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A Whole New Order Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 18, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 28:1-6; 15-19 Luke 6:12-28
From the beginning of his gospel until now, Luke has done his best to let us in on the future that invaded all present arrangements, the eternity that entered time when Jesus was born. First of all, there is Mary who sings of the God who has scattered the proud (past perfect tense) in the imaginations of their hearts, has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up those of low degree, has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away. Soon shepherds enter the story, characters who were the least and the last in society but, according to Luke, the first to hear good tidings of great joy. Likewise, the aged--Simeon and Anna--are mentioned only by Luke as seeing in Jesus the salvation for which they had waited. Then Luke’s gospel inaugurates Jesus’ public ministry in the synagogue with a sermon on a text that names the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed as recipients of an already reversed social order fulfilled in the congregation’s hearing of Jesus. So wed are they to present arrangements that they try to run him, like a scapegoat, off a cliff. Next we are made privy to a series of actual reversals: evil reversed as Jesus rebukes demons and heals the sick; seeing inverted as he refocuses the eyes of his followers to see abundance rather than scarcity by way of a great catch of fish; social and religious mores upended as he touches lepers, forgives sinners, eats with tax collectors, works on the Sabbath: all actions that refuse the order established by the social and religious establishment of the day and reveal a whole new order. I read these things and wonder if the disciples, whom he had called together just that morning, and the twelve apostles whom he had chosen that day for special service, I wonder if they had any inkling of the future already present and the past already ended in him whose kingdom has no end. I wonder on this morning when, through the voice of the church, elders and deacons chosen for special service will bear the weight of leadership pressed down upon their bowed heads by the hands of those who have gone before them, I wonder if they and we have any inkling of the future already present and the past already ended in him who has conquered sin and death on the cross. Theoretically, the community gathered by God’s Word—by Jesus Christ--is given to the world to be a beachhead of a whole new order, an embodiment of God’s future in the present, a foretaste of the kingdom where the last are first, a glimpse of the realm where God reigns. Tragically, the distinctions between the social order within the church and beyond its bounds are so subtle sometimes as to be barely visible! Therefore we would do well to join the great crowd of disciples and the multitude of people on the plain who had come to hear Jesus and be healed, in hopes that we might also hear and in our hearing inhabit a whole new order. In that multitude long ago, Luke tells us there were disciples who had already heard Jesus and newly chosen apostles who were suddenly listening as though their lives were on the line; there were Jews from Judea and Gentiles from Tyre and Sidon who had perhaps heard of Jesus and wanted to hear more; and there were representatives of the religious establishment who had no interest in hearing Jesus or being healed. Rather they were there to observe, monitor, question and even spy on Jesus, says New Testament scholar Joel Green. Translated into this community, there are those here today who have begun to follow Jesus and about to be ordained officers whose lives are suddenly on the line; there are those who have heard of Jesus and want to hear more; and there are the keepers of the status quo—observing, monitoring, questioning and spying on behalf of the beneficiaries of present power arrangements. Perhaps there is a little of each in all of us. For as it was two thousand years ago on the plain, so it is every Sunday in the places where the gospel is preached: Jesus’ words invert, reverse, turn inside-out and upside-down the way the world works, giving those privileged by present arrangements an inkling of what it feels like to be marginalized—literally putting them in the way of grace, though anger and fear blinds them to this--while inviting all present to inhabit the whole new order of God’s reign—inviting us, in a word, to follow Jesus. So when the crowd had settled down, Jesus began to describe the whole new order of God’s reign present in him, to announce the way things are in the world that is either fulfilled in the hearing of God’s Word or falls on the deaf ears of mere observers and monitors and spies. Listen as though you were in the crowd on the plain, for today you are. Notice the leaping and sinking of your heart as Jesus describes the way the world works and the kingdom that has come to us in him. Hear in his words an invitation to dwell even now in the future that has decisively invaded all present arrangements, in the whole new order of God’s reign. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “For his sake,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the disciples and apostles in the crowd, “they have lost all. In following him, they lost even their own selves, and everything that could make them rich. Now they are poor—so inexperienced, so stupid, that they have no other hope but him who called them.” Poor means those who know, first-hand, the bankruptcy of the old order. This could be because that order has kept them from even the most basic means given us by God to make human life human: food, shelter, warmth, health, community. But now and again, the old order’s bankruptcy leads those who have been its beneficiaries into literal poverty because the life of acquisition—be it the acquisition of money or status or social security—no longer has any appeal or power over them. Sometimes this bankruptcy is evident to those who have reached the top of their game and found only emptiness; other recognize from the start the road less traveled that has made all the difference. Then there are those who simply take the first step of discipleship and are drawn unawares into a whole new order where the reversals revealed in a stable or on a cross are made known first-hand at table with sinners or when dining with outcasts. Bonhoeffer goes on to say that Jesus knows all about the others in the crowd too, “the representatives and preachers of the national religion, who enjoy greatness and renown, whose feet are firmly planted on the earth, who are deeply rooted in the culture and piety of the people and molded by the spirit of the age.” Religion is their consolation; the letter of the law in Scripture constitutes their ethics; the maintenance of eternally sanctioned power arrangements is their hope. Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry, says Jesus. Then in the second place, Jesus says, Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Nowhere else in the New Testament does the word laughing appear! Matthew writes instead, Blessed are them that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Luther translated mourning to mean sorrow-bearing: the bearing of another’s sorrow. I think we bear the brunt of another’s sorrow by our refusal to accept as inevitable the conditions that caused the sorrow [refuse because we inhabit the future that has invaded present arrangement in Jesus]. Together we are sorrow-bearers as we not only are given to comfort one another by him who is our only comfort in life and in death, but also as we become disturbers of the so-called peace on behalf of them that weep. “The chiefest sanctity of a temple,” wrote Miguel Unamuno, “is that it is a place to which [mortals] go to weep in common, A miserere sung in common by a multitude tormented by destiny.” That destiny, says Jesus in the beatitudes, is God, where those who weep now will laugh while those who laugh now—their lives unchanged by the plight of others—will join Dives (a character unique to Luke’s gospel) as he weeps and mourns amid the flames of Hades. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Then in the third place, Jesus says, Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you. Blessed are the vulnerable, Bonhoeffer translates. Blessed is “the community of strangers [that] possesses no inherent right of its own to protection…in the world.” Blessed are the meek, Matthew adds, who will inherit the earth that others now think they possess by violence and injustice; and likewise, the merciful “who have in their life with Jesus renounced their own dignity” to take on the humiliation and sin of others. “They will be found consorting with publicans and sinners,” observes Bonhoeffer, “careless of the shame they incur thereby.” Woe to you, says Jesus to those in the crowd who still cling to good repute in the old order, when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. Finally, says Jesus in sum, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. The whole new order of the beatitudes inaugurates a counter-community inclusive of those who believe they have no chance in hell for heaven! That counter-community is the church of Jesus Christ which, I say again, is not to be confused with institutional religion. Being a part of this community, this whole new order, means that we get that we are sinners—not in the hellfire and brimstone sense but in the sense of being without God in the world; not in the repent or else you are going to The Bad Place way, but in the “just as I am without one plea” sort of deep need of grace which alone bears witness to God’s grace in the world. Truth be told, I think in the beatitudes Jesus is rooting for us to be rejected by the righteous religious establishment so that Christ’s love can take up residence in our undefended spirit. For only as we find ourselves in the company of the despised and rejected, believing ourselves to be beneath God’s mercy and grace, do we hear Christ’s call to sinners…to those who reside morally in the company of folks who have nothing to lose…and find ourselves [literally!] following Him. It is in this sense that I believe the community of faith is the community of those called together to incarnate what evangelical activist Jim Wallis calls “a whole new order, [to] offer a visible and concrete alternative, and issue a basic challenge to the world as it is. The church must be called to be the church,” he writes, “to rebuild the kind of community that gives substance to the claims of faith.” On this Sunday when we ordain and install elders and deacons to lead us, to challenge us, to comfort us and to call us to account, I pray more and more that we may become the church, incarnating in our life together a whole new order, offering a visible and concrete alternative to present power arrangements, issuing a challenge to the world as it is and giving substance to the claims of faith, claims that command us simply to love one another and to offer our lives for the sake of the world God so loved. Thanks be to God. |