Luke 6:27-38

“What has Christianity ever done for us?” This is the title of an article written by the retired English Unitarian Minister, Rev. Frank Walker.

In answering that question, he makes a distinction between official (or doctrinal) Christianity with it’s emphasis on correct doctrine and, and unofficial (or practical) Christianity, with it’s emphasis on following the practical way and teachings of Jesus, which has always been the emphasis of our Non-Subscribing tradition. He opens his article by writing the following:

“Let us suppose that one bright sunny morning in winter you decide to on for an invigorating walk in the UK (for our purposes we will say Dromore). As you stride briskly along, revelling in the keen frosty air, you are suddenly appalled by something very disturbing. Shock. Horror! In a ditch you are appalled to see a baby, lying there with no clothes on, freezing. Is it alive? Is it dead?

So what do you do? You pick it up, wrap something around it to keep it warm, and take it at once to the Lagan Valley Hospital and inform the police, in the hope of finding the parents or family of this child, knowing at the very least, foster-parents or some kind of home will be found for it.

Now lets go back two thousand years to ancient Rome. You go out for a brisk walk in the hills on a frosty morning, and the same thing happens. What do you do? Rescue the child? Perhaps. But it’s just as likely, perhaps even much more likely that you will do nothing.

That would be the accepted custom in ancient Rome. People might feel sad, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel guilty. So, in Rome, you would have simply, silently passed by on the other side. It was the coming of Christianity that changed all that. When Christians obtained power in Rome, they forbade the abandoning of children to exposure and death.”

For all of Christianity’s faults, and there are many of them in Church History, Christianity did begin to infuse the wider European culture with a new ethic of love, in which human beings, and especially the lowest and poorest, were invested with a new sense of value. Last week we saw Jesus special concern for the poor and the struggling of this world.

This week, we see Jesus ethic of love extends even to one’s enemies. “If you love only those who love you, that is nothing special,” says Jesus. “Even the pagans do that”.

Jesus roots his teaching on the love of enemies in his understanding of God’s nature, and God’s character. In verse 35 He speaks of the Most High being kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

The Greek word that is used for love in this passage is the word "agapao". It is an ancient Greek word that can be translated as the feeling or attitude you have towards a special treasure. To "agapao" something would be to treasure it.

What this passage suggests is that we are all God’s treasured by God. You are treasured by God. Your family, your friends, the strangers you walk past in the streets, those you struggle to get on with at work,. Treasured and loved by God. Inexplicably, even the ungrateful and the wicked. Even our enemies, somehow, also treasured and valued by God.

Trevor Hudson, who I quoted from last week compares God’s love to the sun. It is the nature of the sun to shine. The sun cannot help but shine. If it ceased to shine, it would cease being the sun. The sun cannot choose to shine on some people and not on other people. The sun’s light can be blocked by clouds, but trees, by high walls or by hiding in a cave. But the sun itself continues to shine.

So it is with God’s love. It is the nature of God to love. God cannot help but love. If God ceased to love, then God would cease being God. We can hide ourselves from God’s love. We can build up walls between us and God’s love. At times it might feel that clouds blow across our lives that it feels like God’s love has been obscured from us. But just as the sun itself never ceases to shine, so, God never ceases to love... and it was the conviction of Jesus that God’s love shines even on the wicked and the ungrateful.

That is good news for us. Because it means that there is nothing that we can do to make God stop loving us. Rev. Ray Light under whose preaching I grew up used to say the following:

“You can be the very best person you know how to be, but it wont make God love you anymore than God loves you right now. You can also be the very worst person, the most wicked person you know how to be, and it will not make God love you any less than God loves you right now.” Why? Because it is God’s nature to love. God is love, and to cease being love would be to cease being God.

Does that mean that it doesn’t matter how we live any more? Does that mean we have free license to live as we like, and to to do whatever we want because it no longer matters?

It may not change God’s love for us, but it still matters for we all reap the consequences of our actions. We reap the consequences, not only in the kind of life that we create for ourselves, but we reap the consequences in the type of persons we become. We see this in our passage from Luke’s Gospel. In verse 37 we see reflected there the law of consequence when he writes “Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven..."

And so in this passage, we find two principles seems to be at work simultaneously. One is the principle of God’s love: that God’s love is constant and unchanging, expressed even towards the ungrateful and the wicked. The second is the law of consequence. When you live in a moral universe as God has created it we cannot evade the consequences of our actions. This is very different from saying that God punishes sinners. In the end, it is sin itself that is its own punishment.

At the beginning of this sermon, I quoted from Frank Walker, who asks: What has Christianity ever done for us? There are many in this world, who have grown tired of Christianity doctrinal claims to having the final truth all wrapped up in a creed, and that to be a Christian, you somehow need to take every word and story in the Bible literally. As a result, many have come to dismiss the whole of Christianity as being a fairy tale, or superstition, an irrelevant relic of the past that has no more value for us today. But Frank Walker reminds us that many of the values reflected in our modern Western, secular democracy’s, actually have their roots in the way and in the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus’ call for us to love our enemies makes us feel uncomfortable. But we don’t realise that this little verse probably lies at the root of our modern laws that demand that prisoners of war be treated in a humane and dignified way, and also at the root of why in any modern democratic country, prison warders are not given permission to torture and mistreat those who have committed even the most atrocious crimes. Where else does it come from, if not from Jesus injunction that we should love our enemies? It certainly did not come from the Roman Empire where enemies were crushed and dealt with ruthlessly.

I will close with a quote from the Progressive Jewish Rabbi Harold Kushner: -

“Do things for other people, not because of who they are, or what they do in return, but because of who you are”. Amen.

Luke 6:17-26
My mother grew up in a family of 6 with a father who was a brick-layer in Johannesburg. He didn’t earn a whole lot of money. But unfortunately on top of that for much of his life, he lived with an alcohol problem. It meant that whatever money he did earn, much of it was spent on his alcohol dependence rather than on the family.

My mom has shared how as a child she has memories of walking the streets after the coal truck in order to pick up the bits of coal that fell from the truck. If you had to ask my mom, I think she would say that poverty is not something to be glorified. For her family, it was a painful and difficult experience.

If poverty is not something to be glorified, then how to we interpret this passage from Luke 6 today. It is one of those really difficult passages of Scripture. To be quite honest, I have never heard anyone preach on it before, despite the fact that it is a passage that comes up every 3 years in the revised common lectionary for those preachers who follow the lectionary.

In many ways, the passage is quite a shocking one. It begins by saying that the poor are blessed and that the kingdom of God belongs to them. It goes on:

Blessed are you who hunger now for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Then in a strange twist, Jesus speaks words of woe to the rich, for he says they have already received their comfort. He goes on...

Woe to you who are well fed now, you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

In the Old Testament scheme of things, and in Jesus day, it was always the rich who were understood to be the one’s who were blessed. Even today, maybe more than ever, we still think of those who are wealthy as being blessed. And in the grand scheme of things, we who are gathered here today, in the eyes of 90% of the world’s population would be regarded as being rich.

One commentator writes that this passage in Luke’s Gospel, it is the first place in the wider Jewish tradition where the poor are said to be blessed. In the normal logic, it would have been said that the poor were somehow cursed. They deserved their lot in life. They were poor because they were lazy or they and their parents were sinners. The poor were not God’s favourites and therefore did not deserve or receive God’s blessings.

Here in this passage, Luke’s Gospel turns that logic completely upside down. Suggesting that somehow in God’s scheme of things the poor are the blessed one’s and maybe not the rich?

How does one make sense of such words that sound so shocking?

A helpful perspective that comes from a Methodist Colleague from South Africa named Trevor Hudson. He tells a story of a mother who had three daughters. On one occasion during a conversation with some of her friends, one of them asked her a really difficult question: “Which of your three daughters do you love the most?”

It was a question that she couldn’t answer. She had tried hard as a mother to give each of her children equal portions of her love and so to answer the question would be a betrayal of how she had tried to be as a parent and a mother.

The friend persisted with the question: “That’s all very well, but surely one of your daughters stands out among the three of them. Surely there is one that in your heart you love secretly more than the other two.”

After continued persistence in questioning her for an answer, the Mother finally gave in. She said, “The one that I love the most, is the one who at that particular time is hurting the most.”

Reflecting on that story, Trevor Hudson suggests that that is what God’s love is like. We are all God’s children, but as you read the Gospel stories, as you read the way Jesus interacts with people, the example of Jesus suggests that God’s love is expressed most especially for those who are hurting in the world.

When we read passages like this one today that speak of the blessedness of the poor, it is suggests that they are blessed in the sense that they are the particular subjects of God's concern and compassion, not because poverty is necessarily a blessed state to be in.

But is is also important to pause and reflect on what Luke means when in his Gospel he uses the terms “The Rich” and “The Poor”.

For Luke, the poor is an umbrella term that refers to all who receive a raw deal in life, particularly because of the way human life is structured. In Luke’s Gospel, it refers firstly to the economically poor. Later on in Luke’s Gospel in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich man (which only appears in Luke's Gospel), Lazarus represents the poor who are destitute, those who don’t have enough to live on to care for their basic needs. But in Luke’s Gospel, the poor also refer to the socially and spiritually poor: tax collectors who were socially rejected and on the margins of society, women who were treated like second class citizens . The outcasts, those who are pushed to the edges of society due to various kinds of afflictions, aliments disabilities and sicknesses.

One the other hand, the Rich in Luke’s Gospel refers to those who are self-satisfied in their wealth and in their privileged position in society – quite happy for things to remain just as they are. In Luke’s Gospel, they are the self-righteous in believing that their state of blessed-ness is somehow because they are God’s favourites. The rich in Luke’s Gospel are those whose hearts are closed to the poor, who have no sense of responsibility towards uplifting the poor. In fact in that parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, the Rich man seems to be completely oblivious to the presence of Lazarus at his door. The Rich in Luke’s Gospel are those get wealthy through ill-gotten gain as well as those who keep building bigger and better storehouses to store their wealth with no thought of using it to benefit others.

Luke’s Gospel as it re-tells the story of Jesus, has a vision of building a more just and equal society where the Rich are brought low and humbled, and the poor are raised up and empowered. In the song of Mary near the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, she bursts into song, praising God who will scatter the proud, bring down rulers from their thrones, he will lift up the lowly, he will fill the hungry with good things, but will send the rich away empty, why? Because they already have more than they need.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is pictured as one who gives new dignity to the poor and marginalised, who empowers them to become full and whole human beings again. To repent in Luke’s Gospel is to no longer participate in perpetuating the status quo of society with it’s stark distinction between the Rich and the Poor. It is to become a partner with Jesus in using one’s wealth and influence to build a different kind of society that works to healing the divisions in society. In the story of Zacchaeus, which again only appears in Luke's Gospel, Zacchaeus stands as a model of one who is rich, who has a change of heart, and begins to use and share his wealth in order to become a partner with Jesus in building a new kind of society.

To end briefly: On Monday night I attended the Women’s League, although as Sonya very astutely pointed out to the guest speaker, I am not a women! But it was a real inspiration to hear how Janice Barr and her family have created a legacy for their daughter Charlene in running a charity (Charlene's Project) in her name that is uplifting the lives of the poor in Uganda, Syria and Guatemala. Inspiring to know that every penny they receive goes directly to those in need. It was a challenge as one who has recently moved from South Africa, a country with great poverty, to one of the wealthiest countries in the world to ask the question: “What am I doing in my privileged position, to make a difference in the world? What am I doing to become a partner with Christ to give dignity and empowerment to those who find themselves at the very bottom of the pile?” Amen.

Luke 5:1-11

In South Africa, loud thunderstorms with bright flashing lightening are quite common occurrences during the hot summer months. In Johannesburg itself, thunderstorms can happen on a weekly and even a daily basis during the summer. Over the afternoon, great billowing clouds will build up and in the late afternoon for about half an hour, the clouds will burst open and thunder will roll across the sky and after just 30 minutes it will all be over and the skies will be clear again.

When the thunderstorms come during the night and the lightening strikes close by, the flashes of lightening can light up the whole house, almost like for a brief moment all the lights were suddenly  turned on and off simultaneously.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in his little book of African Prayers writes in the introduction, that encountering God in all God’s holiness and majesty could be compared to to standing at one’s window at night during a great thunderstorm, and as you peak through the curtains, being suddenly overwhelmed and blinded by a great flash of lightening and the roar of thunder that accompanies it.

I get a sense that this was something of Peter’s experience in our text today. The text itself is Luke’s version of the calling of the first disciples. Luke’s version is different from Matthew, Mark’s and John’s versions. Mark’s version in particular gives the impression of Jesus calling the disciples right at the beginning of his ministry. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is walking along the lake, and seeing Simon (Peter) and Andrew casting a net into the lake simply says to them: "Come follow me" and they drop everything to follow him.

Luke on the other hand gives the impression that Jesus has already been preaching and teaching for sometime on his own. It is on one such teaching occasion when Jesus is surrounded by crowds who are listening to him, that Jesus asks to get into Peter’s boat to continue teaching from there.

After finishing teaching, Jesus tells Peter to put out again to the deep and to cast the net out for a catch. Peter goes along with Jesus reluctantly, telling Jesus that they had been fishing all night without having caught anything.

As the story unfolds, and Peter follows Jesus instructions to go out and fish again, Peter ends up having the biggest catch of his life, so big that he even requires extra help to keep his boat from sinking.

At that moment, it is like Peter has glimpsed through the veil of heaven and seen a great flash of lightening that suddenly illuminates the darkness of his own soul. Overwhelmed by what has just happened, Peter senses that he is in the presence of something or someone much bigger and greater than himself. At this moment, somehow, in the presence of this human being Jesus, he has encountered something of the presence and majesty of God.

He responds: "Away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man", in words that echo the prophet Isaiah who has a vision of God high and lifted up on a throne, and says “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips and and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” (Isaiah 6:5).

But as we read on in the passage, we see that this overwhelming presence that he has encountered in Christ is not the overwhelming presence of judgement or anger, but rather, the overwhelming presence of love, a presence and a love much brighter and more powerful than anything he had encountered before.

Some people would say that God cannot stand being in the presence of sin. But in this passage we see that Jesus is not offended by Peter’s darkness. It is the other way around. It is sin that feels overwhelmed in the presence of Divine Love and light.

From Jesus perspective, there is no need because of Peter’s sense of sin. On the contrary, Jesus affirms his wish that Peter should become his  companion and disciple and a partner in his ministry of catching people in the net of God’s love. God’s love and grace made known in Jesus is greater than Peter’s sense of sin and darkness.

And that is the same for each and everyone of us. God is not offended by our darkness and our mistakes. Sometimes having the light shining into that darkness is painful, because we see things in ourselves that we don't like to see and that we don't want to see. But God’s purifying light and love is not there to destroy us, but to make us whole and to call each of us to become God’s friends and partners in the world to spread wide the net of God’s love over others.

Amen.

Luke 4:21-30

How quickly and how easy it is to fall out of favour with someone else.

That is what we see happening in our Gospel passage today. After Jesus’ inaugural address at his home-town in Nazareth, at first people’s opinion of him was positive. We read in verse 22, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.”

But just a few verses later, the whole mood and temperature of the passage swings completely the opposite direction.

In verse 28 we read: “All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this.”

The Greek word ‘thoomos” speaks of being filled with passion, as if breathing hard. And can be translated as filled with fury, fierceness, indignation and wrath!

But the passage does not end there. It goes on: “They got up, drove him out of the town and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.”

What went wrong in just six verses between verses 22 and 28?

How could it be that the synagogue could swing so quickly from speaking well of him and being amazed at his words, to becoming filled with fury, enough that they were ready to kill Jesus then and there... ready to throw him off a cliff.

What went wrong? What did Jesus say that could spark such a reaction from the synagogue congregation?

To understand it we need to go back to the passages that Jesus quoted from in Isaiah. They are a composite of verses from Isaiah 58 and 61. Words originally spoken to Jews who returned home to Palestine after a 70 year exile in Babylon.

What is interesting in the quotation is not just the words that Jesus quotes, but also the verses that Jesus leaves out.

Where Jesus speaks of proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favour, the original passage in Isaiah followed it up with a verse speaking of the day of the Lord’s vengeance. In other words, the prophet Isaiah looked forward not only to a season, or a time when God’s favour would restore the fortunes of the people of Israel, but also, he looked forward to the day when God would pour out God’s wrath and vengeance on the foreign nations, those who had treated Israel so badly.

In this passage from Luke, significantly Jesus leaves out any reference to the day of vengeance of our God.

Scholars will tell you that this is an important theme that runs through Luke’s Gospel, the theme "no more vengeance". For Luke, in Jesus, the day of vengeance has come to an end.

Later on in Luke’s Gospel, when James and John want to call down fire from heaven upon those who rejected Jesus, just like the prophet Elijah does, Jesus will have nothing to do with it. No more vengeance.

When in the garden of Gethsemane, the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, Peter pulls out a sword to defend Jesus and ends up cutting of one of their ears, Jesus immediately says: “No more of this”... no more vengeance. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says: “Those who live by the sword die by the sword”. In other words, violence only begets violence. No more vengeance.

And on the cross, after Jesus has been betrayed, mocked, abused and tortured, Jesus does not respond by hurling insults at his enemies, rather he prays that God would forgive them because they do not know what they are doing. No more vengeance.

Luke’s Gospel suggests that part of the saving work of Jesus on behalf of humanity is that he comes to end the cycle of violence, that endless tit for tat, eye for and eye, tooth for a tooth violence that by its nature never comes to an end. Jesus comes to break that cycle, with himself as the sacrificial victim in order that humanity might know peace.

His listeners in the Nazareth Synagogue at first do not pick up the fact that Jesus has omitted to speak about the day of God’s vengeance on their enemies. It only becomes evident to them when Jesus begins to speak of God’s favour and grace expressed to foreigners (in other words, their enemies) in the Old Testament.

In verse 24-25 “Truly I tell you... there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zaraphath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha, yet not one of them was cleansed – only Naaman the Syrian.”

Jesus is in effect saying to them: The year of God’s favour is not just meant for you, but also for your enemies, for they too are children of God.

In the passage, it is too much for his listeners. They are enraged by the suggestion that maybe God is not interested in meeting out vengeance upon their foreign enemies. They are enraged by the suggestion that foreigners should also be the recipients of God’s promises and God’s grace.

In their rage, they drive Jesus out of town, take him to the edge of a cliff in order to throw him off.

I have always been fascinated by verse 30 “But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” It is like in that moment something came over them, and they were unable to do to him what they wanted to...”

It reminds me of a very powerful story from South Africa. In the 1970’s and early 80’s, Joe Seremane was a member of one of the militarised groups called the PAC, who were trying to use violence as a means to bring about change in South Africa. In the early 1980’s he was arrested and sent into solitary confinement. In solitary confinement, he would be forced to listen to his fellow prisoners being tortured, knowing that his turn would be come. And sure enough it did come. Over a period of weeks he was tortured on a regular basis for a few hours at a time. On the last occasion when he was tortured he was so badly beaten that in his semi conscious state he knew he was dying. This was it. The end was near. In this state of torture induced delerium, as he felt his life beginning to slip away, in that moment he tells how he said to God, "Here is my life, I give it back to you".

He says that at that very moment, the torture and the beating stopped and he was filled with a deep deep peace and serenity, and instead of dying as he thought was going to happen, he calmly got up from the table where he was being tortured and began to walk out back to his cell. He says that his torturers tried to stop him and continued to try and beat him, but it was as though there was something stopping them. Even though he could see their fists flying out towards him, none of their attempted blows could reach him.

That was a turning point in his life. From that moment he became a person of deep faith and trust in God and the way of Christ. Although he continued to advocate for change in South Africa it was no longer by violent means. And the South Africa he began to work towards was a South Africa that would include room for everyone, both black and white. No more vengeance.

“And they took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd, and went on his way.”