Sermon Archive

"Blessed are the poor ....so where does that leave us?"
Rev. Janet Parker
Daniel 7:1-4a, 5a, 6a, 7, 15-18; Luke 6:17-26

When I was a little girl, I was afraid to look under my bed or in
my closet at night, because I thought a monster might be lurking
there. like many children, I believed in monsters, and I had my
share of nightmares about them. In fact, every once in a while, even
as an adult, a monster or two still peoples my dreams at night. But ..
monsters are just the stuff of children's play, Halloween parties and
nightmares, or so we like to believe.

So what do we make of our first lesson this morning, the story
of Daniel and his Halloween-esque vision of beasts rising out of the
sea? Of course, we can interpret this in our best adult, scholarly
fashion, and see the beasts as simple representational figures. As
biblical scholars will tell you, the beasts represent the four kingdoms
which conquered Israel. But I wonder if this very rational
interpretation does justice to Daniel's vision, and to our instinctive
childish belief in monsters.

I took a page from Kate's sermon last week, and looked up
"monster" in the dictionary. The second definition was particularly
helpful. According to Webster's New World Dictionary, a monster is,
and I quote, "something monstrous." Given this illuminating
definition, I thought it best to continue to the next entry , and read
the definition for "monstrous." Here I discovered that "monstrous"
means a) abnormally or prodigiously large; huge; enormous; and b )
hideously wrong or evil, atrocious.

At the time this text was written, the Jewish people were
suffering under a terrible persecution by Antiochus Ephiphanes, one
of the successors to Alexander the Great. The Jewish land, their
religious practices, even their cultural identity were under attack in
Daniel's time, as a great Empire which can only be described as
"monstrous" crushed the land of Israel.

Jesus, like Daniel before him, was also living in the shadow of a
monster. Jesus suffered from a dual oppression. He experienced the+
religious and political oppression of all Jews who were living under
the Roman Empire, and he also suffered economic oppression,
because he came from one of the landless classes. In fact, Jesus had
a lot more in common with migrant workers than he had with any of
us in this room, at least economically speaking.

That helps to put the Beatitudes in a new light, doesn't it?
Perhaps it helps explain what one commentator on Luke has called
"God's shocking partisanship on the side of those who suffer." In the
early church, the good news of the gospel was often referred to as a
"scandal". It doesn't take long to figure out why. Throughout the
gospels, but especially in Luke, Jesus consistently reaches out to the
least attractive, most despised, poorest people around, while he
consistently ignores, offends and challenges the wealthy, righteous
and powerful. Biblical scholars have even recognized a distinct
theme in Luke which has been called "the rhetoric of reversal." As
one scholar, John York, has written: "God's word is a disquieting
visitor. Indeed, a characteristic of Luke's good news is that God
reverses human expectations. We know it is God's kingdom when it
doesn't look the way we think it should. As the Magnificat
announced: 'He has put down the mighty from their thrones and
exalted those of low degree..."'

Perhaps nothing could offend American sensibilities more than
the seeming unfairness in the reversals of Luke. We, of course, live
by the creed that everyone should get exactly what they deserve.
Yet so many of Luke's stories violate this creed. Workers who labor
for one hour get the same as those who worked all day. A prodigal
son is welcomed home with a big party while the faithful elder son is
taken for granted. Poor and homeless people are promised the
kingdom of God, while the rich, who worked hard and contributed to
the economy are sent empty away. William Doty , another
commentator on Luke, describes the reversals in Luke's stories as
"the immoral factor." He writes that "the reversal happens toward
the end of the narrative, in such a way as to shatter 'normal ' or
'moral' expectations." The people we expect to win Jesus' praise are
criticized, while the people we hope Jesus will condemn are
welcomed, healed, and fed. No wonder Jesus was accused of being
immoral and blasphemous!

So where do we fit into this picture? Where do you place
yourself in today's text? Do you identify more with the poor, hungry,
weeping and reviled, or with the rich, satisfied, laughing, respected
people? For most of us, there's no easy answer to this question.
Matthew's version of this story is often preferred to this one, because
Matthew's Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, and it's a little easier to
squeeze ourselves into that category. But Luke is blunt and leaves
little room for evasion. Blessed are the poor. Period. While some of
us have been poor at some point in our lives, and while few of us
would probably identify ourselves as wealthy, the fact is that most of
us are wealthy compared to the two billion inhabitants of this earth
that live in absolute poverty. On the other hand, some of us may
experience other kinds of social marginalization that would qualify
us for inclusion in Jesus' most favored persons lists, such as
prejudice due to our race, or our gender , or our sexual orientation.
Some of us have suffered from depression or serious physical illness
or disability. But maybe we're missing the point of this passage. .
Maybe we don't need to engage in a calculus of needs and suffering
to see who most deserves to inherit the kingdom of God. Let's look
more closely at whom Jesus was aiming at with his warning to the
rich.

Well, first of an there's the most obvious answer. For me,
certain names come to mind: Mike Piazza, the Mets player who just
signed a 91 million dollar contract, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Disney's
Michael Eisner with their billions, and Michael Jordan, the highest
paid player in professional sports. As one scholar wrote, the woes
are not addressed to those who have enough to live on and be
content, but to those who live to excess. The target is the superfluity
that doesn't need anyone or anything, not even God. But our culture
thrives on superfluity and excess; what would America be without
it?

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there's something
MONSTROUS about a society that pays baseball players $80,000 a
game when teachers are lucky to get 30,000 a year, and that gives
tax breaks to CEO's like Bill Gates when mothers and children are cut
off welfare. In a world where such absurd wealth is allowed to exist
side by side with dire poverty , it would be easy to assume that we're
off the hook, that Jesus wasn't talking about us after all. But before
we get too comfortable, let's take a deeper look.

John York argues that while "rich" and "poor" are rooted in
economic circumstances, these conditions are reflections of deeper
societal and spiritual conditions that concern Jesus. According to
York, the rich are those who live in a world of callous self-
sufficiency, denying their dependence on God or anyone else. The
rich are those who have lost their sense of solidarity with other
human beings, and with earth itself. Locked in splendid isolation,
insulated by their resources, the rich cannot enter the kingdom of
God because it doesn't interest them. Who would want to follow a
savior that associates with such undesirable, unattractive people?
Why follow a savior that wants to intrude into the way we spend our
money and our time ?

For the real surprise in Luke's gospel is not Jesus' partisanship
with the poor, but the consistent way in which Jesus reaches out to
the rich and calls for conversion. Jesus doesn't abandon or reject the
powerful, successful and wealthy. To the contrary, Jesus seeks them
out and offers them salvation. The stories of the rich young ruler,
the wealthy tax collector Zaccheus, and even the prodigal son show
Jesus offering an opportunity to the spiritually challenged. The
stories and sayings of reversal in Luke are meant to shake us out of
our apathy and lethargy. As John Dominic Crossan writes, "The
parables of Jesus are stories which shatter the deep structure of our
accepted world and thereby ....make us vulnerable to God. It is only
in such experiences that God can touch us, and only in such moments
does the Kingdom of God arrive."

There's a wonderful short story by Flannery O'Connor which
deals with just this kind of shattering reversal, when one's whole
world is called into question. It's appropriately titled "Revelation,"
and tells the story of a very self-satisfied, middle-class white lady
named Mrs. Turpin. Writing in the forties O'Connor did a
splendid job of illuminating the psychology people,
who were terribly concerned with preserving their radical and
class privileges.

"Mrs. Turpin," O'Connor writes, " sometimes occupied herself at
night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap
were most colored people; then next to them-not above, just
away from--were the white trash; then above them were the
home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to
which she and [her husband] Claud belonged. Above she and
Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses
and much more land. But here the complexity of it would
begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of
money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and
some of the people who had good blood had lost their money
and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned
their homes and land as well....Usually by the time she had
fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and rolling
around in her head...."

Mrs. Turpin was in for a shower however, when one of the so-called
decent people sees through her and in a scene only O'Connor could devise, attacks her in the doctor's
office and calls her an old wart hog from hell. Thoroughly shaken up
by this event, Mrs. Turpin worries and worries the rest of the day
why she should have been singled out for this awful revelation.
After all, there were plenty of white trash in that waiting room that
were a lot more wart hoggy than her .

like Mrs. Turpin, when we allow ourselves to hear Jesus'
indictment of our society's value system, we also experience shock.
It may be the shock of realizing for the first time that God is on our
side, as a gay person, or a person of color, or a woman, or poor
person, or someone who is disabled or depressed or unemployed.
Or it may be the shock of realizing that our racial or class or gender privilege is not
legal tender in the kingdom of heaven, and far from placing us
higher on the totem pole, only places more responsibility our
shoulders.

For in the final analysis, the Beatitudes are a call to action, a
call to the life of discipleship. Jesus teaches us that human society
should mirror the value system of God. Wherever we fall on the
scale of rich and poor, hungry and filled, mourning or happy, we are
invited to rejoice in God's revolutionary love for the outcast, the
excluded, the impoverished and the rejected. When we find
ourselves in that category, instead of feeling inadequate, shameful
and resigned we can claim God's promise of the kingdom. When we
find ourselves among the rich, respected and self-satisfied, we can
remember that all we have is a gift from God, to be used to serve the
Christ that comes to us in the least of these. Once we reorient our
values in this way, we can rejoice in the marvelous reversals in the
kingdom of God. And perhaps we will catch a glimpse of the second
revelation Mrs. Turpin had at sunset on that fateful day. When
she lifted up her head...[and saw] a purple streak in the sky,
cutting through a field of crimson and leading...into the
descending dusk.... A visionary light settled in her eyes. She
saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward
from the earth.... Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling
toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash,..
clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black folk in
white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics, shouting and
clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the
procession was a whole tribe of people whom she recognized at
once as those.... like herself and Claud. She leaned forward to
observe them closer. They were marching with great dignity,
accountable as they had always been for good order and
common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on
key yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away.

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