All Saints Lutheran Church
Pastor Raita Neely
Epiphany 6C - Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26
February 15, 2004

We all know about intersections. Most of us drive our highways almost daily, so we know the bottlenecks on 62 and 35w, we know that going east on 394 at 94 most often comes to a stand still. We know the intersections at airports, catching planes when you don't have a direct flight can be a challenge. But today we also enjoy an intersection that years ago would have seemed impossible, the world wide web-which allows us to cross paths with people, institutions, and information from around the globe.

The ancient world also had its intersections. Trade routes, favorable harbors, convenient terrain, and the location of political or religious power made certain towns into important intersections.

How interesting then that the most important intersection in all of history happened in an out of the way town called Bethlehem. Not since God first breathed into that lump of clay named Adam had there been such an intimate intersection of God and humanity. Originally God had only breathed into Adam's flesh; but one night in the little town of Bethlehem God climbed into Adam's flesh. So God intersects with humanity in a brand new way.

As God's loving action sinks in, we realize once again, that God acts very differently than we human beings expect. God's ways simply are not our ways. Which means that if we are to learn God's ways, we are going to have to pay very close attention, listening, seeing, reacting, loving, in ways that may at first seem very strange to us and sometimes even turn our world upside down.

God does not keep secrets from us. God does not keep us in the dark. God comes right out and tells us what living with God is all about. But so often, what we see and hear from God, does not make the connection to our hearts.

Take the Gospel for this morning. The scene is especially poignant - Luke tells us that people were coming from all over, Jews and Gentiles, flocking to Jesus to be touched, to be healed, to hear him speak. Many are healed. Many are changed. What touches and moves Jesus is not the size of the crowd, but their sorrow and their hunger. And Jesus fleshes out his deeds with his words. Somehow, in his very person, the acts of healing are held together with the words he speaks. They cannot be split apart; healing actions and healing words both testify that a new thing is happening in our old world. And its happening because of Jesus.

The same message that offended some of Jesus' hearers also offends us. Luke's beatitudes a word which means "blessed", " fortunate", "favored" or "happy", is a very cheerful word. It is something to rejoice about. But these beatitudes are not what we expect.

Blessed are the poor? Fortunate are the hungry? To be envied are those who weep? No way! That makes little or no sense to us. Happy are you when you are hated? Excluded? Reviled and defamed? These kinds of blessings I think I can do without. Most of us spend our lives trying to avoid poverty, hunger, grief, hatred.

And much of the time we succeed. The truth for most of us is that we are rich and we are full. Of course, we can always find someone else who is much richer than we are. But by the world's standards, each of us is wealthy. Our stomachs are full, our closets are full, our drawers are full, our basements and attics and garages are full, even our storage units are full.

To make matters worse, Jesus follows up the beatitudes with the woes. These make us cringe even more. We want to hide from these woetitudes. We wish that someone would find that these words had been added to the text by some later tenacious, overzealous editor, somebody who had a bad morning and decided just to stick these words in, imagining how later generations would squirm. It would be nice to think that these hard sayings of Jesus are really not the words of Jesus but of someone else . Then we wouldn't have to deal with them. Sometimes, when I have a hard time with translating a meaning, I look in my Latvian Bible for another point of view. But to my dismay, "woe" is translated as "How very sad for you" or "How miserable for you." This makes things no better, for here Jesus is weeping over our abundance, our consumerism, our easy laughter. In any translation, first, Jesus makes the things we think are bad look good, and then he makes the good things that we all seek look bad.

If you think about for a moment, the impact of the beatitudes has everything to do with who you are. If you happen to be one of the hungry people, then what Jesus is saying sounds like pretty good news. If you happen to be one of the well-fed people, then it sounds like pretty bad news. The words themselves do not change, mind you. They simply sound different depending on who happens to be hearing them.

I wonder what you will do with this Scripture? Some of you might take a high dive into a pool of guilt. Or you might decide to ignore this scripture by putting it into the file with all the other teachings of Jesus which you are sure that no one else you know follows. You know the ones I mean, - sell all that you own and give it to the poor. Give your life for a friend. Love your enemies. More than one coat in your closet? You see what I mean? We've got more trouble than we can handle.

There is a catch to the beatitudes. They are not reward or punishment. They are not advice or commandments. When Jesus is telling us what to do it is hard to miss, he gives it in imperatives: "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." Love, do, bless, pray, are commands to everyone, makes no difference if you're poor or rich, hungry or well-fed, weeping or laughing.

In the beatitudes, Jesus does not tell anyone to do anything. Instead, he describes different kinds of people, hoping that his listeners will recognize themselves as one kind or another, and then he makes the same promise to all of them: that the way things are is not the way they will always be. None of us can earn God's blessing, at most we can only hear it. It's for you or it's not for you. In our Scripture this morning, for every blessing there is an equal and opposite woe. Most of us would like to choose whether we will be blessed or cursed, but it's not our choice. It's God's decision. Sorry, but there's no sign-up sheet in fellowship hall.

The blessings and the woes are statements that are performative. That is, Jesus words have power and his word performs or makes true the kind of life presented in the statements. Jesus is making the official proclamation of the way life is inside the reign of God. Blessings and woes are not suggestions about how to be happy or warnings about what will make you miserable; blessings and woes from Jesus lips are to be heard with the assurance that they are God's word to all of us and that God's word is not empty.

For those who have always been on the bottom, this is good news, blessed news. They never expected anything different than to be on the bottom. For those on the top, I believe it is also good news, for there are many things about life on earth that you simply cannot know about when you are self-sufficient about everything. When you don't ever have to depend on someone else, or ask someone else for help. In self-sufficient times, your life has a hard time intersecting with the lives of those who need you. But if you have the courage to go to those in the two-thirds world whose every day is a struggle, you will discover that life is not pretty. You may even shed some tears at what you see and loosen your grip on all that you clutch so tightly as yours. And your grief will teach you more than your good fortune ever did.

The point in our gospel for this morning seems to be that God will win over all the forces that take away a person's humanity. God will have the final word over poverty, injustice, hate, captivity, oppression. Here's the gospel truth: When God has embraced you, the world can't take that away. What people say about you doesn't matter compared to what God says about you in Jesus Christ. The world's neglect or mistreatment does not have to determine how you will love and act. When you are beaten up or put down, remember that in Christ there is a love that surrounds you and will not let you be snatched away. That is good news.

As you grow in knowing God's love in Jesus Christ, you are transformed. You begin seeing the world as God sees it. You are given new eyes to look upon people and events from an eternally loving perspective. When that begins to happen, you are given the grace to see that God has an opinion about how life should be lived, what churches should be doing, and how people should relate to each other. You begin to see that the future belongs to those whom God blesses. That includes the poor, the hungry, the hopeless, the damaged and those whose only salvation is found in the God who comes to give them new life. And you want to be among them.

For many of us that means that we are blessed if we are willing to let ourselves be censured by God's word. Then, we can re-examine our views, and come to realize that we have so much to learn about God's ways. And as we learn, I guarantee that God will take us by surprise, will change our convictions, principles and tidy systems. And we will find that everything we took for granted will be swept out from under us. In the end, we will be faced by the fact, once and for all, that for God, nothing is a matter of course and that God may ask anything and maybe even everything of us.

This morning, I give you a blessing: Blessed are you who loose your grip on the way things are, for God shall lead you in the way things shall be. Amen.