Luke 6:20-31
November 3, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Much of what Jesus says is wonderful. God loves us. God forgives us. The kingdom of God is a party. Walk in the light of Christ and have a light of life. But then Jesus has this dark side that seems to want to make everything so much harder.
In our Scriptures this morning, God worries about us when he gets up in the morning. Jesus said that God worries about those who have dropped through the cracks, the poor, the hungry, the hurting and those who are left out. God also worries about the wealthy, well-fed, self-satisfied, and popular because trusting in your own good fortune leads to death.
The lesson today is Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. Most of us prefer Matthew’s kindler, gentler account. Anthems are always based on Matthew’s version; never from Luke. When I read Scriptures at a funeral, I always read the Matthew account. Matthew offers only blessings. He skips over the woes. Matthew encourages the spiritualizing of the beatitudes, but Luke leaves them in the form that is hard to swallow.
Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Luke has none of that “in spirit” stuff and only says, “Blessed are the poor.” Matthew says, “Blessed are those who hunger after righteousness.” Luke’s version is harder to hear, “Blessed are the hungry.” Luke is directly and explicitly saying that those who are poor and hungry are blessed.
Jesus’ teachings on poverty have always been difficult for Christians. The early church believed for a time that affluence is a sin against those who are starving. But they soon discovered that preaching that kind of message tended to keep most wealthy people from joining the church. All preachers know that. It is not surprising that in our materialistic society, wealth is not considered a sin any more.
Isn’t it interesting that in Matthew’s version, it’s the Sermon on the Mount where wealthy people tend to build their houses and Luke’s version is the Sermon on the Plains where most poor people still seem to live today?
Wealthy People
This is a hard passage for me and for most of you, because we have so much. I live in the tony city of Sausalito! Coming home on a plane the other night, the woman behind me was telling her seatmate about how charming and cute Sausalito is and that it’s a wealthy community.
If any people in the world could be accused of having it all, it would have to be Americans. We not only have ESPN, we have ESPN 2, ESPNU, ESPN News, CNN and over 225 other channels on cable. Between Joy and me—two of us, we have 3 TVs! We have blu-rays, microwaves, x-rays, hair dryers, and IRAs. We have disposable diapers, disposable razors, disposable travel underwear, disposable paper ware, and disposable income. We have iPhones smaller than your hand and SUVs bigger than your garage. We have Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, and Pepsi. We have all you can eat buffets, all you can buy factory outlets, Dollar stores, Ebay, Craigslist, Amazon, and don’t forget, Black Friday coming up. We have it all.
Though we do not want to admit it, the gospel of wealth that saturates our society permeates our lives: “Get a good education so you can get a good job. Get a good job so you can get a nice home. Get as much as you can get. Get as comfortable as you can get. Get as many new things as you can get.”
Most of us have more than enough, but we do not have as much as we want. We think about how nice it would be to have more. We like buying what we want, going out to eat when we like, and searching for new ways to entertain ourselves. It is easy to lose ourselves in the emptiness of our culture and never discover how wonderful our lives could be.
Years ago Mother Teresa visited the United States and was asked her opinion of the American way of life. She ministered with the poorest of the people in India, but when asked what she thought of America, she replied without hesitation, “I have never seen such poor people.” She recognized that real joy is not as superficial as we have been led to believe. There is no country in the world as wealthy as ours, but in some ways it does not seem worth it.
In spite of all of our prosperity and the availability of drugs, we can’t seem to buy happiness. When you look at the self-help sections of a bookstore, the pursuit of self-fulfillment remains an obsession. We keep buying Band-Aids when surgery is required. What we think of as personal frustrations are actually small parts of the bigger depressing picture.
By now you are sitting in your pews squirming and wondering why you even got up this morning to come to church. You are thinking I wanted to hear a message about how faithful I’ve been or keep up the good work or even despite our sins, God forgives you. When we read Jesus’ words to the wealthy, we usually hear them as angry condemnations, but it seems more likely that Jesus speaks with disappointment and despair. God is concerned for those who are rich and self-satisfied because they’re likely to miss the grace of God.
We all know that appearances can be deceiving. What you see is not what really is. Things are not what they seem to be. From Luke’s passage, we see that God has different standards from those of the world. Those who seem to live on Easy Street are missing so much. The ones who know they are not self-sufficient, who weep with those who are hurting, who understand what hunger pangs really feel like, and who live with deeper joy are the ones who are truly blessed. From the Sermon on the Plains, we need to turn 180 degrees around, so that we can see what’s worth keeping and what to let go.
A young Buddhist called on a spiritual master to teach him everything so that he could become a master himself. The wise teacher ordered tea for the young student. When it arrived, he began to pour the tea into the disciple’s cup. Soon the tea overflowed the cup, over the saucer and on to the feet of the disciple. The young man cried, “The cup is full! It won’t hold any more!”
“Ah,” responded the teacher, “as you are so full of yourself that there is no room for real wisdom.”
When we are self-assured, we can be so full of ourselves that there is no room for grace. We get caught up in our own good fortune that we’re not open to God’s best gifts. At the end of the day, if our guiding principle is self-interest, then our lives will be empty.
Gifts Planning
Are you full in material possession but still feel horribly empty? As the bulletin says today, we are emphasizing the significance of gifts planning. When we plan to make a gift to God’s work through our estate, we are saying that we are open to God’s best gifts of grace and mercy. Our lives would be fuller because we are not worried about how much wealth we have or how much food we are eating or how much entertainment we are getting. We would have this assurance that whatever happens to us after we have completed our journey on earth that we are in God’s loving embrace.
Most of you have heard me say or read in the church newsletter the estate gifts from Mary Ann Bartz from Nebraska. She lived in San Francisco when Astrid Petersen was with us leading our English classes. Miss Bartz was a bookkeeper who lived on Nob Hill but was dedicated to teaching Chinese immigrants learn English so that they can making a living in the US and to adjust into a new country. There are only a few of you who remember Mary Ann Bartz today. But when she returned to the Lord, FCBC was one of two beneficiaries in her will. Today we are benefitting from the generosity of this saint who walked among us both in life and now in spirit. I believe Mary Ann Bartz was filled with the Spirit because she emptied herself of material wealth.
Today in the church calendar happens to also be All-Saints Day. The meaning of All- Saints Day is that we do not need to concoct the Christian faith on our own; someone had to teach us about Jesus, someone had to tell us the story. That is to say, all that we have as Christians, we have as a gift of grace, an inheritance that we have received from the saints. Mary Ann Bartz is one of our saints.
Every Sunday, the church gathers for worship and what do we do? We submit to the saints. We do not begin by searching for something to say or by reciting the current talk of the nation. We open up and read from a collection of ancient wisdom, Scriptures that we believe shows us the whole truth about God. We submit ourselves to the great company of the long dead, in the faith that they give a fresh, life-changing, world-shaking word to speak to us in our day. All of this is a gift from the saints, those who walked with Jesus long before us.
If you feel that you are prepared to be like Mary Ann Bartz who evidently lived a full and productive life was able to bless our church beyond our imagination with her estate, I hope that you would speak to Wendy Quan or me. Saints are those present in the church, and also those long dead, whom God has graciously given us to be our friends in the faith, those who support us and guide us and show us a way to God that we do not have to walk by ourselves.
Jesus said, “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6:23).
Reward in Heaven
Every once in a while, we have a moment of depth and truth when we realize that Jesus is right. Many years ago when Christian missionaries were allowed to work in China, a minister was in trouble with the authorities in China. He was under house arrest when soldiers came and said, “You can return to America.”
The family was celebrating when the soldier said, “You can take two hundred pounds with you.” They had been there for two years. Two hundred pounds. They got the scales and started the family arguments with two children, wife and husband. I have to have this vase. I have to take this chest. These are new shoes. What about my books? What about this? What about that? They weighed everything and took it off and weighed this and took it off and weighed that and finally, right on the dot, two hundred pounds.
The soldier asked, “Are you ready to go? Did you weigh everything?”
“Yes, we did.”
“You weighed the kids?”
“No, we didn’t weigh the kids.”
“Weigh the kids.”
In a moment, vases, shoes, and books all became trash. Trash. They did not matter anymore.
The good news for us today is that Jesus is Good News. Jesus teaches us to not follow the values of the world but to turn our backs to them. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor for materialism is poison.” Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn with those who are suffering for you will laugh again. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are hungry for you will be satisfied with the Bread of Life in Jesus Christ.” Jesus said, “Blessed are the outcasts who are courageous enough to speak the truth no matter what the cost for your reward is great in heaven.”
We become the blessing of God when we reject the values and attitudes of this world and live in opposition to the foolish materialism of our society.
Let us on this All-Saints Day acknowledge our appreciation for the saints of our church and an opportunity to reaffirm our indebtedness to the long-passed saints who even today show us the way to God.
Let us who have felt God’s blessing do not live like the people of the world any longer because our reward is great in heaven.
Let us not worry about what we own, what we look like, or who we have to impress.
Let us return a generous portion of God’s gifts to God’s work believing that God has given us the greatest gift in his Son and our Savior Jesus Christ who died on the cross so that we may live and have the blessed assurance of everlasting life.
Let us who are blessed beyond our wildest imaginations live in God’s love and celebrate God’s grace.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, we give thanks that you graciously give us all we need to be faithful disciples of your difficult and demanding way. You do not leave us alone or without wise guidance. You give us your word in the scriptures, your church, and fellow Christians in the church who correct us, support us, teach us, and make discipleship possible. You give us the gift of your Holy Spirit, always empowering us, enabling us to do more than we could do on our own.
Above all this day, we give thanks for your saints, those who have preceded us in this faith. These good friends, most of them long departed, continue to reveal you to us, continue to show us the way. For their friendship, even beyond the grace, we give thanks. Amen.