For St Mark’s 16.2.25 (10.30 AM)
I Cor 12.12-20
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your
faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the
dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
Luke 6 .17-28
17 He went down with them and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon, 18 who had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by impure spirits were cured, 19 and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all.
20 Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
24 “But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
Love for Enemies
27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
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Opening prayer:
Sermon
Try to imagine this.
You are part of a big crowd and you’ve travelled a long way with a friend, walking across country from the coast to hear an extraordinary itinerant speaker with a reputation that’s spread out far beyond the North Galilee area where he emerged from. The speaker is quite engaging but what comes out of his mouth is a load of stuff that doesn’t make much sense:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
So you turn to your friend and whisper ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah...He’s got a hope!’ Then this very charismatic speaker whose reputation has spread far and wide, says this...
24 “But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
And at this point your friend turns to you and says... ‘We’ve heard all this stuff before from other radicals...’ - but you shush him up because you’ve just heard Jesus of Nazareth say...
27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
...And you’ve heard enough nonsense for one day... ‘I can’t do that! How can I love those who would do me harm? Crazy...’
The interesting thing is, that the people who heard Jesus DIDN’T reject him like that. Even though his words were deeply uncomfortable they nevertheless took what he had to say and they remembered it – and here it is being read to us today!
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Those who heard Jesus had also SEEN that the difficult things he said were backed up by the way he acted so they knew his words were backed by integrity and truth.
You must be aware, as I am, that we in the Western world have quietly slid into a weird environment where it has become harder and harder to understand the implications of the things spoken by Jesus. You will also know that these words of Jesus are rather important to Christians because they are some of his most memorable.
These words are particularly familiar-sounding because in Matthew’s Gospel we find something a bit similar. Matthew gives us nine ‘Beatitudes’ in his ‘sermon on the mount’ and applies them in a different way.
Luke, on the other hand, – as we’ve heard today, frames them quite differently, putting Jesus in a ‘level’ place and giving us just four ‘Beatitudes’. For Luke they’re the opener to what in his Gospel has come to
be called ‘the sermon on the plain’, and we see how Jesus tackles what everyone simply sees as ‘the accepted order of things’ in everyday life. Luke only needs four of these ‘Beatitudes’ to show Jesus making his point and he picks up poverty, hunger, sadness and social exclusion...
He’s saying: you who are poor don’t need to be downtrodden because you have status in God’s Kingdom.
He’s saying: you who feel a hunger now ‘will be satisfied’ - and we know from Matthew’s version of these words that he doesn’t seem to be referring to malnutrition but to a sort of hunger for what is good and right and just.
He’s saying: those who are saddened will find cause to smile in the future,
And finally he’s saying that if people are excluded because they follow him, that’s only to be expected and they’re doing the right thing before God...
Then comes those words about loving your enemies... something that goes radically against the grain of normal human reactions, doesn’t it? But Jesus said it!
And remember... Those who heard Jesus had also SEEN that the difficult things he said were backed up by the way he acted so they knew his words were backed by integrity and truth.
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I was once a News Editor and have always been interested in what people say, the way they say it, and the way what they say is received by those who listen or read. How we interpret what we hear and pass it on, has come under intense scrutiny over the last few years in the age of the internet with its ability to inform and misinform in equal measure
instantaneously. Never has it been easier to spread untruths and generate misconceptions.
At the same time there have developed hundreds of cable TV networks financed and shaped by the perceived values of the people they advertise to. That means the prejudices and imbalances those media outlets peddle come to dominate the opinions of those viewers whose huge wall- mounted TVs are never turned off.
My professional life before and as a priest was all about communications and it showed me how we live in a constant battle for objective truth as opposed to what people come to perceive and then believe.
Every political environment knows about propaganda... how you manipulate facts and misinformation to persuade people to think in a particular way - and even to persuade them that what they are hearing and even seeing for themselves (in three dimensions and in glorious Technlcolor) is somehow not actually true!
Living history from which we could learn becomes ‘redacted’ - to use the popular word. The result of that is that lessons that could be learned from history are wrested away from ordinary people to reside only in books for the casually interested or the occasional post-grad PhD researcher writing a thesis at some point in the future.
Today we hear very obvious, glaring lies told that nobody seems to question or want to delve behind: so they don’t bother. Thus reality is, I’m afraid, no longer the sure foundation on which people build their ethical, moral and political opinions... they are carried by the crowd for whom it may be convenient and safe to whitewash the unacceptable despite the dissonance that is there at the back of their minds...
That’s how authoritarian regimes grow in power. It’s how the mid-20th century Holocaust was able to carry on. This year sees 80 years since the
horror of Auschwitz was uncovered and the world recoiled. But before 1945 I know from close friends in Germany who teach history that the truth of what seemed to be happening was too distasteful for ordinary people who knew about it to really take aboard in the humdrum day-to-day business of their lives... And the same thing applies, at different levels, to what is happening in a number of situations around the world today.
I felt this acutely as I listened to two public speakers in the week that saw the 47th American president sworn in in mid-January.
The first was the son of the late Dr Billy Graham delivering what was supposed to be a prayer - but nowhere was the Grace of Christ to be heard in it. The Gospel of the Lord Jesus was travestied that day in the Capitol.
The second public speaker was an Anglican Bishop in Washington DC who preached what I heard as a completely biblical and Christian message at a prayer service in that city a few days later. Described by the President and other critics as ‘nasty’ and ‘radical’ she was condemned for speaking out Christian truth prophetically.
It reminded me – and a lot of others of Nathan the prophet speaking to King David in the Old Testament in the wake of his fling with Bathsheba, and also how, in 1938, the 20th century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, was drummed out of the theology faculty of the University of Berlin for his radical proclamation that Jesus was a Jew... What an outrageous thing to say!
So we live in dangerous days. Truth, and most particularly, Christian truth, is at risk of being turned upside down. How do we face a world in which the real Jesus and what he really said is in grave danger of being sidelined or even (dare I say it?) ‘redacted’ ?
To go back to Jesus in Luke 6: Those who heard him had also SEEN that the difficult things he said were backed up by the way he acted so they knew his words were backed by integrity and truth.
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My wife tells me I’m too angst ridden about all this. Shye’s probably right, and I know that to be angst-ridden is not a positive way forward! The storms will rage around us and we can do nothing about that unless we happen to be in positions of influence in politics or industry or international relations.
Every journo knows that crises and media storms last, on average, 11 days. That’s a simple truism that enabled me to get through when really difficult stuff was happening and the stressful phone calls and angry emails were non-stop. I knew they would end and I lunged towards that 11 day point when the focus would move elsewhere and things would quieten down...
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I may seem to you to have strayed slightly from merely considering Luke’s four basic Beatitudes in his ‘Sermon on the Plain’. He gave us four bleak human situations that in the hands of God – in the Kingdom of God – can be turned upside down POSITIVELY and made into blessings!
Well – for that to happen, a realistic perspective has to be maintained... and to build that, there are certain things we can do as ordinary people on the ground. For when the current global storms subside, as history tells us they probably will eventually, leaving a lot of painful fallout, the people of Christ can be part of the business of rebuilding truth and hope and all that the Lord Jesus would have us share as his people.
We can stay awake and be aware: checking out what we hear, questioning very carefully where information is coming from and seeking accuracy. By checking out multiple sources.
We can maintain the security of our faith. Our Gospel reading today followed St Paul writing to the Corinthians about the absolutely central pillar of their faith: the resurrection. He is saying some pretty strong things in that letter because he’s writing to them at a time when things were deeply unstable in the political and everyday environment of their first century world. Aware that some people were being cynical about the Gospel message Paul says this:
17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
He’s saying something that amounts to ... ‘don’t let your faith drift: keep the faith, hold fast...’ So...
We can stay awake and be aware
We can maintain the security of our faith Most of all, we can pray.
I know that’s a tough call sometimes but prayer doesn’t need to be on our knees: we can encounter him and seek the ear of God and his will in all the activities of our everyday lives.
I was impressed to encounter a new hymn a few weeks ago, first written in 2020 but revised this year which can be sung to a number of traditional tunes with a 87/87 metre (like Stainer’s ‘Cross of Jesus’ for example) . It’s a prayer – in sung form... Inevitably it’s rather political but the last two stanzas say this:
Channel grief and anger in us;
let us be your voice and hands.
Spirit, guide our justice-seeking,
take us where your love demands. Christ destroys the powers and forces, chains of bondage, unjust strife,
not by might and raging violence
but a sacrificial life.
How long, Maker, Word and Spirit,
till such evils are reversed?
How-long till your reign’s accomplished and the last become the first?
Hear us God, we pray for justice, hear our cries for those oppressed, hear our voices, never silenced,
till the least are truly blessed.
Gary Hopkins 20/rev25 Mtre 87 87D
Jesus’ words on Luke’s plain and Matthew’s mountain have been kept for us for 2000 years because those who heard them discerned two things in them that needed to be passed on to subsequent generations: truth and hope. We hang on to those vital, seminal life-giving features of our faith in Christ Jesus and with Paul we ‘keep the faith’.
MER 27.01.25
