Sermon preached at the Graduate School of Ecumenical Studies, 9th of February, 2007, anticipating Epiphany 6

Luke 6:17-26

There is a school of thought that says that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and poverty is a sign of God’s displeasure. It’s an understanding that has been around for millennia. The Book of Job challenges it, but it is present in parts of the Scriptures, obvious in some of the psalms, and still around during the time of Christ. This understanding of the moral meaning of wealth and poverty continues to this day, but it is profoundly challenged by today’s reading. In the reign of God announced by Christ, the poor are blessed, but woe to the rich!

Immediately before today’s reading begins, Jesus has spent a night on the mountain in prayer. After praying, he chooses twelve of the disciples to be apostles. In today’s reading he comes down from the mountain with the twelve, to a level place. On the mountain Jesus has been with God. Now on the level place Jesus is with humanity, teaching and healing. As so often we are reminded of the amazing inclusivity of Jesus’ concerns; the people around him include the apostles, the other disciples and a great crowd including both Jews from Judea and Jerusalem and Gentiles from Tyre and Sidon. Today’s reading also emphasizes how successful Jesus’ ministry is. Everyone is coming to see Jesus, to hear him, and to be healed by him, and Jesus heals them all. But in the midst of this scene of success, Jesus preaches a sermon which completely overturns worldly understandings of triumph.

In Greek usage, in the time of Christ, the word “blessed” referred to those who were on a higher plane than the rest of the people. The blessed were the gods, or humans who had gone to the world of the gods. They were members of the wealthy upper class. They were people with many possessions. They were, in fact, those that the world still considers blessed today. But Jesus takes this understanding and turns it upside down: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

The poor are the ones who are blessed, and they are blessed because their poverty will be overcome. The kingdom of God is theirs, and in that kingdom the hungry will be fed and those who weep will laugh. This sermon is eschatological. This is the way it will be when God’s kingdom comes. And it will be this way not because of who we are, but because of who God is. As the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez writes: “God has a preferential love for the poor not because they are necessarily better than others, morally and religiously, but simply because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God’s will. The ultimate basis for the privileged position of the poor is not in the poor themselves, but in God, in the graciousness and universality of God’s agapeic love.”

The eschatological expectation of this sermon does not mean that its concerns are removed from life here and now. When he preached at the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus told the congregation that the words of Isaiah had been fulfilled in their hearing that day.[2] The kingdom is breaking in to the world now. The blessings and the woes begin in the present tense: “yours is the kingdom of God”, “you have received your consolation”. The kingdom will come, the kingdom is here. We are in that well-known eschatological realm of the tension between the “already” and the “not yet”.

The beatitudes of the Gospel of Luke are also extremely material, they speak to real socioeconomic situations, to the concerns of daily life. They are scandalous; they overturn every conventional expectation. Jesus’ entire ministry was scandalous. He associated with society’s outcasts and pronounced God’s blessing on them. He revealed the true nature of the reign of God, as good news for the poor.

The Gospel of Luke is full of such images of the reign of God. Mary rejoices in the Magnificat that “God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” In the synagogue at Nazareth as he begins his ministry Jesus proclaims: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives   and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”[4] Later in the gospel Jesus will tell a parable of a wealthy man inviting “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” to his banquet; and the story of the rich man and Lazarus, which ended with Lazarus in heaven with Abraham and the rich man tormented by thirst in Hades.[6] No wonder the people exclaimed to Jesus: “Then who can be saved?”, and received the marginally reassuring reply: “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.” This gospel is good news for the poor, a message that needs to be repeated again and again in a world that praises and idolizes the rich and ignores and condemns the poor.

I haven’t yet said anything about the woes, the warnings to those who are rich, full and happy. If I was preaching in Australia, I would have emphasized them. Australians, with the exception of those indigenous people living in remote outback communities, are rich. We all have access to clean drinking water, for example. We might be worried at the moment about not having enough water, but no one in Australia dies for lack of it. We have a universal health care system; no Australian is denied access to basic medicine. In global terms, we are the rich and the full, if not necessarily the happy. But this is not Australia, and the message of this gospel for Australians is not necessarily the message this gospel offers us here at Bossey.What does this gospel offer us, students of ecumenism that we are? One of the issues facing the WCC today is an apparent or potential split between “ecumenical” Christians and “evangelical” Christians. The accusation is made that the WCC is too concerned with the material and not concerned enough with the spiritual; that is has lost the zeal for mission that characterized the 1910 Edinburgh Conference and is too focused on the issues of the world. But today’s reading shows that what might be called the “spirituality of the Life and Work stream” is profoundly scriptural. The Sermon on the Plain is deeply material. It reminds us that if we want to follow Jesus, we must be concerned about the needs of the world, the need for food, clothing, shelter, health, safety, education – not just for ourselves, but for all the people of the world. This concern with the material is spiritual. As Nickolai Berdyaev said “My daily bread is a material concern; the daily bread of my neighbour is a spiritual concern.” This concern with the material has long been an important element of ecumenical spirituality. At the first WCC Assembly after his retirement, the first General Secretary, W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, put it starkly: “It must become clear that church members who deny in fact their responsibility for the needy in any part of the world are just as much guilty of heresy as those who deny this or that article of the faith.”[8] This is part of the wisdom of the ecumenical movement of which we are all a part.

In the Sermon on the Mount Matthew spiritualizes the beatitudes. There, the blessed are the poor in spirit, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not only the literal poor, and the literally hungry. As Gervasis has reminded us, the Scriptures are by their very nature ecumenical. The Canon contains four gospels, not just one. We need both versions of the beatitudes, the understandings of both Matthew and Luke about who are blessed. In the same way, the ecumenical movement needs to be concerned about both the apparently material and the apparently spiritual, recognizing that there is no true distinction between them. We need to care about people’s souls and about their bodies. The gospel calls us to care for both. It is not enough to evangelize the world if the people of the world are poor, hungry and weeping. In the Kingdom of God, the hungry are fed and the weeping laugh.

We are about to share the Eucharist together. In an ecumenical community it is easy to get caught up in questions of Eucharistic doctrine and ecclesiology. Who can preside, what words need to be said, who can receive from whom? And yet, among other things, the Eucharist is a shared meal. The bread that is broken is intimately related to the daily bread for which we pray. Christians are a people who gather around the sharing of a meal. This should have a profound affect on how we live out our faith. George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, said, “The greatest community problem of our modern world is how to share bread.” As a community who gathers to share bread together, we are enlightened and empowered to also share bread with the world, to celebrate the ‘liturgy after the liturgy’.

So, as we gather to share bread and wine together, let us remember all those who are hungry and thirsty. As we accept the hospitality of the Lord, who invites us to his table, let us resolve to offer our hospitality to the world. In the name of Christ, who is the true Bread. Amen.

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[1] “Song and Deliverance”, 131.

[2] Luke 4:21.

[3] Luke 1:53.

[4] Luke 4:18:19.

[5] Luke 14:21.

[6] Luke 16:19-31.

[7] Luke 18:26-27.

[8] Quoted in W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Memoirs, (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1973), p. 293.