6 Epiphany C February 17, 2019
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Jeremiah 17: 5-10 + Psalm 1 + 1 Cor. 15: 12-20 + Luke 6: 17-26
These past couple of weeks have been so strange…haven’t they? I mean, this is Seattle…we aren’t supposed to measure snow in feet. We aren’t supposed to need shovels and snow plows and ice melt. But, all that being said, we HAVE found ourselves as survivors of SNOWPOCALYPSE 2019! I am glad to be with you, in worship together, on this day. Will you pray with me?
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
One of the requirements for ordination in our denomination is the completion of 10 weeks of Clinical Pastoral Education. Basically it means you serve as a chaplain in a hospital or similar setting and in the process you learn a lot about yourself and a lot about the fragility and the precious nature of this gift of life.
I did my CPE rotation at Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, which, coincidentally is where Vicar Laura did hers several years later. If you imagine that this would be a particularly heartbreaking site, you would be right.
And while neither of us will ever forget the children and their families who crossed our paths, those stories, their stories, almost all heart wrenching, aren’t necessarily stories we’d share easily and probably not in a sermon.
But what I do remember is that almost to a person, every parent whose child got the scary diagnosis or who didn’t make it home….every parent had their lives divided into what was before and what was after. Before the accident. After the diagnosis. Before the reoccurrence. After the treatment.
And almost every parent would comment about how life outside of the hospital could just go on while their child was in crisis. How other people could go to work or school or to the post office while they spent day in and day out fearing for the well being of their child. There seemed to be a great divide.
In the Gospel reading for today, Luke recounts that as he was coming down the mountain with the twelve, Jesus stopped at a level area where there were a great number of followers.
Jesus stopped at a level area. But wait! Aren’t these the Beatitudes? Isn’t this the sermon on the mount? Then what is this about Jesus stopping at a level place. Well, the sermon on the Mount is how Matthew’s Gospel tells us this story. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus comes down to a level place, where he is met not only by many disciples, but by people who had come to hear Jesus teach, to be healed of sickness, and to have demons cast out of them. And in order to encounter these people and the needs they brought with them, Jesus didn’t stand above them, high on a mountain. Jesus stood in the midst of them, on a level place. And he looked at them. Looking at them, he saw so much. He saw the poor, he saw those who were hungry, he saw those who were mourning and he called them blessed. He saw those who were being persecuted for following him and promised them that they would have a great reward. He also saw the rich and those with full cupboards and said that they were full of woe. And the same for those who were laughing and those who were treated well by others…they were also full of woe.
It’s tempting to say that Jesus was pronouncing bestowing blessing and pronouncing judgment. That he was saying that somehow the poor and the hungry and the mourners and the persecuted were hashtag blessed and the others were hashtag cursed. Or hashtag woe. Although you don’t see many hashtags or decorative signs that say woe.
We’ve coopted what it means to be blessed as something that is bestowed upon us. As something that indicates that God is looking favorably on us The word Jesus would have used meant something different and we don’t really have an accurate word that reflects its meaning. It’s something like deeply satisfied in God; or wholly satisfied and at peace.
Meister Eckhart, the German Christian mystic had a word that also comes close to describing this: Gelassenheit, which refers to the measure of well being, belonging or togetherness experienced.
And the word woe is something of a warning in Jesus’ language. Kind of like “beware!”
So, this paints a rather strange picture if we imagine that Jesus was pronouncing approval and judgment. That’s why I believe something else was happening here.
Remember, these were people who’d come to Jesus looking for healing or relief from mental illness or to hear him teach. He’d gained quite a reputation by then. People knew about him. They were curious. It’s likely that some who came to hear him or see him did so out of that curiosity. Maybe they were skeptics. At any rate, it’s certain that with a large crowd, there were a variety of states of the heart gathered there.
I want to note something here…to take a little detour in this sermon, or as Delia calls it, birdwalk for just a moment. In verse 12 (our reading starts at verse 17), the text says that Jesus went away, by himself, up the mountain, to spend the entire night in communion with God. Jesus’ ministry was making many around him angry. They didn’t agree with what he was doing. He wasn’t doing what they thought he should when they thought he should do it. So Jesus was tired. Weary. And he went away from people and his schedule, he withdrew, to be with God. This is a reminder to us, that time with God is essential to our well being, especially when we are weary in body or spirit. Jesus models this throughout Scripture. Jesus kept Sabbath time and Jesus sat in solitude before God. Those who wrote his story were careful to include it, because it matters.
So back to these blessings and woes and the crowd of people and Jesus on the level place. I believe that Jesus was doing two things there, on that level place, with his chosen disciples and many followers.
First I believe that Jesus was identifying and naming those he was encountering there. He was offering them something that all of so desperately need in life: someone to notice us. Someone to say that although we may be poor or hungry or grief stricken, we are God’s beloved children. That in spite of our circumstances, we are never outside of God’s love for us. Someone to note that we are standing in a place where our lives have been torn asunder….we are standing in the aftermath of some circumstance that has caused us pain. It may be very fresh or it may have happened decades ago. But that pain, although it changes, does not leave us. And so we need Jesus, not up on a mountain, unreachable and unknowable. We need Jesus with us, on a level place. Reminding us that, no matter our circumstance, this is the place where we are most fully known: in the very heart of God. I believe that Jesus looked at those who needed healing and he loved them.
But what of those to whom he called out beware? The rich and those with full pantries and those who the world says are successful. Perhaps those whose world was not torn apart. Or who had somehow managed to turn away from their sadness. What warning is Jesus offering them? He warns them that if they put their trust and their sense of self in those things they have accumulated…in their wealth and success, then they are at risk of losing their sense of self when those things are gone. Because eventually we are all parted with the things we acquire in life.
We are reminded of this very thing in the reading from Jeremiah and the Psalm today. That putting our trust in people instead of God is not life giving. It will disappoint us. It will not fulfill or fill us.
Beloved, we are resurrection people. People who, as Jesus reminds us, place our ultimate hope in the God who created us, not in our circumstances, not in our good fortunes or our ill fortunes, not in whether our cupboards are full or bare. Not in whether people speak good or ill of us. But in God, who loved us enough to send Jesus…the same Jesus who walked with us up mountains, in valleys, and who encounters us on level places, where he can look us in the eye and say that we are, indeed, God’s blessed and God’s beloved.
Thanks be to God and let the church say…Amen.