Finding our Ground (Ash Wednesday ABC)

 

Finding our Ground

Ash Wednesday (Year ABC)
18 February 2026; 12 noon Sung Mass with the Imposition of Ashes;
Homily Delivered at The Parish Church of St. Luke,

Grants Pass, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21; Psalm 103:8-14

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

The burial rite in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has the following instruction:

 

“Then, while the earth shall be cast upon the Body by some standing by, the Priest shall say, ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’”

 

Note the conflation of the ideas of dust, dirt, and the ground in which we are buried with ashes: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Marking the forehead with ashes was the sign of mourning and penitence in ancient Judaism.  That’s why we use it in this rite calling us to the practice of a holy Lent. 
 

 

The Chinese character for ashes is telling:  it is a hand combined with the character for fire.  Ashes, in this view, are fire you can touch.  The ashes we use today are made by burning the palms from last Holy Week.  The ashes remind us of fire that consumes, but also of the life and verdure consumed in the fire.  Ashes are fire we can touch. 

When we impose the ashes, we are told the words said to Adam and Eve as they were cast out of the Garden, “Remember you are but dust, and unto dust you shall return.”  Dust and ashes.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

This season is not about going through the motions, about public display, about drama queen horror at our lowly state.  That’s what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel—don’t make a big show of this.  What counts is what is going on inside, in your secret places.

English Civil War era Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick is best known to most of us for his great Christmas anthem "What Sweeter Music" with its line "that sees December turned to Spring?"  But Herrick also wrote a poem for Lent: “To Keep a True Lent”: 

 

Is this a Fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
from fat of veals and sheep?

 

Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?

 

Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg'd to go
Or show
A down-cast look and sour?

 

No: 'tis a Fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
Unto the hungry soul.

 

It is to fast from strife
And old debate,
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.

 

To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that's to keep thy Lent.

 

Jan Richardson expresses this a bit more intimately in her poem “Rend Your Heart: A Blessing for Ash Wednesday”: 

 

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering
for trusting the breaking
for tracing the tear
that will return you

to the One who waits
who watches
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

 

We often miss the point when we talk about Lent as a season of “repentance,” “penitence,” and “confession of our sins.”  We often think of these terms simply as turning aside from violating God’s laws or commands, making amends, and making nice with God to get him (and this view always has God as a him) over his anger at us. 

 

But sin as a concept is far broader than this petty legalistic view.  And God is most definitely NOT a crotchedy, peevish, and angry old man.  Most modern theo-logians define sin either teleologically or relationally:  something that turns us aside from what God intends when God creates us, or anything that separates or alienates us from God, ourselves, or others.    God loves us regardless, and so it is more a question of talking about things that in our own hearts and minds separate us from the love of God. 

 

Danish theologian Soren Kirkegaard said

“Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God . . . Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.” 

 

We must not forget the fact that we fall short of what God intended when he made us.  1 John says: 

 

⁵ This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶ If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; ⁷ but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸ If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰ If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10)

 

In all of this, we must remember the truth expressed in the collect for Ash Wednesday:  God hates nothing God has made and forgives the sins of all who are penitent, that is, who turn back.  

 

Confession and repentance are processes that help us know who our real selves are, and make us more and more accepting of that and less fearful of standing before God as who we truly are. 

 

The English word confession comes from the Latin Confiteor, meaning acknow-ledge as true.  It comes from the prefix con (with) and fateor “allow or admit”.  The point is that we allow or acknowledge the truth together with someone, whether God, our community, or simply another person, perhaps a friend, a counselor or spiritual director, or, as the 1662 Prayer Book says in its exhortation to a holy Communion, to a “discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word.” 

 

Lent is a time to intentionally reconnect, both with what God intended when God made us, and with God himself.   We are told that to do this, we must be humble.  The Latin word for humble, humilis, is related to the noun for the ground, humus. In Vergil’s Aeneid, the vines of Italy are described as humilis, not “humble” so much as “trained to grow close to the ground”.   In the story of creation, the man and woman are called human because they are made from the soil, the humus: “Unto dust thou shalt return.”  So being humble means being down to earth, close to our origin the dirt, sending down roots and being grounded. 

 

For a holy Lenten fast, let us not rend our garments, but our heart:  open it to Jesus, and use these forty days to wander through our secret rooms at our leisure, seeking grounding.  

 

Accepting who we are is the key in this grounding, in this getting close to earth, in this humility.  We are God’s creatures, whom he declared “very good” when he made us.  But we have turned aside from the beauty he saw in us when he declared us “Very good!”

 

If we open our hearts to Jesus, he will heal us.  He will give us strength, and the inner peace needed for the journey.  He will indeed make us anew in his own image, and bring us to his glory and joy.  

 

Thanks be to God.

 

Sudden Clarity

 

 Sudden Clarity

Last Sunday of Epiphany (Year A)
15 February 2026; 9 a.m. Sung Mass

Sunday Last next before Lent (Transfiguration Sunday)
Homily Delivered at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

Medford, Oregon  

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Exodus 24:12-18; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9; Psalm 2

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

Transfiguration Sunday ends the season of Epiphany, or the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.  In a very real way, the scene here is what we call in popular parlance an epiphany, a moment of clarity when all of a sudden we see things as they really are. 

We all have seen such a moment of clarity, both happy and sad.  It is when you realize you have found the love of your life.  It is when a person in discernment comes to know what it is that God is calling her to.  It is when you suddenly are sure what your passion in life or work is.  It is what makes a destructive drunk "hit bottom" and begin to reach out for help.  It is when you realize you are in a destructive relationship and need to break it off.  It is when a diagnostician suddenly puts together all the symptoms, pathology, and life details of the patient and intuitively knows what disease she is dealing with. It is when you realize that a person you voted for is not what you had hoped, and actually the opposite of your values.  It is when a scientist suddenly recognizes the pattern and comes up with a new hypothesis or theory.  It is when, of a sudden, we know that we love and trust God. 

But this epiphany—God’s glory shining in the face of Jesus—overwhelms Peter.  Seeing the two great icons of the Jewish tradition alongside Jesus—Moses for the Law and Elijah for the Prophets—he thinks it is they who are giving his friend and teacher this new power and glory.  He wants to set up three little shrines to commemorate it.   He does not realize this is a revelation of how Jesus has always been, just hidden.

 

Peter is thinking about Succoth (tabernacles, or booths), temporary shelters set up for the duration of the major harvest festival.  They stood for the tents of Israel during the 40 years of wandering in the desert while being fed on the Manna, the bread from Heaven, and symbolized human reliance on God, an appropriate sentiment for a harvest festival.  The prophet Zechariah had said that when the Messiah came, all the nations of the earth would go in pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the Succoth Festival and build such Booths as commanded by Moses.  God would punish any nation not doing by withholding the rain and sending drought, the punishment that Elijah had famously brought on King Ahab for three years (Zech 14:16-18; Exod 23:16; 34:22; 2 Kings 17).  

Peter wants to build the Succoth for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah to show that Jesus is another great figure in his religion, perhaps even the Messiah who would force all Gentiles to become Jews by invoking Elijah’s curse of drought. 

But God intervenes and sets Peter straight.  A light-filled cloud appears and covers everything. A voice identifies Jesus as the first thing, the real item. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to what he says!’   The cloud disappears, and all that remains is Jesus himself.  Moses and Elijah have dropped from view. 

 

The transfiguration is a moment of sudden clarity for the disciples that they don’t fully “get” until after the resurrection: the realization, in the words of John’s Gospel, that “Whoever has seen [Jesus] has seen the Father.” 

 

As today’s pseudonymous epistle puts it on the lips of St. Peter: “we have been eyewitnesses of God’s majesty,” and “have heard the voice from heaven saying ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”  For this reason, “we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed” (the King James here has “the more sure word of prophecy”).  That is, we understand the inner meaning and direction of the prophets’ words, having seen the Glory of God directly revealed in Jesus.   And this being so, “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”  Paul elsewhere says that “gazing upon the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus” makes us ourselves undergo transfiguration or metamorphosis, changing from glory into glory, closer and closer to Jesus.

  

How can we “be attentive to” this epiphany, this revelation, this moment of sudden clarity when the early disciples first had an inkling of who Jesus truly was?  How do we “gaze upon the face of Jesus?” 

 

It is important to reflect on our Lord and Savior often and regularly.  That is why daily prayer and scripture reading is an essential part of any Christian’s intentional spiritual discipline.  Regular Church attendance helps, but in gazing upon the Lord's glory, we must be the Church, not simply go to Church.  It is not just a passive act of admiration.  Following Jesus in doing corporeal acts of mercy, in serving our fellows, in standing with the outcast, the downtrodden, and the sick--all these give us an experience of who Jesus is and what he does. 

Given the stresses of life, it is easy to lose heart.  It is easy to believe that people cannot change, that we cannot change.  But the miracle and mystery of our faith is this—we can change because God promises to change us.  In the Apostles’ Creed we affirm that we believe in “the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”  This makes no sense at all if you don’t believe that God is at work transforming us, and that we shall all be changed. 

 

Just as God sent that shining cloud to drive away Peter’s silly preconceptions and plans, God works with us as we look into the glorious face of Jesus and try to hear his voice.   God changes us.

Such change is sometimes hard, so hard that at times we do not know whether we will be able to bear it.  At other times it is a relief, as easy as taking off a heavy winter coat in the summer heat.  

 

When Paul says this turns us into "the image of Christ" he is not saying it removes our individuality.  What he describes is a transformation into our true selves, the individual people God intended when He created each of us, with all that makes us who we are, but absent the brokenness that we so often mistake for what makes us who we are. 

One of the greatest foundation stones of my personal faith is the experience of seeing transformed brothers and sisters around me, and seeing ourselves over the years as God works with us and transforms.  It doesn’t mean we are perfect, only that God is making progress in finishing his creation in us.   In the words of the classic line from African-American preaching quoted often by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Lord, I know I ain't what I outta be.  And I know I ain't what I'm gonna be.  But thank God Almighty, I ain't what I was!”

Charles Wesley in one of his hymns summed it up this way--

Finish then, thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in Thee:
Changed from glory into glory,
'Till in heaven we take our place.
'Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.  

 
It is not just in heaven when all of God's creation is done that this happens.  As we are transformed here and now, quickly or slowly, it makes us look around us in amazement at tokens of God's love about us, ourselves experience sudden clarity.  And then we gaze all the more, "lost in wonder, love, and praise," on the author and pioneer of it all. 

  

Thanks be to God.

 

Salt, Light, and Courage (Epiphany 5A)

 

Salt, Light, and Courage

8 February 2026

Fifth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Homily preached at 11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.

Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12); Psalm 112:1-9, (10); 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, (13-16); Matthew 5:13-20

 

God, give us the great infallible sign of your presences, Joy. Amen

 

Jesus in today’s Gospel says we are “salt for the earth.”  He says we, just by being who we are, can spice up this bland and sometimes rotten-tasting world we live in.  He says we can be light in this dark place, so obvious that no one will mistake us for part of the darkness.  He is not giving us a commandment that we must obey, a goal that we must work on.  He is saying that that is just who and what we are if we are his disciples.  

 

In recent years, I have seen too often hatred and condemnation in the faces of others.  I have seen it in the faces of pious “religious” people taking issue with those of us they condemn as departing from God’s pure ways.  I have seen it in true practitioners of faith who have suffered hurt from “righteous” people, reacting in anger.  We all have seen it, more and more, in the faces of our compatriots in this sad broken country of ours that has lost its way so badly. We see it in the face of agents of a police state who kill innocent protestors.  We see it in the face of us people who mourn those deaths and the loss of our democracy.  Sometimes, the more justified the anger, the more bitter the contempt.     

 

Such barely contained anger and resentment contrast with my memories of a former mentor and spiritual director of mine:  a Buddhist nun in a small temple in the mountains north of Taipei Taiwan.  She was joyous.  I can’t think of a time when I did not see her smiling.  She clearly expressed her beliefs and opinions, but always as an affirmation, never a contradiction to others.  She had more than anyone else I have met cause to be resentful and angry over horrible abuse she and her family had suffered at the hands of others.  Her family had fled from Mainland China to escape persecution from Chinese Communists.  But there was never even a whiff of anger or resentment in her.  All she did was done with joy, gratitude, and empathy for others, especially those who disagreed with her. She always talked about cultivating the “Buddha nature” within each of our hearts, of being more compassionate, less judgmental, and kinder to every sentient being.  

 

I also had a Christian spiritual director like this in Hong Kong when I was preparing for ordination, an Australian Anglican priest, an out gay man.  He too was joyous and almost always wore a genuine smile.  

  

We are called to be Jesus’ disciples.  That means following him, and emulating him.  He had his enemies, to be sure.  And he said that in following him, we would have enemies also.  But he taught clearly: love your enemies.  Now at times, Jesus Jesus got angry or impatient with those who used religion and political authority to brtalize and oppress others.  But I think that tells us how bad things were, not about Jesus' heart.  

 

When I was a grad student at the Catholic University of America, I prayed regularly in the nearby National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The main nave is cavernous. On the ceiling above the high altar is an immense mosaic of Christ on the Day of Judgment. As you look up, he peers down at you accusingly, eyes ablaze in anger.  Looking up at that mosaic, I always felt condemned, and bound for hell. I always retreated to the crypt church in the basement for prayer. Te icons of Jesus there are loving and kind.  That mosaic upstairs was just too threatening. I just couldn’t pray to Jesus in the nave.

So when I think of Jesus, I think of him with that gentle smile of deep joy of my Buddhist and Christian masters, not with the condemning grimace of barely concealed contempt we see so often in others and ourselves.  That grimace tells us we have lost hope that others might actually turn from their abusive ways.  I don’t think Jesus ever lost that hope, and God knows, he had plenty of reason to. 

    

Jesus invites us all into metanoia, often translated as “repentance,” but better understood as “a change of the mind” or “a turning of the heart.”  Jesus invites us to close relationship with God, who in his mind was not a warring tribal leader or dour judge or policeman, but rather an intimate and loving parent.   Gratitude should be our default position.  Gratitude drives out fear, alienation, and contempt.  It encourages empathy and forgiveness.  That is why he asks us to pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive the debts owed us.”   

 

The fruits of the spirit according to Galatians are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22).   If we think we are being touched by the spirit or spoken to by God, but what we get is anger, resentment, fear, and contention, we are  most certainly mistaken.  Joy and peace are what the spirit give, what God inspires in our hearts, not partisan posturing or manipulation of others so that they give us what we want in a constant struggle for dominance of submission.  

 

Perhaps as a check on ourselves and the lies we tell ourself, we should ask ourselves, throughout the day, “Am I smiling?”  “Am I trying to understand this person so different from me?”  “Am I thankful?”  When angry, we should ask, “What is it about me that makes me react in this way? What fears and insecurities?”  and not “why can’t that creep over there just change?”

 

But what about grief?  How can we be joyful when we are mourning?  When we have lost those we love, or those we care about?  Isn’t resentment okay then?  Isn’t anger and hatred justified just a little?  Grief is an emotion we must go through and not suppress or stifle.   

 

But we must never let grief overwhelm us so that we lose hope and turn to hatred.   The Chinese have a proverb for this, one taught me by my Zen master,:  节哀顺变  [節哀順變] jié'āishùnbiàn, “bind up your grief so you bring about change.” 

 

C.S. Lewis, in his magnificent but painful “A Grief Observed,” writes that no one ever explained to him how much grief as an emotion feels like fear.  Part of our “binding up grief” in fact is an act of courage in the face of the unimaginable. And courage it is that Jesus calls us to! Courage is Martin Luther King Jr.'s  struggling against racists precisely because he never gave up on them.  It's like Alex Pretti still trying to help those attacked by ICE and CBP and holding up a mirror of conscience to the brown shirts. Courage.  Binding up our grief to promote change.    

 

When the French want to tell you to be strong, find joy or at least calm in the face of trouble, and deal with what life dishes out, they say “du courage!”  It’s like saying “buck up!” or “hang in there.” 

 

 

 

One of the pivotal moments in my life, and one of the greatest bits of counsel I ever received, took place in Beijing China on June 6, 1989.  I was working at the U.S. Embassy there.  In the closing days of May, things in Beijing had gotten more and more chaotic as the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square dragged on.  The evening of Saturday June 3, the army moved in to recapture the Square, re-exert control over the city, and terrorize the people back into compliance with the Communist Party’s leadership.   Many of you saw the picture of the single protester standing his ground before a column of tanks.  That scene was unusual.  Generally people who stood in the way were simply run over by the armored personnel carriers, crushed and chewed up by the treads.  I know, because I saw it.  For days the army used random shooting toward crowds as a way of cowing people to get off the streets.  More than a thousand lay dead, murdered by “the People’s Liberation Army,” and rumors of dissenting Army units firing on each other raised the specter of Civil War.  

 

In all this, the U.S. Embassy granted refuge to two of the leading dissidents in the country, marked for summary execution by those who wanted to make their country great again.  Those two came in through my office.  The next day, the army opened fire at U.S. diplomatic apartments—some with children in them—in an hour-long shooting spree in which, fortunately, no one was killed.   

 

 

The Hon. James R. Lilley and Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping

 

Ambassador James R. Lilley called us all together to announce that our dependents were being evacuated from the country and that we would mount a full-scale evacuation effort to take stranded Americans in remote parts of the city to the airport.  As we were meeting, automatic weapons fire opened up just outside the Embassy compound where we were meeting.  People crouched beneath the window levels as the cement walls around us were chipped and shattered by bullets.  Finally, silence returned.  

 

Ambassador Lilley, a former marine and CIA officer, called us back to order.  What he said then is deeply etched in my memory.  Calmly, with emotion, he said, “We are not often called upon to show courage.  Courage is grace under fire, keeping your head and your heart focused on what you need to do, and why, and then doing it regardless of all the things you cannot control going on around you.  As you go out to help evacuate  Americans, you must keep your cool and stay focused. Bring them reassurance and calm.  As we send off our spouses and children, not knowing when or if we might see them again, we must give them confidence and hope.  Stay on task, remember our values and the oath to the Constitution we took when we entered into Federal service.  Though things might not turn out how we wish, we will have the calm of knowing we’ve done everything in our power.  It’s a matter of faith, both having faith, and keeping faith.  It’s called courage, and that is what we must step up to now, so we can make the best of this bad, bad situation.” 

 

The words had particular impact on me as we drove the next two days in convoys across the barricades all over the city, facing the muzzles of AK-47s held by PLA teenage recruits from the provinces shaky with amphetamines to keep them awake.   

 

I have always thanked God that Jim Lilley knew exactly what to say to us and then modeled courage for us.  He taught where courage comes from: remembering the joy of times past, then focusing on what we need to do, and sharing our calm with others.  As African American Spirituals say, “Keep your eyes on the prize! Keep your hand on the plough!  Hold on, hold on!”  This lesson has stayed with me from then until now.  

What Jim Lilley knew was this:  if we keep our minds on the goal and stay on task regardless of how bad things are, if we are true to the better angels in our hearts, grace under fire just happens.  We are no longer overwhelmed by the things over which we have no control.  And we find we can even find humor, satisfaction, and yes, even joy in pursuing our course, come hell or high water.  We find that we can spice up this life, and be a light, not a judge. 

 

Siblings in Christ: Du courage!  Let us go forth from this Eucharist today, this Great Thanksgiving, renewed and recommitted to joy, to love, to caring for each other, to supporting and healing the ill and reconciling hurt, and to forgiveness.  Let us mourn with those who mourn, but always be ready to find joy and hope and share that with others.  For Joy and hope are there.  We are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  We are in God’s hands.  

 

Thanks be to God. Amen. 

 

God at Work Where We Least Expect (Epiphany 4A)

 

 

 

 

God at Work Where We Least Expect

 

Homily Delivered at St Luke's Episcopal Church, Grants Pass (Oregon) 

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.  

1 February 2026

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Micah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12; Psalm 15

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so people persecuted the prophets who were before you.” 

Matthew 5.3-12

The beatitudes, or macarisms, at the start of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew are so well known that often we unfortunately miss what they actually are saying. When we hear them, we tend to quickly lapse into a happy, warm feeling of devotion and stop listening. Familiarity with these sayings breeds not so much contempt as it does inattention. We usually find the beatitudes vaguely comforting or reassuring without much thought of the content being conveyed.  We are like the people at the back of the crowd in the Monty Python film, Life of Brian.   They struggle to hear the Sermon, but at the end leave, saying, “oh, that’s nice … blessed are the cheesemakers. Good chaps, they.”

 

But these sayings are a core statement of Jesus’ message to his people, a people with clear opinions on what was blessed and what was cursed, like us.  They turn these values and platitudes on their head. 

 

“It’s a good thing to be hungry, it’s a good thing to be poor, it’s a good thing to mourn, to be excluded,” he says.  Really?

 

A little less familiar version of the beatitudes is found in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, as a result, some of these jump out at us in their forceful clarity: 

 

"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Human Child!  Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their ancestors did to the prophets.   

But alas for you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.

Alas for you that are full now, for you shall hunger.

Alas for you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.

Alas for you, when all people speak well of you, for so their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Luke 6:20-26

 

It is clear that whatever it was that the historical Jesus said here, it troubled his followers, as it should trouble us.  Each author, Matthew and Luke, has adapted the series of “blessed are” statements in their shared sayings source for his own purpose. 

 

Matthew has “spiritualized” the sayings, turning “hungry” into “hungry for righteousness,” and “poor” to “poor in spirit.”  Jesus just can’t be talking about the literal poor or the literally hungry can he?  So Matthew turns these paradoxical declarations of true blessedness (beatitudes, from Latin beatus, blessed) into a series of moral nostrums, of “BE-attitudes,” ways of being that we should strive for. 

 

In contrast, Luke adds a “now” to the misfortune being marked as “blessed,” and a “then” to the good thing God will do in the future to fix the problem, turning the sayings not into moral nostrums, but affirmations of the coming completion of the Reign of God whose inauguration Jesus has come to announce.  Luke also adds the woes that counterbalance the “blessed are” statements, placing them all in the second person, “blessed are (or alas for) you,” thus working the eschatological contrasts of his version of the sayings into his overall Gospel story of everyday faith of everyday Christians.   These woes may or may not have been listed together before Luke wrote.   Since several separate “woes” are found on the lips of Jesus in multiple early Christian sources, I think that Luke is probably reflecting something close to what the historical Jesus actually said.  

 

The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas preserves some of these sayings—both macarisms and woes—separately as well, and also adapts them for its own purpose, the promotion of gnosticism.   

 

The idea expressed in the literary form used in these sayings is more than a simple “Happy are they who,” or “How blessed are they who…”   The idea is more like  “How favored by God (or honored) are the ones who.”  “Alas for those who” in Luke is more like “Shame on those who,” or “How outside God’s grace are those who…” 

 

Jesus is turning conventional values of what is desirable on their heads.  Some things just on the surface of them are bad:  starvation, hardship, sorrow at a loved one’s death, social exclusion.   Some things just on the surface are good: having enough food and money to provide for your family and (to quote some of the rabbis) to have the leisure to study scripture.  But Jesus is not so sure. 

 

Some of Jesus’ contemporaries taught an ancient version of modern day “Gospel of Wealth.”  They said, “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.  Since rich people are obviously blessed, they must be close to God; the poor must really be rejected by God.”  But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to good people and that sometimes evil people prosper. 

 

He says, “You’ve misunderstood what a blessing from God is.  It is the poor who are blessed by God, not the rich.”   If those around him say, “Religious and respected people are close to God,” he says, “No, actually, it’s the people who have been excluded because people think that they are unclean or evil who actually are closer to God.”   

 

Announcing the coming of God’s reign, Jesus sees God busy at work exactly where we usually expect least to find God: hunger, yearning, dependence, and vulnerability are all signs of God’s active presence and saving work, not marks of God’s curse or punishment.

 

It is an important idea, and profound theology.  He is not trying to belittle suffering, or say, “it’s not all that bad.”  He is not like the hero of The Life of Brian, who when on the cross, bursts out into the cheery song, “Always look at the bright side of life.”   He knows that hunger, grinding poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and the deadly exclusion inflicted on marginalized people by the so-called righteous are all truly horrible and not a bit of what God wants for his creatures.  

 

When he says that God is at work in these horrors, that God’s favor can be found there, Jesus is not seeking to minimize or trivialize people’s sufferings.  He is seeking to magnify God’s kindness. God is the answer to, not the source, of horror.

 

St. Thomas Aquinas developed this idea into the doctrine of the Deus Absconditus, a term taken from the Latin version of Isaiah 45:15, “Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel.”  God may be hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God that you must wholly trust. Martin Luther developed the idea further by placing it in the broader context of his doctrine of Grace.  The implication of both Aquinas and Luther’s doctrine of the Deus Absconditus is this: horror and evil in the world are not evidence that God does not exist.  Rather, the fact that we revolt against and find horrible the evil in the world is great evidence for God, since the very desire for justice and the right cannot come merely from this messed up world we live in.  Rather, it comes from God himself, imprinted in the creation God made, in the creation of human beings, where it is written on our hearts.    Immanuel Kant expressed the idea differently when he said that he found evidence for God not just in the order he saw in the workings of the stars, but also in the workings of the human heart and mind.  

 

Where Buddhism tells us that the source of suffering is desire and the solution is getting rid of all desire, and becoming detached and truly apathetic to world around us, Christianity teaches us that while we must learn acceptance and patience, it is alright to be dissatisfied with wrong.  In fact, it is essential because God made us thus.  

 

Each of the macarisms includes some point of dissatisfaction: hunger, grief, need.  Jesus thinks it’s O.K. to be not O.K.  Mourning means unhappiness at the loss of a loved one.  It does not describe a state of acceptance or serenity.  "Blessed are those who mourn."  Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction, but desire for something different that what we now have. 

 

Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" is not a prayer only for serenity to accept the things we cannot change.  It also prays for courage to change the things we can.  It also asks for wisdom to know to distinguish between the two.  

The idea of God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors, is a key part of Jesus’ message announcing the arrival of God’s Reign. 

 

Putting the idea into modern words and references, we see the point Jesus is trying to make.  And the point should shock us into recognition of God at work in all sorts of situations where we normally only see horror: 

 

God favors outcasts and deportees, because he will include them.    

God favors the abused, because he will defend them.

God favors the powerless, because he will empower them. 

God favors the homeless, because he will give them shelter. 

God favors those with AIDS; he is at their bedside and in their prayers.   

God favors the addicted, because he relieves their cravings and obsessions.

God favors the solitary, because he brings them into family and community. 

God favors “nobodies,” because he knows them each by name. 

God favors those killed by agents of Empire, they are free at last.  

God favors the sick, because he heals them.

God favors sinners, because he forgives them. 

God favors women, because she knows what they go through. 

 

Shame on you who have big houses, because you will lose your estates. 

Shame on you celebrities, because you will be forgotten.

Shame on you powerful, because your fall will be great. 

Shame on you Empires, because you will go bankrupt fighting your wars.

Shame on you agents and supporters of Empire, no one will ever believe you again. 

Shame on you so-called righteous, because everyone will know your secret sins. 

Shame on you beautiful people, because you will grow ugly and die like everyone else.

Shame on you fashion plates, because you will have to be naked.

Shame on you, oh so brilliant minds, because you will go senile. 

 

So what applies here to us?  First, remember that God expects us to be dissatisfied with things that are just plain wrong.  We should be part of the social and moral conscience of our peer group, our colleagues, and our age.  Next, remember that God expects us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  His grace must work through us.  Third, we must empathize with those who suffer, and redouble our efforts to do corporeal acts of mercy and organize for social justice to alleviate hunger, poverty, persecution, and disease. 

 

“You think I’ve gotten things upside down?” Jesus says.  “Look around you and tell me who is getting things backward.” “You seek to be great, and to make your nation great again.  How’s that working out for you?”  If we love God and trust God, we too must actively engage with evil, in order that grace more fully abound. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.