Beatitudes: Like God are the poor in spirit...

...and the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.

The way out of darkness - out from under the shadow of death - begins here.

This is the threshold to the kingdom of God: to be poor in spirit.

We are not to take from this that God’s kingdom is only for the depressed and is to be filled with a bunch of Eeyores. Depression is not in view here.

Poor in spirit here refers to people who are not rich on themselves with over-inflated egos.

We know that God himself is poor in spirit.

Sadly, there is an entire side of theology that makes God self-obsessed and all he has done, is doing, and will do is for his own self-interest, his glory.

It goes so far that God predestines kindly grandmothers, supportive siblings, and our beautiful children into the eternal torment of being burned forever - to God’s glory, supposedly.

But we see God demonstrate his poverty of spirit with his own coming in the flesh. In our Scriptures, we read that God set aside the advantages of his place and his being in order to come into our world, live among us, and even allow himself to be lynched - loving and forgiving us the entire way.

Here is poverty of spirit: not being rich or built up in myself and any advantages or glory I hold or can attain.

Being poor in spirit is not about what we possess internally or externally but how we possess it.

We have seen the bullies in real life or in a movie who are good at, say, a sport - good to the point of dominating - and even in a friendly game against the most inexperienced player, the bully can do nothing but crush and humiliate their competition.

But then we admire the talented professional who can go out to a friendly match, even against a child, and let themselves lose for the sake of the joy of the one they are playing against, and the glory the other person feels from beating the professional.

Time and again the human heart is moved by stories of people giving up advantage to help someone else, as God did for us.

I recently read the story told by Russian Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko of when his mother took him to the Red Square to watch the parading of 20,000 Nazi prisoners of war:

The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police. The crowd was mostly women–Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and with thin hunched shoulders which had borne half of the burden of the war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. They gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to appear.

At last we saw it. The generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebeian victors. “They smell of perfume, the bastards,” someone in the crowd said with hatred. The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.

All at once something happened to them. They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty bloodstained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down. The street became dead silent–the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.

Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman's shoulder, saying, “Let me through.” There must have been something about her which made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a colored handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now from every side women were running toward the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people.

This woman, with a carefully saved crust of black bread, brought the kingdom of heaven to the Red Square when she gave what little comfort she had compared to the broken humanity being paraded before her.

The threshold to the kingdom of heaven rests upon us being about our own selves less and less.

Here, we have the first step out of the darkness of the world and into the kingdom of light.

In a complete reversal from the politics of the world, the kingdom of heaven is owned by those who give up their advantage for the sake of others to live the example of God through the life of Jesus.

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The kingdom Jesus leads and invites us into connects with a deep truth of the world, lost to time, and buried under millions of bodies through history - going back to Able, murdered by Cain.

This world was made by God, who is love, whose nature is love, and therefore the only grain to underly creation could be love, because God can be and do nothing else.

And Jesus shows us that God, Love, agape, is self-sacrificing, communal, and cares about others. Therefore, Love is, and always will be, poor in spirit.

Thus, to live in poverty of spirit is to live in the grain of creation, flowing with the Creator, moving in sync with Love.

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When we are like God in poverty of spirit, then we become like God and mourn…