Today’s invitation in Scripture and Story is to choose to practice being captivated by Christ’s love. That’s how I hear the words of Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel: he’s asking the people of his era as well as ours to explore a way of being that lives in the moment, honors the grace that shapes ALL of creation, seeks out beauty, refuses to be squeezed into the mold of utilitarianism, brings healing to the hurting, and trusts that the sun will come up again tomorrow morning. It is a way of participating in the love God that shares blessings rather than hoards them. That’s the part of Jesus’ message from the appointed gospel that I want to emphasize this evening: Blessed are you when people hate you, and exclude you, revile and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
· As St. Luke has emphasized throughout the first third of this gospel, Jesus is consciously re-claiming the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel that by some accounts has laid dormant for one thousand years. He is also giving shape and form to his mother’s song we know as Mary’s Magnificat as he lifts up the lowly, heals the wounded, stands in solidarity with the destitute, and welcomes the outcast into the bounty of God’s heavenly banquet table.
· To identify himself as the “Son of Man” – literally bar-adam in Aramaic or ho huios tou anthropou in Greek – is to tell us that Jesus understands himself to be a prophet like Ezekiel or Daniel; an ordinary, grassroots working soul given a mission by the divine to be executed within the nit and grit of real life. It is intentionally different from the phrase “Son of God” which the institutional church claimed for Jesus after his death. To be the fully HUMAN one, a child of humanity as the Hebrew Bible tells us over 107 times, is to be all about solidarity. What I want to share this evening is:
· First, a deep take on the unique insights of Jesus concerning God’s grace from the perspective of a prophet.
· And second, how two creative American composers – Mary Lou Williams and Frances Vincent Zappa – gave expression to the soul of the sacred through their music. It is my conviction that a “still speaking God” is not encumbered nor silenced by a culture’s chaos. As the Hebrew scriptures assure us: the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever! Through secularism, be-yond indifference, decadence, and disdain, and most certainly wherever compassionate free-dom is experienced and celebrated.
The wise Martin Buber put it like this: “In our age in which the true meaning of every word is encompassed by delusion and falsehood, and the original intention of the human glance is stifled by tenacious mistrust, it is of decisive importance to find again the genuineness of speech and existence as WE… Humankind will not persist in existence if we do not learn anew to persist in it as a WE."
In that spirit of radical and sacred solidarity, let me ask you to pray with me before moving into our time of reflection...
Biblical Insights
First, a few insights from today’s gospel lesson from St. Luke. The heart of chapter
· In the verses we use for Advent, the prophetic poet Isaiah, declares that Messiah will bring new life to God’s people by making straight and level the uneven ground of the wilderness and smoothing out the rough places so that NO ONE is denied God’s grace and justice. I can’t help but think of Ezekiel, too, who God commands: cry out to the Spirit of Holiness from within the level valley of dry bones and bring new life to all that is dead.
· And let’s not forget that there is a hint of Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, here as well: St. Luke kicks off his story with Miriam of Nazareth singing praise to the Lord for setting grace and justice in motion so that the wounded will be made whole, the discarded embraced, and the poor liberated. For five chapters Jesus has been precisely doing this as he wandered through the borderlands of ancient Israel healing the sick, nourishing the hungry, and loving the out-casts.
And now, after he’s established his bona fides and paid his dues by getting down and dirty for five chapters, Jesus physically stands among his people and articulates what Mary’s Song, as the heart of Jubilee, looks like in real life: it is a new creation, a level place where everyone is empowered to enter God’s loving presence, and none are forgotten. Chapter six of St. Luke’s gospel completes the sermon of Jesus as prophet that he began in chapter four which, you may recall, set in motion the lynch mob among the elite of his hometown synagogue: Jesus as prophet is one take away here ok?
Sometimes we’ve equated Jesus’ words with happiness, relegating blessing to the realm of feelings. Other times we’ve believed that the Beatitudes were a hierarchy of ethical recommendations were Jesus told us “Go out and BECOME poor, hungry, sad, and outcast.” These, and other one-dimensional explanations, however, don’t do much to help us realize the new creation and level playing field of God’s grace. So, let me try this overview which is indebted Diana Butler Bass in her book Gratefulness where Dr. Bass writes:
What are blessings? The English noun “blessing” means “gift from God” and is derived from the verb “to bless,” “to hallow, or to make holy.” Over time, “bless” became associated with “bliss,” meaning merriment, happiness, and favor. So, “blessing” came to be used in two senses—as both a sacred gift and something that makes one happy – where gifts and gratitude are always of a piece and blessings and thanks go together… how then do we make sense of the Beatitudes and their challenge because clearly, we do NOT give thanks for poverty, hunger, or grief as Jesus did in his sermon. Most contemporary people have a very different idea of what makes a blessed life: Money, beauty, power, achievement, and fame—we hold these things in esteem – believing that if only we had them, or just one of them (in abundance), we would be blessed. We identify bless-ings as material things and consumer goods.
But that’s NOT what the New Testament Greek word, makarios, means – and a quick survey of its etymology has some value. Originally in Greek culture makarios was a reference to the gods: they were the only beings who had obtained happiness and contentment beyond all cares, labor, and death. To be blessed, in its first use, pointed to those who lived beyond this world.
· In time, that other-worldly quality to makarios added a new layer of meaning: to be blessed now referred to the dead – “those who had reached beyond all suffering and dwelt forever within the realm of the gods beyond earthly life.” Scholars tell us that to be blessed in this second phase of the word mean you had to be a god – or exist within the god’s world through death.
· And the third expansion of makarios built on the notion that all who lived “beyond the cares of earthly life” were blessed – including the wealthy and elite of Greek culture. The upper crust of society… who had the riches and power to put themselves above the normal cares and worries of the lesser folk who had to struggle and worry and work” were now called blessed, too.
Now add to the Greek evolution of makarios the spirituality of the Hebrew tradition in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, used throughout the Middle East that was shaped by the book of Deuteronomy in Torah. Here it was taught, as the story of Job discloses, the belief that if you lived right you were rewarded by the Lord. Blessing in this context meant “right living or righteousness… where material abundance, a good wife (in the patriarchal scheme of things), many children, rich crops, honor, wisdom, beauty, and good health” were God’s blessed pay off. As Pastor Stoffregen puts it: “a blessed person here had more things than the ordinary soul for to be blessed meant having bigger and more beautiful things than everyone else.”
· To which Jesus said: NO, these insights and permutations of blessing are simultaneously insightful and ignorant of God’s grace. They are a blessing, as far as they go, but their limitations are a curse. Blessing, Jesus insisted, was living in harmony with God’s will. It was experiencing a life shaped by God’s favor and grace.
· To which he then added: Look at the poor – THEY are favored by God – which does NOT mean we can earn God’s blessed love by being or become poor, hungry or outcast. But rather that something sacred is set in motion for all of creation among the poor – and how we respond to their pain.
In the communities of L’Arche – small, intentional gatherings of people with and without intellectual disabilities – we’ve discerned three connected truths concerning God’s blessing of the poor.
First, their pain gives those of us with more resources a chance to share. As has been said before: mission is how the wounded heal the healthy. Or as the Eucharistic liturgy puts it: sharing by all, means scarcity for none. Second, our sharing of time, resources, and love brings a measure of healing to those most in need. And third, as we learn to walk together in humble love, those with privilege discover how to give it up while those who are most in need learn to claim their own gifts as equals on the level playing field of God’s new creation. Henri Nouwen used to say that L’Arche taught him how to practice “downward mobility” so that his new friends in community could trust God lifting up the lowly as the powerful participated in bringing down their own thrones just as Mary proclaimed. Jesus announces a reversal that brings healing to the poor as the rich and power-ful participate in the dismantling of privilege.
· This is NOT noblese oblige: it is not pity or even charity. It is the healing of creation one heart at a time. Without deep and challenging encounters with the wounded, many of us wounded, bourgeois intellectuals will stay locked in our bubbles of privilege. The poet, Marie Howe, put it like this in “The Star Market.”
· Story of a core member, music, and me...
When Jesus told his people – and tells us now – that the poor hold the key to God’s favor in the real world he was overturning all hierarchical understandings of blessing. Dr. Bass notes that:
The Beatitudes move blessing from a feeling — happiness — to the practice of radical equality. God gives gifts to everyone… and offers unique gifts to the vulnerable and those at the bottom of society. The rich, the sated, the mirthful, the proud have a very hard time understanding this. Gifts are not only for the few, but wildly distributed for all. And the people at the bottom? History’s losers? God’s favor resides with them. God has uniquely blessed them with what we ALL need to become whole. That means the proper response is… gratitude. Blessing is an invitation to give thanks — and a vision of a very different sort of world.
That’s what I see being lived out in both of today’s celebrants: Mary Lou Williams who incarnated the sermon of Jesus in a variety of ways, and, Frank Zappa, who was as far from saintly as you can be in the 20th century, but still celebrated and lifted-up the lowly, the so-called freaks and outsiders as fundamental souls for the healing of the world. You will remember, perhaps, that I’ve been read-ing the appointed gospel texts through the lens of Nordby’s Poem, Beatitudes for the Weird, which announces:
Observations about Mary Lou Williams and Frank Zappa... go to link for Small is Holy @ https://fb.watch/b9lgKdcTvw/
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