Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on February 16, 2025, the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Jer. 17:5-10, 1 Cor 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

It’s a little ironic to be preaching a sermon on a sermon, and anyway I’ve always thought the beatitudes preach themselves pretty effectively without much help from the clergy; maybe more so without our meddling interference!

The version of the Beatitudes we get today is Luke’s version, which is a little grittier and less pious than Matthew’s more famous rendition. Matthew’s gospel gives us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” where Luke gives us the decidedly more pointed, “Blessed are the poor,” full stop. Matthew’s gospel gives us, “Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” where Luke gives us, “Blessed are the hungry.” 

And then, where in Matthew’s gospel Jesus takes the beatitudes as a point of departure for a longer sermon about many things, in Luke’s Gospel Jesus stays on the theme a moment longer to offer a corresponding set of woes. As if his beatitudes themselves weren’t pointed enough, we get a further, “Woe to the rich, woe to the well-fed, woe to you when all speak well of you.” I think it’s fair to say, none of us are getting off the hook in Luke’s gospel, in a way it’s all too easy to spiritualize away the force of the meaning in Matthew’s.

I love Matthew, I love the sermon on the mount, there’s probably a reason it’s the more famous rendition. But then perhaps it’s fitting that this Sunday we hear from Luke; perhaps it’s fitting we get the unvarnished truth, less calculated to appeal to the masses. It’s becoming increasingly clear, that at least since the return from Covid, we live in an ever more confrontational age; here we have a fairly confrontational gospel. What do we do with it?

Most of the time, when we hear this text, we nod sagely and agree. This is exactly why it’s so important that the church be involved in social justice, why it’s so meaningful that here at St. Mark’s we have a feeding ministry, why we can be so proud of the shelter and housing ministries provided across the diocese, why we can take such joy in being a founding partner of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s refugee resettlement ministry: because we believe that the poor and those in need are dear to God, and that to help them materially, or, in the old language, to offer them “the corporal works of mercy,” is at the very core of how we live out our faith.

I never fail to be moved by the story of St. Laurence, the deacon, who, in a time of Roman persecution, was ordered to collect the church’s treasures and surrender them to the emperor. Instead of the alms boxes, gospel books, and precious stones, however, Laurence gathered a ragtag mob of the lame, the leprous, and the indigent. The emperor was incensed at the stink in his audience chamber, and demanded, “What’s the meaning of this?” To which Laurence replied, “Behold, O Excellency, the treasures of the Church.” And the thing is, he’s not just offering a good zinger — he’s telling the truth.

Staying with ancient Rome for a moment, maybe you know the story of emperor Julian, sometimes called, “The Apostate,” because he lived after the empire had formally legalized Christianity and he fervently desired to return Rome to its ancient pagan customs. History shows he was not successful in his attempt. One of the principal difficulties was trying to get his pagan clergy to replicate the care Christians took to look after the needy, especially the needy among their own number. Julian recognized that this gave the Church tremendous moral authority among the people, but he could not get his pagans to care, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. Frustrated in a meeting one day, he finally burst out, “See how these Christians love one another!”

Why do we do it? “Blessed are the poor” — well, because Jesus established the pattern, and gave some fairly unambiguous commands about it. Furthermore, we believe that if Christ blessed human life with his divine presence, then every human life, from henceforth, is equally blessed by the divine touch, and serving the needy is tantamount to serving Christ himself. To give St. Matthew his due, we love the passage from his gospel where Jesus says, “When you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and did these things to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did them to me.” Christian faith gives the pattern and the theological motivation for serving the needy; it’s part of the warp and weft of who we are.

You know me well enough now I think, though, to hear that there’s probably a “but” coming. Luke’s gospel is so stark — “Blessed are the poor; blessed are the hungry; blessed are those who mourn,” that it begs some real soul-searching. In this gospel, Jesus isn’t just telling us — the reasonably well-fed, well-educated, generous citizens of the world that we are here in Berkeley California — that we ought to be kind to our needy neighbors. No, he says, “Blessed are the poor.” 

“Blessed are the poor.” Not, I note, blessed are you if you help the poor out of their poverty, blessed are you if you educate the needy, if you comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, feed the hungry. No, “Blessed are the hungry.” If we stop and think for a moment, we quickly see what a hard saying this really is. Blessed are the hungry? “Surely, Jesus you can’t mean that; surely you must mean that we ought to help them, give them something to eat, lift them out of poverty, get them health insurance, legal assistance, a college education, a pension. Isn’t that what you mean?” “Well yes, you should be doing that anyway,” says Jesus, “But still I tell you, blessed are the poor.”

If we have trouble understanding what he means, and I admit I regularly do, then the fault lies with our ability to see, and not with Jesus’s powers of logic or reasoning. His Gospel doesn’t just give us marching orders to do this project or undertake that ministry. His Gospel upends our entire worldview; it is a “transvaluation of values,” if you will. Blessed are the poor; woe to the rich. At least as far as God is concerned, those nearest and dearest to his heart, those closest to the divine image, the ones in his sight who are kings and princes and heirs of all the earth, tre the poor, the outcast, the stepped over, and the stinky.

This is a great mystery, and I don’t pretend to understand it. Because it means, for example, that the man who sometimes lives on St. Mark’s sidewalk, who makes a lot of trash and other waste, and is often unsettling if not outright threatening to passersby, whom we sometimes have to ask police help to remove — that this man is of such high estate in the kingdom of God that even angels bow to greet him. And I, who have the position, the authority, even the duty, to get him to move, must, in forcing the issue, necessarily admit to a small and mean kind of existence.

This is a painful kind of reversal, but it is just the kind of reversal we ought to expect from the God whom we worship. “Blessed are the poor.” However we understand it, it certainly renders moot all the utilitarian philosophy that undergirds most of our philanthropy and moral thinking. “The greatest good for the greatest number” — sounds like a reasonable metric, and it is remarkably effective at producing results in macro. But then the outliers, the casualties, the cost never go away, and over time they grow to undermine the whole foundation. Perhaps at this stage of our national civic life they already have.

In the midst of all this, the Gospel insists there is a higher mystery at play here. The Gospel is not about “most” for “most,” it is about “All” for “One.” The eternal God, creator of all worlds, became a single human person, to invest with his presence human life for all time with all the whole glory of God.

“Blessed are the poor.” The Gospel is not about statistics in macro, but the individual soul as the temple and tabernacle of God. And in this, the poor, the hungry, and the grieving are the ones upon whom the favor of God rests; truly, they are treasures of the Church, while the rest of us still carry so much dross.

I’ll conclude this morning with a charge from Bp. Frank Weston, the famous early 20th century bishop of Zanzibar, which he gave to a congress of bishops and clergy in 1923. It’s a famous quote, so forgive me if you know it already, and it’s from a very different time. But it bears repeating, especially with this morning’s Gospel and the current conversation in Washington. Weston says,

“If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly, it is madness, to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are [exploiting] him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done. . . 

“Here, then, as I conceive it, is your present duty. . . Go out into the highways and hedges. . . Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel of fellowship and try to wash their feet.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.