February 16, 2025
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26
An Altogether Alien Way of Thinking
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
In the movie White Christmas, Bing Crosby sings the following song about worry and blessings:
When I'm worried and I can't sleep
I count my blessings instead of sheep
And I fall asleep counting my blessings
Count your blessings: it’s something we all do. As both Dale and I look towards the next chapter of our lives, retirement, we frequently remark how blessed we are, especially by the people in our lives.
Blessings are things that foster good welfare or happiness. On a sub-zero night, we count our house and our furnace as blessings. Being employed is a blessing. Having good neighbors and supportive friends are blessings. Health is a blessing. Financial security and full cupboards are blessings. And certainly, faith is a blessing.
Today we hear Jesus’ Beatitudes sermon from Luke. He counts blessings. But his list of what is blessed is quite unlike anything we would choose!
“Blessed are the poor.” What? No! The poor aren’t blessed!
“Blessed are the hungry.” No, no, no, hunger is not a blessing!
“Blessed are the despised and hated.” No, Jesus, they’re not blessed!
This list of blessings doesn’t add up. They’re so far removed from anything we hold true that they jolt us. They’re not just a little off, they’re WAY off.
Jesus isn’t trying to sentimentalize poverty or hunger or hatred. He doesn’t mean to paint a blissful whitewash over their pain and suffering. No, he means it! They’re blessed!
In order to make sense of Jesus’ message, we might think we just need to apply a little bit of counterintuitive wisdom. It’s like backing a trailer. You just need to get used to thinking in this new way, and then it’ll all make sense.
No, Jesus means the poor are blessed. He means the hungry are blessed. He means those who are hated and despised are blessed.
Luke’s version of the Beatitudes differs from Matthew’s. Whose version is more accurate to Jesus’ exact words? We don’t know, we can’t know. Matthew’s version does seem to take some of the edge off. It’s the poor in spirit who are blessed, not the poor. It’s those who hunger after righteousness who are blessed, not the hungry. Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes is a little more lofty.
In fact, even his setting is more lofty. Jesus goes up a mountainside and from there he delivers his Sermon on the Mount. In Luke’s version, Jesus comes DOWN from a mountain. He preaches on the plane. Jesus comes down, down to our reality, down to our world of suffering and misery, death and mourning, disgrace and shame.
Luke’s version is in every way more earthy. The people don’t climb up the mountain to listen to the guru. He comes down to them. He meets them where they’re at, he enters their lives, at their level. His message speaks of real poverty and hunger.
And conversely, Luke includes woes. Matthew doesn’t go there. But in Luke, Jesus continues his sermon by mentioning who is decidedly not blessed. He addresses the flip side of the coin:
“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 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.”
But back to the nature of Jesus’ message. He calls the poor blessed and the rich cursed. The hungry are blessed and the satisfied are cursed. The reviled are blessed and the favored are cursed.
This is simply an altogether alien way of thinking. It’s utterly foreign to our manner of making sense of the world. That’s because Jesus is proclaiming the logic of heaven. When Jesus says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world,” he means it. This is the logos of God, the word from heaven.
Jesus preaches a message entirely alien to our way of thinking. But it’s completely in harmony with the overall message of the Bible. The Lord remembers Israel in their slavery. And they forge a deeper relationship with God through the lean years of their wilderness journey. God commands Israel to remember the stranger dwelling in their midst. They’re called to love their neighbor as themselves.
In the Psalms, the Lord accompanies them through the valley of the shadow of death. When the psalmist doesn’t have a friend in the world, he finds his belonging in the God who doesn’t abandon him.
The prophet Jeremiah recognized the alien truth of God’s word. In our passage today, Jeremiah also speaks of who is blessed and who is cursed. He speaks of our earthly logic. We have a way of thinking in this world, things that we call wise, things that we call strong. But those who trust merely in these things, those who make flesh their strength, Jeremiah says these are the ones who are cursed. He says they’re like a poor old shrub eking out a living in the desert.
The blessed ones plant their trust in something more profound than human wisdom and strength. They look to the Lord. They seek the wisdom that is higher and wider and deeper than our earthly knowledge. They seek God’s ways, God’s wisdom and truth. To the world, it may seem like foolishness. But herein lies the river of grace and steadfast love! And when we are planted near to it, we thrive in its blessing.
We look to this altogether alien way of wisdom, and we are blessed.
Each week I do a chapel time with our Rachel’s Place daycare children. This past week, I read them the story of the Good Samaritan. A wise guy asks Jesus, “Who exactly is my neighbor?"
He’s looking for a loophole. Yes, the scriptures call him to love his neighbor as himself, but who qualifies as a neighbor? This man wants to justify his actions; he wants an excuse to turn a cold shoulder to certain others.
The way he sees it, it’s like there are concentric circles of love. In the very center, there’s your closest family. They’re the inner circle of your love. These you certainly love. Then next you have your closest friends. And then there’s the people in your neighborhood, and then the greater community. And still further out, you have the fellow citizens of your country, and last of all there’s the rest of the world.
This is how the logic of the world works. This is the world’s order of love. We reserve the greater love for those who are closer to us. Here’s the loophole the wise man wants from Jesus. Surely, Jesus, not EVERYBODY is my neighbor?
And so Jesus tells the man this story about a man robbed alongside the road. The person who aids him is a despised Samaritan. He’s about as far removed from a neighbor as you can possibly get. And yet, Jesus turns the situation on its head when he asks, “Now, which one ACTED AS a neighbor to the man?”
This parable follows that same alien logic of Jesus’ beatitudes. The neighbor whom Jesus reveals doesn’t follow the concentric circles of love that our worldly sensibilities define. The Samaritan was the last person anyone would have recognized as the good neighbor. Jesus’ parable crushes our worldview. The two views cannot stand together.
The logic of heaven runs contrary to our worldview. And so, as people of faith, the proclamation of the church will frequently find itself at odds with the world. The world’s movers and shakers and its leaders of government will do their best to silence a logic that runs contrary to their own. Jesus’ final blessing addresses this clash.
The world doesn’t want to hear woes related to the very things they invest in: riches, fullness, happiness, acceptance. So they hurl invectives when the church speaks from God’s prophetic wisdom. This is why Jesus declared, they’ll hate and exclude us; they’ll revile and defame us. But we know where true blessings lie. We are blessed because we claim Christ’s wisdom and truth as our own. Like a tree planted by the water, our source of strength will not run out.
When Jesus says that the poor and the hungry and the weeping are blessed, that’s an indicator that the way forward will not be without struggle or pain. The blessedness of heaven isn’t a magic wand that makes all our hurts go away. But the blessing is something larger than the struggle, bigger than the sorrow, greater than the pain. The blessing allows us to see God’s graceful hand at work THROUGH the pain, IN SPITE OF the sorrow, towards a place of transformation and healing. For we know and rely on the greater wisdom and power of God at work in this world and our lives. New life springs from the grave. This is our greatest hope.
Jesus’ altogether alien way of thinking leads us to what my seminary professors called “alien righteousness.” This alien righteousness was at the core of Luther’s understanding of grace. When Luther spoke of alien righteousness, what he meant was that the source of my being made right with God lies completely apart from me. I cannot create my own righteousness. It can only come from a source outside of myself. Therefore, it’s an alien righteousness.
But through faith, I become joined to Christ! And in this, his righteousness becomes my righteousness! This is the gift imputed only by Christ and within his gift.
That’s why Paul spoke so boldly to the Corinthians about the power of Christ’s resurrection. We cannot on our own rise from the dead. But Christ has. He was laid in his grave on Good Friday. But on Easter morning, he rose, he was made alive.
Here is the one who came to us in a downward motion. He left heaven to make earth his home. He came down to our plane. And from there he went even further down. He was buried in his grave. But then, as he was lifted up from death, so shall we. In becoming the Lamb of God who carried with him the sin of the world, our sins went to the grave with him. And likewise, his victory over death is also ours. Through his resurrection, we live now with the knowledge that we have been made anew.
May we count these blessings from above as our greatest.
