Given at St. Mark’s Church, West Frankfort, IL; and at St. James’ Memorial Church, Marion, IL.
Our two Cocker Spaniels, Phoebe and Zoe, have been the source of many sermon illustrations….they are, after all, possessed of colorful personalities, and, they are all dog!
But beyond their “canine-ness”, they also exhibit some behavior that is remarkably like us human beings, and so, they are a good source for object lessons.
Today’s object lesson comes from the time when they have something afflicting them (like an itch), or when they are wallowing in pleasure (like when they’re taking a nap, or eating a Busy Bone).
Whenever they are afflicted with an itch, their little hind legs go 90 miles an hour, as they stretch their heads to one side, trying to get at that itch…Whenever this happens, it’s impossible for Deb or I to get their attention….impossible!
By the same token (and especially right after they’ve finished their morning walk), whenever their tummies are full, or they’ve just done of their favorite things, they will often lay down on the sofa, on their backs, all four paws going in four different directions, and for good measure, their tongues will hang out of their mouths as they snore the morning away. Trying to get their attention whenever they’re well fed or well exercised is also futile.
The point of both of these illustrations (and the thesis of this sermon) is to say that our circumstances can get the best of us, making it impossible to see anything else or anyone else, especially God.
For our worries and woes consume us, while our joys and pleasures blind us.
Hold those two themes in your minds for a moment, as we turn to the Gospel reading for today, Luke’s account of Jesus’ teaching often nicknamed the “Sermon on the Plain”. [1]
Luke’s report of the Beatitudes (also recorded in Matthew 5: 3 – 12) – so-called because they start with the word “blessed” - differs significantly from the list we find in Matthew, in the following ways:
- Luke's account contains only four of Matthew's nine Beatitudes. [2]
- Luke's account also contains corresponding "woes", which Matthew omits.
- Luke’s four “blessings” are matched exactly by the four “woes”.
- The first and last “blessing” and “woe” are in the present verb tense.
- The second and third “blessing” and “woe” are in the future verb tense.
- The “woes” reverse the situation described in the “blessings”.
Looking a little further, we also see that Luke’s concern isn’t spiritual, but physical, here and now….Note the changes from Matthew to Luke:
Matthew
Blessed are the poor in spirit ...
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness ...
Luke
Blessed are you who are poor ...
Blessed are you who hunger now ...
Luke’s concern is with the here and now, this present life, not with the realm of the spirit….that is Matthew’s concern.
Luke’s concern extends from the here and now into the future…I think that’s the importance of the present tense, leading into the future tense of the verbs….Luke is trying to tell us that God’s blessings (as well as the warnings that the woes represent) are present with us, here and now, but that they extend into the future time, into the coming of the Kingdom of God.
Let’s return now to the image we began with: our worries and woes consume us, while our joys and pleasures blind us…
Both our woes and our blessings isolate us from each other, and from God….
How did the early Church overcome this isolation? How were the poor enabled to inherit the Kingdom of God? How were the hungry fed, or those who wept enabled to laugh?
I think Luke provides and answer for us, as he records in the Book of Acts (4: 32 - 35) that the early Church pooled all of their resources, selling lands and good that they owned, and giving the proceeds to the Apostles to use in meeting the needs of the Church. Luke tells us that there were “no needy persons among them.”
And we know, from St. Paul’s description of the Church, that there were rich and poor, slave and free persons, in the Church. In I Corinthians 1: 26, he writes, “Brothers, think of what you were when you were called (into Christ’s fellowship). Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were influential, not many were of noble birth.” Paul paints a picture of the early Church in which very few were wealthy or of high standing….Yet all sat, men and women, rich and poor, noble and slave, side-by-side in their worship, calling each other “brothers and sisters in the Lord”. To the stratified Greco-Roman world, this was a scandal, and it eventually led to trouble for the body of believers…The early Church’s behavior posed a threat to the established order, even as Jesus’ teaching poses a threat to the “way things are”. For their extreme egalitarianism, the early Church was cast out of society, bringing to reality the blessing that would rest upon those who were cast out “because of the Son of Man”.
Our worries and woes consume us, forcing our attention onto our problems and our predicaments….We find it impossible to focus on much else, at times (remember the illustration of the Cocker Spaniel, chasing that itch!). Our worries and our woes isolate us from other people, and often, also from God. We are alone, we believe, in our needs and in our misery.
By the same token, our need for material things, for food, for the ability to laugh and to be well-thought-of by others, can blind us to the needs of others, and to the presence of God. We may be tempted to think that we are “self-made” persons, forgetting God’s graciousness in the giving of the talents and gifts that enabled the joys we have to be ours in the first place.
Moreover (and this is a key concern of Luke’s, found throughout his Gospel account), the rich may neglect the needs of the poor: remember the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus
[3] … Lazarus longed to scrape up the scraps of food that fell from the rich man’s table, [4] but the rich man ignored the needs of Lazarus. So, in keeping with the Beatitudes we hear today, the rich man and Lazarus traded places once their lives on this earth had ended….their roles were reversed.
We in the Church today do not share all of our possessions in common….But how might we “live out” the Gospel in a way that honors the early Church’s example?
- Might we contribute to the feeding of the poor in our communities through soup kitchens (volunteering and donating food), or to food drives that benefit food pantries? That surely would help to alleviate the lack of food this is a concern for so many in our communities….In so doing, we might remind those we are helping that we are God’s hands “to do”.
- Perhaps we could comfort those who mourn…I think especially of those who mourn the loss of independence and freedom that living in a nursing home face….A visit from us, a little time spent chatting or reading the Bible, might cheer them up a lot and serve to break down their walls of isolation a little. Our hearts can be God’s heart “to love”.
In so doing, we might be reminded of the lessons that today’s “woes” represent to us: we could, by a change in circumstances, find ourselves in need, in deep emotional distress, or hungry.
May God’s Holy Spirit awaken us to see beyond our needs and our blessings, and, like the early Church, serve to put our blessings to work for meeting the needs of others.
AMEN.
[1] Matthew’s Gospel account places Jesus’ teaching on a mountain, but Luke relates that Jesus went to a mountainside to pray (Luke 6: 12), but then descended to a level place to do his teaching. At the traditional site for this event, located on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, there is a level place which is bounded on the north side by a sizeable hillside.
[2] Luke includes Matthew’s first, second, fourth and ninth Beatitude.
[3] Luke 16: 19 - 31
[4] By the way, in our Rite I Service of Holy Communion, we find an allusion to this parable in the Prayer of Humble Access (BCP, p. 337), “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table….”
