Guidance

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany

Luke 6: 1-11

February 15, 2004

I began this past week with a very clear idea about what this sermon was going to be about. I had been doing a lot of reading about medieval forms of pastoral care, the various means by which the church has provided guidance for the faithful. Much of my work during the week, from youth group and book group to working with Sue Bohlman on the children’s Family Lent Packs, confirmed for me that most of the time we, pastors included, are searching for a way to live that gives meaning to our lives and that interprets our place in the world and our relationship with God, and our neighbors, and our selves.

I was going to say a few things about the Jesus’ beatitudes in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, just sung by our choir, and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain which is our text for this morning. I wanted to suggest that they have been a neglected tool in our search for a way to live, one which Jesus meant for us to take seriously. I was then going to sketch a short and I might also add witty history of how Christians have ordered their lives, beginning with early monastic rules like the Rule of St. Benedict. The middle ages taught that the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust) and the seven heavenly virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope and charity) provided guidance for our lives. And I was going to share the fascinating insight that the Ten Commandments did not appear as central to Christian thought until Luther and Calvin put them there during the Reformation in the sixteenth century. They did so because they thought that the basis of Christian ethics ought to be biblical and that the Ten Commandments provided a better balance of our responsibilities toward God and our neighbor than the vices and virtues of the middle ages. All of was to be toward the end of highlighting our neglected use of the beatitudes as a model for a faithful way to live in a sharply divided, consumerist, violent world.

And then I sat down to study Luke’s version anew. While all I have said I still believe to be true of Matthew’s Beatitudes, the sermon on the Mount, which are worthy of their own sermon, I came to believe that the words in Luke’s gospel are not about guidance at all. Typical of so many of Jesus words in Luke, they are about decision, conversion, crisis, choice. The key is in the woes.

Luke not only gives us a series of blessed bes, but also a matching pair of woe to yous. His words are also starkly clear: not blessed are the poor in spirit, but blessed are the poor. Not blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, but blessed are the hungry. And woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are filled. Luke wants us to see the connection between wealth and poverty. He will not let us off praying for the poor without examining our own lives and our interconnections as one human family. Jesus blessings and woes force us to see ourselves as one community of rich and poor and press us to name the connections between the prosperity of some and the poverty of others. And he calls for decision, conversion, choice.

Instead of presenting the beatitudes as pastoral care or guidance, Luke frames his version of the beatitudes along the lines of a re-covenanting ceremony where we, the reader, must choose between one way of life and another. In their form of blessings and woes, these beatitudes are reminiscent of when Moses summarized the law and put forth the challenge, “Choose this day whom you will serve” as he stood before the people, perched together on a hillside about to enter into the long awaited promised land. The writer of Deuteronomy recounts Moses’ words on that occasion.

“See I set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to other gods, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land. I call heaven and earth to witness today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your decedents may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you.”

Jesus, like Moses before him, is asking, “whose side are you on?” He is not teaching, or preaching, or guiding a searching people. He is going straight for the heart, to the will. He wants a choice. In God’s kingdom, God’s world, there is not to be poverty, hunger, or weeping. Or rather, God intends for those who are poor to be lifted up, those who are hungry to be fed, and those who weep to be comforted. We are called by this text to choose sides with the poor because that is where God is. It is good news to them. It can be good news to us.

What seems important to me is having made that choice, how do we live our commitment? What does this decision mean for us? And each of us live that choice in different ways. Some of us will be part of the book study which the Christian Involvement Committee is beginning about the new American poverty. Some of us will be preparing food for the Welcome Inn on Monday evenings. Some of us will be writing letters to congress to ensure that as we adopt a federal budget we are looking at the poverty line first and not the bottom line. Some of us will attend the workshop next weekend at Little Portion Friary sponsored by the University of the Poor to learn from poor people how we can organize together to end hunger. And all of us, I hope, are refraining from eating Taco Bell as part of our denomination’s support for corporate fairness from harvest to market.

We always learn more as we practice our faith. But the things we do we do because of our prior commitment to the poor, our prior decision to be where God is distributing blessings, our prior choice to seek life on God’s terms. And we are promised that when we seek life on God’s terms, when we stand with those who are poor, we too will be blessed.