“Blessedness: Life at the Limits”
Luke 6:12-26
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
6/5/16
In all kinds
of literature, including scripture, when someone heads up a mountain, readers
are being told, “Wait for it. Something’s coming!”
The ascent itself often proves grueling
for climbers, and purposefully so. When they reach the summit spent and
vulnerable, the thinness of air and shortness of breath mean that they no
longer take anything for granted. They – and we – are about to learn something about our lives in particular and
about existence in general. And this lesson comes at a cost.
Philosophers and psychologists
often call this a “limit experience,” an experience at the stressful but
emotionally and spiritually fertile edge of endurance. And at the limits, we
often discover a very thin line between ecstasy and agony. Both can transform
everything. Life as we’ve known it is over, and life as it will be has begun. Think
of the climber standing atop Mt. Everest. The views from that altitude and that
achievement open up whole new worlds. Think of the transplant recipient and the organ donor’s mother. They both know
things about gratitude that the rest of us have never imagined. Think of the
soldier who still hears his own heartbeat and breath when the guns fall silent.
But when he looks beside him and realizes that he will never hear his buddy’s
voice again, what will joy look like for him? After some limit experience,
whether at height or depth, nothing remains the same.
In the first
five verses of today’s reading, Jesus prays on a mountain top. I don’t know
about you, but I grew up with the impression that prayer was like rubbing an
ancient oil lamp. If you did it right, the genie would come out and grant your
wishes. I am so grateful to be learning just how mistaken I have been about
prayer and God. When we truly enter prayer, like Daniel in the lion’s den, or Elijah
in his cave, or Jesus in his tomb, it becomes a limit experience. Prayer doesn’t
change circumstances. It changes us.
Up on that mountaintop, wrapped in
the intimate, mystical embrace of prayer, Jesus’s sense of call refines and
intensifies. Like most charismatic leaders, he has a slew of disciples, but he realizes
that needs more than followers. He needs partners. So, Jesus selects twelve of
his closest disciples and calls them “apostles.” The Greek word apostello means “to be sent.” As
apostles, the twelve will do much more than witness Jesus’ words and works.
They will enter his life, his transforming embrace with God. Jesus will empower
them to participate fully in his work. Jesus calls and sends them out as personal expressions of his own presence in and Love
for the Creation.
The twelve disciples
accept their commission, but they have no idea about the limit experiences that
await them as apostles of Jesus. Back down the mountain, Jesus leads them to “a
level place.” And here Jesus begins to reveal to his wide-eyed, wet-eared
apostles the height, and depth, and holiness of the ground they now stand on.
“Blessed are
you,” says Jesus, “who are poor…hungry…weeping…hated…excluded…reviled.”
But to all who
are rich…full…laughing…and well-liked, “Woe to you.”
Jesus reveals
blessedness from the point of view of his limit experience of prayer, of
intimacy with God. And it throws us into a state of cognitive dissonance. He identifies
blessedness with the very kinds of things we have been taught to expect God to
deliver us from. And the things that make us say, “I feel blessed,” Jesus says that
those things condemn us.
Now, this is
the point at which first world pastors usually make some endearing equivocation
to protect their salaries by absolving their first world congregations.
Something like: Jesus isn’t saying don’t
have nice things. He’s saying, ‘Drive a Ford.’ He’s saying, ‘Never spend more
than $12 on a bottle of wine.’ Besides, if Jesus can turn water into wine,
surely he can upgrade your monochromatic chardonnay to a nice, rich Bordeaux.’
But no, Jesus
does not allow such flippant dismissal. Down there at the foot of the mountain,
he begins to guide us toward life at the limits, the life he calls The Kingdom of God.
I hear Jesus
saying that living as if comfort, power, and privilege are signs of God’s favor
is to confess ultimate faith in something other than God. It is to avoid the life-transforming
limit experiences that await us when we gratefully and lovingly follow Jesus –
when we follow him into relationships with those who threaten us with their
poverty, hunger, grief, and angry disdain.
Spiritual
discovery comes as the gift of risking journeys into the unknown. Jesus calls
us to do more than talk about compassion and justice. He calls us to do compassion and justice. He calls us
to seek, to embrace, and to Love God by seeking, embracing, and loving God’s
beloved children who feel the sting of poverty, hunger, grief, and rage. Sure,
it can be safer to sidestep desperate people who clamber for belonging,
healing, and hope, but those relationships teach us what life in the Household
of God, what blessed to be a blessing
means, accomplishes, and costs.
Shane
Claiborne, who grew up in east Tennessee, now lives in an intentional Christian
community that he helped to start in one of Philadelphia’s poorest
neighborhoods. Claiborne is also affiliated with The Red Letter Christians, a formal but non-institutional community
which embraces the limit experience-creating practices of prayer, simple
living, and radical commitment to Jesus. On their website, The Red Letter
Christians present their core values. Among
their values are these statements: “All people
are made in the likeness and image of God. Doing Jesus’ work leads to personal
growth and greater understanding. Freedom comes through serving others – not power,
politics or materialism. Wherever your power and influence might lie, it is
magnified when shared and held by those who are poor, oppressed and looked over
by society. We respect and fight for the well-being of all people as children
of God – especially those with whom we differ.”1
All of the stated values reflect ways
of living at the limits of human experience where we grow closer to God and to
God’s creation by entering into communion with and for those in deepest need.
In his book The Irresistible
Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, Claiborne laments the fact that much
of Christianity teaches us to “admire and worship Jesus without doing what he
did…[to] applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same
things…[and to] adore his cross without taking up ours.”2
“Most good things have been said
far too many times,” says Shane Claiborne, “and [now they] just need to be
lived.”3
May God give
us the strength to desire life at the limits of human experience. And there may
we discover the transforming ecstasies and agonies of true and eternal
blessedness.
3Ibid.
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