Too blessed to be stressed

Who has ever heard the phrase “too blessed to be stressed”? It is a phrase that is meant to be helpful, but in all honesty it has the potential to do a lot of harm to people. If I tell myself that I am too blessed to be stressed then I am denying all the things that do cause stress in my life. For example, while the leak in our house has been fixed for a while now, we are still working on getting all the holes in our home patched so that we can actually turn our home back to the way that it was before all of this started. Then throw on top of that all of us got sick a while back and a lot of other things happen in our lives or the lives of people we love. While I do count all the blessings in my life and know that I have a lot to be grateful for, I honestly believe to deny the presence of real stress in my life will only do harm to both my physical and mental wellbeing.

Think about what your life might look like if you either constantly told yourself that you were too blessed to be stressed, or that someone else kept telling you that, especially in the context of faith. It could and has led to people feeling that because they have faith that they should not have major stresses in their life because as a person of faith they are blessed by God. If that continues it also creates this false sense that as a person of faith you cannot be vulnerable or susceptible to stresses in your life and if you do then you have to continue to work harder at your faith to make the blessings overcome the stresses.

It kind of reminds me of the picture perfect housewife of the 1950’s and 60’s. The wife that took the kids to school and extracurricular activities, helped them with their homework, cooked, cleaned, did the laundry and anything else that the family needed…and they did it with a smile. The problem is, then everyone expects that to always be the case and then the housewife, or anyone else are now put in the spot that if they do complain, or ask for help, or need something, they can’t go to others for it because they have put on this persona of perfection that they more than likely don’t feel they can go back on it. So the continue this facade of putting on the smile while enduring stress, strife, and unhappiness, but pretending that they are indeed to blessed to be stressed. And it still happens today, I’m not just talking about the 1950’s housewife anymore.

This is why I love the psalms so much. They are so full of emotion and honesty. Psalm 69 is a psalm of lament where the speaker is sharing just how bad things are going in their life. The psalm begins by saying they have waters reaching all the way to their neck, which to me is the exact same thing as when we say, “I’ve had it up to here” with whatever is going on. And the imagery of being stuck in mud is just a great one about what a difficult time this person his having and how they want God to know about it. The speaker knows their life isn’t going the way that it should and they are sharing their feelings, their knowing that life isn’t perfect with God, so that God knows how they feel. This person isn’t hiding behind a fake veil of happiness.

Jesus even goes so far as to help us know that the people who are happy and the people who are blessed are not the ones who have perfect lives or who pretend they have perfect lives. Which is exactly what the beatitudes are all about. In fact, the beatitudes must have been a very bizarre discourse to hear for people, because there was at that time a similar way of thinking to this whole ‘too blessed to be stressed’ idea. The society, by and large, was built around this idea that you needed to get to the top and the way to get to the top was by interacting with people who were either on the same level as you were in society or above yourself so that you could climb the social ladder. The more you climbed the more money you had, the more access to things became, the ‘happier’ you were, and the more blessed you appeared before everyone else.

Yet, that was the whole point. Jesus wasn’t talking to the elite or the social climbers. He was talking to ordinary folk who probably didn’t feel they were happy or blessed by society or maybe even by God. They were the ones at the bottom of the ladder wondering what it was that society and God had for them. So to hear these words of Jesus were probably very revolutionary. He begins his sermon, his message by directly addressing those who are hopeless or poor in spirit, the very people who had probably come to hear him. Then he tells them that they are blessed or happy, not because they will climb the social ladder, or that they have done something to find favor with God, but simply for who they are and that, right here and right now the kingdom of heaven is theirs. It didn’t say that the kingdom of heaven would be theirs one day, or that if they were good enough, happy enough, successful enough, or sacrificed and worshipped enough that one day they might receive the kingdom. No it is theirs right here and right now.

Jesus makes the world right by turning the world upside down. Jesus takes the measures by which society had believed, and still does, and without directly saying it threw them out the window and created a new standard, God’s standard for who is blessed in the world. And if we look at all the things that the happy or blessed receive we have to keep in mind that they are all in reference to God and faith. They will be made glad in the God who comforts them. They will inherit the earth that God has given them. They will be fed when God’s kingdom is fully realized. They will receive mercy not from others, but from God. It is those who work for peace that will show that they are God’s children.

Speaking of peace, think about how the Zealots, those who felt a violent overthrow of Rome was what God wanted for the freedom of the promised land. Jesus is even overturning this idea that a violent revolution was the solution. Instead he tells us that those who work for peace in this world are the ones who reflect what it means to be a part of the family of God.

To bring it back full circle, Jesus is telling us that all the people who are doing their best but are having a hard time with life are the people God wants to know that they are loved, blessed, and happy. Throughout scripture God has always been concerned about the poor, the widow, and the outcast, but the world somehow continues to miss that point and makes it about success. I don’t want to be too blessed to be stressed, because I want to know that my struggles are real and that the God who loves me understands them and walks beside me with them. And that’s exactly what Jesus tells us. God is with us, all of us who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, for God will give us rest. God loves our authentic self, when we are complaining to God that the water is up to our neck and when we are too stressed to feel there is any sort of blessing in our lives, because then God knows that not only are we being our authentic self, but that we are also having an authentic relationship with God, and with that God can be there with us, every step of the way. Amen.