Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the sixth Sunday after Epiphany, February 11, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

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

Woe to you when all speak well of you,
for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
    -Luke 6:26

     Well, this is disturbing. It seems to say that if you aren't actively getting on everybody's nerves, then you're not a person of faith or a follower of Christ. And the fact is, I could name some folks who appear not only to agree with this statement, but to be doing their best to put it into practice in their every waking moment. I bet you have a list of them too, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some ministers on yours, as there are on mine. People who think their unpopularity is proof of their superiority.

     Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that proves what a sellout you are, what a panderer, what a crowd-pleaser, what a phony. It proves you have no principles, no integrity, no backbone and no honor. I ask you, is this really true or fair? If it is, then we live in a pretty doggone rotten world, a society that can be relied on to punish virtue and to reward falsehood and hypocrisy.

     Is that really the world we live in? Maybe so. You couldn't disprove it by turning on your TV and flipping through the channels. You couldn't disprove it by reading fashion magazines or listening to political pundits or analyzing our health-care system.

     But beware of going down that road. One of the rules of reading the Gospel is that whenever we start thinking the sayings of Jesus are really targeted at "the system" or at "those people over there" or at anyone more than they are targeted at us, we are certainly misreading them.

     Jesus knew his Hebrew Bible. He knew that passage where Jeremiah says, "The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse - who can understand it?" He knew that doesn't apply to some human hearts and not to others, it applies to all, including my heart and yours.

     The heart is devious, and so it is capable of taking pleasure and satisfaction from the approval of the crowd. The heart is devious, and so it is capable of taking pleasure and satisfaction from the disapproval of the crowd. Both are equally wrong. Both are wrong because both focus on the wrong thing, the attitude of the crowd.

     The Biblical teaching is that the attitude of the crowd towards you is, well, not insignificant, and not irrelevant, but not determinative either. It is not your compass, either to draw you or to repel you. You notice it, you take it into account, and you move on. And what actually guides your movement and gives you direction is God's Word, mediated to the community of faith through God's Spirit.

     But what about the fact that Jesus counterbalances the woe directed at those who win popularity contests with this blessing: "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you"? "Rejoice," he says, "and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to Elijah and Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah and all those other good guys." Doesn't that amount to saying: Blessed are the antisocial personalities, for theirs is the Kingdom of God?

     No, it doesn't amount to that, and here's why: We have overlooked the critical phrase, "on account of the Son of Man." But who is this "Son of Man" that Jesus has a habit of referring to? Himself, of course, you already knew that - but why does he call himself the Son of Man? And does that have anything to do with the Son of God? It's confusing.

     Well, if you read what the Biblical scholars and theologians have had to say about the Son of Man over the last two thousand years, you discover that their achievement is not so much to clear up our confusion as to make it more profound, and possibly to overcomplicate things. "Son of man," or "son of Adam," or "daughter of Eve," these are all simply ancient poetic ways of saying human being or mortal or member of the human race. Put it in capital letters and use it as a title, and it means The Human Being. The special one. The chosen one, the one set apart for some distinctive purpose. In Christian terms, the one human being in whom God chooses to be present among other human beings.

     Blessed are you when you pay a price for your loyalty to me, that's what he means. Me, Jesus. Blessed are you when you are willing to get yourself into hot water on God's account. And this is not the same thing as general obnoxiousness, although I grant you there are plenty of Christians who confuse the two, and that includes liberal Christians as well as conservative Christians.

     The question is not whether you thrive or suffer, it's not whether you become wealthy or poor, not whether you laugh or weep, it's not whether you are admired or despised, envied or pitied. The question is what you are paying attention to, and what you pay attention to is determined by what you trust and what you value. And it's not just Hollywood and Washington and so on that you can't trust - it's also yourself. To have yourself at the center of your consciousness is the same as having no center at all.

     So it's not necessarily the kiss of death to be popular and to get elected to office and to get promoted and to get rich. Not necessarily. Good people can have these goodies. Look at Job, who was a righteous and God-fearing man and had them all, and lost them all through no fault of his own, and if you believe the end of the book regained them all too. The thing is, you have to avoid the temptation to start believing those goodies are the real goodies, and relying on them. Because they are not. They are vanity and a striving after wind. They are the flower of the field that flourishes and is cut down. They are false gods, and if you put your trust in them they will destroy you.

     And of course the kicker is that if life gives you the slightest opportunity to put your trust in false gods of any kind, you will go for it, hook, line and sinker. So woe to you if all speak well of you, for you will believe them and admire their discernment and good judgment. Or if you are of a different sort, woe to you if all speak well of you, for you will despise them in their base fawning over you, and you will despise yourself for pulling the wool over their eyes. Either way, woe to you because in your struggle to come to terms with the world around you, you have allowed that world, and yourself, to take center stage, which is the place that belongs to God.

     The seductions of human self-sufficiency are compelling. We get snookered by them every time. Come down the stairs in the handshake line and tell me my sermon was so inspiring that it knocked your socks off, and I'll glow for the rest of the day, or else I'll decide you didn't get it. Avoid eye contact with me or tell me the sermon was interesting, and I'll die a thousand deaths, or else I'll congratulate myself for having skewered you. But I won't even be wondering whether I was and am God's instrument in what I say and do. You don't need me to translate that scenario into your life, you can do it for yourself.

     "Your reward is great in heaven," Jesus says, and it sounds like he's promising us pie in the sky bye and bye, but don't be misled. Jewish tradition avoids naming God directly. It's considered disrespectful. So you would talk around it. You would say, "in heaven," when you meant, "from God." From God not in some other world or afterlife, but right now. Blessed are you in the present tense if devotion to God is your compass. Faith and hope change lives now.

     We have this amazing propensity for getting things backwards. We honestly believe that the prudent and cautious course in life is to watch out for ourselves, to calculate our own good in all our interactions and endeavors, to be clever and cagey. We view the life of faith as risky, naive, unrealistic. Here we have Jeremiah and Jesus, and also Paul, doing their level best to tell us it's the other way around. There's nothing more dangerous or self-defeating than to put ourselves at our own mercy or at the mercy of others like ourselves. There is nothing more hard-headed or realistic than to be humbled and awed before God, and therefore to embark on the pilgrimage that we hear about in places like this, that pulls us in and pushes us out week after week, year after year, for the rest of our blessed lives.

     Amen.