“Name. Bless. Connect.”

Luke 6:17-26

February 17, 2019

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

If you’re the type of person who loves trivia nights at the local bar or just enjoys watching Jeopardy at home, you might want to take notes on the first part of today’s sermon because I’m going to lay some serious Bible trivia on you.

Fun fact #1: you might not have heard a sermon on this passage from Luke in a while. For churches like ours that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, we only come to a particular text in the Bible once every three years. But...it’s been longer than three years since we last heard this text because of the long Epiphany season we are having this year. Since Lent and Easter fall later in the calendar, we have a longer Epiphany season which means we get to hear some texts we haven’t heard in a while.

Fun fact #2: if this passage sounds familiar to you, but also seems like it’s awfully short, that’s because most of us are more familiar with the version from Matthew. If you want to look it up to compare and contrast you can grab your Bibles and look up Matthew 5.

In both versions, Jesus begins a longer teaching with a series of statements about who is blessed. In Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount goes on for three chapters. In Luke, it’s usually called the Sermon on the Plain and it’s a little shorter.  

In Matthew, there is a longer list of beatitudes….and we don’t have the “woes” immediately following. In Luke we just have a few short statements of blessing, followed immediately by cautionary statements. That word, “woe” is meant to be an attention-grabber. A “hey, watch out!” or “Warning! Danger ahead!”

Biblical scholars have frequently noticed a key difference between Matthew’s “blessed are the poor in spirit” and Luke’s “blessed are the poor.” Those feel different, don’t they? The poor in spirit is a broad category that could include people who are feeling down and out for any number of reasons. “The poor,” when given without any other qualifiers as it is in Luke, typically makes us think of those who are economically vulnerable, who may not have enough resources to meet their basic needs.

Some have noticed that Luke’s version of the beatitudes is a continuation of earlier themes from this gospel. You may remember a few weeks ago, when we looked at Jesus’s opening sermon in Luke 2, his mission statement, he pulled directly from the prophet Isaiah….”the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

And in those words from Isaiah, we also hears echoes of Jesus’s mother’s song in Luke 1. Mary sings, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; the hungry are filled with good things, and the rich are sent away empty.”

So the author of the Gospel of Luke continues to build on this theme of God lifting up the dignity of the poor….first, Mary’s song; next, Jesus’s first sermon; and now with this sermon on the plain.

And that’s another fun fact: in Matthew’s Gospel the beatitudes are given on a mountain, the Sermon on the Mount. But let’s notice where we are in Luke. Jesus has just come down from a mountain, where he went to pray. But now, we hear Jesus “came down and stood among them on a level place.”

Further, he is not with just his disciples as he is in Matthew. In Luke, there is a much larger crowd of people, including folks from “all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.” Those last two places, Tyre and Sidon, are important because they remind us that Jesus came not only to teach faithful Jews, but also to reach Gentiles and other outsiders.

That Jesus, I tell ya. Every single time we try to draw a circle and mark some people as outsiders, Jesus reminds us that every single person is made in God’s image, and erases the circle. Every single time. Following Jesus always means seeking Christ in the face of every other person we encounter...whether we want to or not.

And because we often fail to do just that, I find the fact that Jesus delivers this sermon down on “a level place” to be very good news, indeed. Biblical scholar Ron Allen explains that the Greek word translated “level” here “often refers to places of corpses, disgrace, idolatry, suffering, misery, hunger, annihilation, and mourning.” [1]

In other words, Jesus sees us humans struggling in the mess and muck of our lives and Jesus comes and meets us right in the middle of it. Jesus doesn’t hover above us on a cloud. Jesus doesn’t look the other way. Jesus comes right into the middle of our messed up lives, meets us here, and begins to teach.

And, Holy Moly, what he’s teaching here is mind-boggling. When he says that the poor,  the hungry, the weeping, the excluded are blessed, he is saying they are respected, dignified, worthy, beloved, made in God’s image. The word here, “blessed” isn’t like they’re lucky or #blessed. It’s way deeper than that. It hearkens back to the passages from the First Testament that we heard a few minutes ago. Jeremiah says those who trust in God are blessed. The Psalmist is talking about the same thing when they write “blessed are those who turn away from the advice of the wicked.”

This “blessed” is not about being popular, good-looking, lucky, or having the best toys. This blessed is being a person who is deeply respected, admired, looked up to as a pillar of the community. A leader. A person that we can learn from. A person that we should try to emulate.

The poor are leaders, Jesus says. The hungry are teachers. The weeping deserve our attention. Those who are despised because they follow Jesus should be our heroes.

And the caution is for those who are rich, who are full, who are laughing, who are spoken highly of….the caution, the warning, the “woe” is a reminder that so many of the things we think of as our “worth” are temporary. Our successes, our health, our wealth, our beauty, our good fortune...none of these things are forever. And none of these things have anything at all to do with whether or not we are blessed.

In God’s realm, every single person is blessed because every single person has something to share, something to teach, something to offer. We humans keep looking to a small group of people who mostly look the same….wealthy, powerful folks in fancy suits to solve all of our problems.

But when we place our trust in a small group of people, we are doing two things. First, we are forgetting the wisdom of the prophet Jeremiah, and so many others, who teach that our trust must be in God and God alone. Jeremiah says that when we trust in God we become like healthy trees planted next to the water….trees who have roots that go down deep, trees that grow in strength and beauty, trees that flourish in good years and persevere in hard times because their foundation is firm.

Second, when we only see a small group of “acceptable” folks as our respected, admired, wise leaders we miss so much wisdom from others that we think don’t look the part. We might even start to believe that we don’t have anything to offer.

I want to close with a brief story from the Rev. Mike Mather, who is a dear friend of mine and the pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis. Mike recently published a book, Having Nothing, Possessing Everything: Finding Abundant Communities in Unexpected Places, which includes many stories from his decades of ministry in communities filled with people who are often cast aside and overlooked.

When Mike became a pastor, he wanted to help the people who lived near his church. He had been taught that Christians should see needs and then meet them. He did all the regular things we think of churches doing...food pantries, free Vacation Bible Schools, basketball leagues for “troubled” youth, tutoring programs, etc.

But over the years, Mike began to see that Jesus calls us to celebrate the gifts each person has to share. Every person, created in the image of God, has talents and skills to offer. Every person wants to be useful and needed. So Mike started asking what people had to give, not just what they needed. When people come in to ask for financial assistance, Broadway doesn’t give them rent money….but they will ask them what they love to do, what they’re good at, what they might be able to teach someone else. And then they will give them seed money to start sharing their talents with the community.

When Mike met a teenager who was in danger of flunking out of school, he asked him what he enjoyed and was good at. What he might be able to teach someone else. He learned that Adrian knew a lot about fixing bicycles. So Mike connected him with an adult in the neighborhood who was also good with bikes. Eventually, Adrian and his new friend created a bike shop. They taught bike repair classes to folks in the neighborhood and got a lot of people’s bikes up and running. As his confidence grew and he was able to channel his skills into something useful for the world around him, Adrian’s troubles at school lessened. Imagine that.

What Mike did wasn’t rocket science, exactly. Any of us could do it. But many of us would see only the need, not the gifts. Many of us might see only a poor kid….not a blessed being created in the image of God.

Mike says that our job as followers of Jesus is to name, bless, connect. We need to look around and name not only the problems in our communities, but the opportunities, too. We need to remind one another that we are blessed - created in God’s image. And then we need to help each other connect to others who might benefit from someone we have to offer, or who might help us grow.

Name, bless, connect. This is what I think Jesus is doing in this sermon on a level place. Naming the pain of those who struggle and the naïveté of those who think they have it good. Blessing every single human present from places near and far. And re-connecting each person to their foundation, reminding them to put down roots in God’s love and be like trees firmly planted by streams of living water.

Name, bless, connect. May we continue to follow Jesus’s lead as we seek blessings in all we encounter.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3960