"Good News/Bad News"
February 11, 2007: 6th Sunday after Epiphany, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org
Scripture:
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus came down with his disciples and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."
Sermon:
Most of us are familiar with the idea, if not the particulars of the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel according to Matthew, and the famous series of Beatitudes, or "blessings" with which Matthew's Jesus begins that chapters-long address. Just to refresh your memory, they start out:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for there is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for the will be called children of God. (Matthew 5:3-9)
Over the centuries, many people have come to believe that this sermon and these sayings form the heart of the Christian faith, the Gospel within the gospels. Some have even gone so far as to call the Sermon on the Mount the "Constitution of Christianity," making the Beatitudes a kind of preacher's Preamble And it has exercised this fascination not just for orthodox Christian believers. Other religious leaders, philosophers, and critics as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, and even Friedrich Nietzsche have understood the Beatitudes to describe in brief the way of life advocated by Jesus of Nazareth.
Our reading for this morning from the Gospel according to Luke, the opening verses of what is called the Sermon on the Plain due to its setting not in the hills above Galilee but in a "level place," clearly has much in common with Matthew's Sermon on the Mount. Both occur at approximately the same point early in Jesus' ministry, after he has called a group of intimate disciples and as word of his teaching and wonder-working are drawing larger and larger crowds to hear him; both are extended discourses stitched together from many of the same best-remembered sayings of Jesus; and both open with the same sort of bold, line-by-line rhetorical device.
But beneath the stylistic similarities lie deeper differences, at least in these opening statements. For starters, Luke's conditions for blessing are harsher, starker than Matthew's. Where Matthew has Jesus blessing the "poor in spirit," for Luke, it's just the poor. Instead of a lofty benediction on all who "hunger and thirst for righteousness," Luke leaves it at hunger, period. In fact, Matthew's version is generally considered significantly kinder and gentler than Luke's. It's Matthew who mentions, the meek and those who mourn, the merciful and the peacemakers. And of course, unlike Matthew, Luke includes both blessings and woes, that is, blessings and curses.Sure, you will be blessed if you are poor or hungry, or weeping, Luke's Jesus says, but woe to you if you are rich now or full now or laughing now. For you, things are not going to turn out nearly so well.
Which is why preachers like me are tempted to give Luke a miss this morning and wait for Matthew to roll around later in the great three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary which suggests our texts week to week. I mean, really, they're basically the same, right? Why go to all the extra trouble of explaining all those woes and that tone, when all you have to do is wait a bit and, voilá, it's blessings all the way? Where's the harm in that? It's an argument to which progressive Christians like us, not saddled with the burdens of Biblical literalism or inerrancy and already gun-shy around woes and curses and the like, are particularly susceptible. All things being equal, we'd just rather not go there.
Which is why our more conservative Christian brothers and sisters like to caricature those of us on the progressive side of the spectrum as "pickers and choosers" in our relationship with the scriptures—and why they are often right on the money when they do.
While it's true that many of us have come out of those very same conservative circles where we felt beaten up with the Bible; while it's true that literalism and inerrancy are not the only, or even perhaps the healthiest lenses through which we may read and interpret scripture; while it's true that it is the living Word of God, capital W, who saves, not these little words alone; it is also true that what we do here, who we are here as a Christian community, as followers in the way of Christ, would be impossible without this book. And whereas large portions of the Bible may be, in fact, confusing, alien, sometimes even dangerous, we have a responsibility to our forebears in faith, whose all-too human relationship with the divine shaped this repository of faith, and to the generations coming after us to engage this book more deeply, more prayerfully, and with more integrity, than we often do. We are not slaves to scripture; indeed, we are free in the Spirit to consider, discern, and interpret, but we may not simply pick and choose and call ourselves Christian.
And so this morning we consider Luke 5:17-26, trusting that the words here, prickly though they may be, make a difference... which seems to be somewhat the point Luke.s Jesus is making here—and Matthew's, too, though in a slightly subtler mode, that the Word of God, the Gospel news, makes a very real difference in the world. It is not simply wishful thinking, all sweetness and light, like icing on a cake or a coat of new-fallen snow blanketing a dirty winter world in smooth white silence. No, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews put it, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12). The living Gospel does just that: it challenges the intentions of the heart. It divides truth from falsehood. It holds our lives up to the measure of God's life, our love to God's love, our justice and our peace to God's.
Not that we need to abandon grace to embrace a Biblical faith. Far from it. But neither must we abandon all judgment in order to pursue a policy of grace. Being judgmental, yes, that's gotta go, but exercising good judgment, no. And good judgment says, as Jesus does here, that not everyone will experience the good news as good; in fact, for some, it will be very bad news indeed. The question is who, and why.
Clearly the Gospel as Luke understands it, the news about the transformation of this world according to God's purposes of peace, justice, and compassion, will be good news for the poor, the hungry, and those who weep—in other words, all those who lack not just the spiritual resources but the blood-and-guts physical resources necessary for abundant life. For those who are trapped under overlapping systems of oppression, with all the weight of power and privilege bearing them down, drowning in need, the Gospel of God-with-us in Christ is a word of blessing. It is a word of hope, that like their Hebrew ancestors enslaved in Egypt, God hears the cry of all God's suffering people, and a word of liberation, since this future hope empowers them to claim their blessing now and act for transformation today. In the words of hymn-writer John Bell, a member of the progressive Christian Iona Community of Scotland, the Gospel embodied in Christ and articulated here in Luke means that "Heaven shall not wait/ for the poor to lose their patience,/ the scorned to smile, the despised to find a friend" for "Jesus is Lord; he has championed the unwanted;/ in him injustice confronts its timely end."
But whoa now, woe now! to those who are rich now, who are full now, who are laughing and carefree now, with no thought for just how it is they got that way. Woe to us to the degree we benefit from this domination system that sacrifices so many for the satisfaction, the indulgence, of so few! Woe to us in the West when we hum along high and comfortable on the exploitation of the peoples of the South and East! Woe to us in this nation when, drunk on power, we use force as a weapon of first resort, without regard for consequences! And woe to us, too, when we take for granted rights and responsibilities many around the world can only imagine! Woe to use us when, by simple everyday excess, we devour natural resources meant for the entire world, and for the future, and put the entire planet at risk! Woe to us when we enjoy light-skinned privilege, all unthinking, in a world that fears the dark, or heterosexual privilege shored up by demonizing the queer other! Woe to us, also, when we insist that our way of believing is the only valid way to relate to a God who is constantly more, more than we can ever imagine!
Friends, woe to us all, for as good as we may be—and we are pretty good—we should not delude ourselves into believing we are as good as we can be. Our hands are not clean, but they will be, we will be, because God is changing us. That is our curse and our blessing. We will not be always as we are now. And until that transformation is complete in us in God good's time, both sides of this scripture speak to us, the blessing and the curse, the good news and the bad, and we can ill afford to give either a miss, just to suit our personal taste. It's not a matter of being conservative or progressive, but of being faithful. We are called to walk the hard road from the blessing to the curse with intentionality and mindfulness, while the living Word of God walks with us and works within us to open a space where God's reign of real peace, real justice, and real compassion may grow. We are live under God's judgment, it's true, knowing that we fall short of all God intends for us, but buoyed always by the extravagant power of God's grace, which enables us to try again and reach higher.
To sum up, as better preachers before me have put it so succinctly, the true purpose of the Gospel is to comfort the afflicted, to be sure, and to afflict the comfortable. To reduce the Gospel to just one or the other is to nail it down dead. Fortunately for us, our God has a way of bringing the dead to life—whether this savior, Jesus; this Word in so many words, the Bible, or these people, that is, us, here in this church, and us, the whole wide woeful world. And we don't have to climb some high mountain to chase this gift of grace. It is among us already. As we read in this morning's passage from Luke, all who came to Jesus there in that "level place," all those with afflictions of body, mind, or spirit, the blessed and the cursed alike, they all touched him and they all were healed. Like them, we come today to this level place and to this story to touch him, and through him to feel the touch of God's Own Self, and to be healed ourselves. Thanks be to God for the blessing of this daily resurrection in hope.