Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Third Sunday before Lent

Jesus stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples

Those are the words we have just heard read.  Jesus on a level place.  The Sermon on the Plain.  Not, notice, The Sermon on the Mount.  That is the way Matthew tells it.  This is Luke and he wants us thinking in a particular way.   Luke thinks mountains are for prayer.  For this Sermon, Jesus is talking to a crowd - in the midst and on the level. 

In fact, Jesus has just named his inner group.  He chose twelve… whom he also named apostles (Luke 6:13).  And that’s all Luke tells us.  Matthew and Mark give us bits of a job description, lists of things the disciples will do.  Luke just tells us they will be apostles.  It means sent out, messengers.  What does that mean?  Well, on the level, we are about to find out.  Luke tells us Jesus looked up at his disciples and  speaks.  A sermon, Jesus has something to say to his followers, and it is not about what you do.  It all about who you are. 

Blessed are you who are poor

It is stark.  A speaker gathers an audience with a beginning – ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’, for inatnce.  That gathers a community right away, made from what we share, what we have – we‘re friends, countrymen.  It is Shakespeare of course.  Beginnings are often made to reassure, but not this Sermon on the Plain. ‘Simon, Andrew, James, John… Blessed are you who are poor’. 

Blessed are you who are poor

When you install a Dean in Westminster it is all ‘Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen’, with a bit of our trusty and well beloved Dean.  Status.  What Jesus says to his apostles is that identity and character are not made by what we have, they are not possessions, and they are not status.  In fact, the company of the Blessed, the fellowship of the apostles is made from those who know they have nothing.  Make no mistake - these Beatitudes are a challenge.

Think back to the beginning of the story the Bible tells. Eve and Adam in the garden.  God has set them in the garden to keep it.  He has given them dominion.  It is theirs.  They name the animals and keep the garden.  They share in all that is.  They have it all… and what do they do?  They take an apple.  They want something for themselves.  Ownership, possession, that is what makes us feel better.  Advertisers suggest we can be somebody because we are worth it.   It is almost a comedy; God gives us all things and we get fixated on so little.  Grace pours upon us like a waterfall and we flourish a thimble and want just a new kitchen, a pair of shoes, a Mercedes Benz.  With redemption and salvation before us, comedy turns to tragedy, we cannot seize what is offered because our hands are filled with a few coins.

Rowan Williams is fond of repeating the old joke that the English delight in being self-made and thus relieve God of a terrible responsibility.   But we are not made for ourselves, we are made for each other.  We are not made to possess ourselves, we are made to give ourselves away.  We are not made to be someone, we are made to be a people, a Kingdom, a City, a body.  We are made for the ebb and flow.  We can only do that is we know we need what might be given to us.  Blessed are you who are poor.

And that is how Jesus begins.  Now, if you know the Beatitudes, you might expect to hear next that Blessed are those who mourn.  That is Matthew again.   Luke gives us,  Blessed are who are hungry. 

Jesus wants us to think about our appetites   We really should.  If you live and work here you can soon forget appetite is.  Hunger sits in the gut.  To be hungry is to feel the pangs of it.  But, herewith biscuits in the tin and beef wellington on a table near you we quickly find that our longing is all in our heads.  I reach for a truffle am I actually hungry?  I stretch my hand out for a glass of rioja, am I thirsty?  I begin to forget who I am.  I really do not have to worry about need.  I think instead about what I want.  That Is not the same thing.  I never need consider the fact that needs make me dependent.   I forget what it is to be human.  As if that were not problem enough, as well as having appetites in the wrong place I have appetites for the wrong things.  Stuffed with truffle and rioja I can begin to believe I am satisfied; I am full.  As though truffle and rioja is what I most need.  It is that terrible instinct that draws the curtains on the glorious day outside and the company we might keep setting down to watch instead an endless cycle of daytime television.  Good as I am sure it is Cash in the Attic is not what salvation looks like.  We should long for more.

We must be the people who know something about life as it is and life as it should be.  We are the people who know about crucifixion and resurrection, about sin and salvation.  We are people who should speak of both – speak of all that goes wrong and that might be better.   Hungry for what might be better.  We should be people who can hope for more and people who can be sorrowful when there is less.  Blessed are those who weep, says Christ.  Of course, he does.  We must hope and grieve.  The ones who weep are the ones who really want things to change.  They weep over cruelty and injustice.  We need to know, we really need to know, what glory and wonder is possible and how bitter it is when we settle for loss and settle for less.  We hunger and we hope and we weep.

Poor, hungry, weeping.  It is quite a catalogue.  Remember where we began.  Christ called the apostles.  He has not told them what to do.  Instead, he says this.  Blessed are the poor, the hungry and those who weep.  This is the job description, or rather this is the person specification.  This is who we should be.  Not self possessed, but hungry for the Kingdom and weeping over all that is wrong.  Eager for what Christ can make us.

So, it is no surprise then when he goes on to say,

Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude you, revile you,
and defame you on account of the Son of Man

The poor, hungry, weeping apostles of Christ want to see the Kingdom come.  They do not want the world as it is.  They want the world as it could be.  They do not want this, they want something else.  It is a revolution Christ preaches.  In Pinner, Godalming this morning and Westminster Abbey we are reading the Beatitudes and it is a manifesto for revolution.  No wonder Jesus thought the apostles might be hated.  The Dominican Herbert McCabe used to say ‘If you do not love you will not be alive, if you love fully they will kill you’.   ‘If you do not live you will not be alive, if you love fully they will kill you’.  This creed is precisely the reason that Christ was put to death.    Living and loving fully, that is very hard to forgive. 

Hungry and hated, the tear-stained apostles know they have nothing and yet still they dare to hope for the Kingdom.  This is the Sermon – the one on the level – that tell them, tells us, what it is to believe in life and love and God.  Not what we are, or what we have, but what God might give us.  What God might make us.