Signs of God's Glory: Jesus Blesses Us

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, February 13, 2022
Luke 6:17-26

    We have quite a lot of lists to think about today in worship!  In our gospel, we have Jesus’ famous Beatitudes of blessings along with woes.  And echoing much of what Jesus says, we have our Scout Law to inspire all of us to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.  My guess is that while we try to do these things, most of us have felt guilty at one time or another for failing to be as helpful, friendly, cheerful, etc. as we ought.  And the “woe” language strikes our ears pretty harshly.  Wait, does Jesus not want us to be happy and have enough to eat?  Because all of us are rich by the rest of the world’s standards, are we in trouble?  What are we supposed to do with this list of warnings and our worrying about not measuring up sometimes to God’s standards for us?
    Dr. Karoline Lewis, professor of biblical preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, offered some helpful advice in understanding the “woes” of today’s gospel reading.  She suggests that rather than w-o-e, what if we thought “w-h-o-a?”  The sense that Jesus is trying to get at, she explains, is for we who are rich, full, and happy to pay attention to those who are suffering.  Jesus’ grace and blessing is for you, in other words, but it’s not just for you.  We are blessed to be a blessing.  No matter who we are, how old or young, we are called to pay attention and remember those who could really use a blessing from God because they are hungry, grieving, poor, and persecuted.  W-h-o-a “whoa” helps us refocus our lives on being helpful, friendly, kind and cheerful towards others, not just keeping all the good we have for ourselves.
    So here’s an example.  I went to college in South Dakota, and on a spring break learning trip, I had the opportunity to encounter poverty like I’d never seen before in a rural village in Nicaragua.  The Lutheran church in Nicaragua had a relationship with the Lutheran church in South Dakota, so I was happy to offer to host a member of a Lutheran delegation from Nicaragua to South Dakota the following year after my trip.  I was house sitting for my campus pastor and his family while they were on vacation (I ok’d hosting this Nicaraguan woman with him first!).  It was a pastor’s house, not a mansion, but still a two-story house with four bedrooms, three bathrooms plus a nicely finished basement where I was staying.  I had been practicing my Spanish house words to show my guest how to work the shower and where to find the towels and so on.  When I took the woman to the house after our church meeting, she froze when she walked inside and just kept saying over and over, “Que casa grande!  Que muy grande!” (What a big house, very big!)
That was a “whoa,” moment for me.  The truth is, I had pretty quickly moved on from my experience staying with a family of nine sleeping on straw mats on a dirt floor in a two-room house where a roommate and I shared the only bed during our weeklong stay in Nicaragua.  I had quickly forgotten so many things we take for granted – hot and cold drinkable running water, flush toilets, houses that not only had more than two or three rooms but LEVELS with STAIRS, air conditioning and heat.  Seeing our affluence through the eyes of someone who had never visited the U.S. before was a wake-up call for me to hold the poor of the world in ongoing prayer and to do what I could to alleviate poverty around the world.  Not that I alone can do everything to end global poverty, but I can do something!  Whoa, we might say today as we hear Jesus ask us to pay attention:  “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”  Being involved in a faith community like our church, being involved in service organizations like the Boy Scouts help us to pay attention and stay committed to our central Christian value of loving God, our neighbors, AND ourselves.
    Here’s another example:  I don’t know if any of you have been watching the Olympics, but a few nights ago I saw freeskier Eileen Gu win gold.  She had some jumps that were truly terrifyingly beautiful!  Her third and final jump boosted her score, but there were two skiers left to go.  The first one fell.  The second skier, Tess Ledeux of France, did not have a good final jump and she knew it.  As soon as Tess finished her jump, she burst into tears crying with disappointment.  She had come so close to winning gold but got second best.  What I found remarkable was that Eileen Gu went from smiling and cheering for her big win to crouching down to hug and comfort Tess.  I wonder if it was a “whoa” moment for those two athletes, one mourning, one cheering, and to me it demonstrated real sports-ship to demonstrate concern rather than rubbing a victory into everyone else’s faces.
    Jesus’ woes take us out of ourselves to remind us that God wants ALL of us to be blessed, not just the winners of the world.  This January in the cold and dark and wet/snowy weather, I decided to finally read a book that had been on my shelf for a while written jointly by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu who died just a few months ago.  It’s called The Book of Joy.  I’d recommend it!  It’s a Christian-Buddhist dialogue about joy and how we might be more joyful.  At least for Christians, it was not surprising that both spiritual leaders agree that true joy is not found in material wealth, fame, success, or power, but in showing compassion toward others.  The book notes that scientists have backed up this spiritual truth that serving others actually increases our happiness.  It may seem counterintuitive in some ways that the more we think about others, the more joyful we feel.  This is the message that Jesus is preaching throughout these chapters in Luke.  God blesses us to be a blessing.  We are to love our neighbors as ourselves, and in paying attention to those “whoa” wake-up moments that move us to serve others, we find lasting joy in life. As Jesus says, “your reward is great in heaven.”
    So dear people of God, including our beloved Troop-170, keep striving to follow the scouting law that points our lives toward serving others.  Know that God blesses us in our striving and blesses those we seek to serve.  We ask the Holy Spirit to point out those times, those “whoa” moments when we become apathetic or blind to our circumstances so that we may continue to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.  Amen.