Jeremiah Banks
Associate Pastor of Spiritual Formation
First Baptist Church, Corbin, Kentucky
“The Good Life belongs to those who show mercy, because they will be shown mercy.” – Matthew 5:7 (paraphrased)
I love to listen to podcasts. When I heard the creators of the popular “The Bible Project” podcast translate the usual word “blessed” as “the good life” in their series on the Sermon on the Mount, something unlocked within me. For me, “blessed” can sometimes feel like empty religious language—something you can find sewn onto a pillow rather than the type of radical statement I expect to hear from the mouth of Jesus.
“The good life belongs to those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” – Matthew 5:4 (paraphrased)
There are a lot of definitions of what it means to live a “good life” or what the “good life” looks like. The world of politics tells us power, partisan politics and putting yourself and your party’s positions first is the key. Hyper-spirituality tells us escaping the cares of the world is how you find blessing. The world of social media attempts to boil the good life down to our highlight reels. Each of these perspectives may be valid in their own way. But none of them sound quite like Jesus to me, the man who, upon seeing the crowds, sat down and began to teach: “The good life belongs to those who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
What would it look like for you to flourish? For our communities to believe Jesus meant what he said? What if the values of non-violence, self-sacrifice and mutuality aren’t just pleasant ideas, but really are the moral arc of the universe? If this is what the good life looks like, then the meek must be the ones moving with the grain of the universe after all.
The Good Life
A blessing inspired by Amos 5:18-24
There will be days when we get it all backwards.
Where we will long for the end of God’s good world.
Where—at the rate we are going—the world will end in darkness, not light.
And we will like it.
O Holy One,
May our hearts beat right.
May we resist our desire to escape.
When the roaring of markets and politics come charging at us,
where can we turn?
When we weary and we thirst
from our needs and the world’s needs,
how can we dream?
If we long for darkness, may it be the darkness that dilates.
When we are tempted to fill our time together with smoke and mirrors,
may we remember how quickly an opened window can clear the air.
And when the new heavens and the new earth come ringing,
may the noise we hear be from our own mouths.
May we sing alongside the birds,
chirping of the possibility
of a world where
all can stand on common ground.
Pray...Give...Go.
