As we work our way through Luke’s Gospel, we have looked at a string of stories that explain why it was that such a good guy as Jesus had enemies. He hung around with disreputable people. The Pharisees developed a long list of rules for what you can do and can’t do on the Sabbath. But Jesus went with the general principles of what the Old Testament itself says and ignored the rest of their rules. He claimed incredible authority, to forgive sins. And he backed it all up by healing the sick as he did it.
And as the religious establishment started to get organized to do him in, he started to make a special investment in just 12 men, 12 very ordinary men, his disciples. They could extend his work in 12 different directions while he could only be in one place at a time. They could continue the work after he was gone. He needed to multiply the ministry.
And shortly after he made his choice of his 12 disciples, a huge crowd gathered. Some of them had traveled quite a distance. And I can imagine them wondering if this message that Jesus was teaching was going to work for them. And so Jesus told them who is most likely to benefit, who it is that are candidates for the kingdom of God.
Our scripture text is Luke 6:17-26. I encourage you to open your pew Bible to page 64 in the New Testament section so you can see it for yourself. And then please stand for the reading of God’s word.
17 He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. 18 They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19 And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
20 Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
`Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
24 But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
25 Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets."
What Sylvia just read for us is often called the beatitudes. But we are more familiar with the way that Matthew’s gospel wrote them down. Matthew gives us 9 ‘blesseds.’ Luke gives us only four. And Luke also gives us four ‘woes,’ or we might call them ‘watch outs!’
Matthew keeps it spiritual, talking about heart attitudes. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The focus there is on what’s inside you. Luke is very concrete. “Blessed are the poor.” The focus is on what is happening on your outside. Matthew gives us ‘blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Luke just gives us “Blessed are you who are hungry now.”
And which one is ‘right? Is it Matthew or Luke? My guess is that they both give us faithful summaries of what Jesus said that day, but he said much more than we have recorded. And probably for each point that Jesus made he came at it from several different angles, both inside and outside. Matthew faithfully gives us some of those angles and Luke faithfully gives us some others. And we have important things to learn from both. And what can we learn?
Both gospel writers tell us that Jesus started out announcing blessings. God wants good stuff for his kids. He made an incredibly rich and beautiful world for us. He really wants to bless us. He is here right now to help us build lives that are just plain good. God wants good stuff for his kids.
The first blessing is that Jesus tells us that there is a special blessing for those who are poor. And those who are more familiar with Matthew’s gospel might spiritualize that and say, ‘but he really means the ‘poor in spirit.’’ But in Luke he says, just ‘the poor.’ It’s the word for people who don’t have any money. The first blessing is for the poor and it matches the first woe, woe to the rich. They go together, two sides of the same coin. Blessed are the poor. Woe to the rich.
So does that mean that on the judgment day God is going to hand everybody their tax forms and have them stand in a huge line from richest to poorest, and then send the riches half to hell and the poorest half to heaven? Is Jesus teaching salvation by poverty? No.
When we lived in Nepal years ago we had a friend named Fabio, a Brazilian, who had the idea that poor people were always noble and good. He moved in with a very poor Nepali family and lived with them for a year. They had no electricity. He learned how to do the whole rice crop, by hand. He watched their kids when someone had to go to the doctor. And after a year he concluded that some poor people cheat on their wives and gamble away their paychecks just about the same as rich people.
But there is a really big warning here for those who are rich. And, if you keep in mind the entire population of the earth, the rich is us, every one of us.
And the Bible warns us over and over again about the problems that can come from money. It can be addictive. Sometimes people, even people who have more than enough to meet their needs, are so fixated on getting more money and more money that they don’t even think about God anymore. You’re in trouble when that happens. Sometimes people get so fixated on getting money that they start to step on other people to get it. That might even earn you the nickname ‘Queen of Mean,’ like Leona Helmsley out in New York.
Money can give you a false sense of security. Somebody gets a lot of money in the bank and they think everything’s OK. They don’t need God. They don’t need anyone else. Being rich can make us complacent. And that’s poison.
So, is Jesus being mean or unfair when he says ‘Woe to you who are rich’? No, he loves us all enough to warn us.
And he reminds those who don’t have much that they can be deeply blessed anyway. Sometimes people respond to their poverty by turning to God, or by being very generous to people around them in need, or with a real sensitivity to those who are hurting or mistreated in society around them. And when they do that, they are really blessed, even if they don’t have much money. The heart that is open to God has good things ahead.
His second blessing is for those who are hungry now. And I really don’t like being hungry. But the world is full of hungry people and God really, really cares for them. He shouts to us to pay attention to them, to feed them. And there is something about being hungry that motivates you. For most of us, if getting hungry motivates us, it only has to motivate us to walk to the refrigerator and back and then we’re OK. But Jesus would have been speaking to people who didn’t have refrigerators full of goodies, who were often hungry because there just wasn’t food in the house. Is that horrible? If it’s the thing that motivates you to come to God, it may be the best thing that ever happened to you.
And for us who are well fed every day, probably too well fed, it can leave us complacent before God. And that’s poison.
The 3rd blessing is for those who weep. And it matches with a warning to those who laugh now. Does God disapprove if we have a good laugh? Should we organize a laughter suppression committee to make sure nobody laughs in church? They would have a really big job in this church. God isn’t against all laughter. The Psalms even say that God laughs.
But there are people who go through life laughing at everything, avoiding anything that hurts, anything that is serious, the things that really matter in life. They laugh at those who are serious about God. They laugh at people who are struggling. If you ask them a serious question they deflect it with a joke. They insist on being amused all the time so that serious issues can’t touch their attention. They avoid, ‘getting serious’ like the plague. And that’s an attitude that will make them blind to what God is doing. It’s an attitude that will make them blind to all that is really important in life. Woe to that, watch out!
And there are those who dare to really care about the things that matter, about people who hurt, about things that aren’t the way they should be, people who care deeply enough to weep about them. In God’s eyes, those who dare to care, who dare to love, are the ones who are really blessed.
And if we haven’t been blessed enough with poverty, hunger and weeping, Jesus offers one more, persecution. Our goal is to be like Jesus. Our hope is to be like Jesus. And here’s a test of how you are doing. Jesus was persecuted. If we are like him, we’ll be persecuted, too. It’s really unlikely that we’ll be crucified like Jesus or stoned like Stephen. But if everyone is comfortable with us, then something is wrong.
Christians in the United States have had a pretty easy and comfortable life for a long time. Contractors who were building new housing developments would sometimes plan a spot to build a church for the people who would live there. Pastors were very highly respected in communities. If people quoted the Bible, people would recognize the quote and take it seriously.
But we are seeing a growing opposition to faith in America today. If churches want to build, they often face opposition from neighbors. Vision United Methodist Church has been trying to build in Long Grove for years now and the local government has done everything it can to make it impossible. More and more people are downright ignorant of the Bible and not even interested in learning. We’re had a run of books by atheists, attacking all religions and Christianity in particular.
I play golf (more or less) with the Garden Golf League on Monday evenings through the summer. Maybe a month ago one of the men in our foursome just up and announced that religion was the leading cause of death in the world. I was stunned. How could he say such a thing?
My first answer was that often conflicts that get labeled as religious wars are really battles between cultures or races or nations and they just use religion as an excuse for their fighting.
But then I thought about it some more and said that, for the last century, you just have to say that atheism killed a lot more people than religion. Stalin, Mao Tse Dung, Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh showed us what atheism can do when it gains power without the restraint of submission to God.
CNN ran a series this week with Christiane Amonpour, called “God’s Warriors.” It started with violent Jews who have stolen land from Palestinians and committed terrorist atrocities against them. It moved on to violent Moslems. We all know that story. But the third segment was about God’s Christian warriors. And they didn’t have any examples of violence done by Christians. They interviewed Christians who talked about mobilizing people to vote their convictions and were training young people as attorneys to support Christian causes in the courts. But that’s all fair game. They lumped Christians in with the terrorists and used an ominous tone throughout that communicated that you’d better not get too serious about your faith because religion turns people nasty.
We’ll see more and more of that in the coming years. And we’ll be tempted to hide our faith in order to avoid such persecution. But Jesus warns us that’s a faith killer. And he is there to bless us when we take a wise and loving stand for the ways of God.
So, Luke is starting a wonderful block of teaching. We have some really good stuff ahead. And he starts out with a warning from Jesus about the things that will help us become part of what Jesus is doing and things that will get in the way.
Those who are rich, well fed, laughing and popular, watch out! Is that you today? Have you let complacency blind you to God? Can you feel any zeal for God? Or is your heart dull today? Is it complacent? Jesus warns us. Watch out!
And for those of us who are struggling. We can’t see how the bills are going to get paid on time. We’re having to cut our grocery bill a bit. We feel the weight of the suffering of the world. People are giving us a hard time because of our faith. Be encouraged! God sees. God cares. And if you let these circumstances open your heart to God, there are some real blessings ahead. AMEN
