6th Sunday after Epiphany, 2/16/2025

Texts: Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There are times when Jesus’ words don’t need much explaining. His meaning is explicit and tangible. It would be even appropriate in my mind to sit alongside you and hear Jesus’ sermon over and over again until my heart adopts it wholeheartedly. This sermon from Jesus, often named the Sermon on the Plain, provides us with a blueprint of Jesus’ focus, an elaboration of the ministry He said He would fulfill from Isaiah, which we heard a few Sundays ago. If you want to know what concerns Jesus of Nazareth, look no further than this text. Jesus, in prophetic fashion, addresses His disciples and the crowd that sought healing from Him. Jesus preaches the good news of God’s Kingdom in a series of blessings and woes. God’s Kingdom, while having universal reach, it has a focus. God’s Kingdom is concerned with a specific class of human beings, and through this sermon, Jesus is trying to reveal to those in the woe side, that if we want to follow Him, we need to pay attention to those who are blessed according to the Gospel. And it doesn’t help, that the blessings of God’s Kingdom run contrary to what often many societies including our own, preach for us to pursue, namely the hoarding of wealth and the pursuit of power over others. To borrow a theological phrase, God has a “preferential option for the poor”. Jesus says: Blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed because they follow the downward and radically loving way of Jesus. Throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, God always is on the lookout for the vulnerable. If there is one class of people that God constantly advocates for, it is the poor and oppressed. Jesus is the living embodiment of such advocacy, so much so, that any ill-treatment against this population is regarded as having it done to Jesus Himself. So close does God in Christ relate to the oppressed peoples, that their suffering is God’s own. And so, with that explicit preference for the poor, Jesus flips the tables on those that sit above such a class of people, to the rich, the powerful, the flatterers and those filled with every privilege at the expense of the poor. While the world praises such people, Jesus says “Woe to you”! “You have received your consolation, you have had your fill”. The Kingdom of God will not heap any more benefits to such people, on the contrary, they sit before God’s judgement. God will say to them: what have you done with so much wealth? How much of your fullness filled those in need? What did you do when you heard the cry of the poor? Jesus does not mince any words here. Often I heard in seminary, that the objective of preaching the Gospel is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. And no doubt Jesus is exemplifying such a dynamic in this text. Not because Jesus does not love the rich, rather He loves them so much to reveal to them also the truth of God’s way. As the Black theologian James Cone said: “The Gospel of liberation is bad news to all oppressors because they have defined their “freedom” in terms of slavery of others.”. To live and love as Jesus does, our sense of freedom must then be rooted in love of neighbor, meaning we wish for our neighbor to be free as we are free. To love and live like Jesus, we must keep the vulnerable in our sight always, and not in a paternalistic and condescending way, but rather in unity and love, because as Christians, they are our brethren. We are one community with them, we are called to feast from one table with them, as we do every Sunday during Communion. If we want to be close to Jesus, we must be close to the suffering of this world, and not put our trust, as the prophet Jeremiah said in today’s reading, in evanescent wealth that is gained from a system that feeds of the work of the poor. Beloved, the conclusions one can make from Jesus’ sermon is so world-turning, that we become, again in the words of James Cone: “that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity’s liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of “the Good” or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word “Christian” with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings.”

When Christians are out and about, they go about the Father’s business, and if we read our Bibles rightly, from Genesis to Revelation, God is out there liberating the oppressed from the slavery of sin and all it’s distortions of the worth and dignity of every God-breathed human being. And how amazing this invitation from Jesus, that to follow Him is to love concretely, not theoretically. We love a human face, with a name and a story. And we stand alongside each of those unique faces, especially the ones that are forgotten and not listened to.

Beloved, the question for us today is, that equipped with the spirit of Jesus’ sermon on the Plain, with the knowledge where God’s blessings and woes reside, how do we live by it? And to whom, specifically, is Jesus pointing our attention towards? How do we not practice our faith in vain, as Paul says, and live in faith with the Resurrected Christ? It is to take Jesus at His word. And thus we take Him at His word, when He says Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are those weep, blessed are the rejected, we respond with the embrace that God’s Kingdom holds the afflicted. Due to current circumstances, there are many of God’s blessed, that we rather ignore. And perhaps that is why Jesus is so emphatic about them. Because God is the God who sees. And I’ll be specific about people that I thought about when reading Jesus’ words. I thought about a young Hispanic girl, around 10 years old, being interviewed in 2019 after she was separated from her mom and dad by a series of mass ICE raids in Mississippi; many of the families remain separated 5 years from that raid. This little girl, that did not deserve such indignity, could only weep as she said, in English, the following: “I’m scared and I’m crying because of my mom and dad. The Hispanic people aren’t doing nothing bad; they’re not stealing nothing. My dad bought everything for me to live here. The rent. I don’t know where I’m going to eat. My dad did not do anything. He is not a criminal. I don’t know what I’m going to do now”. Blessed are those weep, says Jesus, for God’s Kingdom will bring back your laughter. As Jesus’ followers, we are the people that must uplift the cause of this brave and afflicted child of God. I’m also thinking of all the people that will go hungry because of over $500 million worth of food is at risk of spoiling due to the paralysis of USAID. Blessed are the hungry, for they will have their fill. I’m thinking of the over 200 refugee families supported by Ascentria Care Alliance here in New England, who are now at risk of falling into all kinds of insecurity. Blessed are you when you are excluded, reviled and defamed, for you will rejoice at the advent of God’s Kingdom.

Beloved, why must we make these connections? It is because the Word of God compels us to do so. Jesus commands us to take a stand for the vulnerable in a very radical way. We must be beacons of light by which the afflicted might glimpse this real and concrete hope that is the reign of Christ. Christ commands us to love the weak in society, to be in solidarity with them, because God is standing alongside them. If I can’t see Jesus in that weeping little girl, I can’t really see Jesus. If my heart does not break and lead me to mend the hurt caused to that little one, I need to repent. If I cannot weep with this little girl, I must ask God for mercy to soften my hard heart. Beloved, our faith is vain, if we do not love. Our faith is vain and we deny the Risen Christ, if we deny this little one. The readings today pose the question provoked by Jeremiah’s prophetic message: Are we putting our trust in mere mortals who make mere flesh their strength and whose hearts turn away from the Lord? Or do we trust the Lord and His Word of blessing and woe? Faith grounded in Christ is like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit”. Following Jesus at His Word, will make us steadfast, and like a planted tree that shall not be moved, we provide the cover, and the sustenance, and the atmosphere for life to grow in our midst. We become a refuge for the weary. And in many respects, this faithfulness puts us on the right side of the history that God has been leading us through. Let us pray for God to give us the vision of His Kingdom, so that we might bringers of good news to the downtrodden. Let us pray: