True Wealth and God
Who is truly wealthy or truly blessed? Do convenience, comfort and self-sufficiency distract us from our deeper connection with and reliance on God? The Sermons on the Mount and the Plane, a mission trip in Jalango, Dominican Republic, and time in a hospital with a child suffering from dehydration, ask us to open our hearts to the relationship between true wealth and our relationship with God.
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Transcript
Some years ago, I was part of a week-long mission from the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast to the Dominican Republic. Our medical and dental team members ministered to and among the people of the small village of Jalonga. As I began planning for the trip, I also eagerly awaited the arrival, yes, Amazon was functional back then, the arrival of the latest edition of The Lonely Planet Guidebook to the Dominican Republic. All of us team members were eager to learn as much as we could so that we could better serve them.
In a country so different from our own relatively affluent one here in the States, the Lonely Planet guidebook gave me a glimpse of what we would find there. A glimpse of “what is,” if you will, in this new-to-us country. Similar, in a way, to my guidebook to the Dominican Republic, which describes a way of life that was already a reality many miles to our south, the Gospel reading for today also gives us a glimpse of “what is.” What is this time? What is the kingdom of God, the kingdom that has already begun to happen with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ some 2000 years ago. Yes, it’s an unfolding into the future, but yes, a present reality as well, if we have the eyes and the hearts and the wills truly to live into that new world governed by God. Throughout our team’s holy guidebook, the Bible (notice I said guidebook and not rule book!) are given descriptions of an ongoing reality that is happening right now, whether we are aware of it or not. And in today’s Gospel passage, here Jesus is – at it again, one might say – reminding his listeners of the topsy-turvy world, of the nature of the kingdom that is God’s. Jesus, through strong and admittedly rather unsettling words of blessings and woes, paints a picture for his disciples (and that would be us too) of the new reign of God that paradoxically already exists even now. It’s a world of radical reversals into which Jesus invites all people.
It’s difficult, I must say, to hear these words of Luke’s Jesus without hearing also echoes of Matthew’s much more well known Sermon on the Mount. You remember Matthew five, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure in heart, the peacemakers” and so on. Matthew’s Beatitudes. But notice Jesus’s language in Luke, spoken now not on a mount, but on a level place, a plain, if you will, and it’s spoken in the second person. “Blessed are what? You. Blessed are “you,” not “them.” There’s an intimacy here and an engagement. And the poor are, well, they’re clearly poor. Not poor in spirit. And blessed are you who are hungry now with empty stomachs, not hungering after righteousness, so much as hungering for the next meager meal. And blessed are you who weep. This is not quiet mourning, but, I have a sense, it’s more like tearful sobs. Poor. Hungry. Weeping. All now, all in the present, not some indeterminate time in the past or in the future, but now. The earthiness and the immediacy and the physicality of Luke’s blessings contrast strongly with the more ethereal language of the third person of Matthew’s Beatitudes, don’t they? Each has its own place in our tradition.
If we listen carefully, we might hear other echoes as well. For example, the Gospel text from two weeks ago. There Jesus is in the synagogue in Nazareth repeating words from the prophet Isaiah, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed and the have-nots.” Jesus upturns as usual, what most people in our society consider valuable. In short, Jesus’s primary work, and God’s work, and by extension, our work: his mission to the disenfranchised, the downtrodden. God’s good news begins there. Our guidebook, the Bible, reminds us of that mission over and over and over again.
Well, then if the rule of God is even now at work in the world, if the kingdom is upside down, if we fail to see it or be aware of it, what might that mean? What might that mean, not only for the truly and desperately impoverished, whom Jesus says are already favored by God, but what might that news mean as well for the rest of us, comfortable by society’s standards, filled to the full with possessions, never having to wonder where to find medicine for our ills, meals for our children, water to wash our wounds.
In today’s lesson from Hebrew Scriptures, Jeremiah gives us further clues about poverty and life in the kingdom. For Jeremiah, the blessings of the kingdom are present to the extent that we, all of us, poor and rich, can recognize and admit our utter dependence upon God for all that we have and for all that we do. Perhaps God’s children who do live in extreme poverty are more likely to be in touch with that truth than are we. We who, at present, may seem to be getting along very well, thank you very much, but are all the while depending upon our human resources at the expense of a life-changing trust in God’s. We become like dried up shrubs in the desert, thinking that somehow we are in control of our lives, but closed to the fact that what we actually want, what we actually long for, is a transforming relationship with God. Given the chance to relocate to the banks along the stream of life, giving nourishment from God, all too often, I think we insist on remaining in our familiar but unfulfilling desert places. Woe indeed, in the words of Jesus. But holy scripture, our guidebook, points us in the direction of the new world that is already awaiting for us just on the other side of the great waters of baptism.
Of course, we are to stand in solidarity with those who have less than we do, in solidarity with the poor, of course. But we are also invited to look within and to find the poverty in our own personal lives; to be open to having all those hungry and thirsty places filled and watered now with God’s generous grace. We are invited to become, in a sense, poor for God, and then to be unbelievably blessed as God gives us our hearts desire.
I’m reminded of a night in the hospital emergency room one winter, many years ago, during particularly bad stomach flu epidemic. A tiny two year-old lay sick on a stretcher under the bright lights of the exam room. Sunken eyes, skin so dry that it tented when stretched. Shallow breathing, barely moving, despite being surrounded by strange people and stranger sights and sounds. Nurse and pediatrician hovering over the small little child trying desperately to find a vein through which to infuse life giving fluids into her dehydrated and exhausted body. As the probing efforts continued, IVs are notoriously difficult to start in a child who was dehydrated, all of a sudden, I began hearing what I thought was something coming from the child. It sounded like “wah, wah?” I thought maybe she was calling for her mother, but instead, I realized that desperately, in her simple toddler language, she cried for what she knew she most needed – water. “Wah wah, wah.” With that weak plea, she entreated all of us in that exam room to get on with the task of giving her the water on which her survival depended. Finally, IV mercifully in place, the life giving fluid poured in.
Well, like this little girl, all of us have a deep and desperate thirst, a thirst for the living God, a thirst that can only be eternally quenched by drinking in God’s love, drinking in God’s promises, and in so doing, living into the present newness of life that God wants to pour into us. Mother Teresa described it like this: “Let us remain as empty as possible so that God can fill us up. Let us remain as empty as possible so that God can fill us up.”
Well, today’s gospel – Jesus’s sermon on the plain. What lessons might God’s poor teach us that will draw us all closer to God and to God’s kingdom? Yes, we do have so much to learn from those who have so little.To return to where we began, the Dominican Republic, as our mission team departed from Jalonga after an unforgettable week, each of us, to a person, realized that we had been the recipients of God’s grace, not the other way around. We had been the recipients in ways that we could never have imagined.
So a question before us this morning – what in our lives is parched, dried, lifeless or empty? Where are those desperate places that cry out to be filled? Or are we so filled full of ourselves, that we are unable to be open to the life-giving nourishment that God, through His Son, offers?
Whether we see it or not, the Kingdom of God surrounds us right now. All of us, no matter what our life circumstances, are welcomed in. But that realm also is one of great reversals. We must want to be guided into new ways of living in partnership with the have-nots of this world. In so doing, we become ourselves, filled to the full, made new, transformed in ways beyond our wildest dreams. In that day, we will rejoice indeed, and we will leap for joy, because “what is” to come will be, by God’s grace, “what is” already here on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.