Blessed are you...Woe to you - A sermon for All Saints

November 3, 2013

Luke 6:20-31

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.  Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.  

This past Friday, five billion dollars in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, took effect.  This means that 47 million Americans, children, and seniors, will have less access to healthy foods as their assistance will drop from $167 per person per month to $158 per person per month.  And more talks are coming in Washington over how to make further cuts to this program, which has provided a lifeline to the working poor, veterans and the disabled, especially in the years following the beginning of the recession in 2008.  All this while it has been publicized that these same Washington politicians are eating extravagant meals during their diplomatic travels.    

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

A couple months ago, McDonalds presented their employees with a sample budget to help them to gain control of their finances while working for McDonalds.  It factored in that their full time employees who earned the minimum wage would have to work a second full time job in order to make ends meet.  They also have resources in place to make sure that these employees have help applying for food stamps, which, according to this sample budget, they would need in order to purchase groceries. While trying to be helpful to their employees, McDonald’s pointed out to the world that the minimum wage is not a living wage, even if you work full time.  Oh, and by the way, while the majority of McDonalds employees make just more than $12,000 a year, the CEO just received a pay raise this year to over $13 million a year in salary.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the son of man.  Woe to you when all speak well of you.

My friend Kirsten is a pastor in Cairo, Egypt.  She was asked by the ELCA to delay her arrival there in August because of the violence there…violence that resulted in the burning of several Coptic Christian churches and at least one orphanage.  Kirsten’s congregation has cancelled and changed worship service times to stand in solidarity with the Coptic Christians, who are in danger because of their faith.  And in this country, where folks claim there is a war on Christianity, we worship freely where we want and when we want without threat of harm or death. 

Are you uncomfortable yet?  I know I am.

As a person who has been blessed to never know poverty, who has never wondered where my next meal is coming from, who has more stuff than I need, who qualifies as rich in the eyes of a good majority of the world, and who is free to lead worship just about wherever I please and whenever I please without fear of being arrested or persecuted for it, Jesus’ words sting.  And I wish that this morning that we were hearing Matthew’s Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount instead of Luke’s Jesus in the sermon on the plain. 

Blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake…I can get behind that.  I have had my share of faith crises…I have written politicians pleading that they not make cuts to programs that care for the poor and that feed children.  There are blessings abounding in the Sermon on the Mount.

But the sermon on the plain doesn’t carry those modifiers…Jesus cuts straight to the point.  Blessed are you who are poor…blessed are you who are hungry…blessed are you who weep…blessed are you who are hated and excluded on account of my name. And Jesus even throws some warnings in there in the woes…But woe to you who are rich…woe to you who are full…woe to you who laugh…woe to you when people speak well of you. 

If you weren’t uncomfortable before, are you now?

To be told that the poor in spirit are blessed, as are the peacemakers, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake is one thing.

To be told that the poor and the hungry and those who weep and those who are persecuted for their faith are blessed all the while woe to the rich and the full and those who laugh and those who are spoken well of is quite another…and it’s harder to digest.

But let us look at it from another angle.  According to Genesis 1, at the end of each day of creation, God looked at what he created and saw that it was good…and when he completed creation at the end of the 6^th day and was preparing to rest, God looked at all that he created and saw that it was very good.  Meaning that God’s intention was that anyone could look at the world around them and to agree with God that it was very good.  God did not create poverty, sin did.  God did not create people to be hungry, sin did that.  God did not create us to withhold things from one another and to ignore the suffering of our brothers and sisters so that we could get rich, sin did that. 

And God saw what sin had done to our world, how it had hijacked the good creation that he had made and he knew something needed to be done about it.  So, God chose to slip into skin and become a part of the human experience by giving up all luxury and fame and wealth and instead living the life of a poor, homeless peasant.  And as he lived among the poor, he challenged all of us to a better way of living, a way of living in which we are transformed into people who turn away from sin and instead seek the wellbeing of our neighbors so that all people can look at the creation around them and say “yeah, this is good.”  And as uncomfortable as it can make us to hear the blessings and the woes, this is the challenge that Jesus continues to give us…to seek ways of living among one another so that one day the number of children that go hungry in this world will be 0, so that one day the percentage of workers earning a living wage is 100. 

Jesus didn’t come into this world to just be and he wasn’t content to leave things the way they are, instead he sought transformation and justice and he died because he challenged the status quo and made the religious and political leaders around him a little too uncomfortable because they were happy with the way things were and they didn’t want some peasant from the boonies coming into Jerusalem and pointing out the ways that they were abusing the power given to them. 

And so, while it may seem like this is a pretty out there text for the Sunday in which we celebrate the lives of All the Saints, I think it’s pretty appropriate.  Jesus called us to live in community together, a community in which the abundance of God’s creation is enough to meet everyone’s basic needs.  And though we may fall short in this expectation from time to time, we are encouraged to keep on striving for the greater good by the knowledge that in our baptism we were joined to Christ in his death and even though we are sometimes confronted by our short comings, we are comforted by the knowledge that, because of our faith, Jesus wants to bless us anyways so that we will be strengthened to out and follow in the footsteps of our brothers and sisters in the faith who have gone before us and shown us what it means to live as faithful followers of Christ, seeking justice and peace in all the world and spreading the news of God’s love.