February 11, 2007

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

Jeremiah 17.5-10; Luke 6.17-26

The Reverend Jennifer K. Morrow

 

Passionate spirituality.  It’s fifth on the list of the “eight quality characteristics” ascribed to thriving churches by the Natural Church Development program.  Unfortunately, both the word “passionate” and the word “spirituality” suffer from extreme overuse and undervaluing in our daily language.  “Passionate” is most often used to describe how one feels about a significant other or a cause…she’s passionate about conservation, or passionate about Carl.  All of the definitions (five of them) I found in my computer’s dictionary had to do with intense emotion or desire.  Which is a long way from the original meaning of “passion:” suffering.

 

“Spirituality” has likewise taken a hit in meaning.  More frequently than any other use, I hear the word “spirituality” juxtaposed with religion.  And in this comparison, spirituality is almost always the better of the two.  But such a comparison actually does little justice to spirituality, allowing it to mean only what it is not:  religion in all its organization, dogma, ritual, tradition.  O.K., so spirituality is none of those things, but what is it?

 

In general, I suppose it could mean a whole host of things, but we’re not concerned with spirituality in general today.  Rather, our task at hand is to explore something very specific: “passionate spirituality.”  Put another way, “suffering spirituality.”

 

It’s not a very sermon-friendly concept.  And it certainly won’t look good on a sign out in front of a church:  “Open hearts, open minds, suffering spirituality.”  It’s a P.R. nightmare, and it’s what our scripture lessons have dealt us today.  We hear both the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah and Jesus himself speaking difficult truths to their hearers.

 

Apparently, Jesus did think suffering spirituality was a good sermon topic.  So good, in fact, that he addresses it in Luke’s version of the most well-known part of his most well-known sermon:  the sermon on the mount.  I say “Luke’s version” because these verses Frank read for us this morning are different in some very significant ways from the account of the same event in Matthew’s gospel. 

 

Did you happen to notice anything different?  First, instead of standing atop a hill or mount as Matthew describes, Luke records Jesus coming down from a mountain to the people and preaching this sermon on a plain.  And what about the blessings themselves, or the beatitudes, as many of us know them?  Where in Matthew Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” in Luke he says simply, “Blessed are the poor.”  And in Matthew, where Jesus preaches, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” in Luke he proclaims only, “Blessed are you who are hungry now.”

 

On a global scale, unless there is anyone here living on less than $2 a day, no one in this room is just poor.  And unless a bagel at coffee hour is the only thing you will get to eat all day, no one in this room is really hungry.   So which account, Matthew’s or Luke’s, do you like better? 

 

I have heard these two accounts compared in this way:  the beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel are “spiritualized” versions of the ones in Luke.  And up until this week, I’ve always basically agreed with this estimation.  This week is different, and it’s because of the concept of passionate, or “suffering spirituality.”  What I’m realizing is that the blessings Jesus speaks in Luke are themselves very accurately described as “spiritual.”  In Jesus’ preaching, the body and its needs are no further from the spirit and its needs than the blessing of God is from the poor.  “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” 

 

How on earth can we claim that such a statement is not about spirituality?!  But given the fact that we ourselves are not poor, we may feel inclined to protest, “But it’s about economics, or politics, or anthropology, or humanity!”  “That’s true,” Jesus would answer, “which is precisely why it is about spirituality.”

 

To insist on this connection, I’ll turn to an unlikely source: the U.S. government.  Reach in your wallets.  Every piece of currency minted in this country says three things.  1. The United States of America.  2.  e pluribus unum, meaning “one out of many.” and what’s the third thing?  “In God we trust.”   I have only recently learned the origin of this hotly contested phrase on our money.  For years I assumed that the words had been stamped on our currency since the country’s beginning.  But this is not the case.  They were not added until nearly a century later during the single most volatile and deadly time in this young nation’s history: the U.S. Civil War.

 

My point in sharing this information is not to make a statement one way or the other about the place of a theistic motto on a national item.  Rather, it is to point out a simple reality:  in a time of crisis, in a time of suffering it became necessary to find a way…an intentional way to claim what it felt to many was the only thing left to hang onto:  “In God we trust.” 

 

And this is related to Jesus’ insistence on the blessing belonging to the poor, to the hungry, to those who weep, and to the oppressed and persecuted.  For all these, what is left to hang onto?  With very literally nothing to lose, they trust in God and they are blessed in the trusting.

 

It’s the same trust Jeremiah described centuries before Jesus preached.  “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.” (Jeremiah 17.7-8)  But opposed to these blessed ones are others, “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.” (Jeremiah 17.5-6)

 

Why are these “cursed” as Jeremiah puts it?  Because of the bearers of their trust:  mere mortals (read:  themselves).  These cursed were a self-sufficient bunch, and would for that very reason, likely be considered quite successful and a long way from cursed if they were with us today.  In many ways they are similar to those upon whom Jesus pronounces curses or “woes” as Luke calls them.  “Woe to you who are rich, full, full of laughter and spoken well of.”  It would be so much easier to hear, wouldn’t it, if the words went “Woe to those who are rich” instead of “Woe to you who are rich.”  Woe to you…

Woe to us?  Woe to us who sit here swimming in riches that read “In God we trust?”  Woe to us in the irony of it all?  In the words we’ve read today, have we a hope for blessing?  If we read closely, I believe we have.

 

The woes and the curses were not dolled out by Jesus and Jeremiah because the rich, the full, the happy, the successful were inherently bad.  There is no indication in the texts that these cursed ones got their money in illicit ways.  There is no sense whatsoever that the simple fact of being rich is a quick ticket out of God’s favor.  Riches in and of themselves are not the problem…rather the problem is the condition they create.

 

And what is this condition?  I believe it is two-fold.  First, they create in us comfortable ones the dangerous luxury of having very little conscious or practical need to make good on our money’s motto: because we have the money that says it, in God we don’t really need to trust.  The second condition these riches create is the perpetuation of a society and a world in which there are those who continue to have much, much, much less than we.  Our ability to consume keeps such a cycle alive and well.

 

And so our hope lies in the reversal of these conditions.  And the reversal of these conditions is the very essence of “passionate spirituality.”  It is true to its name in that it will require suffering.  It is faithful to Jesus’ insistence on the inextricable relationship between body and spirit.  And it takes into account the gospel reality that our spirits cannot be truly whole, nor our spirituality truly passionate while the hungry, the poor, and the oppressed are kept in their “place” by our needs.

 

What does this passionate, suffering spirituality look like?  How do we continue or begin?  I think in at least three things.  First, we must look bravely at our own selves.  We must dare to explore the hungriest, saddest, most captive, and most impoverished parts of our own spirits, bodies and lives.  If we do this in any real measure, then we will instinctively want to look away, or rush to fill the emptiness with all that our money can buy.  But we can’t give in.  We must also look unflinchingly at those who are poor in every way, and find ways to enter into real relationship with them.  The kind of relationship that isn’t patronizing; the kind of relationship in which we cease being charity workers, and they cease being charity cases, and we become mutual friends.

 

If we commit ourselves to such work, and we will find ourselves vulnerable in a way we have not yet known.  Our desires will change, our priorities will shift, our plans will change in ways we cannot now imagine.  And in this vulnerability,  we may find awakening in ourselves the beginning of something new.  With all our old tricks used up, all our needs exposed, with our eyes and hearts open to others we may find that slowly, marvelously, and I dare say, miraculously, in God we trust.  And in this trusting, we will find ourselves blessed.