Saturday, February 16, 2019

People, Passage and Practical Application


God’s grace, peace and mercy be with you. … My sermon title is People, Passage and Practical Application, and my focus is our Gospel. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, the psalmist wrote, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’”[1] Now that our feet are within your gates, we rejoice to hear your Word. As we listen, may your Spirit enlighten our minds and move our hearts to love deeply as Jesus loved. This we pray to you, Most Holy Trinity. Amen.
People, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.
People, written by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill for the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl, is one of the top tunes in American cinema. Funny Girl is based on the life and career of Broadway and film star and comedian Fanny Brice and her stormy relationship with entrepreneur and gambler Nicky Arnstein.
Styne and Merrill were hired to write the musical score and met each other for the first time in 1962 in Palm Beach, Florida. They wrote their songs by day and tested them by night on the Palm Beach socialites at cocktail parties. They wrote People in thirty minutes.
Twenty years before Styne and Merrill penned their lyrics, American Psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority. Maslow stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people. From the most basic, he listed five levels of needs: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. In other words, people have needs.
Jesus knew people had needs long before Maslow. For a considerable time, Jesus has been carrying out the program he announced in Nazareth. In chapter four we read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor.”[2] In the context of this ministry, he called people to be his companions and spearhead His Church’s mission.
In a long sermon, which we hear today, He outlined the attitudes and behavior that distinguish people in this new community from others. The narrative implies that Jesus called the apostles up to the mountain where he spent the night in prayer. He then came down with them to stand on a level place. There he was with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of others from Judea, Jerusalem, Tyre and Sidon. They gathered to hear Jesus and to be healed of their diseases.
Everyone was trying to touch him because power came out of him and He healed all of them. There, before Jesus is an array of burdened and afflicted humanity whom he taught at length, and they longed to access his healing and liberating power. What Jesus spoke was like the charge one receives before an ordination or a sermon a pastor delivers to those about to be confirmed: formal instruction regarding who they must be and how they must behave before the wider group that they will serve. Specifically, the Twelve and the disciples serve the crowds of people.
This wider group of people had needs that the Twelve and other disciples would address. Luke did not use Maslow’s words, but members of Luke’s community would address people’s basic needs without forsaking the Gospel, particularly love and belonging. And so, we move from my first point, people, to my second point, passage.
As I said a moment ago, within this setting, Luke presents Jesus imparting a great body of knowledge. His version is shorter than Matthew’s, but Luke reserved a good deal of material for Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. Both begin with a series of Beatitudes. Luke has four, followed by four corresponding woes. Compare Luke’s “Blessed are you poor” to Matthew’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” While Matthew massaged his to address his community, Luke’s is blunt and definite.
Strictly speaking, the biblical tradition “blessed” does not indicate a fortunate or advantageous position (in view of what God intends to do to bring about His Kingdom). Blessed really amounted to “Congratulations” – the sort of thing you might say to a friend who won the lottery.
The Beatitudes are highly provocative. This series of oxymorons is outrageous in any age. I mean, why congratulate the poor on being poor or the hungry on being hungry? Why praise the weeping and the scorned? Correspondingly, it appears foolish to declare unfortunate the wealthy, well-fed, the laughing and those with good reputations. These four states are not morally bad; and other things being equal, they are perfectly desirable.
The point is, however, that in the vision of Jesus other things are not equal. The Beatitudes and Woes make sense in light of the coming reversal of fortune prominent in Luke’s view of salvation. Mary proclaimed this reversal in her Magnificat: “He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”[3] In chapter four, Jesus himself announced good news for the poor, sight for the blind, and liberty for captives.[4]
This reversal of fortune makes it better to be poor, hungry, weeping and reviled rather than rich, full, laughing and respected. So imminent and certain is the reversal of one’s state in life that the thought of it overcomes the pain of those listening to Jesus’ words. In the light of expecting the arrival of God’s Kingdom – and only in this light – it becomes reasonable to hold together “blessed” and “poor” and other contradictory pairs. So, Jesus is not endorsing poverty or hunger. He is insisting that what most people calculate to be advantages and disadvantages are relative, and indeed reversed, in view of the coming of God’s Kingdom.
What the Beatitudes basically depict is a situation of extreme vulnerability. According to what the world values it makes little sense to adopt this posture of vulnerability. Yet in light of the coming of God’s Kingdom, it makes very good sense. Everything ultimately rests upon a particular vision of God – a God who has pledged to act on behalf of the poor and marginalized rather than the rich and the well-off. The Beatitudes and the Woes are provocative both for the poor and the rich. But they do not suggest that the poor should be content with their lot and passively accept it. By calling the poor blessed, the Beatitudes maintain that God has adopted the side of the poor and will reverse the situation. The poor can only benefit from the action of God. The rich have much to lose. The great advantage is to have the ability or the lack of dependence on goods to accept that the God of overflowing generosity can fill your life with blessings. The poor are blessed and the rich are not because God is as Jesus proclaims God to be.
Now, in relation to Beatitudes and Woes, it is often asked whether by the “poor” who are blessed Luke means economically poor or spiritually poor. The whole pattern of Luke’s Gospel suggests that the question poses a false alternative. The poor are certainly economically poor, but at the same time, in Jesus’ day, the poor had become a standard self-description for the faithful in Israel who waited hopefully upon the Lord, that is, people like Simeon and Anna. At the heart of their waiting for salvation lies a deep spiritual longing that may have been present in others whose plight is primarily economic. In this perspective, the poor can include the afflicted in general. The poor are all whose emptiness and destitution provide an opportunity to God to be generous in his actions. The poor wait for the God of Salvation to act on their behalf.
Keep in mind the context in which all this is said to the disciples – in front of the afflicted masses who have come to hear Jesus and to be healed of their diseases. In the Beatitudes, Jesus depicts his community as vulnerable, and in their vulnerability, they are blessed. Being vulnerable means that I am open to God’s power. A vulnerable community can become for the afflicted an instrument of God’s hospitality. It is the vulnerable who make the world safe for humanity. Let me repeat that: the vulnerable, those open to God’s power, make the world safe for humanity. So much for the passage, my second point.
My third point is practical. What is the practical application of this passage into my life as a Christian and our life as a community? If you search the web for answers to this question, you will find plenty of advice. I could cite pastors and lay people from every walk of life offering advice on how to live the Beatitudes, and end my sermon with their advice. Instead, I am going to tell you a story.
A while back, my brother and sister-in-law visited my wife, Cindy, and me. We spent a beautiful October day sightseeing Chicago. In Millennium Park we noticed a Buddhist monk approach a street vendor selling hot dogs. We were close enough to witness this exchange.
The Buddhist monk approached the vendor and asked, “Make me one with everything.” The vendor handed the monk a dog with everything and the monk handed him a twenty-dollar bill. The vendor put the bill in his apron. After a minute of waiting for his change, the vendor informed the monk, “Change comes from within.”
Of course, it’s a joke, but there is a kernel of truth in humor: change comes from within. There is a lot of advice on how we can live Luke’s Beatitudes, but let me conclude by returning to my first point. Recall the different groups of people listening to Jesus: The Twelve, disciples and a vast array of humanity with assorted human needs. Where are you in that audience?
Where are you as an individual and where are you as a community? Personally, I would say that I see myself as in the group of disciples. In front of me is Jesus, and around me are needy people: poor, hungry, weeping, hated. Who will address their needs? With the help of God, I will. With the help of God, we will. How? We’ll figure it out as we meet them in their need.
Friends, we have everything necessary to serve others in their need. We have Word and Sacrament. We don’t need more books and better blogs, we have the Word – Scripture and the Word Incarnate. We have the Teaching of Jesus and the Holy Spirit – present in our hearts and minds, in our Baptism, Confession, Forgiveness and Lord’s Supper. All we have to do to help a vast array of humanity is to be vulnerable. Being vulnerable means that I am open to God’s power. A vulnerable person, a vulnerable community can be an instrument of God’s hospitality. The vulnerable make the world safe for vulnerable people seeking the Living God.
When we draw near to Jesus, we know that He will give us everything we need to live the Beatitudes. We will know when it happens because the peace of God that surpasses all understanding, will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.[5] Amen.



[1] Psalm 122.
[2] Luke 4:18-19.
[3] Luke 1:51-53.
[4] Luke 4:18-19.
[5] Philippians 4:7.

No comments:

Post a Comment