In case you haven’t heard, we rescued a “new to us” Pomeranian named Bentley this month. He’s adorable and sweet. And someday soon, he’ll be in great health. However, Bentley is going through some serious reconstruction. In the past two weeks, he’s undergone three rather invasive medical interventions and been shaved down to the skin alongside getting settled in a new home with a grouchy sister, Freckles, who is conflicted about his presence.  

When I met Bentley at the pound, I knew he was 8 years old, had four teeth left that were all in bad shape, and had seriously matted fur that left areas of his body bald from neglect. He was also terrified and it showed. There were a lot of good, sane reasons to not rescue this dog.

However, Nate and I didn’t think much about his complications as much as we saw an little dog who would flourish with a little care … ok, maybe a lot of care … and of course love. So, he’s been fixed and got his seriously clogged up anal glands cleaned out and medicated. (If you’d like to know more about that, I told our some of our high school kids all about it in great detail over lunch the other day, which was of course the perfect topic at the bagel shop.) He then had his remaining teeth pulled and he was shaved to his skin with just touch of peach fuzz left.  

If he were a house, it’s a bit like took him down the studs. However, thanks to the miracles of antibiotics, pain meds, and Bob’s great skill alongside Bentley’s God-given body that knows how to heal and good nutrition, he’s on his way to flourishing.

That said, if we had been looking simply for a dog who would fit neatly into our lives without troubles or extensive needs, we would likely have not chosen Bentley. There certainly were healthier dogs at the shelter, but we love Pomeranians and we saw in Bentley a little dog who was perfect for us. Yes, a bit of a hot mess disaster, but a truly sweet dog who’s eager to love and be loved. His hurdles are small potatoes in comparison to all the gifts he brings.

In the gospel today, Jesus and his disciples have a chat on a mountain after leaving a crowd of people with a variety of diseases and issues who gathered around Jesus for healing, comfort, and hope. These people were looking for new life beyond the chronic conditions and situations they found themselves stuck in. When Jesus goes up the mountain with his disciples, he’s talking about the people who they had just been with – people who were on the edges of society, the unclean, the suffering and despairing. These are the folks Jesus tells the disciples are blessed.

In some ways, the ancient world is not that much different than our own in that the strong, wealthy, powerful folks were and are considered the blessed ones. We name ourselves as blessed when we’re grateful for something wonderful in our lives, don’t we? We say we’re blessed by our families, our friends, or our comforts and joys. This understanding, however, sends the subtle (or not so subtle) message that you’re not blessed when you’re down on your luck or suffering in some way. This is so easy and intuitive to think this way!

So it makes sense that Jesus made sure his disciples understood that the ones who are truly blessed are the ones who they were just with, the riffraff. These folks, who were the hot mess disasters like Bentley, were the blessed ones.

Again and again in the gospels, we hear Jesus’ teaching that the Kingdom of God is an inversion of the way we normally think. Humans think the rich and powerful are the blessed. Jesus says the least of these are the blessed. Humans think God will save us by giving us power and helping us win over our enemies. Jesus says the way to the kingdom is by the way of the cross and death to our egos and selfishness. Humans tend to believe our struggles are shameful while Jesus says you are blessed in exactly the ways you are in struggle. The struggle, the pain in you (and in everyone else) is the center of God’s love and care.

Regardless of how we may pretend differently, we’re all rescues waiting to be found and adopted into the fullness of life, the fullness of the kingdom of God, with all our complications and needs. When dogs are adopted, there’s no hiding the complications for the most part. When you go, you get their medical report, and you can see for yourself all the general hot mess-ness of them when you get a visit. However, us humans can be very skilled at hiding the hot mess of our lives, our hearts, our families, finances, and our general realities. We so easily buy into the idea that it’s the powerful, the beautiful, and the strong who are blessed and so we hide our needs, our suffering, our grief so that we don’t find ourselves exposed like a rescue dog with all our problems documented and on display for the world to see and judge.

This is the gift of Jesus’ grace. God sees so clearly all our issues, all the hot-mess-ness of us and all people and still calls us blessed. If we take this seriously, the Sermon on the Mount undoes our ideas of what makes us lovable or even eligible to be one of God’s people, full citizens of God’s world. While we may think we need to deny our hot-mess-ness, Jesus sees the suffering and the realities of the people and declares that these people are blessed as they are because their circumstances are not the defining realities. Our sufferings are not shameful. They are loved, included, and cared for and they will not last forever. They do not define us, just as Bentley was never defined by his epic anal gland situation and his rotten teeth. He has been adopted, loved, redeemed by Bob’s great skill, and set on a trajectory of health and new life. Our struggles may form us, but they do not define us.

This promise is for you, however you mourn or suffer. We are saved here in this world of beauty and complication. We are also ultimately saved in God’s kingdom hereafter in heaven. The ones who we honor today on All Saints have taken their places in God’s great Cloud of Witnesses, in the vastness of God’s love that is fabric of this universe. The grief we may feel is blessed. All our sufferings are all gathered in, seen, cared for, and healed bit by bit.

These promises are also for all people, including the ones who we may find easy or even satisfying to judge, the ones who we may think deserve their suffering for one reason or another. Exactly who we judge may differ between us, but we all have our judgements, if we’re honest. So, these judgements are something to notice, get curious about, and bring to Jesus for wisdom and guidance. In this teaching, Jesus is telling his disciples (which means us) the ones who society judges as unworthy and unclean are at the center of God’s care. While humans tend to reject and avoid the complications of suffering in ourselves and others, God sees the complication and difficulty of suffering and draws it in close. This is the call that the saints of the church have understood and obeyed across millennia. This is the call for us.

Martin Luther, one of the church’s great saints in Lutherans’ opinion, famously said on his deathbed that we are all beggars. We are all the riffraff, the unclean, and the unwanted in one way or another. We are all poor in spirit, mourning, or suffering in one way or another and yet we are adopted into God’s blessing, not by our own action or achievement but by our need and acknowledgement of the gift. That’s it.

So, let this embolden us. With God, there is no shame in our struggle. Humans are imperfect, so they may not always be perfect in their response to our sufferings and complications, which is likely the biggest understatement I’ve ever made. However, that very human failure doesn’t mean our complications are shameful, just like it’s not shameful that Bentley has not one single tooth left. Humans’ imperfect responses only means humans are imperfect and that we know, right? That doesn’t mean the shame that imperfect human love communicates is real in God’s reality. We can claim and love the parts within us that struggle and bring them all to God, for God knows them as blessed. And we can stretch ourselves to love those who struggle around us and to see them as blessed because they are.

This world can be hard. Being human can be hard, just like it is hard being a little hot mess Pomeranian in the shelter. It need not come with shame or condemnation because Jesus takes it all and soaks it in love, care, forgiveness, and even joy. This is the path of renewal for ourselves and a mighty call to action for us as disciples. May we let Jesus’ teaching guide us in our gentle, yet insistent compassion for ourselves, for others, and all of this complicated, hot mess world. 

AMEN