Knoxville pastor Larry Fields was telling us the other night about attending an Army reunion in Gatlinburg of the 10th Mountain Division descendants. Who knew they had groups like that? So he sits down for dinner at a table with two free places, and before he touches his iced tea, a sweet couple come up looking for seats. There is one chair at Larry’s table and one at the next table over. Being the incorrigibly nice guy he is, Larry insists that the couple take his seat. He moves to the next table and strikes up a conversation with two older men. He tells them his name, and their faces light up. Are you Chaplain Fields’ son? Turns out these men were fighting in northern Italy during the Second World War. They’d been beaten badly in a certain campaign and had come crawling out of the woods—cold, hungry, tired and defeated. Larry’s dad greeted them on Easter Sunday. Chaplain Fields led them in a service celebrating the resurrection and prayed for those whose lives were now in the hands of the Easter God. It restored their souls. Larry learned things about his father he had not known. He would never have known them if he had not given up his place for the sake of others.

This is the way things work in the economy of God. The Beatitudes of Jesus are full of these kinds of surprises. Do this and things happen you would never expect. Give up your seat at the table, and you’ll get something more than a place to eat. Live in a self-sacrificing way, and you will be rewarded with things you thought you were giving up.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for instance. Who wants to be poor in anything? But if you are humble before God and the world, if you understand that you depend upon God and others, instead of gaining the whole world and losing your own soul, yours will be the kingdom of heaven. They are all like this, the Beatitudes. The losers win. The humble are exalted. Those that show restraint receive unrestrained blessing.

But before we make an infomercial out of the Beatitudes and start selling the world spiritual drivel about how God is obligated to give you things in exchange for your doing certain other things, let’s look at what is really going on here. It about what is really going on here. It’s about what is real and about keeping it real.

Here, in this world we live in, we tend to think that the world is organized in favor of those who are favored with good looks, good genes, good teeth, good grades, and good gumption. Tall people have a better shot at blessedness than short people. The blue ribbon goes to the one with blue blood. Success comes to those willing to do whatever it takes to win. You have to want it more than anyone else. If you have to climb over someone to get it, the problem is not your being too aggressive; it is the one climbed over being too passive. He gets what he deserves, just like you.

Jesus paints the picture of a world in conflict with that world. Cooperation rather than competition wins in this world. You go to the top by going to the bottom to lift those who have fallen along the way. You find out secrets and long-untold truths by giving up your seat to a strange couple. This is the real world, Jesus is saying, because in this world God is given space to work.

So often we hear people say things like, I know Jesus says that if someone strikes you on one cheek, you should turn the other cheek and offer that one, too. And that’s all fine and good when you’re talking about a fight on a playground, but it’s unrealistic in the grown-up dog-eat-dog world I live in. The only thing you get by turning the other cheek is a second bruised cheek. Jesus doesn’t want us to be doormats, does he?

But that whole reasoning is the very thing Jesus is challenging. We think what Jesus tells us is nice for children. It’s beautifully idealistic, and it would be great if people did that a little more. But we don’t think we can actually live that way, because, after all, we live in the real world, don’t you know?! Many Christians actually think the Beatitudes are really describing the world to come, not the world we are living in now. I am okay with that, except that some of them go on to say that since the kingdom of God has not come yet in full, Jesus’ words are not binding on us yet. We are excused from having to be peacemakers, for example, because after all, until Jesus comes there will be no true peace on earth. We don’t have to mourn, because to do so is not to have faith in the God who is in charge of everything that happens. But I don’t get why if we have to wait for kingdom come to be bound by the Beatitudes, we will mourn then. Won’t all the cause of mourning be gone?

Listen, Jesus is trying to tell us how to live real, genuine, honest and authentic lives right now. The Beatitudes are new attitudes for people tired of living in the unreal, disingenuous, dishonest, and inauthentic world we inhabit too often. He is saying that God is alive and well and holding the world together invisibly by rules of order that can be accessed and experienced and understood only when we behave beatitudinally.

So you have to make a commitment to live this way if you want to know the promises of God that come with this way of living. I counsel with people sometimes who are nervous about taking the step from dating to marriage. I remember one man who wondered out loud with me about letting himself become that vulnerable with someone. He feared losing control of his life, of the image he had put forward to the public. A wife would look right through all of that and see him for what he truly is. What if he lets her know him that way and then she leaves him? Well, I said, that is entirely possible. It’s happened many times before. But here’s the catch: it’s all risk-reward. The greater the stakes, the greater the payoff. The more you open yourself to love, the more love you experience yourself.

Jesus wants us to know the depths of love that rule the world. God is love, and when we are poor in spirit, when we mourn, when we are meek, when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we show mercy, when we will one thing purely, when we are reconcilers, when we accept persecution with grace and forgive our enemies, then, then, and only then will we understand the real world that God rules with grace. If you want to sense the kingdom of heaven in your life, if you want to be comforted, if you want to inherit the earth, if you want to be satisfied, if you want receive mercy, if you want to see God, if you want to be children of God, then, then, and only then you must make these beatitudes real in your life.

Blessed are they…, Jesus says. If you want the blessing of God, behave beatitudinally. Now, some people like to call these saying of Jesus the “Be-Happy-Attitudes.” As if by getting an attitude adjustment, you will make yourself happy. Not true. This is about being blessed, not about being happy. Happiness comes and goes. Blessing spends the night. To be blessed is to be made fortunate by God Almighty, not to make your own fortune by being happy. Blessing carries a sense of well-being and salvation that goes much deeper than happiness. The opposite of blessedness is not unhappiness; it is cursedness. To be blessed is to be given the gift of divine favor. And God promises us that we access that gift—we receive it—by living authentic lives. You’ve got to keep it real, in other words. And the Beatitudes are your guide to keeping it real. You see, the world of hatred and cruelty and misery is not the real world, while the Beatitudes are the ideal world. No, the world of the Beatitudes is the REAL world; the world of hatred and cruelty and misery is the UNREAL world.

So, then, by living the Beatitudes, we are keeping the real world real. We show the unreal world what is really real. And we invite people to come and join that world of blessing. That is why right after the Beatitudes, Jesus calls those who live that way the salt of the earth and the light of the world. And when we baptize you in this church and salt your lips and put a flickering votive in your hand, we are reminding you to remind the world all your life what is really real.

Clarence Jordan started Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, in the 1940s. He was a Baptist minister with a degree in agriculture from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in New Testament and Greek. How’s that for a combination? What’s most impressive is how he made it into a combination. Jordan believed that Jesus meant what he said about living the Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount that follows them. He might have agreed with the British writer G. K. Chesterton, who famously said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. Well, Jordan decided it ought to be tried. So he gathered everything he had, and he moved his family to Americus, opening a farm where white people and black people were invited to live together, eat together, work together, and worship together. They disobeyed no laws. They didn’t crusade against segregationists. They simply lived as if the real world were the world of the Beatitudes.

The unreal world of hatred and cruelty and misery revolted against them. Men in white sheets and hoods shot at them, burned crosses on their property, beat them up, and threatened them. Shopkeepers refused to trade with them. Churches ushered them out of pews instead of into them. And yet they stayed put and stayed at it, until the unreal world began to give way to the real world of God’s kingdom. Because of Clarence Jordan and other Christians like him at Koinonia Farm, segregation was ended, and ministries like Habitat for Humanity were born.

Listen, it’s hard to be a Christian sometimes. And it’s harder to be a Christian the harder you try. But what does the world need most? Isn’t it to find the life that really is life? Isn’t it to discover what is really real after all? And how will the world know that, Christian friends, unless we take up the words of Jesus and make them real in us?