The following sermon was offered at Christ Lutheran Church on February 13, 2022, the 6th Sunday after Epiphany. Due to the positive feedback and discussion, that followed, I am posting the text here. I have also embeded the worship service below. Primary text: Luke 6:17-26, the Beatitudes.
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Well, settle in. This is a critically important discussion today, and it is one I know will be difficult for me, and likely for some of you – hopefully touching our hearts deeply. So, I will try to do my best. With St. Valentine’s Day upon us, it is a happy coincidence that our assigned lectionary readings lead us to reexamine the Beatitudes. The early Church consider them formative values that should shape our life together in the world. Yet I clearly recall as a youth forced to memorize them for confirmation, I really didn’t get them. I looked at them as maxims or even law like – a pronouncement from some distant God up high and far away. Perhaps that’s partly because the Beatitudes aren’t really meant to be memorized. They are meant to be integrated into one’s heart and soul, and that might take a mature faith born of suffering.
At their simplest, you can understand the Beatitudes as sayings of Jesus. Some of you might know or recall that our Jewish siblings often call what we know as the Ten Commandments the “Sayings of God.” Yes, they are at some level laws on how the community of faith should get along with one another and the world, but recall what Jesus and prophets said before him. The fullness of the law is love – in particular loving God and others as oneself.
And so, if you read Martin Luther’s Large Catechism or Rabbinical interpretations, they don’t always sound like stark law or mandates. They are a way of love…a means of walking through life with more joy and peace…literally walking humbly in the way of and with our God. The sayings – not numbered in the Bible but by people after the fact – are sometimes numbered differently, yet they are not legal codes. They are unique because through them God speaks love to those he has chosen, so that that they might…just might…become a blessing of love at work in the world. You can find moral and ethical dimensions to be sure, but they are all wrapped up in love.
With such a gift, it can be such a shame that we lack the understanding, the spiritual maturity, that they are meant to be so much more than Law. There’s Gospel infused into them too, because God spoke them and gave them to Moses for the people of God as a gift. God wanted the Israelites…and now through faith us…to become the Holy People of God…עם האלהים, a phrase in the Hebrew scriptures mentioned exhaustively and one I thus lift up to you often. We are a people set apart, made holy by God, called to live in holy ways, but not for our own sake. We are charged with a loving purpose in a fallen world.
Well, as scripture reveals to us, and our own more recent history makes plain, we cannot do this on our own. Scripture is a help. Thou “shalts and shalt nots” might inform, guide and challenge us to do better, but perhaps you have noticed that we live in a challenging world. Everything isn’t cherubs and boxes of chocolate. (My apologies to Forest Gump!) Love can be hard, and even when we try our best, we can fall, fail or suffer.
And so, out of love for us, Jesus offers us new sayings, blessings. (That’s really what beatitude means anyway – blessing.) These blessing will serve to draw us closer, more intimately toward God and one another. Yet unlike Moses’ experience, they are not sayings given directly to a prophet and by extension to the People of God. No, Jesus is God incarnate, and so these sayings are beyond special. They are not mediated but given directly to us. In a fallen world, these blessings recognize our suffering, but they tell us…promise us…God’s love is with us! Always with us! More than that, these sayings remind us that nothing can separate us from such a love.
In Luke’s telling, his witness, of the Gospel, there are some significant differences from the account in Matthew 5. (I’m not going to address those in detail today. I’ve tried to explain why such differences exist in detail on Facebook, my blog, Bible studies, and elsewhere recently.) Yet, consider who Luke was. He was a human just like you and me. He was of likely Greek descent, many think a Gentile, but some suggest perhaps that he was a Hellenized Jew. And in his life and time, he had the good fortune to become a doctor, meet Paul in his travels, and become a coworker with him. Luke inherited these stories, and so in the Gospel according to Luke, we hear his witness of Jesus. Much as if you or I were telling a story, the truth is transmitted through his lens (his context and experience), and he likely wanted it to relate to and be understood by his audience – those many Gentiles and Hellenized Jews we know surrounded him. (They are who he first wrote to.) In short, Jesus is a God of suffering. No, not causing suffering, but Jesus is willing to suffer for us and with us, and ultimately the answer to all suffering in the world.
Through Luke’s vocation (as doctor and servant of Christ with Paul), Luke knew the extreme suffering of his century. Luke would have been all too familiar with sickness, injustice, poverty, violence and death and the grief that always results. Thus, Luke recognizes the special nature of Jesus as God who has profoundly come to us as one of us. Jesus came to share in that suffering and reach out to the outsider (like gentiles and widows, immigrants, the lonely, the sick in body and spirit). Jesus was and remains God with us in our imperfection and suffering. At the same time, Jesus came as the answer to the Fall. Jesus came to heal and restore. This is exactly what Luke remembers and shares with us as Jesus prepares to share his most central of teachings. Luke points out to us in the opening verses, “Jesus heals! Jesus saves! Jesus loves those entrusted to his care amidst the evil and loss of our very real world!”
At this point in the story, people didn’t fully understand Jesus yet. (I’m not sure we really do today. I know I don’t!) Still, in hearing of his teaching and preaching, as well as the authentic love that he gifted to others, crowds came from all around the region often walking miles and miles and miles. Luke tells us that the people were desperate, so desperate for hope and healing, that they wrestled with one another reaching out to Jesus just in the hope of touching him, for “power came out from him and healed all of them.”
It is here that Jesus chose to share Good News with the crowd – and with those who might come afterward – to all those yearning to just touch the hem of his garment…to experience a little bit of hope if nothing else. Jesus knows not all of those in need could touch him in that sea of humanity any more than we might with him now ascended to heaven. Yet, Jesus wants us to listen and believe.
So, listen to what Jesus says. Reread it when you get home, and then over and over again. Treasure and ponder these words. In the beatitudes, Jesus is telling us that he already loves us amidst our suffering, and he invites us to love others as best as we are able. Whatever our sufferings are – big or small; transitory or seemingly permanent – he is God with us and already loves us. We can rejoice when our crops fail as the prophet Habakkuk announces. We can cast all our cares upon him for he cares for us, as Peter urges. We can recognize with Mary in her song, the Magnificat (also in Luke’s Gospel), that our soul magnifies the Lord, and we can rejoice in God our savior, as lowly as we might be. John says in Revelation, there will be a day when all our tears and suffering will be washed away, a future filled with hope Jeremiah called it, but John, too, acknowledges we aren’t quite there yet. All creation groans for redemption, as Paul tells us, so why are we surprised at suffering. Indeed, Jesus suffered for us. Yet suffering is not all that there is, for God is not only with us, God in Jesus is for us. We belong now to Jesus, and not one of his sheep will be lost.
What I am getting at is that all of scripture is filled with similar promises. The Beatitudes bring these promises into focus telling us that we should not trust our eyes or other senses. God is already blessing us with fortitude, hope, understanding and counsel and so much more. When we don’t have the words, we are promised the Holy Spirit lifts up our deepest needs and wounds to God. Life is hard…we might even at times rightly use more forceful, descriptive words than that…but don’t think for a moment that God’s love has abandoned us…abandoned you! Hope truly can be born of suffering.
At times, we might kid ourselves to think that we can just keep our chins up and make it through. We might internalize and deny our pain or the pain of the world. Yet we lie to ourselves when we share the old maxim, “God won’t give us anything more than we can handle,” for in the verse that inspires such hubris (1 Corinthians 10:13), we are instead told that our suffering is just part of our world…common at some level to one and all of us…but Paul actually writes, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, [but if you are] with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” Did you catch that? When we feel overwhelmed and cannot go on, when all hope seems lost, and we might feel like the biggest losers of victims in the world, dead inside, God will be there to bless us! Jesus plans our resurrection! It is God who will give us the way out and a way forward…always. It is God who will turn our suffering on its head and declare ultimate blessing. Even in suffering, more is going on than we can see or understand. God’s love for us overflows. Just hang on to the promise like a life preserver.
Now, I know I have gone on longer than normal, and I am the only thing standing between you and your Super Bowl fair, but please bear with me. After all, this is among the most important passages of promise offered us in scripture. As Christians we need to consider where we can testify to the Good News, and that can often come from our own stories and experience. So, I want to share one difficult but profound experience of grace from my life.
If you have experienced the death of a child, or experienced such deep loss in any way, you might relate to the seemingly inconsolable pain that such an experience can create. My wife and I have no children, which is a kind of loss for us emotionally, but I have experienced the death of beloved children at very young ages that I have had deep relationships with – a cousin at 16, and children and youth that I cared for in mission and other vocations. I have also seen children and infants brutalized and sometimes die. And as a police, hospital, and hospice chaplain, I have walked alongside officers, and nurses and families that have shared in such tragedies and walk wounded afterward as a result…often brought to tears just at the memory. How can we speak love at such times? Well, we can try to because God is there…perhaps hidden…hard to see…but our God who is love is there. So, we are asked to press on, reach out, and watch and wait for Jesus.
As a young chaplain, I was called to the hospital from home. A newborn infant had just died, and the family was gathered. The family had already been presented a memory box with a hand and footprint, a lock of hair and other small mementos of an all too short life. I came into the room not knowing exactly what to expect. I didn’t know what I could say, as I’m pretty sure no human words are ever good enough. As I turned the corner, almost startling me from my thoughts…there was the mom, held by the dad, right in front of me. The mom in her turn was lovingly, ever so gently, cradling her baby’s body in her arms. (It is an image I will never forget.) They had been praying…praying so very hard…and yet their beloved child had been taken from them. It was brutal. It was unfair. It remains beyond understanding. “That God would take a child from its mother as she prayed” was appalling.[i] I think a little bit of me died in that room in that moment.
Then awkwardly, hopefully, the mom reached out to me. She asked me to hold the baby in my own arms and bless the gift that it was and remained to them. And in that sacred moment, and still today, I know that as hard as it was to see through their tears and now my own, God was with us. God was in that shared love found in family and community. God was in the mom’s eyes looking at me with love and hope. God was in the caregivers and volunteers who supported them and those like them. I discovered that God was even trying to break into the world through me and my own heart which was now being torn apart. It wasn’t being torn for the sake of suffering. No, in that suffering, my heart was being opened so that that I could better welcome and embrace those in need before me.
This was a difficult, horrific event, perhaps one of the worst of my life and certainly their own. Why did this happen? I had and have no answer. Yet with that small body cradled in my arms, I recognized (perhaps it was God speaking) that God was cradling us in our suffering. It wasn’t about me and my abilities as a chaplain or human at all. God was at work, and Jesus opened my eyes to it. And so, I found I was empowered to bear this moment and perhaps somehow serve as a sign of grace to try to bear them up too…perhaps simply by my presence then…and perhaps now in my testifying of this sacred moment to you…As I walk on from it, even as it wounded me, healing was and is still entering the world.
As a Christian singer who experienced the loss of her own baby wrote in a song I deeply love and appreciate: “This is what it means to be held; How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life; And you survive. This is what it is to be loved; And to know that the promise was; [that] When everything fell, we’d be held.”[ii] I wish I could speak a word, and all your pain and the pain of the world would be gone. And, I don’t pretend to know why God has allowed things to be this way with so much suffering and pain. Yet I do know this…“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
My beloved, God is with you and loves you. It is Jesus, after all, who said this, and proved it through his own suffering, death, and resurrection, so that we might experience life with him. These blessings are not about you, your strength of faith, or your perfection. They aren’t really about suffering either, even as they call us to be something (someone) more in the face of the suffering that is in the world. These blessings are about a new reality whether you believe it or not…God is active in our lives and our world – a God who is only love.
Go to Jesus as you can, not as you hope that you might. Reach out to him even when he seems too far away (if not hidden) from you, or when you think your suffering might be more or less than the crowd around you. For you and your struggles matter to Jesus, and he is already reaching out to you. Jesus is with you, always with you, and it is he who cradles you lovingly in his arms. Receive the blessing and believe. Amen.
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[i] Natalie Grant, “Held” (2006).
[ii] Natalie Grant, “Held” (2006).
© 2021 The Rev. Louis Florio. All content not held under another’s copyright may not be used without permission of the author.
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