Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; I Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26
Preached on February 11th, by the Rev. Preston Parsons
When Jesus descends from the mountain and gives his sermon on the plain, he looks to his disciples and tells them of a great reversal.
Jesus preaches: "You who are poor will inherit the Kingdom of God; you who are hungry will be filled; you who weep will laugh; those of you who are hated, reviled, and defamed – you will rejoice and leap for joy."
But the reversal that Jesus describes doesn't work only one way.
Jesus also preaches: "You who are rich, you will one day be without consolation; you who are full, one day you will be hungry; those of you who are laughing: you're gonna mourn and weep."
I was in a good mood, and enjoying a good meal, when I read this on Tuesday.
None of us are easily let off the hook of this one. Luke, in his rendering of Jesus' sermon, puts us as hearers of the sermon, into one of three groups of people: we might be in the overhearing crowd, the sons and daughters of the ones who persecuted the true prophets, who spoke well of the false prophets; this is not such a good group to be in, but it could certainly be worse. We could be the disciples who are rich, full, and laughing, but whose luck will be overturned for the worse; the good fortune enjoyed by these disciples is going to run out. Jesus calls down to these, “woe to you, woe to you." Or, we can be the disciples who are poor, hungry, weeping, and persecuted, whose fortunes will be overturned for the better; these disciples are the ones who rely on hope. To the ones who rely on hope, Jesus calls out "blessed, blessed."
For this third group, the poor, hungry, weeping, and persecuted disciples, of these Dietrich Boenhoeffer
writes that there is only one place for them, namely, the place where the poorest, the most tempted, the meekest of all may be found, at the cross on Golgotha. The faith-community of the blessed is the community of the Crucified. With him they lost everything, and with him they found everything. Now the word comes down from the cross: blessed, blessed.
I wish that I could make this one easier, to tell you today how we might be able to reconcile wealth with discipleship, but Jesus doesn't leave me with many options. There are the disciples who share the sufferings of Christ, and these disciples, the community of the crucified, receive the blessing. And if there is such a thing as a disciple that doesn't suffer for their faith and commitment to Christ, these, the rich ones who have no need for the community of the crucified, they have already received their reward.
Sounds a lot like bad news for rich Christians! And maybe it is. It might not be a bad idea for us to come to terms with the fact that our wealth won't last. In fact it's probably a good idea for us to come to terms with the fact that our hope ought not to be placed in the things we buy, or even in the good things people say about us. We should probably come to terms with the fact that even our happiness, so long as it is not grounded in Christ, and him crucified, even our happiness won't last. Weep we will, so long as we base our hope in that which will fade and pass, so long as our hope is found apart from the community of the crucified.
Boenhoeffer, as well as so many others who have suffered for their faith, point out that our hope is with the crucified one. Christian fellowship begins not with what we do apart from the crucified one, or even what we do for the crucified one, but in what the crucified one has done for us. Discipleship begins with what the crucified one has done for us, and continues with the suffering we experience in our belonging to this body of Christ, the body of Christ crucified.
What haunts me as I read these kinds of texts is that it might very well be, that if we are not suffering for our faith, then we do not properly know what faith is.
I wish I could say that suffering with illness, or suffering at the hand of some tyrant for something other than Christ, was the kind of suffering meant here. I know I'd get a few points for struggling through sickness, others might find points for other suffering, if this was true. This kind of suffering, like that of sickness and loneliness, might help us understand, or bring us closer to the suffering Christ. But this is not the kind of suffering meant by Jesus in this sermon. Jesus is talking about the suffering experienced on account of him, and he's pretty straightforward about this.
For many of us, including me, reading this gospel in a good mood over a good meal,
being rich and belly-full, we are confronted with the truth: it will take a powerful turn of events for us to make it through this one alive.
But thank God that he is merciful, even to the selfish and the ungrateful, as Jesus will say later in this same sermon. We can be thankful that it is God's property to always have mercy.
Our confession is not simply of Christ crucified, even though this is integral to understanding discipleship; but as Paul remind us in our passage from Corinthians, Christian proclamation hinges on the resurrection. Paul writes that "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins," and that if we have hoped falsely, "we are of all people most to be pitied." "But," Paul continues, "in fact Christ has been raised from the dead." We are not left in our sin.
By Christ's resurrection, and our belief in him as the one vindicated by God and the one able to lift us out of our addiction to wealth, to prosperity, to good words, all the things that keep us from the radical commitment asked of us, it is this Christ who lifts us out of the dust, the one who lifts us out of our infatuation with ourselves and our wealth.
It takes a J. Alfred Smith, Sr.
, one of the great black preachers and teachers of this present generation, preaching to his flock in Oakland, to tell us what this means: he says that God continuously retrofits the foundations of our faith conversion. Conversion is not a once-and-for-all experience in our salvation history. Conversion is the act of sanctification, where God continues to call us from corruption to a clear lifestyle of thinking and living. God continuously retrofits the foundations of resurrected faith with a commission. God commissions cowardly disciples(all of us)
with a history of denying Jesus(all of us)
into becoming courageous witnesses of the power of Christ's resurrection and the richness of the fellowship of Christ's suffering.
As we begin to think about Lent, a season of preparation for the great drama of Holy Week, this may very well be a good place for us to begin: by confronting what keeps us from this life,the life of the fellowship of Christ's suffering and the community of the Crucified; and to begin to ask and pray, asking for God's strength, so that we begin to heed God's commission to become courageous witnesses of the power of Christ's resurrection.
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