as a heightened state of happiness and joy, implying
very favorable circumstances and enjoyment.
Rabbi Russ sees ashrei as the true happiness.
I like that, so I'll use that.
The true happiness.
Now what these verses reveal is that life in Yeshua is ashrei, even in the midst of
great difficulty and trial.
We'll begin with verse three.
We'll just cover verse three today and then we'll cover the rest tomorrow.
Ashrei, truly happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Now in context we need to remember that Yeshua is speaking directly to Jews about Jews, so
he's speaking mostly to what we call the Amharits, the people of the land, who were kind of a
broad category of Jewish people dispersed outside of Jerusalem, in the Galilee.
These were people who were abused and often very poor.
They were policed by Rome and oppressed with impossible taxes.
We think of Pontius Pilate who is recorded as having mixed the blood of the Galilean
Amharits in with their sacrifices.
He wasn't a nice guy.
Further we know from rabbinic texts that reflect back to first century political dynamics that
there were groups of Jews in leadership in the temple who despised the Amharits, not
because they were poor per se, but because they lived a simpler Jewish life and often
challenged some of the pharisaic reformations that were promoted from Jerusalem.
These reformations tended to give these leaders more authority and power and placed even heavier
burdens on these Jewish people who were just trying to survive.
For example, during a time of famine one member of the religious elite in Jerusalem said,
Woe is me for giving my bread to an Amharits, and again speaking of the Amharits, their
poverty is a sign of pride.
So when Yeshua says, Ash-re, the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, his immediate
hearers would hear something remarkable, that God saw the Amharits and that they had a very
special place in his eyes.
Now the first century Judaism scene was very complex and there were many different branches
in sects, not just the elite in leadership.
And there were many things that we read about the Amharits that are also very positive.
Yeshua was not creating new teachings for these Jews, he was pointing to the heart of
what Judaism was really all about, pointing the way of the true Torah.
Here's an example of how Judaism developed in the third century.
In Talmud, Joshua B. Levy said, Come and see how great before God are those who are bowed
down in spirit.
Similar idea.
And again in Talmud we see, those who suffer from poverty will not see the face of Gehenna.
Gehenna is the same term that Yeshua uses for hell later in his sermon on the mount.
It was a garbage dump in the first century, a place where corpses of criminals and dead
animals and all kinds of manner of refuge were thrown to be destroyed and burned.
So the valley was a burning place of sewage and burning flesh and garbage and it made
a great metaphor.
Now in fact this passage even goes so far as to say that their poverty is what rescues
them from the judgment of Gehenna.
So this is inside of our tradition as well.
Perhaps Yeshua is drawing straight from Isaiah 61.
Here Isaiah reflects on the Jubilee and then remember when he reads this in his home synagogue
in Nazareth he applies it to himself.
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news
to the poor.
He sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening
of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of
the vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn.
We know that Yeshua reads this passage in his hometown synagogue and applies it to himself.
He is the one who comes to bring good news to the poor and what is that good news?
That they are ashray because they are inheriting the kingdom of heaven.
One clue to what Yeshua is saying here is the word itself.
There's is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew is setting up a contrast between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdoms of the
earth.
In the kingdoms of the earth the strong and the wealthy and those who are held in high
esteem have already been rewarded with power.
This is their world but for the poor, the beaten down, the bedraggled, those who have
no place of joy in this world, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The idea isn't that the kingdom of heaven is like a pie in the sky kind of platitude.
One day it will be better but rather Yeshua is revealing an entirely different set of
values and priorities to his disciples, to his hearers.
Yeshua says in the disciples prayer, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
It's not only a promise of eternal peace after death, it's like a prescription for a new
set of glasses.
Kingdom of heaven glasses where Yeshua is inviting us to take off our earthly glasses
that are colored with greed and pride and run by the power struggles and oppression
of the world and to replace them with heavenly glasses which see the world through heaven's
eyes to quote from the prince of Egypt.
In Isaiah 57, 15 God says, I dwell on high and in holiness yet I also dwell with the
contrite and the poor in spirit.
Reviving the spirits of the lowly, reviving the hearts of the contrite.
Now the Hebrew here is literally, it's shefal ruch, the poor or the lowly in spirit.
Psalm 51, 19, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.
To the world system, the broken, the oppressed and the humble people of the land are simply
there for the strong and the powerful to stand on and to use, but not so in heaven.
In heaven everything is flipped upside down and God sees, he values, he has compassion
on those who are weak.
Rabbi Russ wrote an entire book about this called The Divine Reversal, the transforming
ethic of Yeshua.
In his words he says, each of these sayings in the Asherah of Messiah, as we are calling
it, reverses a common ideal of happiness to reveal the source of true happiness.
The pages of world history books are filled with the same story which repeats itself over
and over again.
People desperately seek happiness through power, through control, through money, through
fame, through revenge.
Those who are the most successful in these pursuits are the ones who we know about who
have caused wars, slavery and terrible pain to the world that's still going on today.
Others continue to strive from one thing to the next but never taste true Asherah.
In the kingdom of heaven, true happiness does not come from these things.
The kingdom has radically different priorities and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount will
tell us what those priorities are.
Follow the way of Torah, always reconcile, love even your enemies, forgive, trust God,
give what you have.
Elijah Svi Solovecek lived in the 1800s.
He was an orthodox scholar who interestingly wrote a Hebrew commentary on the Gospels,
attempting to connect Yeshua's teachings with the teachings in Talmud.
That was his vision because he grew up learning this.
He wanted to bridge the gap and show that Yeshua was really a great Jew.
Now Solovecek was also a great, great relative of the famous Joseph Solovecek who was the
founder of the modern orthodox movement today.
Jordan Levy, many of you know her from Campo El Dorado translated his commentary into English
and it's in print today.
You can find it on Amazon.
Solovecek sees poor in spirit as a call to Judaism's highest value of humility.
He quotes from Perkei Wot 4-4, be very, very humble for the end of man is the worm.
All human pride is vanity and will end in the grave.
The Hebrew here translated humble is shefal ruch, poor in spirit.
Historic Christian thinker of the fourth century Augustine joins Perkei Wot.
Pride is the beginning of all sin, he writes.
Let the proud therefore seek after and love the kingdoms of the earth.
But blessed are the poor in spirit, the humble and the God fearing for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven.
Isaiah 66 two gives us a bit more depth.
All these things my hand has made and so all these things are mine says the Lord, but this
is the one to whom I will look to the humble and contrite in spirit who trembles at my
word.
Now the Hebrew word translated as humble here is ani, which literally means poor, but it
has the connotation of those who recognize their dependence on God and their dependence
on others.
Amy Jill Levine wisely writes in her commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, thus poor in spirit
crosses economic lines.
To be poor is not necessarily to be righteous.
They don't mean the same thing necessarily.
And if we hold this equation, we wind up romanticizing poverty rather than working to alleviate it.
Nor for the gospels is being rich synonymous with being venal or evil.
Rather having surplus or wealth comes with the mandate to help others.
The poor in spirit are those who recognize their dependence on others and others dependence
on them.
Yeshua's words are not only an encouragement for us, they are a mandate that we become
agents of the kingdom of heaven here on earth to be aware of our own obligation to care
for those who are in need, those who are suffering hardship, those who are brought low, those
who are hurting, those who might depend on us.
Being poor in spirit then isn't about how much money a person has or doesn't have.
It means that you have exchanged at the deepest levels of your identity the world's systems
for happiness and success with God's values in the kingdom of heaven.
It also means that you've given up hope of finding Asherah in yourself.
And instead you realize that Asherah is found in the presence of God and among God's people
with whom you are inseparably part of your larger family.
And even more, one who is poor in spirit thinks less and less about his or her own Asherah
at all and instead becomes an agent of the kingdom of heaven seeking to meet the needs
and even the Asherah of others.
These people have found true Asherah, true joy because they have inherited the kingdom
of heaven and the kingdom of heaven is filled with joy.
I will pause now and we'll pick up with the rest of the Asherahs that Yeshua teaches us
tomorrow morning.
We have some really great material to get into when we hear the hundred blasts and the
shofar.
But for now I invite you just to close your eyes for a moment and just imagine that you
are with the disciples in Galilee.
You're following your beloved master, Yeshua.
There are crowds pressing in and Yeshua has been healing one person after the other.
Everyone who comes to him, he listens to, he touches, he looks in their eyes and he
heals them.
As you see Yeshua, your heart fills with love and you just want to be near him.
You take a breath and you look toward the distance.
The hills are filled with luscious tall grass that shimmers in the sun.
The sky is crystal blue and casts its striking reflection onto the sea of Galilee below.
A sweet breeze comes as you hear the shouts of joy as a woman is set free from her suffering.
Then you look, Yeshua is no longer there.
You turn around and you look for him.
You just have to find him and then you see him walking slowly up the path on the mountain.
He's alone.
He turns and looks at you.
He smiles and he motions for you to come away with him.
Instinctively you follow as if your bones had no other desire in the world.
And you find Yeshua sitting on a rock waiting for you.
And you join your friends, the other disciples.
And by now others have seen him climb the mountain too and they're approaching in crowds
eager to hear.
Yeshua smiles.
He looks on the people with compassion and he seems to be moved inside.
He looks upward for a moment, his eyes welling with tears.
And he opens his mouth and he begins to teach.
Ashray.
Truly happy are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
It wasn't just teaching you how to be a disciple.
He was actually making you a disciple as he taught.
Yes, yes, yes.
You think to yourself.
I will follow you, my king, to the ends of the earth.
Hashem, malech, Hashem, malech, Hashem, yimlok, le'olam, va'ed.
The Lord is king.
The Lord was king and the Lord will be king forever and ever.
Let us rise and we'll sing this together.
Hashem, malech.