Read at Grace and Canadochly on Feb 17, 2019 (Pastor out sick)
Preaching text: Luke 6:17-26
“Where do you see God in all of this?”
The question caught me a little off-guard. I suppose it shouldn’t have. The hospital chaplain who asked it of me knew what I did for a living. He knew I am a pastor. He also knew the history; that this was my sixth visit to the hospital in three years. We’d just been talking about the rollercoaster that is my life.
I began to answer with the obvious. I saw God in the good. I saw him in the support and prayers I received from all of you, my parishioners. I saw him in the well-wishes of friends. I saw him in the love of family. I saw him in the skill and science of the doctors and nurses and the power of the medicines they were using to heal my body. I saw God through my colleagues, who visited and brought with them Word and Sacrament from God himself.
But then I diverged. I also began to see God in the pain and loneliness. I saw him in the sleepless nights, the nausea, and other symptoms too disgusting to mention. I saw him in the bad too, because I wondered what was God trying to teach me here. I know I’m not the only one who struggles with these diseases. I’m far from the only person with diabetes. Far from the only person with severe gastrointestinal illnesses. Far from the only one with depression and anxiety. What was I to learn? Empathy perhaps? Strength? Perseverance? Compassion? All things that would make me a better pastor and a better person. All things that would make me better suited to serve my God and his people.
God was in all of it. There was none of it where his grace was not touching me and sustaining me.
I was thinking about this when I was reading Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, which is our Gospel lesson today. Luke does something very different than the more traditional version of this text that we’re familiar with; the one from Matthew’s Gospel. Luke shows Jesus not just offering blessings, but also woes. Blessings to the hungry, the poor, the mourning, and the hated. But also woe to the rich, the satisfied, the exuberant, and the well-regarded.
What’s this about? It makes Jesus sound like he doesn’t want us to be successful or happy. I don’t think that’s it. Nor do I think it is merely limited to most common interpretation we place on this text. After all, we’ve all met or encountered someone in life who was rich or self-satisfied and was absolutely insufferable for it. None of us would mind a little divine reversal on those types. Likewise, we’ve all met or encountered someone who was poor and downtrodden and our heart didn’t break for them. Would be nice to see some reversal for them too. No, I think it’s more than that too.
I think Jesus is talking about the whole of the human condition.
We all receive some degree of success in life. The question is how. We reach the top of the mountain and look back at all we’ve been through and we see hard work, perseverance, and a little luck (or maybe a lot). The question we never ask of ourselves is “Who did we hurt on the way up? Who did we harm? Who did we run roughshod over to get here?”
Our inclination would be to say “no one.” Most of us of good heart and nature would be appalled to learn we hurt someone to get where we are. But appalled or not, odds are good we did cause harm, even if we never meant it.
Recent events in Virginia have brought racism to the fore once again. Most of us sit back contented that we never wore blackface or did anything quite that offensive, telling ourselves that we’re not racist. And that may be true. But there’s another truth that lurks under the surface. We white folk are living in a world that was built for us and it is often quite comfortable, but it was built by those in past generations who WERE racist and used their vile beliefs to shape the world in particular ways. We today benefit from their guilt and we often don’t even know it.
How much is that T-shirt at Wal-Mart? How much for that iPhone? Expensive or not, these things often do not cost what they are supposed to. And why is that? Perhaps because some poor soul in the Third World was paid starvation wages to make that for you. How much farther have we all come because we’ve never had to pay the REAL cost of what we own?
How much pollution have we put into the atmosphere? Or the water? Or the earth? And how much hurt did that cause? Was it the herbicide we sprayed on our weeds that caused the neighbor kid to get sick? Was it the cloud of noxious smoke that belched out of our car that tipped that man just enough to trigger his cancer or COPD? These questions don’t have answers, but you have to wonder.
Sin is inescapable.
Try as we might to live upright and moral lives, it doesn’t take long for us to realize that life really forces us to run roughshod over others, often without even realizing it. We hurt and we harm and we benefit from the hurt and harm inflicted by others. What can we, those of good heart, do about this? Very little. Save to remember that when we are rich, satisfied, happy, and well-regarded, woe to us for what we’ve done to get that way.
And then there’s when the shoe is on the other foot. When the sin we experience is not what we’ve done or who we’ve hurt, but instead what is done to us or how others have hurt us. That too is inescapable. When the one who was run roughshod over in the climb to the top was us.
We always talk about how life is hard. We know that lesson well. Sickness, injury, financial ruin, family troubles, divorce, loss. We’ve all been there. And what can we do about it? Very little. Save to remember that when we are poor, hungry, sad, and hated that we are blessed.
So where is God in all of this? He’s in all of it. He is in the blessings and the woes. He sees our sin, whether we intend harm or not, and it doesn’t make him happy. He sees the sin inflicted upon us and that doesn’t make him happy either. But he’s there, with us through it all. He’s in the good and the bad, and unlike us, who can do very little to change the sinful circumstances of our broken world, he intends to do something about it.
He sent Jesus. He who came to destroy sin forever. And through his life, death, and resurrection, he did just that. Thus God blesses us in the bad and forgives the bad we’ve done, again sometimes without even knowing it, to receive the good we have. And life goes on, blessings and woes, until Christ comes again to bring his kingdom in its fullness.
We are given a hard task, to live in the inbetween days. We know that sin is conquered, but the fullness of that gift has not yet come. Life is a rollercoaster of blessings and woes. The good and the bad, and we endure it all. But God is there, in the midst of all of it. No matter what we’ve done or what’s been done to us, he stands by our side through thick and thin, walking with us to that bright future that was promised through his Son. Amen.
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