Seehafen mit der Predigt Christi (Seaport with Christ's Preaching) , Jan Bruegel the Elder, 1598

On A Plain

Homily delivered for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
3 February 2019

8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26; Psalm 1

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

I read something this week that deeply troubled me. Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, who served as acting director after the President fired FBI Director James Comey, wrote of a telephone call he received from the President at the Bureau just after Comey’s firing: “Toward the end of the conversation, the president brought up the subject of my wife. Jill had run unsuccessfully for the Virginia state Senate back in 2015, and the president had said false and malicious things about her during his campaign in order to tarnish the FBI. He said, How is your wife? I said, She’s fine. He said, When she lost her election, that must have been very tough to lose. How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose? I replied, I guess it’s tough to lose anything. But she’s rededicated herself to her career and her job and taking care of kids in the emergency room. That’s what she does. He replied in a tone that sounded like a sneer. He said, ‘Yeah, that must’ve been really tough. To lose. To be a loser.’”

Such an ugly story--I hope it is not true, though I suspect it is! What troubled me here was not so much the impropriety and possible illegality of the call, with its overtones of obstructing justice and interfering with ongoing criminal investigations. What bothered me was the world view where a very few are winners and the rest are just, well, losers.

Winners over losers. Rich over poor. Strong over the weak. The trope gets played out variously in our world: Men over women. Whites over people of color. Americans over foreigners and aliens. And, in the world of faith: Righteous over sinners. It is an idea blasted by today’s readings.

Jeremiah says,

“Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals

and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from Yahweh.

They shall be like a shrub in the desert…

They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.

Happy are they who trust in Yahweh…

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…

The heart is devious above all else;
it is perverse--
who can understand it?”

The Psalm:

“Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,
…nor sat in the seats of the scornful!

They take delight in Yahweh’s instruction,
and they meditate upon it day and night.

They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither…

Not so with the wicked;
they are like chaff which the wind blows away.”

St. Paul in today’s epistle says that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the heart of any hope we may have in this world where the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Jesus, killed in shame and nailed to a cross, was the ultimate loser in the eyes of the Roman Imperium and Palestine’s Religious establishment. But God raising him from the dead turns the world upside down. The high are brought low, the lowly, lifted high. That’s why “if Christ has not been raise from the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.”

The theme is developed at length in the Gospel.

“And [Jesus] came down with them and stood on a level place.” This phrase in today’s Gospel from Luke seems to be a trivial detail in the setting of the sermon Jesus is about to give. Unlike Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, in Luke, Jesus’ sermon is on the plain. In Matthew, Jesus “went up into the mountain” to speak his “Blessed are” sayings. There, Jesus is the new Moses, giving a new Law from the Mountain of God. The whole Gospel of Matthew is divided up into five speech and narrative sections, like the five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch. But Luke tells a very different story, and presents Jesus in very different terms. In Luke, though Jesus is on the mountain side when he calls the Twelve, he comes down to address the people. And it is not just fellow Jews to whom he talks, but to “people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.” In Luke, both Jews and gentiles gather together in a level place to hear Jesus, in a low place, not a high and exalted one.

Lowliness and plainness, leveling out the highs and lows, are major themes for Luke:

In chapter 1, Mary sings:

[God] has looked on the lowly position of me, his servant.

Mark it—from now on all generations will call me blessed…

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;

He has brought down the mighty from their thrones

and exalted those of humble estate;

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.”

In chapter 2, Jesus is born in humble, lowly circumstances, in among farm animals: a feeding trough as a crib. Shepherds, the lowliest of day laborers, are the ones who visit the baby, not kings bearing gifts from afar.

In chapter 3, John the Baptist preaches. Luke introduces him as a great leveler, quoting Isaiah:

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall become straight,

and the rough places shall become level ways,

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

In chapter 4, Jesus adapts Isaiah in his first sermon in Nazareth:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

In Luke, Jesus does not speak from on high, whether from Matthew’s Mountain cribbed from Moses’ Mt. Sinai or from John’s Bosom of the Father from which the Logos descends. He speaks from our side, having lowered himself to the smooth place where he declares the great leveling effected by God’s love.

Luke is all about Jesus beside us in day to day life. Where Matthew has “give us this day our daily bread,” Luke has “give us each day our daily bread.” Where Mark has Jesus saying, “If any want to become my disciples, let them disregard themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (8:34), Luke has him say, “let them disregard themselves, take up their cross each day, and follow me” (9:23). Luke thus subtly shifts the focus from fear of a coming judgment when Jesus comes back here from up there to seeing Jesus’ example and teaching along side us as a model and inspiration for us right here and now, each and every day.

When Jesus in Luke gives his sermon on the plain, notice how he starts. He speaks of the lowest of the low–the poor, the starving, those crushed by grief at the death of a loved one, and all the marginalized, the hated. He tells all these losers that that God is on their side, is there with them, and will sustain them. Then he speaks of the high and mighty: the rich, those with plenty to eat, merry-makers and those who laugh at others, and all winners, people accustomed to having others suck up to them.    Their happiness is a mirage. It will end. They will be brought low.

Luke is consistent in his message that Jesus is the great leveler.   He speaks to us on a plain. Luke, alone among the Gospels, tells story after story about the women around Jesus. If he tells a story about how Jesus affected a man, he is sure to pair it with one about a woman as well. Alone among the Gospels, Luke tells the story not of the Good Jew, the Good Priest, the Good Levite, but rather of the Good Samaritan, member of an outcast and heretical people seen as the ultimate losers by Jesus’ people. In the second volume of Luke’s Gospel, the Book of Acts, he tells at length the story of how the gentiles came to be accepted as equal members of the Church along with Jewish believers. With Jesus as the great leveler, the distinction between winner and loser disappears.

Following Jesus each day as Luke would have us means being agents of levelling as well. Let us try to look at a person’s hope and aspirations, not their checkbook or status. Let us accept that the divide between good and evil is not a wall that divides groups or categories of people, but rather is a fine line of choice that runs down the middle of each and every human heart. Let us proclaim the day of liberation of the captive, consolation to those who grieve, welcome to the foreigner, and help bring light to those in darkness.   Let us forgive others in order for us to be forgiven. Knowing that we are all in this together, let us trust in God, and have God as our trust. Then indeed, God will lift up the poor and cast down the proud.
In the name of Christ. Amen