Luke 6:17-26

 

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The last church I served was in what could be described in the parlance of politics as a “deep red” part of the country. During my time there a deeply faithful member of the church proposed the creation of a public faith space. A property across the alley from the church that had once been the YWCA was now an empty lot. The building that had been there had been demolished and the local hospital system who owned it had abandoned their plan for building on it. We went to work raising the money to buy it and develop it into a kind of public park/greenspace that was intentionally faith focused. Pavers on the path through it bore bible verses. Because we had decided to call it the “Shepherd’s Garden” there was a monument with the 23rd Psalm engraved on it. The member who proposed the project was adamant that there also be a monument with the Ten Commandments. Because this was private property, developed with private money that was completely appropriate, but I asked if that same monument could have Jesus’ Beatitudes on the other side of it. So, those were included; the ones from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. You may be familiar. What a whole lot of people are less familiar with are the blessings from what is sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain that can be found in Luke’s gospel. There are few reasons for that. For one, there are less of them. Only four compared to Matthew’s nine. But even those who know those four exist tend to gravitate toward Matthew’s version. And I suspect it has something to do with the overall tenor of the sermon from Luke. Because according to Luke, Jesus says, “blessed are the poor.” Period. End of sentence. Quote that to someone and chances are good they will think they need to correct you by quoting Matthew and adding, “in spirit.” Because they are pretty sure there’s nothing blessed about being poor.  

When I was in Tennessee, I thought our church could use a better Mission Statement. The one we had wasn’t bad. But it was kind of vanilla. There is a phrase found in one of our prayers for communion that I really liked, that I felt was a good image for what the church is called to do. “Held in his love,” the prayer intones, “may we embrace all whom the world denies.” So, I made that part of our new mission statement, that we existed in part to embrace whom the world denies. I got some confused emails from church members. They couldn’t identify with this language. Without using these words what they communicated was their own privileged experience of not feeling the world deny them, their existence, their value, their contribution. It was a revelatory moment, because in their words you could hear the edge of concern. They didn’t want to be denied by the world. Was the church going to somehow stop embracing them? First, they misunderstood their role in the mission of the church. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to any of you, but the primary mission of the church is not to serve those who attend worship, or associate themselves as members. That casts the church as something separate from those who make it up. Those who attend worship and associate themselves with this body ARE the church. We aren’t a commercial retailer of spiritual goods for folks to consume, we are the body of Christ for the world.  As such, we do care for each other. But if that is all that we do, take care of our own, we can hardly properly call ourselves Christian. No, to be Christian, to follow in the way of Jesus Christ, is to lay down our own lives and preferences for the sake of a world that God so loves, that God’s love might be seen and known and felt. 

But second, what I realized is how abhorrent to them the prospect of being denied by the world was. And of course, no one is more denied by the world in such staggering numbers, no one is made more invisible than the poor. Not the poor in spirit, but the actual poor. We hardly know true poverty in this country. Not many people want to experience poverty in our country, and still that is rich compared to a world in which, according to the World Bank, 44% of the global population lives on less than the equivalent of $6.85/day, or $2500 per year. 

So, when we hear Luke’s Jesus say, “Blessed are the poor,” of course we jump to Matthew’s spiritualized version, because like those good church folks who didn’t want to experience the denial of the world, we certainly don’t want to consider what life would be like at that level of poverty. And yet, Jesus says that the realm of God’s power and presence in the world belongs to the poor. But Luke’s Jesus doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say that those who are hungry now, those who weep now are also blessed. Not those who hunger for righteousness, but those who are simply hungry. These words carry greater gravity this week as the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID has been suspended resulting in.