Be The Exception: Reconsider Status Quo
Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26
Calvin started coming to church to share a meal that was provided on Wednesday nights. But he didn’t want to just show up, eat, and leave. He enjoyed the fellowship and he wanted to contribute in some way. So, he started arriving early to help with set up and he would stay through the end and help with clean up, too. Sharon was the volunteer coordinator of these mid-week meals. Her out-going, sassy personality jived with Calvin’s and they struck up quite a friendship working together in the church kitchen week after week. Calvin became a member of the church and was there nearly every Sunday for years. Sharon and Calvin were close. They found each other to laugh, check in, share the blessings and woes of life. I don’t know when it happened, but Calvin started calling Sharon, Sunshine. One year, Sharon and her husband invited Calvin to join their family for Easter lunch. The countertop was full of food. Calvin sampled a spoon-full of almost everything. Sharon remembers hearing Calvin “mmm-mmm” each time he tried a new item on his plate. Then, he got a spoonful of a family favorite – the corn casserole. You know the recipe (?): corn, cheese, Jiffy corn mix, butter, a pinch of sugar, and more cheese. Calvin put his fork down and with conviction said, “Sunshine, this is all very good, but this corn casserole is off the chain!”
Calvin went home with a plate of leftovers that included the remaining corn casserole. A week or so later, on a Wed night, Calvin informed Sharon that he had stretched that remaining corn casserole over as many days as he could, but he had finally eaten it all. So, the next week, Sharon showed up with another corn casserole all for Calvin. Thus began an ongoing exchange – a full pan for an empty dish. Calvin would bring back the dish when it was all gone and soon, Sharon would return it to him full of that off-the-chain golden goodness. This story about Calvin and Sharon is what I thought of when I read Jesus’ blessings in this week’s account of the Sermon on the Plain.
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled. (Luke 6:21)
This list of Blessings and Woes sounds familiar but not as familiar as Matthew’s version of the beatitudes. His are all blessings. Matthew’s beatitudes are the preamble to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Luke, on the other hand, describes Jesus “coming down” to meet and teach the crowd at a level place. Both Matthew and Luke seem to be making a theological point through a geographical reference. In Luke, mountains are places of prayer, God-encounters, and big call-oriented events. When he moves Jesus to the plain, he is literally placing Jesus on the same level with the people. It’s not about status, but Jesus’ relatability. Jesus has come to meet the people where they are. This crowd is made up of the 1) the twelve apostles, 2) those becoming disciples and 3) those seeking to know more, or perhaps to benefit from Jesus’ healing ministry. Luke makes a point to note that the people came from as far as Jerusalem and Judea to the south and Tyre and Sidon to the north. It is another way of saying that Jesus’ ministry is for all. Jew and Gentile. Professional disciples and would-be disciples. What is being offered here – healing, teaching, an invitation to follow him – is nothing secretive or exclusive. That would be in contrast to Jesus’ entire ministry (as portrayed in Luke).[1]
Luke is a tell-it-like-it-is evangelist. Maybe that’s why Matthew’s version has 9 blessings and 0 woes while Luke’s list has four of each. Did you hear the parallels? Poor-rich, hungry-full, weeping - laughing, rejected - accepted. Jesus’ Jewish listeners were probably reminded of the blessings and curses they learned in Deuteronomy (11:26-28). The difference in Jesus’ teaching is that the blessings and curses in Deuteronomy were contingent on one’s behavior. In Jesus’ teaching, there is no contingency, no urging, no cajoling to act so as to receive a blessing or avoid a woe. Jesus is stating the way life is inside God’s reign and thus outside of God’s reign. [2]
Mary Hinkle Shore said it this way:
[When] Jesus speaks blessing… [he says] To the poor belongs God’s own realm (theirs is the Kingdom). The hungry will not be hungry for long. Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning (Ps 30:5), and [God’s] joy extends to embrace those who are excluded, reviled, or defamed by virtue of their connection to Jesus. [Those who have been rejected], whom others have tried to cut off, have a belonging [to God] that is deeper than anything that the people around them could withhold.[3]
Your adversaries will try to ostracize you, but all the more the Love of God will embrace you.
The message to Jesus’ hearers (the majority of whom are most-likely among the poor, hungry, despised) is that “when the evidence suggests that you have been forgotten or forsaken, you are not.”[4] This is God’s great reversal.
The challenge for us is to TRUST that this message spoken on the plain is meant for our ears too. Is Jesus still speaking on our level? Is it the blessing or the woe that we are supposed to hear? Do we dare ask? Many of us may think, Woe is me for this or that hardship or inconvenience we must deal with. But truly, don’t we spend most of our time in the category of well-fed, have all we need folks? We won’t want to be “woe’d!” Listening to Jesus’ list as an either / or, we may be tempted to think, “I’ll take my chances with the status quo.” [5] These blessings and woes are bound up with real life. And in all our lives we know both blessing and woe.
I have thought about Frederick Buechner’s words: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.” But many are afraid… Where is the blessing for them? In my plenty… In my have-enough-ness to share with others, Am I woe’d beyond God’s grace? Or am I called to share in the blessing of others: the literally poor, lost, afraid, or hungry?
Kate Bowler has offered her own blessing for a beautiful, terrible day. (She writes:)
blessed are we who see the suffering, the damage done to body and spirit, the need that dares not hope. we who know what it feels like to languish. who live in the place where pain and joy meet.
God, today both the beautiful and the terrible are so intensely present. help me live here, seeing the whole truth of what is.
blessed are we who walk toward the suffering, bringing what gifts we have, and our sufferings too, whether of illness or loss, grief or betrayal, confusion or powerlessness.
it is the beautiful that tells me what I love, and the terrible that tells me what I never want to lose.[6]
Woe to us if our vision is so small, we can’t see what we are missing;
Woe to us if we accept the status quo of our privileged position while our neighbors languish in poverty; while they go hungry.
Woe to us if we accept the lie we are being sold that our own comfort, our own dreams, our own points of view are all we should care about and spend our energy on.
Woe to us if we believe in the false promises that only seek to protect me and the people who look like me, sound like me, believe like me.
Blessed are we when we walk toward the suffering, bringing what gifts we have, even our own suffering… I can hear him. I believe we can hear Jesus speaking on our level today, too. Like his teaching, our choices and actions are “bound up with real life” too. What we choose to do matters. We can choose to accept the status quo; or to be a partner with God in the blessing… And you do this! You do!
● Through generous donations that purchase food, provide basic needs, and support ministries locally and far away;
● and that provide new stuffed bears for children coming into foster care in our state;
● By showing up to stand in an assembly line and pack brown bags to go home with food-insecure kids over spring break;
● By volunteering hours of your time in our nursery to keep children safe, fed, and happy –for those who come to ESL every week;
● By standing with and advocating for trans-folks who are being vilified by our own state legislature; gender-fluid teenagers who need safe and generous spaces to figure out who they are…
Jesus’ blessings and woes are specific and daunting. They should make us reconsider how we have ordered and understood our world (the status quo); and challenge us to amplify compassion and generosity.
Don’t we want to be the kind of friend who refills the dish time and again? The kind of church that responds to our neighbors’ emptiness with fullness, with blessing.
And isn’t that who God is to each of us? We bring our empty dish back to a loving God, and God returns it to us overflowing with off the chain goodness.
Bring it to God.
Bring it to God.
Bring it to God.
Bring it to God.
When your plate is empty, bring it back to God who longs to fill it.
Blessed are those who hunger now, for they shall be filled.
[1] Craddock, Fred Interpretation Commentary Luke
[2] ibid.
[3] Shore, Mary Hinkle Working Preacher, commentary Luke 6:17-26, February 2025
[4] Shore
[5] ibid
[6] https://katebowler.com/blessings/a-blessing-for-a-beautiful-terrible-day/