Luke 6: 17-26
Grounded in
God
February
11, 2007
Rev.
Elizabeth Macaulay
Kurt
Vonnegut has this observation to make about what you will hear this morning in
today’s text. He says:
“For some
reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they
demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard them demand that the Sermon
on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom?
“Blessed
are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon?
Give me a break!” (Man
Without a Country pg. 98)
And of course, that’s the issue.
Jesus doesn’t
give us a break. He doesn’t allow us to
dodge the ways we are called to live together.
Today’s
text is a partner to the Sermon on the Mount shared through Matthew’s
gospel. Today’s text comes from
Luke. And rather than have Jesus
delivering the sermon on a mountain top - a geographical location meant to
symbolize and believed to be close to God, Jesus teaches his disciples in the
dust and shared footing of a plain.
After he
has been on the mountain and called his disciples, Jesus comes down into the
world. He brings his band of ministers
and teachers away from any sense they might have that ministry means being
cloistered in the gentled quiet of clouds.
No. Luke has Jesus bringing those fellow teachers
and healers down to where the people are.
Into the midst of life. And there
he commences to healing. And there he
commences to telling them what it is to live this way of discipleship.
And we who
hear it on this morning, if we are listening, might well want to say “Give me a
break!” because the words of our teacher and leader Jesus are strong enough to
make us squirm.
(Read Text)
In Luke’s
telling of how it is Jesus shared this teaching, there is no dodging that Jesus
is talking to his listeners about poverty.
Not poverty of heart or spirit, but poverty of resources.
And where are we, listening in some two thousand years
later?
Most of us
are not counted among the blessed in this teaching - the poor, the hungry, the
grieving, the hated.
Most of us
are among those being “woe’d”: the full,
the laughing, those spoken well of.
Does this
mean that we have no place in God’s kingdom?
Are we doomed to woe simply because we are, so many of us here this
morning, those who have?
Of course not.
But if we don’t listen to how it is Jesus proclaims release
to the oppressed.
If we try
not to hear that the movement of Jesus is meant to be built up from those our
culture feels comfortable judging.
If we don’t
open ourselves to the reality that God calls us over and over and over again to
KNOW that we are not isolated in this world - we exist in a community in
which we are called to hear and tend all - most especially the poor - if
we dodge these things because they make us uncomfortable. Well, then, we are armchair dabblers in
Sunday morning dramas. We aren’t
followers of Jesus.
John Wesley
taught that the poor are the teachers we perhaps most need in order to grow in
our discipleship. He taught that in
visiting the poor and marginalized, we invite them to transform us, to
transform our hearts, to transform our understanding, to
transform us into instruments of the divine mercy and justice - of God‘s
peace, as St Francis would speak it.
Wesley was
convinced that there is no substitute for personal contact with the poor. No distance knowledge gained through reading
the paper or watching the news is sufficient.
Check writing is commendable, and it is not sufficient. We also need to experience relationship first
hand. To see people - the poor - as kin in Christ.
Wesley
speaks:
“One reason
why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so
seldom visit them. Hence it is that,
according to the common observation, one part of the world does not know what
the other suffers. Many of them do not
know, because they do not care to know:
they keep out of the way of knowing it - and then plead their voluntary
ignorance as an excuse for their hardness of heart. (Wesley, quoted in The New Creation,
pg. 190)
He
continues through this reflection in a journal:
“On Friday
and Saturday I visited as many more of the poor as I could. I found some in their cells underground,
others in their garrets, half starved both with cold and hunger, added to
weakness and pain. But I found not one
of them unemployed who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, devilishly false is that common
objection, ‘They are poor only because they are idle.’ If you saw there things with your own eyes,
could you lay out money in ornaments or superfluities?” (Same source as above)
The most
recent statistics I could find on poverty in
The level
of income that qualifies a person to be considered living below poverty is
$9,300 a year for a single person and $14,500 for a family of three.
As of eight
years ago, 7% of the population of
We know the
numbers of those living in poverty has gone up since then.
And we know
that the annual income number used to determine poverty is obscenely low.
So situated
as we are in
I usually
try to weave in a story in my sermon to illustrate my point. Stories bridge the gap between the teaching
of Jesus and our living of it in our hearts and lives. Stories make the Word flesh and cause it to
dwell among us.
Well, in this sermon, YOU are the story.
Are you
willing to mix it up with the poor? To
learn the faces of your brothers and sisters and to welcome them without
judgment in order that they might get two bags of groceries a month because we
as a church care enough about their plight to open our doors and our hearts?
Every
fourth Saturday a number of us have gone to Minnehaha UMC to unload a truck and
sort produce and be in community with the poor of our neighborhood and through
that outreach people are treated with dignity and respect and they leave the
house of Jesus with bread for their tables.
We want to start a similar program here at
In this
sermon, YOU are the story. Will you join
with Don Bodger and with me and with members of this church to make Rich
Harvest a witness to the ways we live the teachings of Jesus in this place?
If so, go
to the meeting after church. Offer to
help. Pray for this outreach. And refuse to practice voluntary ignorance
about the needs of the poor. One in ten
outside the doors of this place. And
that number grows by the day.
Are you
willing to learn from the poor? Then
help the mission trip to
YOU are the
story! Will you lend your money and your
prayers to the building of the mission fund here at your church? We must build our capacity to react, to
witness, to touch, to be in the way of Jesus.
I end with
the words of a man whose story inspires us yet.
Robert Kennedy Jr. It’s a call to
join the story oh please will you:
“Let no one
be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do
against the enormous array of the world’s ills - against misery and ignorance,
injustice and violence… Few will have the greatness to bend history
itself; but each of us can work to
change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be
written the history of this generation…
It is from
the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is
shaped. Each time a man stands up for an
ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice,
he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from million different
centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep
down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
YOU are the story.
Blest are you.
Amen