1 February 11, 2007 Sixth Sunday in Epiphany Jeremiah 17:5­8 Luke 6:20­26 Downward Mobility Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God … But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Luke 6:20b, 24 A family who had fallen on hard times had to sell nearly everything they had to pay bills and to put food on the table. Nevertheless, a burglar broke in one night when the family was away. They returned and found the door knocked off its hinges and the place a wreck. "What did the thief get?" the police officer asked. The father just shook his head: "Practice I guess," he said. There is not much that’s funny about poverty. Everyone who has ever had to struggle to live without the basic necessities of life knows that. Frank McCourt wrote a memoir of his childhood called Angela’s Ashes. I read it. It was: Three­hundred grueling, exhausting pages about hungry second­graders fighting for the apple peels left over from the teacher’s lunch … shoes repaired with tape and old tires, four sick children sleeping in the same flea­ridden bed, no running water, the constant stench of poverty i Poverty is not blessed. Jesus never said it is. He said that God blesses the poor, chooses on behalf of the poor ­­ including the 12.4% of families and 16.7% of the individuals in Sarasota who live below the poverty line, including 28.5% of children and 7.7% of the elderly ­­ our own neighbors that the last U.S. Census found living in poverty right here among us. ii When we are most honest we will admit that we are pretty ambivalent about all that. The recent discussion about the Family Promise ministry is an excellent example. Jesus may have surrounded himself with the poor but we find that practice very frustrating and difficult. Honoring the poor doesn’t fit well into the framework of a society that worships pleasure, power, success and youthful beauty. J.B. Phillips, author and bible translator rewrote Jesus’ beloved words tongue in cheek. He said: Happy are the "pushers:" for they get on in the world. Happy are the hard­boiled: for they never let life hurt them. Happy are those who complain: they get their own way in the end... Happy are the slave drivers: for they get results.
2 Happy are the knowledgeable… they know their way around. Happy are the troublemakers: they make people take notice of them. iii No wonder we feel conflicted! Psychologists call it “cognitive dissonance” – the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. On the one hand we have our national and cultural values, and on the other Jesus and his ethic of love. Jesus almost certainly knew the teachings of the prophet Jeremiah, who in his characteristically in­your­face way announced that God curses all of us who trust in our own strength. All who believe we are pulling ourselves up by their own bootstraps, all the self­made women and men: we are damned, he said, we are like dry, shriveled shrubs baking on the desert sand where nothing can grow. No, Jeremiah, really, tell us what you think. A guy went into a Barnes and Noble store to return a book. The clerk was surprised when he took the book out of the bag. “It’s a Bible?” “Yes” said the customer, “I want to return it.” “Was it a gift?” “No, I bought it for myself, but I made a mistake.” “Didn’t like the translation? Or the format?” “Oh no,” the man said, “they were fine. I want to return it.” The clerk was puzzled, “Well, I need to write down the reason for the return.” The man thought a minute, “write down that there is a lot in that book which is tough to swallow.” You know it didn’t go down a whole lot easier for Jesus’ original hearers. Jesus has a way of turning everything upside down, of upending all our cherished assumptions, of pushing us right out of our comfort zone. Like many people today, lots of Jesus’ original audience believed the poor were cursed – by their own sin or bad habits or lack of judgement. Jesus said “No!” He said it often, he said it loud: The poor are honored, beloved by God. The poor are first in the Kingdom. What about the rich? That’s me, by the way, and you, every single of us, even those of us who are solidly middle class, even those of us who feel poor are wildly rich by the world’s standards. Ask the Kenya Team when they return next week! How about us? A very loose paraphrase of these beatitudes might be: You rich, listen up: you have a lot to learn from the poor. The poor are blessed not because they are poor but because they trust in God.
3 They have to trust in God, and someday soon, Because of their faithfulness, The poor will be laughing and dancing and leaping for joy! I learned about this many years ago from two bright, popular teenage girls named Katie Mowry and Sydney Vance, youth in the Venice Presbyterian Church. The week I landed in Florida these two young women showed up at my door as I was unpacking boxes. They had just returned from a mission trip toWest Virginia (a mission our young people still do in cooperation with the other churches in our Presbytery.) I stopped unpacking and listened; I was drawn into to their stories of the poor they had met in Appalachia, descriptions of the families, old people, and children rolled out of them like a bubbling stream. They talked about the painting homes and trailers, cleaning and carpentry work that they’d been able to give to the people they’d met. But more than anything, the girls said, they had learned about a living faith in Jesus Christ. I’ll never forget what Katie said: The people we met there have so much faith. They trust God; they have to, they have nothing else. Want to know why the poor are blessed – it’s because of they trust God, they have to, they have nothing else. Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, explains why it is so critical those of us who have the comforts of life do what these girls did, why it’s so important that we be physically close to people who suffer poverty. It’s why we do mission trips. But you don’t have to go across the country. Mission is right here – at SURE or Habitat, Caritas, Resurrection House or Family Promise. Proximity to the poor is essential for compassion. Wallis said: “Our hardness of heart cannot be maintained for long in the midst of obvious human suffering.” iv A man I admire very much is named Bob Lupton. Bob has lived and worked alongside poor people in urban Atlanta for the last 34 years. He’s no starry­eyed idealist. A Vietnam veteran, Bob founded FCS Urban Ministries in 1976. He wrote a little book called, Theirs Is the Kingdom, the story of an educated and middle class white guy who moved his family into a high crime neighborhood with the intention of bringing Christ's message to young people. And the ministry grew and grew. He tells a hysterical story about inviting one of the neighbor ladies over for supper, a glorious Christian lady that they also knew from church. She was dangerously overweight, suffered from all manner of health problems and had some very questionable personal hygiene. Bob prayed “Lord, I love you, and I love my neighbor, and I love my new recliner chair. Please, when Mrs. Smith comes over let her sit somewhere besides my brand­new recliner chair.” You know how this ends. Mrs. Smith came through Bob and Peggy’s front door and headed straight for that recliner. Sat in it the whole night. They practically had to pry her out of it for dinner. Bob titled the chapter, “Please Sit in My Chair” Bob has learned an enormous amount from serving among the poor all these decades. Here’s a piece of an essay he wrote called “Downward Mobility,” to me it reads more like poetry: A passion for excellence
4 Diligence Drive Efficiency The competitive edge These are the values of achievers, The essence of upward mobility and the stuff of which success is made. Enter Jesus, the Christ Mighty God The Everlasting Father Emptied Weak Dependent Here to show us the way to greatness, heavenly greatness, by becoming least. King turned servant. Downwardly mobile. What sort of ethic is this? There are those who will find it exceedingly difficult to understand, the Teacher said. Like the wealthy, successful, educated ones… Indeed, his teachings are suicidal for the successful. The downward mobility of the kingdom strikes at the very heart of our earthly strivings. It feels like death to let go of our diligent preparations for the next step up and the investments that insure our tomorrows. Who in their right mind would gamble away a reasonably predictable and secure future on a high­risk, intangible faith venture like the kingdom of God? Jesus the Christ. Mighty God. Destitute. He says we can’t have it both ways, that our security is either in God or mammon… The first fruits of a new world order have come, and he has revealed the values of his kingdom: vulnerability, obedience with abandon, lavish giving, faith that defies reason,
5 volitional downward mobility. v That’s really what we are about in the church. “As you have done it to one of the least of these my sisters and brothers you have done it to me.” More than anything else, Jesus was intentional about identifying with the poor, joining in their life experience. God’s coming in human flesh was the ultimate example of downward mobility when the One who: Though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death ­ even death on a cross. vi We are simply here to do the same. He didn’t say that poverty is blessed. Jesus hates poverty even more than we do, and he calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely and imprisoned without regard for whether they have brought their situation upon themselves. He calls us to pass laws that protect the weak and vulnerable and to speak out on behalf of those who can’t speak for themselves. He calls us to be his hands and legs and arms of compassion throughout this hurting world. I love what Bono said about our power, and our role in bringing God’s shalom. Listen: [New Song Video] You have surely noticed if you’ve ever worshiped in a poor community all the singing and praising and leaping for joy that Jesus talks about here and how it just kind of rubs off on you! One of my friends visited South Africa around the time of the elections in 1994. It was a terrifying time for that nation as an entirely new, free society was being born. On Sunday my friend drove into Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa. He remembers seeing the impressive city of steel and glass, rise up on the horizon. As he drove into downtown he was stunned to see a small congregation of black South African Christians worshiping inside the green circle of an expressway ramp. Tom said he nearly wrecked the car; he was absolutely stunned. He wanted to abandon his car on the highway and go over and worship with them! The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Against the skyline of the great city of Pretoria, the strong symbol of the bitter years of Apartheid, this tiny group of people with no church building, no pews, and no organ or piano, nothing except some tambourines, prayed and sang and danced before the Lord. Pretoria stood majestically, the embodiment of the principalities and powers of this age, while the little flock praised the God of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. vii Theirs is the kingdom. Apartheid and all other kinds of hideous violence are always wrong, and while we have breath we have to work to overcome them and to honor the poor as Jesus did until the day he comes.
6 Susan F. DeWyngaert, D.Min. First Presbyterian Church Sarasota, Florida i Michael Lindvall, “Moveable Feast,” paper for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 1998 quoted by Chandler Stokes in “Good News to the Poor,” a sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church, Oakland CA on September 19, 2004. ii 2000 Census Data, see http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/12/1264175.html and http://www.reference.com/search?q=sarasota%20 iii J.B. Phillips by Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan, 1995) 113. iv Jim Wallis by Erica Liu, PresHouse Blog, University of Wisconsin – Madison http://www.preshouse.org/blog/blog.main.cfm?mode=entry&entry=9B508BFA­1143­EBB8­ E754BF14910C6115 v Robert Lupton, Theirs Is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America (HarperSanFrancisco, 1989) 8­9 vi Philippians 2:6­8 vii Thomas G. Long, “Preaching God’s Future” in Sharing Heaven’s Music: The Heart of Christian Preaching, Barry Callen, ed. (Abingdon, 1995) 202