Epiphany 6

Blessed are you who are poor. Jesus was not teaching that poverty is spiritual. He knew that in human terms, poverty meant humiliation, fear, and despair. For poverty then as now, was only too real and most of the poor were forsaken by the affluent. No, in saying, Blessed are you who are poor, Jesus wants his followers to see the reality of the poor.

In Prophet of Plenty Wilma Dykeman described the Southern experience of poverty, as she saw it among the poor in the pre-civil rights era:

What is poverty? It is the cooking smell of old grease used and reused, saturated into clothes and hair and rotting upholstery; the sleeping smell of beds crowded with malnourished bodies, and threadbare blankets soaked with odors of sickness and staleness..... It is the sound of perpetual crying; and infant mewling, a mother mourning, an old man moaning.... It is the sight of slumped shoulders, useless hands stuffed into empty pockets, averted eyes..... It is the taste of hot saliva boiling into the mouth before nausea, of dried beans and chicken gizzards and hog skins and too many starches and too few fruits.... It is not only hunger today but fear of tomorrow.

Prophet of Plenty: The First Ninety Years of W.D. Weatherford. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1966.

Such subsistence poverty has haunted and hurt humanity, down through the ages. Blessed are you who are poor, says Jesus. See the poor! He is saying to his Church. How seriously he means that becomes more clear when we consider that the Greek word for "poor" Jesus used points to a continuous state of total destitution. It's not about those who merely lack the money to buy everything they need; instead Jesus points to those who have no money, no job, no family support, no possessions, and who are on the street begging for the essentials of life. It's about the poor as having lost all honor in the community, the poor who were as low as anyone could get, blamed for their poverty because of their bad choices, not merely bad luck. Not much has changed over the centuries. In modern America it is almost sport to go and on about choices in order to blame and shame those who've made bad ones. In our day such shamed and destitute poor might be, for example, drug addicted gay men, forsaken by their families, dying of AIDS in San Francisco. In pronouncing the possibility of such people being blessed, Jesus is shocking for many, even in our day.

But that's exactly what in this beatitude Jesus is saying, Blessed are you who are destitute, cut off from family, society and any and all means of earning daily bread. Blessed are you who are the despised outcasts and shamed sinners, for yours is the Kingdom of God! Church, can you see these poor as beloved children of God? Jesus does!

Luke wants us to pay attention to this detail. Jesus looked at his disciples and said: God will bless you people who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours. Jesus looked at his disciples. This must mean that among the larger group of disciples, there were actually those who were the shamed and desperately poor. Why would they have been there? Remember that the gospels frequently mention such unfortunate people, not in a shaming way, but astonishingly, to show that Jesus enjoyed fellowship with the destitute poor, with outcast and dishonored sinners. It would have been natural for them to follow the One who alone honored them by fellowshipping with them. They are and will be blessed--why? The kingdom of God is theirs not because of their poverty but only because Jesus now stands with them as the presence of God on earth.

Jesus as God truly present for the most desperate and despised of the poor has been a powerful stream in the Christian tradition. In our day, Mother Teresa gave her whole life over to the care of the despised, forgotten, ignored dying beggars of Calcutta--a powerful example of Christ's mandate: because the destitute poor represent the human extreme of dishonor and abandonment, a true lover of humanity must stand in solidarity with them. In fact, Christ became one of the despised and dishonored poor on the Cross, mocked by his wealthy enemies.

But that's later. Now, gazing out at the surrounding crowd Jesus notices the rich. Hearing his words, I wonder if the rich were scowling. In the church for which Luke wrote his gospel, there were many rich. I wonder how they handled this teaching. Luke was wealthy himself, a physician and highly cultured man, and clearly he did not write as a revolutionary, urging upon the Church hasty political action. No, Luke wants the well off to see what the poor can see when Jesus is with them: there is no blessing but God. But when we have more than enough of most things, we don't believe we really need a Lord who loves the down and out. Then, unlike our Lord, we turn our backs on the poor.

A poem from the 8th century Chinese poet Du Fu:

Behind the gates of the wealthy / food lies rotting from waste.
Outside it's the poor / who lie frozen to death.

And so Jesus said, You rich are in trouble, because you've had everything, and yet you live for lies. Lies? Yes, the lie that promotes money and power as the way to blessing. The lie that says nothing matters more than having successful people saying good things about you. The worst of the lie is the refusal to admit to a desperate need for God. And thus God becomes just another feature in an affluent life, like a good dividend on an investment. We know we are witnessing lies whenever the rich feel privileged enough to proclaim they are released from any serious, sacrificial obligation to help and honor the poor.

Now Jesus looks at the crowd around him and sees the few disciples who will be following him. He sees not just the present moment, but their future. He sees the shaming poverty the apostles will experience: they will be hated, excluded, destitute, reviled, defamed and executed by the state. And this will happen, not because they are promoting a revolution, but on account of the Son of Man--simply because they give their total allegiance to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. Caesar with all his wealth and power isn't God. Only Christ is! That faith, the risen Jesus is Lord, brought down the Roman Empire. Have we lost the power of such faith?

Ever heard this old parable?

Disciple:	How can I achieve enlightenment?
Guru:	You cannot, any more than you can make the sun rise.
Disciple:	Then what is the purpose of all these spiritual exercises you are assigning me?
Guru:	To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.

On Easter Jesus became the sun beginning to rise. Watch out, world of money and power! A new day of justice is dawning. Meanwhile, Christ issues his wake up call to the church: God will bless you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours. If you want true happiness you need to find Christ. If you want to find Christ, then go looking for him among the poor. Amen.