Whoa!
Text: Luke 6:17-26
When doing sermon preparation each week, it’s not uncommon for us preacher types to look at the work of others to see how they handled the text. Given that both Sarah and I are ministers, we frequently exchange ideas. It’s part of the process… looking at how someone else approaches a given text, or what direction they’ve taken once they’ve had a chance to grapple with it. More often than not, Sarah and I find that we take different directions with a similar text, because we both find something different in the text that bubbles to the surface. We also find that where we preach has an impact on what we preach. A powerful “mountaintop” sermon that works really well in one place, can fall flat in another.
One of the preachers I was reading this week took a really different tack on Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. He looked less at what Jesus said, and a bit more about how he actually preached it. I must admit it caught me a bit off guard, I found myself going “whoa!” but he was right. As Luke tells it, Jesus preaches not on a mountain as Matthew does, but on a level plain. Yes it’s inconsistent, but preachers have been recycling their best sermons for years, so why would Jesus be any different? Not only that, but Luke adds this mirror to these blessings… a rather harsh series of “woes” as they’re translated… but really they are curses which follow the blessings. Yet how do we deal with that? It sits there and challenges our common sense… It’s uncomfortable… But instead of retreating back to the more comforting words in Matthew, maybe it’s worth a second look:
Jesus comes down on a level place and begins to preach. We’ve heard a similar sermon from Matthew’s gospel which we call the ‘sermon on the mount’, but Luke’s version is a bit different, in some significant ways. You might have noticed, at least in the beginning of this sermon, Jesus doesn’t tell us anything that we are to do. Lots of people think that is the whole purpose of a sermon.
“I come to church and listen to the preacher tell me what I need to do to lead a better life,” or something like that. But this sermon is about people who are “blessed,” and people who are cursed. Jesus doesn’t tell people what they are to do to be blessed; rather, he announces that certain people are blessed, others are cursed. So, the sermon really isn’t about us, who is in and who is out, who is behaving correctly and who is misbehaving. The sermon Jesus preaches is about God.
So instead of calling it the “Sermon on the plain”, a better title for it might be “A sermon about the nature of God.” God is the merciful one who is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” Perhaps you thought if God is good, then that means that God punishes the wicked and sticks it to the ungrateful. Well, think again, says Jesus. It is easy to be kind to people who are grateful for the kindness that we show them. It is easy to do nice things for good people. But this God that we’ve got is different from us. God is kind and good to the bad and the ungrateful.
It won’t be many Sundays from now until we shall read a familiar story from Luke, the story of the prodigal son. There, Jesus introduces us to an incredibly gracious and kind father. When the older brother wants to know why in the world the father is throwing a huge homecoming party for the returning, wayward younger brother, the father replies, “We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found!”
This is overstating things just a little. The facts are, the younger brother was not “dead,” he was out on a binge in the company of loose women. Nor was he “lost.” He didn’t forget the way home one day after school. Rather, he ran away from home, took his father’s hard-earned money and headed west for a good time.
Which makes all the more remarkable (for the older brother, not remarkable, but exasperating) that the father is throwing a huge party to welcome home an ungrateful and wicked son. But we were warned. As Jesus says, God is kind precisely to the wicked and the ungrateful.
And, if you thought the facts were that God is in the business of punishing the wicked and stringing up the ungrateful, then God’s mercy and extravagant forgiveness is exasperating to us. For it is exasperating to find out that God does not fit our idea of God.
Let us note that Jesus’ entire sermon, at least the first half of it that we are listening to today, is a series of statements, assertions. In remembering something from what we learned in our English classes in school, the sentences are in the “indicative” rather than the “imperative” mode. They are a statement of what is, rather than what we should do. Jesus is simply stating the facts of life, the way things are, reality.
Blessed are the poor - the same people, whom we overlook, disregard, despise, and consider failures. Blessed are the hungry - the same hungry people whom we expect must be lazy or inept or they wouldn’t be asking for handouts. Blessed are those who weep - the same whiners and complainers who are always acting like they’ve had it worse than anyone else. Blessed are you when people hate you - because you are abrasive, or holier-than-thou, or self-righteous, the way so-called “religious” people often are. God, this God, blesses those whom we tend to curse.
Then Jesus moves to an even less attractive part of the sermon as he curses the rich, the content, the happy, and the morally upright (in short, people like most of us), but there’s no need for us to spend time on all of that, right?
I expect is was a shock that day, for all the good, church-going, Bible believing folk to see a portrayal of God that didn’t fit their received Sunday school images of God. I expect it was a shock as great as climbing up out of the darkness of a deep, dark cave into the blinding light and reality of the sun at midday.
Perhaps this is the point of Jesus’ words, and preaching in general. Not first to tell us what to do, but first to help us see. The acting follows the seeing. Perhaps that’s why Jesus begins this sermon with healing, as a sign that a whole new world is breaking in to the old world, a new reality is shining through the darkness where those on the bottom are now brought to the top, and those who are poor, weeping, and despised are put at the center of what God is up to in the world.
So my sermon this morning doesn’t tell you to go out and do anything, though, by implication, you may be thinking about something that you need to do. That’s why Christians live as we try to live, not simply because Christ has commanded us to live in a certain way, but rather we live in a certain way because of the way we now know the world to be. We want to get in step with the way things are, reality, now that God in Christ has entered the world.
When my wife worked at her church in Thamesford, she knows someone who is a cardiac nurse. His job is to assist in the surgery and the care of people who have serious heart disease. Many of his patients don’t make it through the delicate, risky operation. Some of his patients have a very difficult time in their lengthy recovery. It can be depressing, difficult work. “How do you keep going?” Sarah once asked him.
“Riding my bike” was his reply. He explained, “I take an hour off for lunch and go to ride my bike. I ride my bike back and forth to work…” This wouldn’t be really remarkable, except that it was about a 20km ride each direction… and would do it three seasons out of the year, four if he could get away with it. While riding, he would see people who are happy, healthy. He would see children playing and healthy older people having a great time talking with one another. All this reminded him how things are meant to be. This is the real world. It helps him to keep going in very difficult situations.
Are his bike rides an escape from reality, a trip into never-never land? No, they are for him, a realistic engagement with the reality, a sober look at the way things really are and are meant to be that keeps him going in a shadowy world where it is easy for him to forget what’s what.
That’s a major reason why we gather here for worship on a weekly basis, to be reminded of what’s what, to get a vision, to receive a picture of reality now that God in Jesus Christ has reached out to us. It’s that kind of reality check that we need every once in a while. Amen.
Note: Special thanks to both The Rev. Sarah Fanning and The Rev. Dr. William Willimon in many ideas and development of this sermon. The irony is that this week Sarah and I went almost exactly in the same direction with our sermon. Most of the time it doesn't happen that way... -JC
When doing sermon preparation each week, it’s not uncommon for us preacher types to look at the work of others to see how they handled the text. Given that both Sarah and I are ministers, we frequently exchange ideas. It’s part of the process… looking at how someone else approaches a given text, or what direction they’ve taken once they’ve had a chance to grapple with it. More often than not, Sarah and I find that we take different directions with a similar text, because we both find something different in the text that bubbles to the surface. We also find that where we preach has an impact on what we preach. A powerful “mountaintop” sermon that works really well in one place, can fall flat in another.
One of the preachers I was reading this week took a really different tack on Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. He looked less at what Jesus said, and a bit more about how he actually preached it. I must admit it caught me a bit off guard, I found myself going “whoa!” but he was right. As Luke tells it, Jesus preaches not on a mountain as Matthew does, but on a level plain. Yes it’s inconsistent, but preachers have been recycling their best sermons for years, so why would Jesus be any different? Not only that, but Luke adds this mirror to these blessings… a rather harsh series of “woes” as they’re translated… but really they are curses which follow the blessings. Yet how do we deal with that? It sits there and challenges our common sense… It’s uncomfortable… But instead of retreating back to the more comforting words in Matthew, maybe it’s worth a second look:
Jesus comes down on a level place and begins to preach. We’ve heard a similar sermon from Matthew’s gospel which we call the ‘sermon on the mount’, but Luke’s version is a bit different, in some significant ways. You might have noticed, at least in the beginning of this sermon, Jesus doesn’t tell us anything that we are to do. Lots of people think that is the whole purpose of a sermon.
“I come to church and listen to the preacher tell me what I need to do to lead a better life,” or something like that. But this sermon is about people who are “blessed,” and people who are cursed. Jesus doesn’t tell people what they are to do to be blessed; rather, he announces that certain people are blessed, others are cursed. So, the sermon really isn’t about us, who is in and who is out, who is behaving correctly and who is misbehaving. The sermon Jesus preaches is about God.
So instead of calling it the “Sermon on the plain”, a better title for it might be “A sermon about the nature of God.” God is the merciful one who is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” Perhaps you thought if God is good, then that means that God punishes the wicked and sticks it to the ungrateful. Well, think again, says Jesus. It is easy to be kind to people who are grateful for the kindness that we show them. It is easy to do nice things for good people. But this God that we’ve got is different from us. God is kind and good to the bad and the ungrateful.
It won’t be many Sundays from now until we shall read a familiar story from Luke, the story of the prodigal son. There, Jesus introduces us to an incredibly gracious and kind father. When the older brother wants to know why in the world the father is throwing a huge homecoming party for the returning, wayward younger brother, the father replies, “We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found!”
This is overstating things just a little. The facts are, the younger brother was not “dead,” he was out on a binge in the company of loose women. Nor was he “lost.” He didn’t forget the way home one day after school. Rather, he ran away from home, took his father’s hard-earned money and headed west for a good time.
Which makes all the more remarkable (for the older brother, not remarkable, but exasperating) that the father is throwing a huge party to welcome home an ungrateful and wicked son. But we were warned. As Jesus says, God is kind precisely to the wicked and the ungrateful.
And, if you thought the facts were that God is in the business of punishing the wicked and stringing up the ungrateful, then God’s mercy and extravagant forgiveness is exasperating to us. For it is exasperating to find out that God does not fit our idea of God.
Let us note that Jesus’ entire sermon, at least the first half of it that we are listening to today, is a series of statements, assertions. In remembering something from what we learned in our English classes in school, the sentences are in the “indicative” rather than the “imperative” mode. They are a statement of what is, rather than what we should do. Jesus is simply stating the facts of life, the way things are, reality.
Blessed are the poor - the same people, whom we overlook, disregard, despise, and consider failures. Blessed are the hungry - the same hungry people whom we expect must be lazy or inept or they wouldn’t be asking for handouts. Blessed are those who weep - the same whiners and complainers who are always acting like they’ve had it worse than anyone else. Blessed are you when people hate you - because you are abrasive, or holier-than-thou, or self-righteous, the way so-called “religious” people often are. God, this God, blesses those whom we tend to curse.
Then Jesus moves to an even less attractive part of the sermon as he curses the rich, the content, the happy, and the morally upright (in short, people like most of us), but there’s no need for us to spend time on all of that, right?
I expect is was a shock that day, for all the good, church-going, Bible believing folk to see a portrayal of God that didn’t fit their received Sunday school images of God. I expect it was a shock as great as climbing up out of the darkness of a deep, dark cave into the blinding light and reality of the sun at midday.
Perhaps this is the point of Jesus’ words, and preaching in general. Not first to tell us what to do, but first to help us see. The acting follows the seeing. Perhaps that’s why Jesus begins this sermon with healing, as a sign that a whole new world is breaking in to the old world, a new reality is shining through the darkness where those on the bottom are now brought to the top, and those who are poor, weeping, and despised are put at the center of what God is up to in the world.
So my sermon this morning doesn’t tell you to go out and do anything, though, by implication, you may be thinking about something that you need to do. That’s why Christians live as we try to live, not simply because Christ has commanded us to live in a certain way, but rather we live in a certain way because of the way we now know the world to be. We want to get in step with the way things are, reality, now that God in Christ has entered the world.
When my wife worked at her church in Thamesford, she knows someone who is a cardiac nurse. His job is to assist in the surgery and the care of people who have serious heart disease. Many of his patients don’t make it through the delicate, risky operation. Some of his patients have a very difficult time in their lengthy recovery. It can be depressing, difficult work. “How do you keep going?” Sarah once asked him.
“Riding my bike” was his reply. He explained, “I take an hour off for lunch and go to ride my bike. I ride my bike back and forth to work…” This wouldn’t be really remarkable, except that it was about a 20km ride each direction… and would do it three seasons out of the year, four if he could get away with it. While riding, he would see people who are happy, healthy. He would see children playing and healthy older people having a great time talking with one another. All this reminded him how things are meant to be. This is the real world. It helps him to keep going in very difficult situations.
Are his bike rides an escape from reality, a trip into never-never land? No, they are for him, a realistic engagement with the reality, a sober look at the way things really are and are meant to be that keeps him going in a shadowy world where it is easy for him to forget what’s what.
That’s a major reason why we gather here for worship on a weekly basis, to be reminded of what’s what, to get a vision, to receive a picture of reality now that God in Jesus Christ has reached out to us. It’s that kind of reality check that we need every once in a while. Amen.
Note: Special thanks to both The Rev. Sarah Fanning and The Rev. Dr. William Willimon in many ideas and development of this sermon. The irony is that this week Sarah and I went almost exactly in the same direction with our sermon. Most of the time it doesn't happen that way... -JC
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