All Saints Sunday, 11/04/2007

Sermon on Luke 6:20-30, by David Zersen

Looking at his disciples, Jesus said,

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now, when they exclude and insult you

and reject your name as evil because of the Son of Man.

Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.

Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.

Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers

Treated the false prophets.

But, I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who

curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If some one takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do no demand it back." (NIV)

STRUGGLING WITH SAINTHOOD

I have a 3 year-old granddaughter who struggles with sharing. When her little cousin comes to visit, she gets very concerned that the toys that her cousin touches or plays with are "hers." Sometimes she declares war by shouting "mine" or she kicks or spits and tries to rip the toy away. One can see the gloom in her face at times when she knows that the cousin is coming. She has tried to demonize her by thinking, "this is that girl who just comes in here and gets to use my stuff." All the nurturing words of the worried father, like "sharing is caring," don't seem to help and the best advice from relatives and friends seems to be, "well, it's a stage. She'll get over it."

From a psychological standpoint, the relatives and friends mean well, and they are partially right. There is a developmental stage from which we free ourselves as we gradually learn that sharing doesn't mean losing what we have. However, there is something more at stake here, from which we never entirely free ourselves. As humans, we have a continuing need to secure our advantage. It is part of our fallen nature. In some situations, such assertiveness can lead to force. As we mature, however, we often find more sophisticated ways to address this issue. We look around at our relatives, neighbors, schoolmates or colleagues and find shortcomings that make them less-qualified or

-valued than we think ourselves to be. We become smug, condescending. This is something we work out in our heads. It doesn't need to lead to action. We can be happy in knowing that we are less troubled or more disciplined than others. We enjoy knowing that we are good at being good. This is more sophisticated behavior. How do you feel about it?

Understanding why humanly-contrived goodness is a dead-end street

At base, this is a spiritual, not just a psychological problem, because it deals with our values, our attitudes toward others and our sense of meaning in life. At the heart of the spiritual problem is a self-righteousness which needs no forgiveness because we have convinced ourselves of our own goodness. And the technique used by self-righteous people to absolve themselves is called scapegoating, a way of placing our faults on others so we can be free of fault ourselves. It is a process through which we demonize others and place upon them our very own guilt.

This is the very thing at which my little granddaughter was so good, making her cousin the problem. And then, she followed it up by smugly smiling and trying to crawl into grandpa's lap after she had finished her dirty deed. It is here that Christians who believe in original sin have the upper hand for they know that we don't begin to have spiritual deficits when we are 12 or 14, but rather when we exert our egos in the cradle.

And wise marketers, whether they represent commercial or political interests, know how to cater to such egocentricity in more (and I put this in quotes) "sophisticated" adults. People who sell luxury line wrist-watches, autos, clothes and homes cater to our need to be better than others by showing us pictures of the way life "ought to be." We can make our own judgments about the poor, hungry and troubled. They are simply at a different level than those like us to whom the advertising speaks. We could have been like that too, but through hard and honest work we have risen above that. We are not as they are. (Wasn't there a tax collector who said something like that?) How do you feel about this?

Politicians can be very clever at enhancing our self-righteousness. Consider the "family values" camp, regardless of with which party they may seek to align themselves. They wish to help voters (and in the last election 20% fell in this group) believe that they are the moral winners by demonizing those who vote pro-choice or pro-gay marriage. Now, I will not say there are no moral issues to be debated in both of those matters, but Jesus said precious little about either of them. What he did say a great deal about was how we spend our time and money and whether we love others as much as we love ourselves. When a politically engineered campaign makes us feel smug because we are not as others are, we have fallen in the very trap set for us. We have affirmed our own goodness by placing our sins on scapegoats. Do you see this happening?

At the heart of the New Testament is this conviction that not only do we typically do this with our fellow human beings, but we did it with Jesus of Nazareth as well. We placed our sins on him who knew no sin. Using the self-righteous stance that sees us good, not even needing the love and forgiveness of God, we silence the voice of his love at the cross, and say with the crowd, "his blood be on us and our children." Our violent behavior, going back to our cradles, is part and parcel of who we are. And in the crucifixion, God says, "no more!" to this behavior. He puts it to death once and for all. In raising Jesus to life, he gives us the opportunity to consider a new and nurturing life style through which we care for our brothers and sisters in love instead of condescending to them out of arrogance. He introduces us to the possibility of sainthood, Jesus style. And once we learn what Jesus' approach to faith and life is, we no longer need to struggle to make ourselves acceptable through faulty views of our own goodness.

Understanding why Jesus' love for us sets us free really to live

Today's text generally makes us nervous because we see impossible rules being imposed upon us. It challenges the very type of life-style in which we pride ourselves as Westerners. We are meant to be victors, achievers, possibility thinkers. Even Jesus wants us this way, a recent best-seller titled Jesus CEO tells us. Why would anyone want anything different?

On a day which remembers the saints who have gone before us, as well as our own status as saints, we have a Gospel lesson which seems to encourage us to believe that if we are to be like the saints, we will need to be poor, wretched and blind. Or at least like Mother Theresa who cared for the poor, wretched and blind. How many of us seriously want to move to Calcutta or any other marginalized setting in which the have-nots are separated from the haves? And if you've done any traveling at all or just read the newspapers, you know that the differences between your status and that of people who live at subsistence levels throughout the world is very great indeed.

It is good to remember that Semitic language loves hyperbole and Jesus often expresses himself in extreme ways in order to make a point. In this Sermon on the Plain, as it is often called, Luke gives us a different setting from Matthew's Sermon on the Mount. Here we are not with a new Moses on a high promontory, but on level ground with the people, you and me. And Luke fashions Jesus' words in a new way, giving to each "Blessed" a contrasting "Woe." Yet all of these words are spoken to his disciples, and thus to you and me. They are not meant to be words of lightning and thunder, as those from Sinai, that none can approach, but rather words of a new loving lifestyle that places Jesus' follower's in solidarity with those of no account in the world.

Admittedly, this is radical, at least in terms of the lifestyle which our society prizes as acceptable and attainable. We live in a society which believes that we ought to strive to achieve, to assert our advantage, to insist on our rights and to repay injustice with appropriate vengeance. This sounds acceptable because we have allowed it to become our way of life for too long. It is a way of life that can lead us to reject people, to repress them, to retaliate and rise above them. Implicit in all such actions are varying degrees of violence.

Jesus, however, does not find himself at home in a world of human violence because it leads to a dead end street. Instead he seeks to identify with those who are victimized, with the poor, the hungry, and the suffering. His boundless love which affirms these people-even those whom we make our scapegoats-the hated, the excluded and the reviled-introduces an approach to oneness and peace which is certainly within our reach. We may never perfectly achieve it, but his love empowers us to embrace the marginalized in our society. And as we become one with them, we discover a new sense of who we are and who we are called to be as Christ's brothers and sisters.

Let me give you just one contemporary example of how Christ's approach is different from the more traditional approach of peace through righteous violence. A number of politicians have said in recent months, "Let me tell you what the most important threat facing us in our world today is!" We wait, of course, with bated breath for the answer. Typically, the answer has something to do with "Extremist Islamism," meaning not just Islam, but the belief that Islam is society's only hope. Now, of course, this is scapegoating in the classic meaning of the term, placing the ills of society on another so we don't have to accept it as our own problem. We are not a part of this problem. We are simply the victims. So we can rally around the politician and make common cause with those who want to fight extremism.

Reflective people will know that this is overly simplistic and that it leads to the kind of righteous violence which is creating animosity between the U.S. and other countries throughout the world. I'm not here proposing that we need to have a religious attitude on the part of our administration. I am suggesting, however, that as Christians we should be concerned for peace with all humankind, even with our enemies. We are called to love them, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who abuse us. And that will entail discussion, exploration of common ideas, sharing of common values, and embracing crucial hopes.

Challenging as those words sometimes sound to us, they are not intended as political or economic rhetoric or policy for a government. They are the words describing an experimental life style for Christian communities which gather regularly to study the Bible and to eat and drink Bread and Wine together as they celebrate the love which God has extended to them in Jesus Christ. And as they seek to affirm all humans with that love, they discover that sainthood in the Christian sense is not something you strive to earn, but rather it is God's gift to us. We may continue to challenge one another to rise up to the full stature of Christ among us, but we never need doubt that we are, along with those who have gone before us, recipients of God's own gift of holy faith and life. And struggle as we may to make sense of the way in which this gift integrates itself in our daily life, we rejoice that we have been given this day, and this week, to explore its impact on those around us.

See also:
A Hymn Festival on Luke 6: 20-31remembering the Hymns of Charles Wesle

Prof. Dr. Dr. President Emeritus David Zersen
Concordia University Texas
E-Mail: djzersen@aol.com

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