Transcript
Today’s Gospel reading might sound a bit odd, like it’s almost like what you know, but it’s not the one you know. And that’s probably true. You see, what is commonly referred to as the Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus proclaims nine “blessed are” statements and then he goes into this message about salt and being the light in the world — that’s all in Matthew’s gospel. Today, though, we get Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, the “blessed are” statements. And Luke’s version isn’t quite as nice. It doesn’t quite sit as politely with us as Matthew’s version does.
And here’s why. In Matthew’s version, Jesus is talking about a metaphorical state of being. He refers to the poor in spirit and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Whereas in Luke’s version, Jesus is talking about the actual state of being poor and hungry, without money or possessions and without food. As a result, we might like Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes better; it makes us feel a little bit better about ourselves, perhaps. But Luke’s version is just as viable, just as worthy of celebration, so to speak, because Luke’s version is not a statement of faith. Instead, it is like a call to action. As Eduard Schweizer, a Swiss theologian and New Testament biblical scholar of the 20th century, says, “This is not a theologically conceived attempt to summarize the Christian message in its entirety.”
Instead, this passage jars us out of our faithful complacency. It forces us to look at our own contexts against the context to which Jes Jesus preaches, our own blessings and woes compared to the blessings and wo Jesus proclaims. Jesus’s words make us feel shaken because they make us question ourselves — not just where we stand in society, you know, our socioeconomic status, also perhaps our faith, where we stand in relationship to Jesus. Because if we truly love and honor and obey in all those things we do towards Jesus, then hearing this Son of Man tell us that the poor are blessed and the reviled are blessed, but the rich are wretched and the popular are in trouble — well, it can maybe possibly make us question our own faith in the man who is God, who comes among us and offers salvation to all of us.
Here’s something I want to offer real quick, and that’s our roles in all of this. We are not the ones to place one another in categories. We are not the ones to judge. We cannot look at someone and say, “Oh, she’s totally blessed because she’s clearly poor,” or, “Oh, woe to him, look how much food he just ate, he will definitely be hungry in heaven.” Only God can do that. And honestly, we can’t even really do that for ourselves either, because we have our own blessings and our own woes, and who are we to judge how good or bad they might be, as if it’s a scale or a board game where you try to move pieces up or down in relationship to the woes and blessings that Jesus proclaims?
After all, if we were to look at our own lives, we can certainly find blessings. If you look for them, they’re pretty much everywhere. We can also find woes; I don’t think we even need to look for them.
Last week in Bishop Susan’s address she talked about fear and even mentioned doom scrolling. But we don’t have to go to social media to be reminded of all the woes in our own lives, all the grief, regret, or affliction. We can go to the doctor’s waiting room and the anticipated results of a test or a procedure. We can go to our bank accounts and the anticipated tax bills or gas bill — I just got my first winter gas bill. We can look at our kids report cards or the letters from their teachers. We can even, for those of us in school, consider all those tests and quizzes and papers we have coming up, maybe even ones we forgot about. We don’t have to look elsewhere for fear, or for those things in our lives which might be lacking security, and maybe hope, and even a little bit of faith in the really hard times.
And at the same time, as I said, we can also look around and see an abundance of blessings in our lives too. And not just the social justice kind of blessings that fit into Luke’s Beatitudes — also the blessings of hope and faith and love and joy, from and for a God who does proclaim these blessings and these woes.
There’s another thing I want to offer to you all. Jesus doesn’t preach this message to the whole crowd — I’m not sure if you noticed that in the Gospel reading. Instead, Jesus preaches this to his 12 Apostles, or disciples. This isn’t a mass message tweeted or written in the sky or published in the newspaper. This is boundaries for those who most intimately follow Jesus, at a time when following Jesus wasn’t always a good idea. This is the establishment of a blessings and woes fulcrum (you know, like the center of a seesaw, teetering back and forth between the two sides) for those who have stood up and said, “Here I am, yes, choose me.” That’s what this message is about. And at a time these made sense to Jesus’s followers, or maybe not his followers, but definitely to those 12 who unabashedly agreed to intimately follow Jesus — something we do, and something we also can’t always really do.
Today, though, I want to ask you: what would Jesus be saying to you for the four “blessed are” and the four “woe to,” those phrases that make up this theological sense of one standing before God? I suspect, in our context, in today’s culture, with our, dare I say, privilege — what would our “blessed are” and our “woe to” statements be? I can certainly give you some of mine; I’ve been working on them this weekend. So let’s see.
How about, “Woe to you who fills your days with emails and meetings, for you will miss the personal connections in a hospital room.” Or, “Blessed are you who assembles your own furniture, for your dwelling in heaven comes fully furnished.” Or maybe, “Blessed are you who coupons and sticks to a strict budget, for your vacations will be the splurges of your life.” Or, “Woe to you who opens that really nice bottle of wine on a Tuesday, for you will wish you could share it with a friend later.” And yes, granted, these are mostly silly. But I’m sure we can come up with our own “blessed are” and “woe to” statements — the ones that are comical, yes, like mine, and also the ones that hit a little bit closer to home, a little more personal in our lives and in our relationships with Jesus and our faith.
I’ll leave it up to each of you all to come up with your own “blessed are” and “woe to” statements. And I’ll leave it up to each of you to figure out how to live this passage, this gospel’s message, this teaching from Jesus — how to live this passage out in your own lives.
Finally, I, I offer you this: to be blessed does not mean the absence of struggle, nor does it mean a state of happiness or bliss. Instead, it refers to our relationship with God and our neighbor. It refers to experiencing the full impact of God’s presence in our lives, now and in eternity, knowing that God’s grace extends to us even when we’re not at our best, when we sometimes choose not to align with God, and yet still being loved by a God who knows that even as we sometimes fail, we always remember to turn back to God. That is definitely a blessing. Blessed are you, for God loves you.
Amen.