Sermon: Upside Down Blessings

Luke 6:17-26

Upside Down Blessings

James Sledge                                                                                       February 17, 2019

Many years ago, prior to becoming a pastor, I was teaching an adult Sunday School class. We were studying Luke, and lesson was on the “Sermon on the Plain,” a portion of which we just heard. I read the four blessings or beatitudes and the corresponding woes. I then asked the class what they thought about these words that spoke of God’s favor on the poor but woe on the wealthy. 

One lady quickly spoke up to correct me. Jesus had said no such thing, she insisted. He was talking about the poor in spirit, not actual poverty. When I suggested that she might be thinking of Matthew’s gospel, that Luke spoke of rich and poor, of well-off and those without enough to eat, she only became more adamant. Jesus couldn’t possibly have meant that.

I suspect that when most people think of the Beatitudes, they think of those found in Matthew. Matthew’s list is a good bit longer than Luke’s, and it has no corresponding woes. And it also does say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…”

Matthew’s beatitudes are more popular, and the long list of blessings sometimes prompts people to read them as instructions on how to get blessed. I think that misreads Matthew’s gospel, but you certainly can manage that with many of his beatitudes. But Luke is an entirely different matter, and unless we’re going to tell people to become poor, hungry, and mournful in order to gain God’s favor, we’ll have to find some other way to understand them.

When Luke tells of these beatitudes and woes, he uses Old Testament language of blessing and curse. The contrast is between God’s favor and God’s active disfavor. “Blessed” means God wants things to go well for you. “Woe” means God wishes bad things upon “you who are rich… who are full now…who are laughing now… when all speak well of you…”

It’s more than a little unnerving. If you are poor, hungry, mourning or hated, then God is for you. But if you’re well off, have a full pantry, are happy and laughing, and everyone thinks you are wonderful, God is against you. That can’t be right, can it? No wonder that woman in my Bible study class said what she did.

These blessings and woes are completely upside down and backwards from what the world expects. The world says, “God helps those who help themselves.” We thank God for our many blessings, often referring to possessions and good fortune that would seem to put us squarely in the “But woe to you…” camp. And I think that may be exactly the point Jesus is making. He says that God’s ways are completely upside down and backwards to ours.

Throughout history, almost every culture has used religion to buttress the status quo, its economic system, and so on. It was not so long ago in this country that most Christian denominations issued statements saying racially based slavery was ordained by God. Many of these denominations later split in two when Christians in the north began to question such statements and seek to overturn them.

During the Civil War, many in the south saw the fight to preserve slavery as partly a religious one, a righteous battle to preserve a way of life instituted by God. One famous theologian from my seminary alma mater in Richmond was still writing impassioned defenses of slavery and the racial inferiority of African people decades after the Civil War.

In my childhood, many churches still viewed segregation as instituted by God, and fought tooth and nail against the Civil Rights Movement. They used their faith to support the racial status quo, even though there is scant support for such views to be found in Scripture.

Sometimes support for the status quo is more insidious and subtle. Most churches now forcefully reject any notion that God approves of divisions by race. And yet we often tie our faith so closely to white, Western styles of music, art, culture, and architecture that we continue to segregate our sanctuaries on Sunday mornings.

Faith also gets woven into our economic status quo. We give thanks for our blessings, for our wealth, our comfort, our happiness, our success, our plentiful Thanksgiving tables. That assumes these are indeed signs of God’s favor, which at least implies that those who are poor, hungry, miserable, and outcasts must not enjoy divine favor.

But Jesus turns such notions upside down. According to him, God has nothing to do with a world where some are at the top and some are at the bottom. If it were all a matter of God’s favor or blessing, there would be an economic leveling that is scarcely imaginable.

So what does all this mean? Why does Jesus tell us this. What does he expect of us? As individual people of faith? As a congregation? Does Jesus expect us to divest ourselves of our wealth and possessions and give to the poor? That is certainly a possibility. Jesus says exactly that to one well off man who comes to him for religious advice.

But I think that in this case, Jesus is asking us to change our worldview. He asks us to let go of long standing religious notions and instead embrace God’s way of seeing things. He asks us to see that a world of have and have nots does not come from God, but from human sinfulness. He invites us to wonder about what our lives, individually and corporately, would look like if they were the result of seeing the world as God does.

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Last year I and number of FCPC members participated in a series of fairly intense facilitated discussions on race, an activity spurred by the horrific events in Charlottesville in summer of 2017. These conversations, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more have helped me continue to realize the countless ways my life has been made easier and, by our culture’s standards, better because of white privilege.

A lot of people bristle at the very notion of white privilege. I suppose if you’re white and have had a difficult life, you may not feel very privileged. But the simple facts are that whites have enjoyed betters lives because people of color have had worse ones. It’s how our society was built, in much the same way it requires some to be poor for others to be wealthy.

I think the idea of white privilege also bothers some people because they fear it means feeling guilty about being white. I don’t want to feel guilty just because I’m white, but then again, I don’t want to feel that God is against me just because I’m relatively well off; well, actually quite rich by Jesus’ standards.

Jesus began his ministry by proclaiming that God’s new day was breaking into our world. This new day, this kingdom or dominion, is upside down and backwards from the world, and its coming turns the world upside down. In our reading, Jesus describes it using the hyperbole typical of his culture. But Jesus’ words still demand that we rethink the status quo and our place in it. His words invite us to imagine the world God’s dream envisions. Jesus’ words call us to begin living now in the wondrous hope of God’s new day that turns the world upside down.