Affliction and Comfort

Scripture:        Jeremiah 17:5-10                    Psalm 1

I Corinthians 15:15-20             Luke 6:17-26

Today’s reading from Luke’s gospel gives us the beginning of what is called “the Sermon on the Plain,” Luke’s counterpart to Matthew’s much more famous Sermon on the Mount.    Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel, while containing a lot of material in common, were addressed to different audiences of early believers, who would have responded to different imagery.  Matthew’s gospel was written to a primarily Jewish group of early converts to the way of Jesus, and presents Jesus as a kind of second Moses, ascending a high mountain to bring commandments from God to the people.  Luke’s gospel, written to a predominantly Gentile audience, presents Jesus as having already come down from the mountain with this disciples to a level place to teach a crowd that had gathered, consisting of Jews from Jerusalem and Judea as well as Gentiles from Tyre and Sidon.   We can think of Luke’s description of a level place as indicating not only elevation, but also status.  That is to, before Jesus, everyone with him – disciples and not, Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor – are on a level playing field, with no one having more or less claim on Jesus’ favor than anyone else.  Also, we have echoes of the verses from Isaiah that were quoted in describing John the Baptist – hills brought low and valleys lifted up, rough places made plain.  A side note:  Luke says that before beginning to teach on this level plain, Jesus looked up at his disciples, and some have taken this description to indicate that perhaps Jesus was short of stature, a little guy, a shrimp.  This might explain how, earlier in Luke’s gospel, Jesus has avoided being thrown off a mountain by his townspeople – perhaps he was able to duck down and hide and crawl through the crowd without drawing notice.  Of course, this is just speculation, but I thought it was an interesting possibility.

Why has a crowd gathered?  They weren’t there just out of idle curiosity:  they had an agenda.  We’re told that they were there to hear Jesus and to be healed of their diseases.  We’re told that those troubled by unclean spirits were cured, and that everyone was trying to touch Jesus in hopes of being healed – we’re told that healing power went out from Jesus and cured all who were there.   What an amazing picture – this crowd of people with all manner of physical and mental illness converging on Jesus, and power going out from Jesus, and the crowd going on their way cured.  Sometimes I think we who have worked in the church for a long time can be a little hard on those who come to church primarily in hopes of getting material assistance – a meal or clothing or a SEPTA pass or some other kind of handout…and here I’m preaching to myself, because there are times when my stamina and emotional resources to deal with the needs of others run short, when I’m too exhausted to take one more phone call or hear one more tale of woe.  While we certainly want people to come to hear the good news and for their lives to be turned around so that they can support the church or pay the assistance forward to others, the reality is that the people who came to Jesus in today’s Gospel reading were there not only to hear Jesus’ gracious words, but to have their immediate need for healing met.   They literally came to Jesus with their hands out – they had their hands out to touch Jesus.  Often it is only when we are at our lowest point of desperate need that we are willing or even able to come inside the doors of the church to hear the good news of Jesus.  Of course, we want peoples lives to turn around, to change – and it can be exhausting being the ones called by Jesus to meet the needs around us - but we have to meet people where they are before we can lead them to where we think God wants them to be.

And then Jesus began to teach.  Remember that this passage parallel’s Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s gospel.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus gives eight beatitudes or blessings – blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.   In Luke’s gospel, Jesus gives four blessings and four woes.  Here are the four blessings:

                Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

                Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

                Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh

                Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 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.

It’s interesting that while in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus speaks of the blessed groups in the third person – the poor, the meek etc – while in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is directly speaking to some in the crowd around him – blessed are you poor and hungry -  you who are right in front of me, you who might have received healing from me just a few minutes ago.   It’s also interesting that in Matthew’s gospel, some of the descriptions are spiritualized – the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, while in Luke’s gospel, Jesus speaks to those who are poor and hungry in material terms of lacking food, clothing, and shelter.  The Greek word translated as “the poor” is ptochos , meaning the destitute, those reduced to begging.  The Greek word translated as hungering is peinōntes, meaning “famished”.   Jesus’ words in Luke, “Blessed are  you who weep now, for you will laugh” is similar to Matthew’s “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” 

As I said, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus offers eight beatitudes or blessings.  In Luke’s gospel, there are four blessings followed by four woes, and here are the woes:

                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 laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

                Woe to you when all speak well of you,
       for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

If you’re feeling a little uncomfortable just now, so am I – so you’re in good company, I guess -  and so would have many who were in the crowd with Jesus that day.  While I would hardly call myself rich, I’m certainly comfortable, with a roof over my head.  If I catch a nap on a church pew, as I have here from time to time after everyone has gone home from worship and I’ve dropped off all my riders, it’s because I’m exhausted and afraid of falling asleep at the wheel of my car, not because I have no home to go to.  You have only to look at my ever-expanding stomach to know that I don’t miss a lot of meals, and if I do miss a meal or two from time to time, as I sometimes do, it’s because I’m running on adrenaline and so busy that I forget to eat, not because I can’t afford to eat…..and what I miss during one meal I surely make up for during the next meal or the one after that.   Both weeping and laughing are a part of my life, so I find myself on both sides of Jesus’ blessings and woes.  Now, I can honestly say that I know what it is to have people offended at me for trying to speak and act as I think Jesus would want me to do.  I hate conflict with the burning passion of a thousand suns, and try very hard – probably try harder than I should - not to offend, but sometimes offense is unavoidable.  Winston Churchill is quoted as having said, “You have enemies?  Good.  That means you stood up for something, sometime in your life.”   There’s a quote among community organizers, the origin of which is unknown although it’s often attributed incorrectly to Gandhi:  “First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.  Then they fight you.  Then you win.”  Similarly, Frederick Douglass said that, “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”   So being within in the will of God, acting on the values of the reign of God as described by Jesus, doesn’t mean we won’t offend people –  if we are fighting oppression, we will assuredly offend oppressors.   Sometimes our reality check for the rightness or wrongness of our actions may come by observing who our words or actions offend.

Jesus’ words, as described in Luke’s gospel, are very hard on many of us who live in relative comfort, and I count myself in that number.  We should remember that Luke himself was a physician, highly educated for his day, and his writing style is very polished.  Luke himself almost certainly was not begging in the streets.  But Luke, following in the way of Jesus, had a real passion for helping the poor and marginalized of his society, and it comes through over and over again in his gospel.   For Luke, I suspect, the challenge of wealth was what to do with it.  Luke’s gospel – and the sequel to his gospel, the book of Acts - gives examples of good and bad uses of wealth.   Zacchaeus, the wealthy tax collector who promised to give half his goods to the poor and to refund fourfold any wealth he had taken dishonestly, was an example of a good use of wealth.  The same can be said of the early Christians who sold their possessions and pooled the proceeds to help the poor.  By contrast, the rich man in Jesus’ parable who ignored the beggar Lazarus at his gate was a negative example, a poster child for what not to do with wealth – and in Jesus’ parable, in the end it was the rich man who was begging Lazarus for a drop of water, while Lazarus was in comfort at last.  Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus shows us what Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading look like in action.

The earliest Christians, the early church, functioned as a kind of alternative extended family, as people referred to one another as sisters and brothers.  And, even with all our struggles and limitations here at Emanuel, I think we’ve developing a similar sense of extended family, as I see you all checking in on one another on Facebook during the week, offering prayers, advice, and assistance.  The challenge of living out that level of deep community, in Jesus’ day and in our own time, is that it connects us to the deep pain of our sisters and brothers.  In the words of the old hymn, “We share our mutual woes/Our mutual burdens bear/And often for each other flows the sympathizing tear.”  That sense of extended family won’t let us just cuddle up in our cocoon of comfort.  And so we may find it difficult to sit down comfortably to eat a big dinner if we know that a sister or brother is looking for food in the trash, may find it difficult to sleep comfortably in our soft bed if someone we know is sleeping on the street.  Last Sunday, when we didn’t have heat in the church, for an hour or so we got a tiny glimpse of what life is like for those who don’t have a roof over their heads, or who don’t have heat in their homes.  Of course there are limits to what any of us can do, especially if we live at a distance from the church…I know for myself that I can’t drive in from Conshohocken at all hours of the day and night….but I do try to make myself available on some regular basis, usually toward the weekend, and I know other members contact me regularly to ask where to find and how to help our struggling members. When our last newsletter went out, one of our readers – a longtime friend of the church – gently chided me because an article about the winter break in our homeless street outreach was on the same page as the article about our upcoming dinner church.  She thought we were feasting while others starved.  Of course, I assured her that far from abandoning our commitment to the homeless, the dinner church is a key part of our homeless outreach, in that our homeless members and friends are almost always at dinner with us, and I purposely try to order in more food than we can possibly eat at one sitting so that we can send food home with our members who are hungry, so they have something to eat the next day – the overflow of food at the dinner church is intentional, an attempt at a picture, a bare glimpse, of the heavenly banquet promised first by Isaiah and later by Jesus, where there’s always plenty of food and drink and no one ever goes hungry.

Jesus’ words in our Gospel comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable – and we too may variously feel afflicted or comforted by Jesus’ words.   May the comfort of Jesus’ words lead us to gratitude, and may the affliction found in Jesus’ words lead us to change.  May our hearts be open to the challenge of Jesus’ words and the pain of our sisters and brothers’ lives.  And may God’s power go forth from our lives to bring  healing to a hurting world. Amen.