2022 02 13 Sermon
Sermon for February 13, 2022 Epiphany 6 C House of Prayer Lutheran Church
Luke 6:17-26; Jeremiah 17:5-10 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
When I was in 4th grade our teacher, Mr. Joffee, took our class on lots of great field trips. Of course we loved the chance to spend a day outside of the classroom, and we went to some really great places. But the highlight of every field trip, it seemed, was the visit to the gift shop. At one particular museum gift shop, the souvenir the appealed to me was a flute made of bamboo. So I bought it, and it held my attention for a few days at home. But when I lost interest in it, my dad found a better use for it—he’d play reveille on it when it was time for me to wake up and get ready for school. He even had words to go along with it: “You can’t get ‘em up, you can’t get ‘em up, you can’t ‘em up in the mooooorning. You can’t get ‘em up, you can’t get ‘em up, you can’t get ‘em up in the morn.”
Every morning, whether I was ready or not, my dad played the bamboo flute and got my attention with reveille, calling me to get up and head out into the world of 4th grade. I was not one who had an easy time waking up, and as my dad wisely realized, I needed something to catch my attention that was out of the ordinary, which would give me some inspiration to start the day.
This is the same kind of thing the crowds were wanting from Jesus, too. They came from all over: Judea, Jerusalem, the coast of Tyre and Sidon—north, south, east, west—to be healed and to hear what Jesus had to say. They wanted to be inspired. To have their attention grabbed. And Jesus provided inspiration. The crowds were always pressing in on him, because he had a way of catching their attention and shaking them awake to a new reality that we call the Kingdom of God. Jesus consistently gave them a way of looking at the world, and their lives, from God’s point-of-view.
The message Jesus gave from the “Sermon on the Plain” (as it’s known) from Luke chapter 6, as he speaks of blessings and woes, is just this kind of message. It challenges us to look at things from God’s point of view, instead of our own human point of view. “Blessed are you who are poor; blessed are you who are hungry now; blessed are you who weep now; blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you, and revile you.” What a strange way to think of blessing! This is the complete opposite of how we look at blessings from a normal point of view.
And when do we tend to think of ourselves as blessed? If you’re rich, if you have a full belly, if you’re laughing and having a good time, and people are speaking well of you. Things we all aspire to! Yet in the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus is saying “Woe to you who are rich; woe if you are full; woe if you are laughing; woe if people speak well of you.” This is all very confusing. It seems that maybe even Jesus is confused. What’s going on?
Notice that Jesus does not say that you are cursed when you are experiencing the “high side” of life. He doesn’t say that you are cursed if you are rich, or full, of laughing, or well-spoken-of. He says “woe”. As in “watch out”! Just because things are going well for you now doesn’t mean they will be going well forever. Rare is the person who doesn’t suffer a reversal or setback at some point in life. So if you go looking for your identity or sense of worth in how many good things you have going on, then when you do suffer that reversal or setback, your fall will feel very far indeed. You’ll moan to yourself, “Woe is me!”, if you find yourself numbered among the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated, the excluded, or the reviled. You may feel lost or even like God has abandoned you.
Why does Jesus say that these categories of people who are going through the “low side” of life are blessed when they feel so miserable? Does God want us to be miserable? No. Jesus is saying that when you are in a tough situation, God sees you. God hears you. God loves you, and wants things to turn around for you. In times of trouble, God is profoundly with you and available to you through the Spirit of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
We have a tendency to hear scripture verses like these blessings and woes as an either/or situation. You’re either blessed or cursed; blessed or full of woe. We like to sort people into easy to define categories, but Jesus is trying to help us see that it’s not always so clear cut about which categories people might fall into. In reality, any one of us could end up being on the “high side” or on the “low side” of life at any moment. Most people probably go back and forth between the highs and lows during different seasons of life. Sometimes you’re in the money; sometimes you ain’t.
I hear what Jesus is saying as being similar to the famous poem from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 in the Old Testament: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…”
When you are on the “high side” of life, Jesus is trying to get your attention, to ask you to pay attention to people who are struggling and calling out for help and understanding. Jesus is asking you to respond with generosity, and with compassion, realizing that you might be in their spot one day, and you just might need someone else to help you. And when you are on the “low side” of life, Jesus is trying to get your attention, to reassure you that the things you lack do not define your worth or your identity as a person. Jesus is asking you to look to God who has already given you an eternal and heavenly value.
And as we grow into living by trust and faith in the Lord, we become (like the prophet Jeremiah put it) like a tree planted by water, sending its roots out into the stream. With faith and trust in the Lord, like a tree by the water, you can be nourished through prayer, love, and a community of support in good times and bad. When you’re weak, you can gain strength, healing, and new life. When you’re strong, you can share the fruit you’ve produced to help others.
With his message of blessings and woes, Jesus is calling us to pay attention to God’s point of view, and not just to the way we normally see things from a human point of view. Jesus calls us to recognize that even though people may live in vastly different situations from each other, God has still made us responsible for one another’s well-being, in body, mind, and spirit; and God has given us a responsibility to our fellow human beings so that we’ll work towards a more just society.
This is the kind of world and partnerships that Jesus has been calling our attention to, not only in his Sermon on the Plain, but also since that early Easter morning at a tomb outside Jerusalem, when God played reveille, and Christ rose from the dead. Amen.