February 11, 2007 - Blessed are you

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
11 January 2007
Luke 6.17-26
Blessed are you
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007


In my first ordained position, I was the Assistant Pastor of a large congregation in San Rafael, California. The pay was horrendous, especially for a job in the heart of Marin County. They told us before we ever got there that we’d have to live 15 miles away at the northern end of the county. We had a 4-year-old, Russell, and 2 month old Schuyler. Mortgage rates were high, so that even in the cheaper neighborhood where we bought a 900 sq-ft condo, our mortgage payment alone was well over half what I earned. Then there were homeowners fees, insurance and property taxes. Marcia figured out how to make some money at home and save on child care by working during naps and paying 8th grade girls to watch the kids downstairs, while she pounded out court transcripts upstairs in one end of our bedroom closet.

Somehow, we made it.

Now, when we looked around the world then, as we still look around the world now, it didn’t seem reasonable to call ourselves poor. Our floors were carpet and not dirt. We ate our fill at every meal. We were warm in the winter and dry in a storm. If we got sick, we saw a doctor. Poverty was not our condition. Yet, by comparison with people otherwise like us in church and with most of the families our eldest would meet in kindergarten, we were at the low end of the income scale. We didn’t drive the cars others drove or take the vacations they took. It was even too expensive for us to go out for dinner and a movie with friends we made at church. We just paid our bills, and we usually felt broke.

We remember it as some of the best days of our lives. When Monday came, my day off, we packed a lunch and drove. (Gas was cheap.) The Point Reyes National Seashore was free, where the tide pools were interesting for the parents and fun for Russell to splash in. Or there was Pier 39 in San Francisco. A block or two beyond the parking garage, we parked for free. There were buskers performing their street acts, our favorite the Butterfly Man, who had a butterfly tattooed on his bald head and who was clever at insulting those of us in the audience who could take a joke. The weather was especially pleasant in spring and fall, and after we picnicked on one of the benches, we threw bread to the seagulls and later splurged on ice cream cones—a few dollars treating the whole family.

When we spent time with people in our community or in the church, the lack of glitzy entertainment meant entertaining each other with just our own company, which proved to be easier than we’d have thought and was usually more enjoyable than the sort of outing that cost a couple of days’ wages.

One of our most memorable days, for me, was an afternoon and evening at the Tumazis. They were a family from Iran. The father, Peter, though, made sure we knew that they were Persians, not Iranians. They were from a proud and ancient culture, not a nation-state made up to accommodate a 20th century shah and international politics. We ate interesting food that night and learned about people in another part of the world of whom we’d been ignorant and whom by our ignorance we had demeaned. I became a better person that day, for I learned that there is a kind of ignorance that is not benign—that in my favored status in a powerful nation, my ignorance permits the ruin of lives and cultures. I was suddenly living in a bigger, more interesting world. It’s the sort of thing a week’s vacation in a tony cottage at Sea Ranch along the north coast, no matter how much you spend, cannot buy.

All the same, if Jesus had said to me in those days, “Blessed are you poor,” I think I know how I’d have taken it. I think I’d have said that even in my situation, if Jesus had hedged and said, “Blessed are you low-income,” it would have left me nonplussed. Scraping by is stress, and as far as I know, it is still true that family distress over finances is a leading cause of divorce in our country. Tight money is hard on a family, and that was true for us. Still, what Jesus says is also true. We are all of us blessed, and the grinding challenges of our lives—even abject poverty, famishing hunger, crushing sorrow, or devastating hatred—are somehow part of that. Blessed are we all of us.

And don’t forget how this day with Jesus starts out. There he is with that great multitude closing in on him. “They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured,” it says in Luke. “And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.” These are people with deep troubles. They’re desperate for healing, for cleansing, and for cure. They believe in the power to heal, and they reach for the power and the hope of life restored, no matter who knows it.

That’s not our kind of openness, is it? Not our kind of honesty. We can feel bad—we can feel terrible—but it makes everything worse when people know. And by all means, don’t let anyone think we’re desperate. Desperation is so shameful. Desperation is for sissies. We think this way.

The people coming across the plain to Jesus, though, they could care less what it looked like to stagger and grope their way to his touch. Jesus likes that. Not that Jesus needs to be needed, but how else is he going to know that someone has a disease to heal or a demon oppressing their heart and mind? Jesus does not see us in the privacy of his office. He does not hand us the little gown that closes in the back and tell us to change while we leaves the room. He does not do a little clinical tapping and probing and then hand us a note on which he has scribbled his best guess for what ails us. He does not send us out with our doubts and confusions and worries to wait silently by ourselves while something happens or does not happen with our health, strength and sanity. Jesus does not forget about us until we call again to say that what has happened or not happened has left us still far from whole, or especially to say that it is so lonely to be sick and worried and, inevitably, dying, having hidden ourselves from the world in our trouble.

Jesus does not send us into isolation but offers healing in the whole community of faith, where, because we all of us move to him and bend to him with our sores showing and our tears falling for the whole world to see. The way Jesus sees it, we are safest in our sickness with each other, not in quarantine. For when he is absent, his power to heal remains in our spiritual communion with one another and God.

Thus gathered for our care and cure at the touch of our Lord, he not only heals but also speaks, for we came both to be healed and to hear. He has said, “Blessed are you poor,” and we have already understood something about that, that being poor of itself is its own blessing. “For yours is the kingdom of God” is what he says next, which is to say not only that we are already part of the kingdom but that we also share in some way in our own sovereignty there.

Poor and hungry yet though we be, we are royalty with our places at the table of abundant grace. You may be a single mother out there, beset with worry in that world where your worth is defined by how well you compete for money, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the duchess of grace and peace. You may be a father out there in that mystifying world, where you daughter won’t speak to you but your prostate won’t leave you alone, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the duke of holy friendship and love. You may pull out that tray of pills, three sections for every day, tablets and caplets of all colors and shapes, reminders of how many ways things can go haywire in an aging body, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the prince and princess of wellness and fullness of life.

We are all of us here with you and for you, whoever you are. When you go downstairs for soup and a sandwich after worship, today, soak it in. Look around you and adjust your gem-crusted mantle. Tilt your scepter in greeting to your cousins of the royal family. Doff your crown to the princes and princesses scurrying about on the linoleum. Whatever ails you, whatever hatred and scorn may elsewhere oppress you, in line for le buffet royale de potage et sandwich, the blood running through your veins is blue, and the sun never sets on your realm. Rejoice in this day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, or at least next to the Crock-Pot® of chili.

So this is good, noticing before Jesus and one another our poverty and hunger, our weeping and the fact of hatred in some hearts toward us. It is good to stop and notice this. Then it is necessary to hear the rest, the woes to us who are already so rich that we can sleep in beds and heated homes, that our worst health problems visit us through our abundance of food and leisure. Woe to us who are full and rich and laughing, to us whom the world may resent but must also admire, if grudgingly, for having achieved such wealth and power that our influence reaches every corner of the globe. Everyone knows all about us.

It is necessary to hear these disturbing woes and necessary that we be disturbed by them. For the degree to which we tilt the balance of wealth and well being to our own advantage is the degree to which a power greater than ourselves will wrench it back toward level, and if Jesus is right, it won’t be pleasant.

We tend to believe in America, anymore, that the only invisible power greater than ourselves that moves the forces of wealth and well being on this planet is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that corrects all problems and imbalances through the magical workings of a free market. So if that is true, America’s manufacturing workers and farmers already know what a grim and cruel hand this free and unfettered market is, passing their jobs and opportunities to lands where decency doesn’t matter, health doesn’t matter and life itself in the waters of the world doesn’t matter. If the free market is what corrects the imbalance of wealth around this globe, the woes have already begun for many people just like us.

But Jesus believes—and I keep thinking American Christians still, in their heart of hearts, believe—in a moral hand that invisibly moves among the masses and even along the halls of power. And woe to them who neglect to watch for it, heed it and look for their moral direction in its reach. Woe to us when we intentionally blind ourselves to the immoral poverty and disease that arise from injustice, or to the immoral devastation and grief that arise from violence and war. If we believe there is a moral hand moving among us, woe to us if we fail to watch where its finger is pointing; woe to us when it opens to us and we fail to fill it for the sake of God’s compassion.

It is good to remember this side of Jesus who blesses, the part that when he blesses—however much blessing, though it be infinite, with which he has it in his power to bless the world with. It is good to remember, along with the blessing side of Jesus, this other side of him that cannot fail to see how little we some of us, or all of us sometimes, care that our enjoyment of life may be granted through the suffering of others. You may believe that Jesus will not in the end punish you for your comforts and pleasures here—and to be honest, I don’t believe he will either—but while I, for one, am here to enjoy the royal treatment of blessing through the touch of Jesus, I want to live in the light of that blessing and not under the dark cloud of his woes. To so live in that life, I have some reordering to do, and I intend to work on that, which, if we believe such saints as St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa and countless missionaries from all varieties of churches, is a great joy.

Anne Frank wrote, “No one ever got poor by giving.” Anne Frank, a teenage. Hiding in the darkness from people who hated her, she remembered in her poor state and in the crosshairs of some of the most vehement hatred the world has known, knew something about giving. If we can discover for ourselves the deep blessings of the hard times in our lives, and if we can find it in us to give from what we have now for the sake of bringing the world into the balance Jesus says he wants to see, then what blessings we will enjoy.

One way or another, in spite of it all and because of it all, blessed are you.

Amen.