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Joseph P. Mathews, OSL
All Saints, C
1 November 2007
Luke 6.20-31

Those who have been attending CHURCH on a regular basis might have noticed a few changes tonight from the way some things have been happening this year. I’ll get to the text shortly, but first a few comments about tonight’s service. As the year started I thought about the hospitality of changing certain things every week. In the beginning, today was the switching point of the first semester. How we respond to the first lesson with the Psalm has changed and will stay the same through the end of the calendar year. Our creeds and prayers of the people have been relatively consistent; each has had one change over the course of the semester.

The biggest change – how we respond to the second lesson in preparation for the Gospel lesson - is a direct result of this day. We’ve come together tonight to remember all God’s saints and those close to us who have died in the last year. We’ve changed from a gradual hymn – one that sandwiches the Gospel lesson, often to give room for a Gospel procession into the people – to an alleluia as the Gospel acclamation. In the burial rite of the Book of Common Prayer¬ – the service book of The Episcopal Church – after communion the priest says, “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; 
and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we 
return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ All of us go down
to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, 
alleluia, alleluia.”
As we’ve gathered here tonight having come from various graves our song continues to be the joyful song of the resurrection – alleluia, alleluia, alleluia – and our Gospel text for this day lends itself to that song and calls to mind the Saints of God who surround us now in a great cloud of witnesses and those souls who have passed from our lives in recent times. And now to address the Gospel before us.

Today’s Gospel text contains the Lukan Beatitudes, which as I read them you may have noticed are not the ones that we usually see on bookmarks or lists or ever discussed really. Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, or as Dallas Willard likes to put it “Discourse on the Hill” was recorded before Matthew’s and the words Luke has for us are sharper and – like how I think the Gospel should be read and lived – scarier. In addition to having Beatitudes – blessings, this text contains Woes and the beginning of the Lukan account of Jesus’s speech about loving one’s enemies. All three parts can be applied to our lives in some way or another, regardless of how the text directly speaks to us.
The first part of the text is a section of blessings. Blessings are for the poor, the hungry, and the weeping. Something that did not escape my eye the first time I read this passage (while I had Matthew in my head) was that these blessings are not for those who lack in a spiritual sense, but rather for those who merely lack. The poor were at the bottom of the heap in the First Century CE. As such not only would the first line have spoken to them, but the second and third parts too. If you are poor you may not be able to feed yourself – or more scary to some, your family. If you are doing your best to pay rent and get food on the table, but feel like nothing is working, you might break down into tears. Frequently. Jesus talks to these people in these parts.

The blessings Jesus gives the poor, the hungry, and the weeping is a role-reversal that has is a common theme in the Lukan narrative. Although the Sunday readings have us in Luke 18 now, for the last many chapters Jesus has been flipping things upside down. Rabbinic teaching of the day was that those who were wealthy were blessed of God. The people with tables full every meal had done what they were supposed to do and God was rewarding them. Here Jesus takes that and completely rejects it.

Rather than saying the rich and the full are blessed, he offers them woe. Those who are rich have received their due. Those who are full will be hungry. Those who laugh will weep. This is a message of hope for some but not for others. The Mathian version of the Beatitudes we are used to hearing not only spiritualizes huger and poverty, but also omits Jesus’s woes that Luke records. How, then is this Gospel text good news for those of us not utterly oppressed? Though we may be weeping at the losses of our loved ones, how can those of us who are neither deeply impoverished nor starving see what Jesus has to say as good news? Do the woes apply to…us?

I would say that depends. The Good News of this text for many of us comes in the way Christ spoke to the disciples. The langue here in the Greek is active and performative – think back to how the Christian creation story is recorded. God speaks and it is. In saying these things and speaking these words, Christ not only verbally rejects the rabbinic teaching of the day, but through the Word of the Almighty makes it so. The poor are blessed. The hungry are filled. The weeping do laugh.

But what of the second part of the sermon here? Where Jesus talks about loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, giving to anyone who begs?… I quote verse 31 in summary, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Here Jesus is saying more scary things. Roles were reversed at the beginning of this lesson, and now Jesus is calling us out of the safety that we may have found in our faith. We are not called to return evil for evil. Or to hate those who hate us. We are not called to grudingly give our coats and keep our shirts. We are not called to question the motives or usages of those who beg or are in need. We’re to return a slap for a slap, give more than is asked of us, and give to whomever asks of us. This is not safe in the world in which we live, where we might be kidnapped or physically harmed or where we ourselves might be starving or cold. These people, though are the people we remember today. The legend of Saint Martin of Tours, patron of the local Catholic parish is that he took the cloak off his back and gave it to a beggar.

As I think about those I’ve lost in my life in the last year I think about my grandmother, who on many occasions told me to turn the other cheek. She died early in the spring, and I remember the tears that I wept from the Honors Cottage to the Wesley. While writing this today I teared up thinking about those tears. I remember how stoic I was during the entire burial and how much I laughed with my family at her house. I also remember that it really hit me not during the service of Death and Resurrection, but during the remembering of the dead at St. Mark’s. Elizabeth Mathews was a saint of God. In showing her love for other people she became active in the performative language of Christ.

Loving one another in the radical way that Christ loved us is dangerous indeed. Christ addresses it when he says, “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.” Here he tells us that our radical, world-changing love is to include all people as people. All means all, and people means recognizing that every human being is a creation of the divine. Labeling others in terms of one aspect of their life devalues them as human beings and objectifies them as items to be tossed about. Conversely, those who maintain established norms so well that no one speaks badly of them are warned that they’re not doing something right and should reevaluate all that they’re doing.

On this All Saints Day think about the communion of saints – those who have come before us, those with us now, and those who are yet to come. Think about those we remember tonight – individually and corporately – who loved everyone, especially their neighbors and in doing so joined in the active, performative language of Christ in blessing the poor, the hungry, and the weeping. Think about saints today - those from all walks of life beside you, those you know, and you yourselves evaluate how you are loving your enemy, giving to all who beg, and blessing the poor.

I leave you with the words of a hymn that I adore, number 712 in the United Methodist Hymnal, written by Lesbia Scott. It’s a hymn entitled “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” and was originally written as an Anglican hymn but has been made more specific to the American church. It addresses the love we are to show to God and to our neighbor and illustrates that our living into Christ’s words is not dependent on our job or station in life.

I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green;
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and his love made them strong;
and they followed the right for Jesus' sake
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there's not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn't be one too.

They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still.
The world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus' will.
You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store,
in church, by the sea, in the house next door;
they are saints of God, whether rich or poor,
and I mean to be one too.

In the name of the Alpha and the Omega: the God who was, the God who is, and the God who is to come. Amen.

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Ashley Davis
28 October 2007
22+ Pentecost, C
Luke 18.9-14

So, on our way back from Park Memorial this afternoon, Paul, and Jeana, and I were listening to this song and it struck me that there was some syncronicity to this song and our Gospel text for the day. It is a dialogue song. Gary Coleman’s part of the opening dialogue goes like this:

GARY COLEMAN: Right now you are down and out and feeling really crappy
NICKY: I'll say.
GARY COLEMAN: And when I see how sad you are/ It sort of makes me...Happy!
NICKY: Happy?!
GARY COLEMAN: Sorry, Nicky, human nature-/ Nothing I can do!/ It's...
Schadenfreude! Making me feel glad that I'm not you.
NICKY: Well that's not very nice, Gary!
GARY COLEMAN: I didn't say it was nice! But everybody does it!

Yes, I just quoted “Shadenfreude” (which is German for happiness at the misfortune of others) from Avenue Q in a sermon. The song ends with the lyrics, “Shadenfreude: making the world a better place to be.”

Meanwhile, back at the text…Verse 9 tells us that this parable was written to “some who were confident in their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else.”

I think the first question we should ask is, “Who you talkin’ ‘bout, Jesus?”

Luke says Jesus speaks to “some,” but we want names, don’t we. Traditionally, we have assumed that Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, all Pharisees are proud and self-righteous now aren’t they, talk about stereotyping, but notice that the text does not say that Jesus addressed the Pharisees.

Drop down to the closing line of our passage, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” This is a direct quote from Luke 14:11, when Jesus talked to the guests who chose a places of honor at a banquet. The last verse keeps us from limiting who Jesus is talking about to just one group.

I think maybe at this point, since you are all intelligent people, you realize that this is just as easily about the disciples and certainly just as easily about each of us. We read this parable and immediately and ironically think, gosh, that Pharisee was wrong, glad I’m not like him, and whoops you are.

Let’s dig into the body of this passage a little more. Both people go up to the temple. Regardless of which direction you come from the temple was at the highest point in Jerusalem so you had to go up. Prayer has been a theme from the beginning of this chapter, which told us through the widow to “pray persistently” and here to beware of the “perils of presumptuous prayer.” We get both the position and the prayer of both individuals. Both people start out with the word “God” and that is about as much as they have in common. The Pharisee stands up front and offers God a prayer of thanksgiving and reminds God of all he has done for God. The tax collector stood at a distance and said,” God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The tax collector’s words mirror the beginning of Psalm 51, except that he adds the words “a sinner.” The Psalm goes on to say, I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me…create in me a clean heart and put a new and right spirit within me.”

Let’s hold up before we give the tax collector some metal of honor and make the Pharisee out to be a certified stinker. This parable neglects the fact that this tax collector, once he has wiped his eyes and blown his nose, will head home and probably continue his shady job. Sure it sucks, it is a nasty business, but he is stuck in it. To care for his family and what not, tomorrow he will take from his neighbors, turn money over to the empire, and keep some for himself. How many of us get the prayer right in church and fail to live it out in our daily lives?

On to the Pharisee, the parable doesn’t tell us that he sang “The Summons” all the way to the temple that day, or that he had tears in his eyes as he prayed, or that he was awash with emotion, and really meant all that he said. What preacher wouldn’t love a church full of people as committed as the Pharisee: he titles regularly, teaches Sunday School, visits the sick and feeds the hungry.

His prayer wasn’t that bad, it is very similar to many classic prayers of the time, look at the Psalms. The thing that separates him from the Jewish form is that he doesn’t say thank you from sparing me from being a thief or a rogue, but thank you that I am not like “this” tax collector. Here, he changes from a grammar of gratitude to a grammar of elitism. Here, he stopped praying and started speaking. With one sideways glance, he measures himself against his neighbor and is quite pleased with the distance he finds.

So in a sense this parable is a warning against pride, and self-sufficiency, and of relying on one’s own good works. It is also about being aware of who you are, both as a sinner and as a child of God, without having to compare yourself to your neighbor. As it so happens, we having been studying just this same thing in Tuesday lunch Bible study, Henri Nouwen in his book Compassion says, “Through union with God, we are lifted out of our competitiveness with each other into divine wholeness. By sharing in the wholeness of the one in whom no competition exists, we can enter into new compassionate relationships with each other. By accepting our identities from the one who is the giver of life, we can be with each other without distance or fear. This new identity, free from greed and desire for power, allows us to enter so fully and unconditionally into the sufferings of others that it becomes possible for us to heal the sick and call the dead to life.”

The group that the Pharisee belonged to did not make this easy for him, to be a Pharisee meant that you separated yourself from others so as to maintain purity before God. If you drew cartoon balloons over each of our heads I imagine some of them would say, “ Thank God I’m not like those fundamentalists.” Or “Thank God I’m not like those liberals.” Or “thank God I’m above all this.” Is there anymore of a sign that we have no idea who we are? Isn’t it so much easier and more comforting to look at others than to try to make sense of our own paradoxical selves? As our opening lyrics of the sermon said, does it really make the world a better place in any way for me to feel glad that I’m not you? Who you talkin’ to Jesus? Me and you and you and all of you.

In the name of our creator who invites us all to remember our true identity as children of God, an identity that doesn’t come from comparing ourselves to others or separating ourselves from them, amen.

Fall Break Part 2

No gathering.

Fall Break Part 1

No Gathering

Fifth Sunday

Gathering of song and scripture.  No sermon.