Readings:
Sermon:
When I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner with some of my American friends, we were asked to go round the table and talk about some of the things we were thankful for. I will let you imagine the joys and successes we all listed, but it certainly didn’t sound like this: I thank God that I am poor since I lost my job and I am so grateful that my friends abandoned me, mocked me, dropped me from their circle because they were embarrassed of me.
And yet, Jesus mentions exactly these categories---the poor, the hungry, the downcast, and the despised. All of them, Jesus says, will be blessed because theirs is the Kingdom of God. All of them should rejoice, because they shall be greatly rewarded in heaven.
And then, he goes straight to those will know nothing of the Kingdom of God, and pronounces his woe on people in these categories: the rich, the full, the happy and the highly acclaimed. Incidentally the things Jesus pronounced his woes upon were the very things we were thanking God for over turkey and three kinds of mash.
There seems to be an obvious disconnect here. Is Jesus condemning the rich or not? Is Jesus cross with those who have eaten their fill or not? Does Jesus really want us to be miserable---and what about our carefully curated reputations, our Instagram worthy selves we show to the world?
Ah! We might begin to see the cracks forming in this perceived perfection that is of this world. This might be the sort of woes that Jesus is warning us about.
When Jesus says Woe to the rich, he isn’t condemning money as means to purchase goods needed to survive and thrive. What he is condemning is the structures of the worldly system where every person is unable to survive and thrive.
Samuel Wells, in Companions of God writes: God gave us everything we need to be his friends and to eat with Him. Woe to the full is a challenge to those whose plates are overflowing with God’s abundance as to why their brother and sister are going hungry.
Woes come with disconnect and isolation with fellow human beings. Self-serving human endeavours are at the centre of these woes: The love of wealth, gluttony in food, surrounding oneself with those that refuse to be challenged by the parabolic stories in the gospel where the first becomes last and the last, first.
When we welcome the stranger outside the walls we build, when we listen and feel with the lonely and despairing, when we break bread with the hungry, only then do we discover the God who resides at the edges. ‘If we draw a line of who belongs in church and who doesn’t, God goes and stands outside the line’
We excel in building higher walls, we engage our intellect to craft waterproof laws that exclude those we consider strangers, we delight in our righteousness to decide who is included in God’s grace.
But if we are serious about our journey with God, if we are truly seeking to walk with God, we need to move to the edges, beyond the boundaries, over the walls, and discover that the law of the Kingdom of God is all about building a longer table and breaking bread together.
Here are a couple of questions I’ll leave you with. If we understand blessings to come in the form of relationships created with those who are intimately close to God’s heart, particularly the edge people, what are the ways in which we could gravitate towards the edges? And when we get there, and stand with the edge people, the poor the dispossessed, the meek, the hungry, the mocked, the scorned, how do we find ways to dissolve the borders, erase the edges and give them a share of God abundance that is rightfully theirs?