Good News you can use

Let’s be honest: at some point, having faith in God means having faith that something good is gonna happen.  And you expect that you’re eventually gonna see the good happen: you will witness the people who do evil things getting what they deserve, and you will witness the righteous people getting their victory. 

We’re not here to talk about the Bible as a thought exercise.  We don’t want to hear about benefits we won’t receive until after we have died and entered the presence of God. 

We’re here, just like the great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon: we have come to hear Jesus and to be healed of our diseases.  Depending on the day, our most vexing diseases may be bodily pains, chronic illness, or social maladies like loneliness or disconnection from community, or maybe toxic optimism or affluenza, to give a name to the condition of greed.  What we need is healing. 

What Jesus gives us is healing: to remind us that we’re wrong if we’re laboring under the impression that wealth is bestowed only upon those who morally deserve it.  We’re wrong if we believe that people who are hungry must not have worked hard enough for their food.  We’re wrong to avoid the people who are grieving because it feels socially awkward because what are you supposed to say, do you bring up their loved one who has died or will that upset them?  And we’re wrong to be suspicious of people who are excluded and reviled—we have it all backwards. 

If you heard these words of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel and asked yourself, haven’t I heard something like this before?  It’s quite possible you’re thinking of Jesus’s words in Matthew’s Gospel, where something similar is recorded, though not exactly the same.  These statements that begin “blessed…” are sometimes called beatitudes, which comes from the Latin word for blessed.  Or you may have seen your Bible refer to these as “makarisms,” which comes from the Greek word for blessed. 

When Matthew writes this sermon of Jesus, he calls it the “Sermon on the Mount,” which starts with beatitudes that speak more to the human spiritual experience: “Blessed are those who are poor in spirit…blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” and so on. 

The way Luke tells this story, Jesus is on a level place, so sometimes we call this the “Sermon on the Plain” because Jesus isn’t up above anyone else—Jesus has his feet on the same ground as everybody else. 

In fact, I love this detail in verse 20: “[Jesus] looked up at his disciples…”  Jesus has a way of making you look down at what you’re doing and pay attention.  And here’s where we are really challenged to take Jesus literally—when we’re hated and excluded, that’s when we’re supposed to rejoice and leap for joy?  I confess I have never once done this.  Have you?  Did it even occur to you as an option? 

Do you ever hear people use religious language in their everyday conversation and think to yourself, they can’t possibly be serious, thinking God is going to magically fix this problem?  I confess I’ve had that skepticism from time to time.  It’s probably some expression of my human nature, my human sinfulness that wants me to feel like I’m better than someone else, so I can look down upon them. 

Could this be why Jesus looked up at his disciples when he preached to them? 

Justo Gonzalez, a liberation theologian and church historian, has written about the separation between what is bodily and earthy, on the one hand, and issues of the soul and what is spiritual, on the other hand, though he acknowledges a danger in establishing one as better or higher than the other. 

He says that for a long time, theologians and people highly engaged in academic pursuits have thought that the greatest human achievements are of the intellect, buying into what he calls the “myth of the superiority of the intellectual life…[clothed] with all sorts of theological justifications.”[1] 

Gonzalez writes,

“Men who have been doing their theology in universities and libraries have tended to look down upon the women who cook their food and the minorities who collect their garbage.  Their life and work appear to them as the pure pursuit of intellectual matters, while those other folk are somehow more earthy and less developed.” 

Gonzalez speaks to himself and other academic-types when he says,

“Those of us who form part of the intellectual elite need to be reminded that our society could go on living for quite a while without us, but it would have a hard time surviving without those who pick lettuce, cook food, and collect garbage.” 

Gonzalez is talking about a different way of seeing the world, where body and soul, where earthly and spiritual, do not exist in a hierarchy but are balanced.  He calls this the biblical understanding of human nature.  “It may well be,” Gonzalez writes, “that theology is best done with dirt under one’s fingernails.” 

And this is the point: God gets involved in the world and calls you deeper into involvement with the world as well.  It’s messy and it will get under your fingernails, but it’s important to notice the ways God works when you show up willing to get involved, even to the point of doing work that gets your hands dirty. 

Because whatever you think about God, whatever you confess as your faith, doesn’t only live in your head—it informs your actions.  And your actions will betray what you really think.  Jesus said, the truth will set you free, and I would add: on the way to freedom, the truth might also make you a liar! 

Jesus said “Woe to you when all speak well of you,” and that hurt because I really like getting people’s approval.  This idea of leaping for joy while people hate you, it really got to me this week because when I’m feeling hated, I just want to curl up into a ball and disappear, or go silent until the moment passes, because I’m actually pretty weak. 

Don’t I say I believe in God?  Don’t I publicly get out here in this pulpit and proclaim God’s mighty power on behalf of the poor and the hungry and those who weep and those who are hated? 

Sure, but I don’t wanna be one of those people! I want to be strong and gift my goodness to those in need, those other people in need, and that way I never have to be vulnerable and maybe I don’t even need God’s mercy because I’m doing just fine, thank you very much. 

One of my pastor colleagues this week remembered that Martin Luther would say that your God is whatever you look to to give you life.  Is my God really my own sense of independence?  Is my God actually my confidence in my own competence?  Wouldn’t that be putting my faith in a lie?

Am I bold enough to live in the truth of God’s freedom?  Am I bold enough to rejoice and leap for joy on the day when I’m being hated, excluded, and reviled?  Is the Word of God more to me than mere words to remember, but words of life to guide my actions, even if that means rejoicing and leaping for joy in the face of hatred? 

Some of us are getting really discouraged every time we look at the news, rattled by national institutions losing their funding, information centers going dark, public servants losing their jobs.  And of course, these situations are terrible, but now is not the time to lose hope.  Now is the time to confess our vulnerability and plead for mercy to the God of eternity who has seen all of this before—and in truth has seen so much worse—and this same God still has not abandoned creation. 

How do I know God is still present?  The evidence is all around, especially for those willing to look for it.  I have to share this story with you, from Sojourners magazine, written by Moya Harris, an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  This is a story of what it means to trust in God and act in faith.  This is good news you can use.  She writes:

“In December 2020, white supremacists marched through Washington, D.C., defacing our church’s Black Lives Matter sign. This wasn’t just vandalism; it was an act of terror, a deliberate attempt to silence a Black church—Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church— that has long stood for justice. But fear has never had the final word in our tradition.

“I won’t lie though; we were unsettled. I will never forget when my pastor, Rev. William H. Lamar IV, shared the news with our waiting congregation. We were at the height of the pandemic, before vaccines, navigating an online worship reality with no clear end in sight. My mind flashed to cross burnings in the rural South. I wasn’t surprised, but I was angry — and tired.

“My pastor stood firm, reminding us that God is still with us. He didn’t flinch when he said, “We will not be silenced.” And we weren’t. We did not cower. We did not retreat. Instead, we kept doing what we have always done: worshiping, liberating, and serving — trusting in a God who bends the arc of the universe toward justice. We remained steadfast in our calling as the Cathedral of African Methodism, refusing to lose heart in the face of white supremacy.

“In June 2023, Metropolitan AME successfully sued the Proud Boys, winning a $2.8 million judgment through default judgement for trespassing and vandalizing our property. But because they have yet to pay, our church creatively sought to ensure payment by stripping the hate group of its trademark, meaning they can no longer sell merchandise to fund their hate — unless our church allows it. Any profits the Proud Boys earn from using the trademark must be paid to Metropolitan to help fulfill the multi-million-dollar default judgment.

“A Black church now holds the legal rights to the identity of those who sought to intimidate it. This is more than a court decision; it is a reversal of power in the tradition of Jesus.”[2]

Friends, if I thought that Jesus was merely philosophizing, or engaging in a thought experiment, when he said “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kin-dom of God,” I could not stand up here and say, here are some good ideas to think about.  These words are not good ideas; these words are evidence of how God heals us and heals the world. 

God, heal our weariness, heal our skepticism, heal our insistence upon self-reliance.  Show us your mercy, eternal and refreshing, like a tree planted by water.  Make us bold to rejoice and leap for joy in the face of hatred.  And help us to keep doing what we have always done: worshiping, liberating, serving and trusting in you, O God. 

Amen. 

 Pastor Cheryl

[1] Justo Gonzalez, Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990, page 129.

[2] Moya Harris, article found in an e-mail newsletter, https://sojo.net/articles/opinion/my-black-church-now-owns-racist-logo

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