Mike Boucher preaches about how Jesus uses the beatitudes to provide a new understanding of whose experience is centered in the kin-dom of God.
Homily Transcript:
So a poorly dressed man who seemed somewhat intoxicated and was smelling pretty ripe gets on a bus and sits down next to a Catholic priest and the priest was visibly annoyed. But the man seemed oblivious, he opens up his newspaper and starts reading and after a couple minutes he puts down his paper, elbows the priest and says, “Hey! Father, what causes arthritis?” The priest says, “Mister, arthritis is caused by loose living, excessive drinking and blatant disregard for your fellow human.” The guy goes, “Imagine that!” and goes back to reading his newspaper. So the priest feels horribly about this and then eventually says, “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t meant to come on so strong. You know…How long have you had arthritis?” “Oh! I don’t have arthritis, Father, but I was just reading in the paper that the Pope does.”
Now, we are always surprised by reversals, right? Something we thought was true turns out not to be so. I love the quote by Mark Twain, “It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you in to trouble, it’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.”
In today’s Gospel we hear what are traditionally called the “Beatitudes”. Biblical scholars often call this passage the great reversal because all these categories of people that might be considered on the outs or despised are said to be blessed. And all the people who were thought to be blessed were told that it just may not be so. Now, if you grew up Christian or Catholic, you are probably quite familiar to hearing this passage and you might even have some sentimental reaction or sweet feeling when you hear this in church, like, “Oh! My God. Blessed are the poor, yes. They really are blessed.” But Jesus’ words actually shocked his audience. It would be like Jesus saying, “Blessed are those who have cancer. Blessed are those whose hearts are torn open by grief. And we would be like, “Wait! What?” And we are told in the Gospel that Jesus had come down from the mountain and he found a huge crowd gathered. People who had come to hear him. They were seeking healing for a whole host of problems that had made their life miserable – poverty, sickness, hunger, mental illness, addiction, abuse, rejection. Now when you hear the bible use the word, the “poor” this is who they are talking about. People who are destitute, people with few options, people with broken hearts and crushed spirits. And then the passage tells us he came down and stood on a level place with them. And I just love the geography of that statement. He stood on a level place with them. He looked at them eye-to-eye and then told them something they needed to hear.
Father Greg Boyle wrote a wonderful book called, Tattoos On the Heart, which I would highly recommend. He works in Los Angeles with ex offenders and really some of the most marginalized people in this country, and in it he says, “…that compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others, it’s about bringing them in towards yourself. He goes on to say what we need is a “…sense of kinship with people who are marginalized. And, kinship isn’t serving the other, it’s being one with the other. That’s why Jesus knows what people needed to hear. He’s been around them, up close and personal. And his words today are directed at people where society just doesn’t have much time for. Now we as a culture seem to spend a lot of time and energy trying to get away from people who are hurting or in pain somehow. We live in neighborhoods that isolate us from one another. We build highways around places we don’t want to go through. We don’t talk much about certain groups. we talk a lot about others. We structure our world to benefit certain people and leave other folks out. But not Jesus. He gets up close and he says, “I see you. God sees you. And as the theologian, Barbara Brown Taylor, puts it: “ The Beatitudes are not advice, They are not even a judgment. It is just simply the truth about how things work. Pronounced by someone who loves everyone. So when Jesus says that the poor, or the weeping or the hungry are blessed he’s not saying that they are better than anyone else and he is not saying that their condition is blessed. It is not a blessing to live in poverty or to have a broken spirit but when we get scraped raw by life and we become vulnerable and powerless something becomes available to us that is not available when we have more power and status and privilege and that something is uniquely connected to God.
Now some of us get occasions of it and some people seem to have a lifetime. So if I had to sum up what I hear happening in the passage today I’d say simply: #poor lives matter. Now its not that other lives do not matter, it’s just that poor lives especially matter.
Now you may have heard the analogy that if you are living on a street and there is a house burning and the fire fighters show up, you don’t go: “Hey! Hey! Hey! All houses matter. Let’s make sure they all get some water, ok?” The one that’s burning gets the most attention. And so Jesus turns his attention to the people who need it the most. He calls them out and he makes their pain visible. Because visibility helps people heal.
And so he names the poverty. He names the despair. He names the betrayal and the abuse. He acknowledges discrimination, rejection, oppression and grief. He calls out confusion and hopelessness and harm and Jesus says, “If you are going through this, I see you and you are blessed in God’s eyes.”
Now, I don’t know how many of you have a friend or someone, perhaps a relative, who at a moment like this they just say something that turns the conversation in a whole different direction. But that’s where today’s reading goes. Jesus says, “Woe to you if you are rich, if you are full, and if people talk well of you.” And up to this point most of us can jump on the band wagon and say, “Right on! Blessed are the poor, brother. I get it!” And then He starts this woe talk.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week because if I’m honest my life falls mostly in to the “woe” category. It’s not that I don’t have problems, and it’s not that my life and perspective don’t count. But what I think is happening here is that Jesus is no longer privileging the experience and perspective of the non-poor. If you have some wealth and privilege and a full belly and are well spoken of it’s not that you are a bad person but Jesus most likely will quote the words of the 20th century poet, Shania Twain, “That don’t impress me much.”
And when you become use to some privilege and power and status and then your perspective, your viewpoint, your experience are no longer at the center of everything you can even begin to feel that you are being discriminated against. But it may not be discrimination so much as discomfort.
I remember a few years ago I was in a race workshop and it was a mixed race group and I was trying to begin my own journey of understanding race in our world. One of the facilitators, an older woman who identified herself as black and queer said, “For the next part of the workshop the facilitators only want to hear from the people of color about their experiences. So I caught some feelings around this because I had a lot to say, I had a lot that I wanted to contribute and so I raised my hand. So she came over to me and without allowing me to speak she put her hand on my shoulder looked me right in the eyes with love and said , “Sweetie, it’s not about you right now. We are asking you to listen.” After I sulked for a few minutes and I got ahold of myself, I realized in essence that the facilitator as asking me, “can you stay present and supportive when it’s not about you? Can you show up when your perspective is not front and center?”
And the more that the world is structured in our favor – and believe me the world is structured in my favor. This might be more of a challenge. But how is it that we think the “isms” will actually get undone unless someone else’s experience is centered. So I think Jesus is saying “woe” statements to the people who have experience some form of privilege and don’t want to relinquish it.
Woe to you when you have something and you are not making sure others can have it too. Woe to you when you know injustice exists and you just keep going. Woe to you when you don’t even try to find out the realities of other people’s lives. Woe to you when you separate your life from people who are hurting.
The civil rights activist, Ruby Sales, tells the story of how she learned to ask a simple question that has profound implications for her but also the civil rights movement. Ruby’s daughter was addicted to drugs and her daughter had been out all night hustling and if you have been in a relationship of some kind with a person who is in addiction you know that is probably hard to respond out of a place of love because sometimes we get so fixated on what people are doing with their pain that we forget how they get in to pain in the first place. But this night Ruby said that something told her to ask her daughter, “Where does it hurt?” She had never asked her daughter this question before and when she did it opened up this floodgate of emotion that ultimately helped them both heal.
So what if we start asking with greater frequency, “Where does it hurt?” What if we ask people living in poverty, “Where does it hurt?” What if we ask people who experience oppression, “Where does it hurt?” What if we ask people who have been discriminated against, “Where does it hurt?” What if we ask people with broken hearts, “Where does it hurt?” What if we ask people who are marginalized, “Where does it hurt?” What if we ask ourselves, “Where does it hurt?” And when we hear the responses, let’s just believe them. Let’s just move along side the people who need us. And make their priorities ours.
Today’s Gospel is about being in relationship with each other and turning the tables on all the things that separate us. It’s about recognizing our kinship with one another and repairing what has been torn apart. It’s about looking at our lives and seeing both the broken places and where we can make a difference and it is about standing at a level place with one another but especially people on the margins and asking, “Where does it hurt?”
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