Sermon preached by Rev. Lillie M. Henley 11 Feb 2007
The Gospels tell us Jesus’ lineage is rooted in Abraham and Isaac and their descendents. They tell us Jesus’ ancestors are the great Hebrew kings.
Yet, there’s a dissonance for me, because I see Jesus’ lineage, not in the line of the Kings, but in the line of the great prophets.
After we explore this prophetic connection, I will address the blessings and the warnings of Jeremiah and Jesus.
For the last two decades, we have come to see Jesus as the radical, Mediterranean peasant. John Meier calls Jesus in his extensive three-volume work a “Marginal Jew.”
Jesus was the rabbi from Nazareth called to serve God and his people in a time when the Hebrew people felt the fever of revolution. It was in Jesus’ life-time we find the roots of the zealots who caused the destruction of the temple and the Diaspora of the Hebrews in the year 70 of our common era.
Jesus was a man called to a demanding, life-giving struggle. So were the ancient Hebrew prophets. We do not know the life of Jesus between the days of his twelve-year-old temper tantrum in the Temple, and the beginning of his ministry. Nor do we know if he struggled with his call. Did he anguish over his fate, just as the prophets of the Hebrew people? Did he want to run away like Jonah? Did he have doubts like Isaiah and Jeremiah?
What the Gospels tell us, is that during his ministry he showed no hesitation or fear of his mission. Only at the end did he have doubts, and they were relieved by his total acceptance of God’s will for his life.
We have come to see Jesus through the eyes of the Jesus Seminar and other twentieth century Bible scholars as the unconventional and the unorthodox—a nonconformist. We see him as an itinerant preacher who taught the opposite of the prevailing, religious practice.
For me, it seems, Jesus’ lineage was more in the line of the great prophets than the great kings. He was more like those called to live and suffer for the sake of the Hebrew people than he was to live in luxury in a great palace.
We only have to look at his Sermon on the Plain, our second reading today, to see the similarities between his words and the words of the great prophet Jeremiah.
This sermon given was meant for those who suffered, or who were going to suffer. Similar to the Sermon on the Mount in the book of Matthew, it may have been the same sermon, remembered differently by the story teller Luke. What is glaringly different in this sermon, is that while there are similar blessings, there are the woes, or warnings, which are absent from Matthew’s story.
Of course, we will never know “why” the stories are similar, yet drastically different, but scholars tell us, that Luke, more than any other voice in the New Testament was concerned about the poor and downtrodden. For Luke, Jesus’ message was the opposite of the prevailing view, that wealth and possessions demonstrated God’s favor.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain is more similar to Jeremiah’s blessings and warnings.
Both are about relationship. There was six hundred to a thousand years between the prophets and Jesus, but they all called the people to look at the religious customs that interfered with their love for God.
It brings to mind what Theodore Parker called “pure religion” in his famous sermon, “The Transient and the Permanent.” It was a sermon he preached at an ordination of a Unitarian colleague in 1841.
Theodore Parker was the preeminent Unitarian preacher of his time. He preached to a congregation of 8,000 people on any given Sunday in Boston’s Music Hall.
It was one of those decisive, history shaping sermons of Unitarian Christianity.
In the Transient and the Permanent, Parker said, the transient in Christianity, in any religion, for that matter, are the “theological notions,” the “forms and the doctrine[s],” the religious philosophies, or our “notion” of what religion is.
“It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. An undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance.”
Pure religion, true religion, he says, attends to the “divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man.”
This is the heritage of Jesus from the prophets; this is our heritage from Jesus—pure religion. This is what the Sermon on the Plain and Jesus’ ministry was—is—all about—our souls, our love for God, our love for others. It was Jesus who said, in Luke 10:27:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.
True religion, pure religion
What did Jeremiah say? Those who put their trust in God are like a plant transplanted from the desert to the banks of a stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.
What a wonderful metaphor for the blessings of a relationship of trust with God. Isn’t that where we all want to be—in a place of trust and strength and comfort in our God? It is a real spiritual place in which we can find nourishment.
Jeremiah warns us, though, right after this, the human heart is perverse. Beware. It will find ways to interfere with our relationship with God—and God knows our heart—and we have to be diligent, as Parker would say, in caring for the “divine life of our soul.”
We look to the Gospel of Luke and Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. Jesus turned to his disciples, it doesn’t say, Jesus says to the multitude, it says, Jesus turned to his disciples and said, blessed are you who are poor, and hungry, and weep, for you will have the kingdom of God, you will be fed, and you will laugh. And he warns them, “Woe” unto you who are so caught up in the things of the world that you forget about God. If you do, you will be poor and hungry, and you will weep.
Pure religion, true religion
When Jesus turns to his disciples to deliver his blessings and his warnings, he is talking to all of us. Jesus knows how difficult it is to live that pure, that true religion. Our “perverse hearts” get in the way. Our lives get in the way, too.
It is necessary to stop here and recognize the two different aspects of these blessings and warnings.
There is the spiritual piece that is outside any physical considerations and outside time.
There is the physical piece that concerns our earthly existence.
Let us look at the physical.
We hear his message from a North American view. Most of us here have comfortable lives. Most of our friends have comfortable lives. But all we have to do is look around us, at work, in the neighborhood, in this city, at this congregation, even in the cities of the suburbs, and we know that there are those who are less fortunate than we are.
Living out a true religion, a pure religion calls us to love our neighbors. The blessing of a comfortable life brings with it the warning from Jesus, that if we do not love our neighbors we are at risk.
‘But woe to you who are rich, ... ‘Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. ‘Woe to you who are laughing … for you will … weep.
What does that mean? Is it a fact; no, it is a warning. Not a threat, but a warning.
Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about a man in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who shared his donkey’s feed with another man and his donkey. When thanked for sharing the food, he replied, “When we have [it], we have it together,” and when we don’t have any, we do without together.
We know, intuitively, that we are all connected. We are all family. Conventional wisdom may not see that what happens to the woman stranded in this freezing weather because of spouse abuse is my sister, but she is.
This morning, Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain calls us to evaluate how we show our love and care for our neighbors, our sisters and brothers who are not related, but nevertheless are our family.
The other aspect to Jesus’ words is the spiritual dimension. In this, spiritually, we are all equal. There is the pain of illness, the pain of loss, the pain of betrayal, the pain of heartbreak. There is sorrow in all our lives, no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable we are. And yes, what Jesus says is true, there is blessing in the pain and the sorrow, too.
Ric Masten, a poet and songwriter, who is also a Unitarian Universalist spoke at a workshop at the UU General Assembly a few years ago. He said he had been diagnosed with an aggressive, rare kind of prostrate cancer. He said, “It is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
I have heard it over and over again as a chaplain in a hospital… as a witness to a family’s grief…as a pastor…as a friend… The challenges of life allow us to tend to our “divine life of the soul” and our “love to God.”
Jesus speaks to us today, in the voice of his rich, prophetic lineage… his call to a true, to a pure religion. In Theodore Parker’s tradition,
let us tend to the divine life of our soul,
love God, and
live out our love for our brothers and sisters.
Readings
Jeremiah 17:5-10
Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.
The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.
Luke 6:17-26
He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. ‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. ‘Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. ‘But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. ‘Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. ‘Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. ‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.