Community Church Sermons

The Sixth Sunday After Epiphany, Year C - February 11, 2001

"The Sermon That Still Shakes The World"

Luke 6:17-26

Among the athletic fields upon which we used to play as kids growing up was our Whiffle Ball Diamond. It was located at the intersection of Calumet Avenue, where Cataumet Street empties into it, forming a "T". Home plate was made by taking a jagged rock and scraping it repeatedly on the asphalt paving until something looking like a base appeared. First base was a grated sewer cover on one corner of the intersection, second was the big double sewer on the other side of Calumet, right in front of my house, and third was the sewer on the other corner.

And there on that field, Dennis Astrella and I met and vanquished all our opponents. That had a lot to do with the fact that Dennis and I were pretty good at sports - especially baseball. And it probably had something to do as well with the fact that we only played people who weren't as good as us. Like my little brother Steve, and Danny LaMarche, the tall, skinny kid next door. And our perfect win/loss ratio was perhaps helped just a tad by the fact that Dennis and I - being the home team - got to make up all the rules. And, if there was a dispute, we'd vote on it. And it would always come out two-to-two, leaving the tie to be broken by the oldest player which happened to be Dennis. After all, that was one of the ground rules we'd established.

And so, season in and season out, Dennis and I compiled a perfect record, beating all our foes by an average margin of - oh, say 212 to 2.

But, lest you think this was an idyllic world, there were problems too, not the least of which were all the sewers in the field of play. And with great regularity, one of us would hit a grounder at one, and we would all cringe as the whiffle ball disappeared through the opening against the curb. And balls didn't come cheap - they were about 19 cents each! And so we had to come up with a way of somehow retrieving the balls that rolled into the sewer. We tried various instruments, rake handles, fishing line and hooks, clothes hangers tied to string. But none of them worked. And that's when we came up with the idea of using Danny LaMarche. Now, I'm not going to say that Danny thought it was a good idea. But we voted on it. Two-to-two. And Dennis cast the deciding vote. And so off came the grate of the sewer, and down went Danny LaMarche who we held by the ankles. Thank God Dennis and I never slipped and let the poor boy go! And Danny would come back up, sludge up to his elbows and smelling pretty bad. But he'd have that - well, brownish colored whiffle ball in his hand. And the game would go on!

Darwin might have proved his theory of natural selection if he had ever come to our neighborhood. It was the survival of the fittest. Dennis and I were the top, and they were the bottom. We were the winners, and they were the losers. And I never gave much thought about it until years later when I read, for the first time, Jesus' sermon on the mount. And in Jesus' sharp distinction drawn between the poor, the hungry, the sad and the unpopular, and those on the other side - the rich, the satisfied, the happy, and the accepted, I saw the old neighborhood structure in which Steve and Danny were the former, and Dennis and I were the latter. And it sort of shook me up.

When Jesus preached the sermon on the mount, or the sermon on the plain as it is described in Luke, it shook up the people of that day, too. And, it's a sermon that's still shaking the world.

You know, we don't talk about it very much in the Church, but Jesus came down pretty hard on successful people. In today's passage, Jesus offers God's blessing and good will toward those who are deprived - the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, and the oppressed - and then he goes on to express God's lament over those who are doing okay - the affluent, the well-fed, people who are happy, and those who are accepted and admired by others.

Jesus offers blessing to the deprived, and expresses woe for people who are satisfied.

And I wonder, "WHY does Jesus DO that?"

Now, I don't believe Jesus had any bias against successful people, and even affluent people. His ministry, you know, was financially supported by wealthy women. He invited well-off people - like the rich young ruler - to come and follow him. Jesus was also cared for in death by the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea who provided the stone tomb in which his body was lain. It would not be correct to say that Jesus was filled with some kind of religious class-envy and therefore railed against wealth and wealthy people. The Bible does not support that idea at all.

But what the Scripture does show us, is that Jesus seemed to believe that those who are on top of life - financially secure, satisfied, happy and well-respected have a beautiful and exciting calling from God which we sometimes do not achieve because the richness of our lives lulls us to sleep.

I've just finished reading Chamique Holdsclaw's autobiography. Chamique is, arguably, the best woman's basketball player of all time, the Michael Jordan of the women's game. Many of us had the opportunity to watch her work her basketball magic during her career as a University of Tennessee Lady Vol. And yet, when you read her story, it may surprise you to learn that, on more than one occasion, Chamique almost quit and left the team. She and head coach Pat Summit constantly clashed, with coach Summit almost never satisfied with Chamique's effort. Day after day, and week after week, the coach rode her, placing the responsibility for the team's poor play directly on Chamique's shoulders. She almost broke under the pressure.

But, in one of those transforming "ah-hah!" moments of life, assistant coach Mickey DeMoss set up a private meeting between the star player and her coach. And they had it out. During that meeting, Chamique poured out all her frustrations. And Pat Summit told Chamique why she worked her so hard.

You are the most gifted women's basketball player I've ever seen, Pat said. You can become the greatest of all time. But you are too often satisfied with where you are, and don't rise up to where you can and need to be. You need to be committed to elevating yourself to higher levels of play. You are the only one who can make your teammates better than they are!

That's why coach Summit rode Chamique the way she did. And today, as a star in the WNBA, Chamique Holdsclaw acknowledges that Pat Summit - now one of her closest friends - is largely responsible for the success she has achieved.

Do you suppose this is why Jesus spoke to people like us they way he did?

Does our success, our well-being, our high level of satisfaction with life as it is, actually hold us back from the high levels of service to which God is calling us? I suspect that may be exactly why Jesus said what he did. And throughout the pages of Scripture, we can read about the underachievement of those of us who are well-off.

One of our most glaring errors, for instance, is that we - like Chamique - sometimes forget our relationship with those who are struggling.

I was at a clergy association meeting this past week and Ron Jordan, the Executive Director of the Good Samaritan Center reported that in January, the Center had helped over 250 families. More than 9,000 pounds of food were given out. Since the cold weather hit, Volunteer Support Services has paid out more than $11,000 to help families with skyrocketing utility bills. The resources are evaporating quickly.

But as we were discussing these concerns, our human tendency to forget and lose sight of the poor entered the discussion. One of our members raised the question of unscrupulous people using the system to avoid taking responsibility for themselves. The fact of cheaters and scam artists almost always comes up when well-off people discuss the poor. And there are some bad apples out there. But as we focus our attention on those who take advantage, we seem to forget the vast majority of people who are genuinely in need. People like my mother and other elderly persons who find it impossible to stretch a Social Security check far enough to cover prescription medications, rent payments, and food costs. They've never abused anything! People like a single mother I know who works full time at a menial job trying to provide for her two girls and not wanting to end up on the welfare roles. She's never taken advantage of anyone! People like the hundreds of children in Loudon County whose homes would be without heat were it not for people who care. Those children have never cheated society out of one red cent! None of these are scam artists. But all of them live in a world in which they are genuinely unable to provide for their own needs.

And there are four billion such people in our world. And we are called into relationship with them.

What is it that makes us not notice these people - the two-thirds of the world's six billion people who live in abject poverty? What is it that causes us to focus instead on the relatively minute numbers of scam artists and people who abuse the system?

Call it human nature, or sin, or whatever you want to call it, but how easy it is to lose sight of the poor. The Old Testament prophets railed against those who forget, and Jesus warns us about it. In Matthew 25, he talks about Judgment Day, and he describes a certain group of people who fail to live up to God's calling by refusing to give a cup of water to a child, or clothing to a naked person, or to visit someone in jail. And why did they neglect these people God loves? Probably because Satan deceived them into believing that the poor are really just people who won't pull their own weight. And there are many such people in our world who view the poor this way. I think that may be one of the reasons Jesus said, "Woe to you who are rich…well-fed…happy…and accepted." These seem to be the ingredients involved in the recipe for forgetting about the poor.

But it doesn't need to be this way!

The Gospel of Jesus challenges us to become a part of God's plan to build a Kingdom in which poverty is eradicated. Jesus invites comfortable people like you and me to rise up to incredibly higher levels of service and achievement. And if you're interested in really making a difference - of moving out of woe and into blessing - let me suggest some things to work on:

First, dedicate yourself as a Christian to learning about poverty. What causes it? What sustains it? What fuels it? I believe that if every affluent person devoted herself or himself to reading, studying, and coming to understand what it is to be poor, we would discover a deep passion within ourselves to do something about it. Maybe a good place to start would be by reading all the Bible references to the poor. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Community did that once. Took a Bible and actually cut out the passages that spoke about God's compassion for the poor. And when he was done, there was almost nothing left of the Bible. And he learned something about God, and about the poor from that.

Second, go out and get into relationship with people who live in vulnerable settings. A minister in Miami, Florida did that a few years ago by actually living among the homeless population for three days. Put on rags, left behind his wallet, and went out into the streets to see what it's like. It was a pretty dramatic move. Amazingly, he discovered that the worst part of being homeless was the way people don't want to look at you. They pretend like you're not even there. And, among other lessons learned in that experiment, this minister discovered that just making human contact with people on the street made a huge difference in their lives.

Now, I don't recommend that you go camp out on the streets of Knoxville. But I do encourage you to become involved somewhere in the community or in the world where you have the chance to get to know people who live in poverty. And what beautiful people you will encounter!

In the depths of the depression of the 1930's, a government agent visited the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The federal government was making small allotments to impoverished farmers for stock, feed and necessary equipment. The agent came upon a mountain woman who lived all alone and tried to grub out a living from two acres of land. She had no floors in her cabin (save for the packed earth) and just a few sticks of homemade furniture. Daylight streamed through chinks in the cabin walls. The agent looked around and then asked, 'If the government gave you 200 dollars, what would you do with it?' The woman weighed the question for a long moment and then replied, "Oh, I reckon I'd give it to the poor."

Poor people are far more beautiful than we who live in suburbia can possibly know. And when you go out and get into relationship, and begin to put faces and names to the poor, you'll never be the same again.

So learn about poverty. And get into relationship with those who live in it. And finally, live each day as though you are poor!

Do you realize how thin is the line separating our affluence and others' poverty? How easily erasable it is. If we had been born into a different home; if we had gone to a different school; if we had made a different financial decision; if we had married a different spouse... And who knows about the decisions we'll make tomorrow, or the tragedy that will befall us, or the sickness that will empty us?

The truth about us is not our success. That is just a passing thing. In the words of an old Australian saying, "Rooster today, feather duster tomorrow."

Your true identity is not among the have's, but among the have not's, for we came into this world with nothing, and we will leave this world with nothing. In the meantime, God has granted us gifts to share with our people.

And so I want to call you to rise up to the heights! This sermon of Jesus continues to shake the world! But it is not really a sermon putting down people like us.

It is, rather, a sermon that offers the world hope! Poor people and affluent people together, working to build the Kingdom of God!

Of course, we couldn't see that way back then in the old neighborhood on Calumet Avenue. But that was before we met Jesus who shook us up by inviting us to reach higher! And taught us a brand new way of playing Whiffle ball!