Luke 6:17-26
Erika Funk
How do you conclude your emails? “Sincerely?”
“Yours?”
“Best”?
“Peace”?
“Take care”?
“Take care” has been my go-to for some time. Not too long ago someone (a Gen Z someone, if that matters) pointed out how vague it sounded and oddly intimate in a way. “Take care”? Care of what? Take it where?
As a church professional, my send offs usually are in the context of ministry so I go with “blessings” but in looking for a replacement for my old favorite “take care” I realize that “blessings” is too, quite vague, even ….. innocuous.
But blessings aren’t meant to be harmless, meaningless or weak! They are what prayers are made of. We ask for blessings constantly, at the table when giving thanks, when finding words to pray when someone is suffering or hurting.
Our text today is full of that word: blessing. This text is referred to as the sermon on the plain, as opposed to the sermon on the mount in a different gospel. It’s also called the “woes and blessings” passage, aka the Beatitudes. Which mean: “supreme blessedness”.
Reading The Chrisitan Century recently there was an article about this passage from Ed Horstmann, a pastor in Connecticut. He describes the beatitudes as God’s value system.That seems specific. Not vague, not a warm, cuddly emotion.
God’s values.
Horstmann wrote: [these blessings] recognize human suffering. They do not accept hunger as an inevitable consequence of living in a Roman-occupied country. Instead, they promise a day when hungry people will eat their fill. [God]uses blessings to congratulate people whose actions in God’s name have earned them hatred.
When I was young, I remember studying the Beatitudes in Sunday School. For some reason I thought the verses (with the cadence of ‘if this then that) were like a menu, as if you could make a selection from this list of rewards. Similar to when NPR runs their multiple times a year pledge drive and they ask for pledges by promising various gifts based on how much you give.
As a child, I chose humility not because I thought that was a good way to live, but because I thought it would be cool to own the earth. Matthew 5: 5 if you want to check. Forgive my 9-year-old self, please. I’m glad they weren’t teaching from Luke that day because the “woes” that follow are rough! Too rough for my soft hearted 9-year-old self who simply wanted to rule the world.
But I think Luke’s “woes” are just as important as the “blessings”. This isn’t a reward system, it’s discipleship. Jesus spoke these words to encourage and provide hope, especially to those whose lives needed just that. Underneath these words, he is saying, You are beloved. The world may not see you that way, but I do. And I will treat you accordingly.
I’d like to tell you about Fanie Lou Hamer. Because she can show us what a life, based on these gospel truths, looks like.
From one of her biographies, we know:
“Mrs. Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the 20th and last child of sharecroppers. at age six Hamer joined her family picking cotton. [imagine a six year old you know…] By age 12, she left school to work. In 1944, she married Perry Hamer and the couple worked on a Mississippi plantation until 1962.
I know for some 1962 seems like a century ago. Only three years later would I be born on the other side of the country. If Fannie Lou Hamer was still alive, she’d be only 63 years old. She’d be sitting in these pews or singing in the choir (she had a beautiful voice I’ve read). *
[In the summer of 1962, Hamer attended a civil rights meeting. She became a SNCC organizer and on August 31, led 17 volunteers to register to vote at a Mississippi Courthouse. the group was harassed on their way home, and police stopped their bus and fined them $100 for the charge that the bus was too yellow. [there’s just something about that… desperate times]
*Less than a year later, after successfully completing a voter registration program in Charleston, South Carolina, Fannie Lou and several other Black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Winona, Mississippi. At the Winona jailhouse, she and several of the women were brutally beaten, …no details….leaving her with lifelong injuries.”
By Mary DeAngelis and Kate Wallace Rogers Feb 16, 2022
But she was not deterred and while she has said she prayed for those who persecuted her, she also helped organize Freedom Summer that very next year, which brought hundreds of college students, Black and white, to help with African American voter registration in the segregated South. That led to the formation of dozens of Freedom Schools which remain today, including right here in Charlotte.
“’Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable,’ was one of Fannie Lou Hamer’s mantras. She fought passionately against attempts to deny Black people the right to vote. And never hated those who tried to stop her, even those who brutalized her.
She once said, “The beatitude[s] of the Bible, said: “Blessed are they that moan, for they shall be comforted.” We have moaned a long time in Mississippi. And he [Jesus] said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” And there’s no race in America that’s no meeker than the Negro. We’re the only race in America that has had babies sold from our breast, which was slavery time. And had mothers sold from their babes. And we’re the only race in America that had one man had to march through a mob crew just to go to school, which was James H. Meredith. We don’t have anything to be ashamed of. All we have to do is trust God and launch out into the deep. You can pray until you faint, but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” Her faith was a foundation and an anchor for her activism.
She said “We are not fighting against these people because we hate them, but we are fighting these people because we love them and we’re the only thing can save them now. We are fighting to save these people from their hate and from all the things that would be so bad against them. We want them to see the right way. Every night of my life that I lay down before I go to sleep, I pray for these people that despitefully use me. And Christ said, “The meek shall inherit the earth”
God’s vision for the world, sets us free from “that’s just the way it is” mentality. God’s eschatological vision for the present and future can seem crazy, un-American, socialist, fascist or whatever label we’re using these days that means we should be against it. But the truth is here in the scripture, that God is always bringing into being the things we cannot yet see or understand. The people you think have God’s blessings? Look again. My 9-year-old brain wasn’t there yet. I was still thinking, as a 9-year-old brain would, in a linear fashion, either/or, the way I had so far seen the world work. Consequences involve actions, choose your own adventure, hard work pay off, and so on and so on,
But over and over, Jesus told his disciples, the crowds from the mountaintops and the plains. That being blessed by God may not mean what you think it means. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry. Blessed are the weeping, the broken, the upside-down ones of the world. God asks us to take our 9-year-old or even our 39, 59 or even 79-year-old brains and look differently. Believe differently. Rewrite the script we think the world has written and look at the script God has written.
Do you feel like one of the broken hearted or the meek or lowly or the least of these? God says “there is a place for you in my kingdom”. There is a place for you among the beloved, the faithful and the disciples. Perhaps you also are one who wrote a script for this world that clashes with the gospels. God says: there is a place for you among the beloved, the faithful and the disciples. Let us all go out into our worlds and remind ourselves, our neighbors, our loved ones and the ones who have been told “I don’t love you.” the good news of the gospel.