Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 6:17-26

In February 2012, I flew from Atlanta to the Twin Cities for a second interview with the call committee from Gloria Dei. As background, you should know that February is the time in the south when people say, “I’m so tired of winter.” This is usually said after a series of 40-degree days, or after a few mornings of frost on the windshield. It is always while the first daffodils are blooming.

For the first interview a few months before, I stayed in a hotel near the airport. This time, I thought I wanted to learn more about St. Paul, so I stayed in one of the downtown hotels. As I checked in, it began to snow. I was on an upper-level floor. When I opened the drapes of the room, it felt like the reverse of the moment in Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy arrives in Oz and the movie bursts into technicolor.

It was bleak. I looked out at the Mississippi River and the St. Paul airport. There were only shades of gray, maybe a bit of brown. Not one wisp of green. I don’t remember what expression, or sound, or exclamation I made when I opened those drapes. I hadn’t learned the word Uffda. At my final interview six weeks later, when even a late spring is supposed to make its emergence, you pointed me to the buds on the trees, already swelling because of a weak of abnormally warm temperatures. To confess, I told you I saw them. But I didn’t. I remember thinking, “Wow, these people really have to trust resurrection, because there is not one shred of evidence that life is coming again.”

Only Luke has us travel from blessing to woe, which feels like the same reversal. The word that we translate as woe means something more like a sharp intake of breath, or a cry outload, an expression of grief that comes when you see something you didn’t want to see, even an expression or anger. Somehow, just like looking out at the scene in St. Paul, you know deep down that you’re going to be asked change. You can’t un-see. Well, you can, but that requires pulling the drapes and pretending it’s all not there.

I couldn’t stop focusing on the woes this time. Maybe because we’re living it. But I noticed something new this time. “You who are full now will be hungry; you who laugh now will weep and mourn.” According to our default metrics, it sounds like, “Ha. You’re going to get yours.” Who’s laughing now, Mr. Winner?

Hearing it that way makes Jesus into our own image. If we step out of the reward-punishment pattern for a moment and just assume that God is love like the Bible says, we hear something different. You will weep and mourn isn’t so much a threat but a promise that when you lose or embrace your vulnerability–and you will–you will not be destroyed but discover a blessedness that’s deeper than anything you’ve know. You thought you were the tree, but you really were the shrub. The spiritual irony is that those painful moments of realization are exactly what leads to being planted by streams of water.

Lutherans have this idea that God’s word always comes to us as good news and bad news. We always like the good news part, and there are times when we desperately need it. The bad news is harder to hear but it’s always for the sake of seeing something we don’t want to see but need to. For our own good and the good of others. Woe and blessing are two sides of the same coin.

Jesus’ sermon isn’t saying that rich people are necessarily bad and that poverty is good. It’s just acknowledging that the more you have, the harder it is to grab hold of the things that really matter. The problem with wealth, or being stuffed, or laughing at others is that you start to believe God gave all that to you, or that you deserved or worked harder than those other ones who didn’t end up where you are. If you’re on the wealth train, there is never going to be enough, a kind of hell on its own. At some point, you’re taking what’s not yours. To keep getting more, or even to just hold on to what you have, you have to pull the drapes and build your own moral universe, a world with your own experience at the center, star of the show. You’re the most deserving, the strongest, the best, the greatest, the winner. And anyone whose presence might remind you really aren’t at the center is the enemy. Everyone is trying to take what is yours.

The rhetoric is astonishing and profoundly cynical, in which others, especially those whose need or struggle is so viscerally present, are dangerous.

If the effects weren’t so devastatingly real, I would have laughed out loud when I heard that Elon Musk’s little team picking apart the USAID department, labeled Lutheran Services of America as a money laundering operation. LSA is one of the nation’s largest collection of organizations providing health and human services to empower people “to live their best lives.” Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota is just the local iteration of the scam.  In order to say such a thing, they had to take programs, which were adopted as aid to the world and to bring stability and peace, and reimagine them as cynical power grabs or dark streams of my money being sent to people who don’t deserve it. Aid workers are really scamming. Doing good is an illusion. Being helped is the same as being manipulated. Sharing is an unjust redistribution of what should be in my pocket.

This kind of selfish greed in a world that wants more and more, larger and larger piles, must defend itself from the have-nots who are out to take what is yours and claim that it is theirs. It’s also in all of us in some form. If we demonize one person or one party, we’re still not seeing it. Typically we the people that have qualities that we despise in ourselves.

If it all makes you weep or despair or feel lost, blessed are you. This is exactly the place where new life comes; new possibilities emerge; and it turns out God uses chaos and death to set into motion a stream of love and mercy that cannot be stopped. Christ is risen and has gone ahead. If don’t trust that death couldn’t stop his presence, our faith is in vain and we will lose heart.

After the move to Minnesota and that shocking view out the window, maybe I did have to trust resurrection more than I ever had to before; fewer visible signs. But what I now see is that there are always signs, and a strange, powerful beauty emerges. My eyes have been retrained. I can find the first green blade arising from the snow, and it’s as grand as a southern avenue of exploding azaleas and dogwoods. I noticed the buds on the lilac bushes when I left home this morning. I drove to church in the light. Now, I’m standing here looking at you, who came to this place to touch the healing life of Jesus. Yes, we are caught in all that is out there, practicing to see what God’s people have always seen: the presence of love and mercy pushing up through the bleakness every day. There is a goodness at work that cannot be stopped, no matter what stone you try to roll over the door, or what voices you silence or marginalize.

We’re going to throw open the curtain, pick up our woe, and live into the blessing. The church’s mission is crystal clear and relevant. Love of God, and love of neighbor. This is the place where we hatching a scheme to save all of us; a place where every offering is a money laundering operation. We take our wealth, and our whole selves, the good and the bad, and rinse it in baptismal water. You should see what God can do. Church, this is our moment.