Revealing God’s dream
All Saints + Souls  |  Luke 6:20-31

There is a lot here today, Friends! Blessings! Woes! Commands that seem near impossible sometimes. Lots of opposites, juxtapositions, flipped expectations, word play — Jesus is setting a big challenge for us this morning, and given the time, we best get into it. But first, of course, context.

We’ve jumped back to chapter six in the gospel of Luke, so it is still early on in Jesus’s ministry. He has just pushed the establishment about Sabbath law, breaking tradition by healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath, in front of a lot of people. It was a statement healing. And people flocked to him.

Then he calls his disciples together and names twelve of them to be apostles. This is the inner circle who are to not just follow as students, but apprentice to do his work and eventually take his place.

And now, tons of people are following Jesus and waiting for the next wisdom to drop and bringing their sick family members to be healed. People are reaching in, pushing, trying to get a piece of the Jesus experience. This is when he launches into his Sermon on the Plain.

Blessings and Woes!

Jesus offers two sets of four: blessing, woe. They contrast each other. And both also each represent a contrast to our expectations. Blessing in poverty is not what people are thinking about. Woe in wealth is also not what people are thinking about. So these two lists of blessings and woes mess with our expectations by together revealing the Dream of God still defies our expectations and desires, two thousand years later. 

It would be easy to say this is human nature — that we are always like this. But that is too simple and deterministic. It’s a way of avoiding the fact that we could do things differently. We could follow Jesus instead. Let’s hold onto that thought.

Note these pairs of blessing and woe deal with finances (poverty/wealth), sustenance (hunger/sated), well being (grief/joy), and status (oppressed/empowered). In other words, the stuff of survival, human dignity, and participation in our common world: the sort of stuff which we must consider human rights. The ability to survive another day and live a life worth living are the base levels of human life; the bottom rows of Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

And yet, these are also places the few use to exploit the many. It is where the wealthy command outsized power to control resources and prevent the people from self-government in the abstract sense and feeding themselves, paying utility bills and rent, in the literal sense.

Remember that Jesus’s greatest concern and most common teaching is about the way the wealthy exploit the people, steal from the people, oppress the people, and prevent the people from thriving — against the laws of God. That this the gravest sin and the most common in their world. And ours.

It is a matter of exploitation.

This pairing of blessing and woe is put into a wider frame of the fulfillment of God’s dream for creation. So the wealthy and powerful, exploiting resources for personal gain, privilege, and present happiness are condemning themselves and all of humanity, burning fossil fuels to run massive data centers which are using up all of our electricity, fresh water, and pitching communities into poverty conditions right now at an alarming rate to fill the insatiable appetite of businesses to integrate AI into everything we do.

They are getting their joy now, at the world’s expense. At the expense of our future.

Exploitation isn’t a zero-sum equation of the present. It is how societies build frameworks for slavery, then protect the slave trade, to attack their own government to expand slavery, to fight reconstruction tooth-and-nail, found the Ku Klux Klan to carry out extra-judicial killings to preserve slavery by a different name, to oppose civil rights, to use slavery laws to define the American prison system. And then we have a Supreme Court today arguing that racism has a time limit of what, twenty-five years? 

This is a rejection of God’s dream for us. 

Jesus wants us to see God’s dream.

But to see it, we have to see the system we’re already in for what it truly is. Therefore, to embrace God’s dream, we must turn away from excusing exploitation. Our vision of Jesus’s Way of Love is so often from within the midst of our own suffering, trained as we are to judge each other, compete with each other, condemn each other.

So, when we hear of loving enemies and doing good to those who hate, it doesn’t seem natural to respond with love — within the adversarial system of kill or be killed. A system that relies on hatred and abuse and cursing. It is how we so easily reason that our response to evil against us is to do the same in return. That’s how we teach them not to hit people, we argue. By hitting people. Killing to prove killing is wrong.

But just because this is natural within that system: a system of exploitation and pain, remember, which seeks to do violence for the preservation of systemic advantage: that doesn’t mean it is natural. It doesn’t resemble the Dream of God. Jesus invites us to do things a different way. That God commands us to respond differently.

In our baptismal covenant, we promise to respect the dignity of every human being. It is hard to make that promise and reject some of them. To hate, rather than love. Even one’s enemies. Even those who hate us. Even those who abuse us.

Preventing evil and punishing exploitation isn’t antithetical to love. Rejecting the dignity of others is.

So when a person condemns us, we don’t condemn them. This includes violence, stealing, or rappelling down from helicopters and busting down our doors. Even the obvious war crime of sending missiles to destroy fishing boats in international waters and killing people so no one can even prove their guilt. This is evil. And letting ourselves believe that some extrajudicial killings of our own would be just — isn’t.

Love, bless, pray.

It isn’t about retribution, but the goodness of God.

One doesn’t turn the other cheek to appease the violent person or to cower to his demands, but to stand up to his abuse and resist being an abuser in return. It is a rejection of the exploitation ideology that is governing so much of our common life.

A person’s act of violence is still violence. It is still wrong. The person who seeks to take away your coat is breaking the law. Even when the court does it. Because Torah commands that nobody be without a coat. Furthermore, it commands us to give away extra coats to people who don’t have them because that is literally life and death. It is why we are commanded to feed the hungry and to house the homeless. Commanded. It isn’t a matter of partisan ideology and whether someone should help themselves in some abstract sense. It is the Law. We don’t hear a lot of people appealing to that part of the Law these days.

This is the foundation of the Golden Rule:

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

It isn’t just be nice to be nice. It is about adopting a posture of openness to God and our neighbors. To love each other so that all of us might be loved. We learn this in all of the world’s religions and through game theory. Because it makes more sense than the stupid stuff we tend to call normal: the selfish, thinking-about-ourselves-first stuff. It doesn’t actually work. And never has. Treating other people well gets us more than everybody-for-themselves does. This is always true.

Saints offer this other vision.

For the most part, anyway. Some can be a mixed bag. But on All Saints’ Day, we remember the whole host of saints who remind us of what it looks like to embrace God’s dream as the alternative worldview that it is. Because they often see things in fresh ways, say things to help others find God, or put their own bodies on the line for the good of the gospel. 

Modern saints like Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, and Jonathan Daniels help us see this more clearly, I think, than many others. Because they showed with their lives what it looks like to love people we are still told not to, that the world wanted them to hate. But God commanded them to see these people as friends, siblings, who deserve the same dignity as themselves.

This is the radical truth of All Saints: in lifting up these people as special, we embrace their message of our specialness. That our commonness is the grace of God. Our community and love and support for each other is the grace of God. We are blessed in our poverty because we aren’t following the exploitation ways of the world. We are embracing our diversity as strength, our humanity as our most precious gift. Love!

All Saints + All Souls

Today we will remember all of the saints and all those others we loved and lost. Today we pair all the people the church lifts up as saints with everyone else. And we say all of these, too, are people of dignity and grace. Examples of faith to follow, like my grandparents and even all those others who fall short of it, like everybody else.

This comes from turning the other cheek, turning away from hatred and exploitation. Turning away from all forces of evil and toward God. That is our vision of grace. Our hope. Our common decency. It is an antidote to our sickness. A vaccine that can prevent the spread of disease. 

This is God’s dream and Jesus’s Way of Love: to love everyone as we are loved. As God loves us. And we share that love with everyone.