Aligning with the Plain-Talking Jesus

6th Sunday After the Epiphany - Feb 16, 2025

Rev Sarah Colvin

You can find this week's readings here.

O the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it just keeps on giving.  Kind of like the sky did with the snow this past week.  You may remember thinking “enough already—-it was pretty a few hours ago.” 

And then we have these lectionary passages.  One isn’t supposed to complain about scripture, the readings are what they are.  Sometimes we feel the pinch of scripture more than other times.  

It is truly no surprise that most of us feel a bit of a pinch with these passages, the Gospel passage more so, but they do all pinch. The Gospel is uncomfortable and convicting.  Most people tend to like Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes. Matthew’s Beatitudes is from what is called the Sermon on the Mount.  Matthew’s Gospel has a more spiritualized version. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”  So, you know on any given day, most of us can chime right in there—-“Yep, my spirit is poor, Jesus is talking to me, I’m Blessed.”

However, we are in a three-year lectionary cycle, and we are in Luke. Luke’s version is from what is called the Sermon on the plain. Personally, I think it is fitting that Jesus is on the plain.  In this passage, he is on our level, he is just saying like it is, just as simple and plain as possible. And although many Christians first come to enjoy reading the Gospel by reading Luke, on this passage, Luke is not easy.  He is not easy, because Luke talks about the poor, like the truly poor, as in “no money, no resources.” Even if you are homeless in the US, you are richer than most of the people in the rest of the world, but Luke is also difficult because he goes on to list all the woes too. And convicted we are---we are rich and relatively full.  

Blessings and curses--it’s a pattern we first see in the Old Testament. Jeremiah and Psalm 1 somewhat reiterate each other.  It is not known if Jeremiah is quoting the psalm, or if both Jeremiah and the Psalm relied on similar source material.  Particularly in Psalm 1…a strand of Wisdom literature comes to mind.

This kind of Wisdom literature is found all over the Middle East at that time. To summarize this message: “Good things happen if you do the right thing/ behave yourself and bad things befall you when you don’t.”  For the monotheistic Jews, this then takes the form of “follow God and goodness happens”. You become like a tree planted by water in a desert climate. Brings to mind that song: “Like a tree planted by the waterside, we shall not be moved.”  We delight in the Lord when we follow what the Lord commands us.  The only way we and trees in deserts flourish are when we are by the source of life, the river---God, the giver of life.  

And in a slightly different way, but related, the Gospel tells us that the realm of God rests among those who have nothing but God.  I’ll say that again, the realm of God rests among those who have nothing but God. If we have desire to have more blessedness and less woe, then we are to take up our cross and have solidarity with the poor, we must share the life of the God of compassion— we must change and live out that hope.  And this is heavy stuff, this is a game changer.

So what are we to do?  Do we all give up our houses and our bank accounts, since it is “easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of God?” Some do, and we have called some of them saints. I am pretty sure that we shouldn’t do nothing with the thought that we know we are sinful, and can rely on Christ and so will be redeemed on the last day ….and so we really don’t have to live any differently. On the other hand, the sainthood of the voluntary poor is probably not everyone’s call either.  We are in a pickle.

Paul tells us in the letter to the Corinthians that it’s not only about resurrection of the dead, AND it’s not only about life everlasting, BUT it’s about aligning with the plain talking Jesus. Says Paul, “If Christ has not been raised, we are still in our sins.” But Christ has been raised, and so even our sins cannot separate us from the redemption and love of God. We must face what Jesus tells us are God’s desires for our right behavior. When we face our shortcomings, and the shortcomings of our leaders and culture at large, it brings home that sin (not living rightly) and holiness overlap in everybody.” This is what is Jeremiah was saying,

The heart is devious above all else;

it is perverse—

who can understand it?

Devious in this since means crooked and is from the same Hebrew root as the name Jacob.  There is something to being human, being the sons and daughters of Jacob, adopted through Christ who both plainly calls us to feed the poor and the hungry. We all have our blessings and woes.  We are human, we are crooked, our hearts are devious. Hopefully we still let God’s desires work on us. We live plainly on earth and through Jesus, reach for God’s desires of heaven.  We move the needle off inaction.

To paraphrase Johnny Cash, we can’t be ‘so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good’, but conversely we must not be of such earthly mind, that we lose sight of heaven. 

O God, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will AND deed.

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IMAGE ATTRIBUTION:

Bruegel, Jan, 1568-1625. Sermon on the Mount, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55346 [retrieved February 19, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sermon_on_the_Mount_by_Jan_Brueghel_the_Elder,_Getty_Center.jpg.