A Matter of Life and Death (6th Sunday after Epiphany, Year A)

6th Sunday after Epiphany
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37
February 13, 2011

A Matter of Life and Death

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I set out this week intending to preach a sermon on the rather sharp-edged demands of the text from Matthew. “No Excuses” is the title that you find in the bulletin and announced to the community on our sign board. But events have overtaken me and I found myself hearing the passages from Deuteronomy and Matthew quite differently than I had several weeks ago when I made my choice of text and topic. I will get to the question of how that happened in a moment, but first, let’s begin with the text from Deuteronomy.

In this reading Moses is addressing the people of Israel for what he knows will be the last time. It is his farewell address. Moses used this occasion to reflect on what the Israelites had gone through in their recent past and to sound a warning. As the story tells us, these events began a little more than a generation before. The Israelites had found themselves as slaves in Egypt, slaves who served the Egyptian imperial machine and the gods who protected it. Their lot was wretched. They were forced to make mud bricks to build cities of warehouses to store the plunder of empire. They had quotas to fill. They were given starvation wages. They served the gods of production and profit.

When they complained about how hard their work was, their Egyptian masters forced them to gather their own materials without adjusting their quotas. The Israelites lived unhappy lives. Then as now, God’s people have felt free to complain. They didn’t know God, so their complaint was addressed to the universe at large, to whoever might be listening, to whom it may concern. And God heard the cry of the Israelites. Yahweh came to Moses and said:

“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.¹

And God did indeed bring them out of Egypt. God set them free from slavery to Pharaoh.

We’d like to be able to say that everything went well for the Israelites after that, but we know better. They had experienced the world as a harsh place, a place of scarcity, a place of lack. They experienced life in the empire as a constant struggle. They lived under the thumb of an empire whose only interest in them was its own self-enrichment. They produced great wealth, but enjoyed none of it. The whole experience made the Israelites anxious and distrustful.

Strangely, it made the Egyptians anxious and distrustful, too. The Egyptians worried about how many Israelites there were and how rapidly they multiplied. They were afraid of an uprising. They were afraid of their own slaves. The Egyptians, too, were driven by anxiety and fear.

We would think that the Egyptians would not be anxious or fearful. After all, they were powerful. They were the strongest empire they knew of. They had so much stuff they had to have slaves build warehouse cities to hold it all. Why should they be anxious?

But they were. In fact, if I read the whole of the Bible correctly, it is anxiety that is at the heart of all imperial ambition. When we are anxious, we are less able to live in community. We are distrustful of others. We see the world as a place of scarcity. We see others as rivals, as competitors for scarce resources. When we are anxious we are less able to work out peaceful ways of living with each other. Our minds play tricks on us so that we can justify nearly anything if only it will make us less anxious. Naked aggression becomes “securing our vital interests.” An ancient and nearly universal piece of wisdom like the one we know as the Golden Rule—“Treat others as you would be treated”—gets twisted into something like: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

So the Egyptians looked out at their world and saw nothing but threats and danger. They responded accordingly and, in the course of history, became a threat and a danger to everyone in their neighborhood. Anxiety drives us to try to control things. But the more we try to control, the more there is to control.

This is why anxious rulers tend to become tyrants. At the root of every dictatorship is anxiety, whether on the scale of a household or an entire nation. This, I argue, explains a great deal about a man like Hosni Mubarak. He became the president of Egypt when President Anwar El Sadat was shot and killed by a radical Muslim assassination squad. Mubarak himself was wounded in the same attack. We can understand his anxiety. And we can see where it led. And we know that, in the end, his strategy for managing anxiety did not work. However much he tried to control the events around him, there were always events just beyond his grasp. And in the end, as we have seen in the last two weeks, he could not control his people.

Moses, of course, did not know about any of the events of modern Egypt. But he saw easily enough that an anxious people cannot create a humane life for themselves. In their quest for control they would never be able to live with the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Indeed, they would recreate their slavery in their new land. They would make one of themselves a king. They would act like the nations around them. They would fashion their own gods out of wood, metal and stone, gods whom they could control, gods who would in their turn offer them control of their world, gods who would be just as cruel and harsh as the gods under whom they had suffered in Egypt. Moses knew this.

So Moses warned the people while he had one last chance. This way, he told them, was the way of death. They could choose it, but it would not offer them good lives or long in the land of promise. What then would?

It’s natural to read Deuteronomy as if the deal that God were offering the Israelites were actually a threat: Follow my rules or else! In reality what God is giving them is a choice. If existence in Egypt was slavery under an anxiety-driven imperial regime of scarcity and control, then the life that God offered the Israelites was in every way its opposite.

In place of control God offered a life of covenant. Life with Yahweh was not to be some sort of technology or technique that guaranteed that the world would be run for Israel’s comfort. Israel and Yahweh were not bound together by their mutual convenience. Israel and Yahweh were bound together by love. In their covenant they are both free. God deals with real people who are stubborn and resistant but also intimately honest. Israel deals with a God who has a passionate commitment to justice and a massive ego and who will not stop loving them no matter what the cost.

In the place of empire, God offered life in community. In community others are not regarded as competitors for scarce resources. Others are not regarded as untrustworthy strangers to be rejected. Others are not regarded as enemies to be fought and conquered. This how empire treats others. In community by contrast we embrace others as those with whom we share a common life and common future. We welcome them as those who already belong. We see them as those with whom we might enjoy the blessings of peace.

In place of slavery God offered freedom. This is not the freedom to do whatever we want, not the freedom to make our own rules or treat each other as we please. It is instead the freedom to live truly human lives in covenant community. Let me say by way of a footnote at this point that this is the freedom that Jesus offers us in the Gospel reading. Not only murder but even hatred are incompatible with life in a covenant community. In a covenant community reconciliation is more important than victory. In a covenant community, we cannot treat others as objects for our gratification. In a covenant community we do not play games with truth. What Jesus is doing in the text that I’m not preaching this morning is laying out in exacting detail what it takes for us to live into the choice that Moses set before the Israelites. The freedom to become truly human is not easy, but anything else is in fact slavery. In place of slavery God offered freedom.

In place of scarcity, God offered abundance. The land that they were about to enter was a “land of milk and honey.” It would give the Israelites everything they needed. In fact it would give them enough that they would be able to do something no one had ever done before: they could set aside one day out of every seven and do nothing at all, but celebrate the goodness of life. Six days of work would yield seven days of living. There would be an end to production quotas and the endless postponement of promised rest. There would be enough of everything, even enough of rest and leisure.

Covenant, community, freedom, and abundance all rested on one last choice, the choice that the whole sweep of the Biblical story regards as fundamental to human life: the choice between anxiety and trust. What God offered to the abused survivors of the empire was a relationship that they could trust. If they would trust God to be their God, if they would be faithful to their covenant with God, then they would have no need for anxiety and for the inhumanity that anxiety spawns.

In truth, God was not easy to trust. Truth to tell, the Israelites weren’t all that easy to trust, either. Have you ever done a thing called a trust walk? A group is divided into pairs who will be partners. One partner is blind-folded. The other partner leads them through a series of obstacles. The blind-folded partner has to trust their guide. The guide has to behave in trustworthy ways. In the trust walk that is life in covenant, it seems to me that God sometimes forgets that we cannot see. And we sometimes forget that God can. So naturally there are misunderstandings on both sides. Trust means being vulnerable. Being vulnerable means we can get hurt. And sometimes real hurt happens to Israel or to God or to both.

So trust isn’t easy. But it’s the only alternative to anxiety. Anxiety is the way that leads to death. Trust is the way that leads to life. Those are the alternatives. There are no others. So the Israelites had to choose.

Now to the events that overtook my sermon writing. The Egyptians are an ancient people whose civilization was old when my ancestors were still painting themselves blue and worshiping trees. They are a people of heritage and dignity. They have suffered over the centuries and in the last few decades this suffering took the form of a series of autocrats. They have known what it is to live under anxiety-driven oppression and anxiety-induced scarcity. They have finally had enough. The people of Egypt have reclaimed their dignity and their humanity. Like the Israelites in our text they are poised on the brink of a new future.

Now they have a choice. And it’s not the choice many in Washington and Tel Aviv suppose that they have. It’s not the choice between being ruled by a secular strongman or a fanatical theocrat. That’s like saying they have a choice between being ruled by a devout thug or a non-devout one. Not much of a choice. No, the choice is between thugs or the genuinely new possibilities of a trust-based life in covenant community.

That’s the same choice that all of us have. We can surrender to anxiety, seeking control over our neighbors and over creation itself. In that case we will know slavery, scarcity and death. Or we can choose to trust God and begin the careful, messy, difficult work of fashioning a covenant community. In that case we will know freedom and abundance. That’s our choice.

In the mirror of the choice that lies before the people of Egypt I have seen our choice and mine, a choice that both thrills and frightens. I feel overwhelmed for my fellow human beings in Egypt. I will pray for them that they will choose well. I hope that they will pray the same for us.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Exodus 3:7-8a, 9.

Fish Gotta Swim, Light Gotta Shine (Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20)

5th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20
February 6, 2011

Fish Gotta Swim, Light Gotta Shine

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

I learned that song at a pretty young age and I’ve led kids in singing it many times since. “Let your light shine,” says Jesus in our Gospel reading.

Do we read the rest? Do we know the rest? “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

We’ve been a little vague about what that is supposed to mean. Whether rightly or wrongly, I always assumed that letting my light shine had something to do with other people becoming Christians and joining the church. This was a comfortable notion for mainline folks, since it meant that all we had to do was to “let our light shine” and people would be drawn to us and to our church. We wouldn’t have to embarrass ourselves. We wouldn’t have to learn any new skills. We wouldn’t have to talk to anyone about God, which we find unbelievably hard to do. Church growth would just happen. All by itself. And all we had to do was to “let our light shine.”

Never mind that we never bothered to decide just what “letting our light shine” meant. Never mind that when I was growing up in the church, the church was growing because of the baby boom, not because of shining lights. Let’s face it, however much we have sung about letting our lights shine and however much shining we have done, we United Methodists haven’t made converts in any appreciable numbers since the 1880s.

Never mind all that. We were supposed to let our light shine so that other people would see our light and join us and they in turn would let their light shine so that still more people would see our light and join us.

I’ve often puzzled over this vision of growth for the church. Each church member brings two people into the church. They bring in two more each, and so on. This is a familiar mathematical puzzle called “the king’s chess board.” The way I heard it a king borrowed money from a shrewd banker. When the king asked the terms of repayment, the banker, said, “I’d just like a few pennies. If you majesty will take his chessboard and place one penny on the first square, two pennies on the second, four pennies on the third and so forth until each square on the chessboard is covered, I’ll call it even.” The king agreed, not realizing, of course, that this agreement would bankrupt him. In fact, the total would amount to one hundred eighty-four quadrillion, four hundred sixty-seven trillion, four hundred forty billion, seven hundred thirty-seven million, ninety-five thousand dollars. This is a lot of money. The banker settled instead for the hand of the king’s daughter.

I get a little leery anytime I hear a scheme of exponential growth. A scheme of exponential growth must sooner or later run into the fact that we and our world are finite. This is the wall that caused Bernie Madoff’s operation to come unraveled. But that doesn’t keep us from dreaming this particular dream.

I imagine that Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald’s, may indulge in the fantasy of exponential growth. He may only talk in terms of increased “market share.” He, like any other business person, would like to increase the share of the market that comes to his organization. But what is the upper limit of that fantasy? Does he really imagine that there might come a day when the only restaurants in the country, or even the only fast-food restaurants, are McDonald’s? If so, he is shooting himself in the foot, since an “all McDonald’s all the time” diet would kill off his customers. In his case at least, a scheme of exponential growth is neither possible nor even desirable.

Infinite expansion is a dangerous fantasy. Three examples of infinite expansion come to mind. The first is the chain letter. We’ve all gotten them. Send this letter to ten of your friends! Sometimes there are even threats: Someone didn’t forward this letter and they slipped on ice and broke a leg, got fired, discovered that their spouse was cheating on them and were featured in People magazine as among America’s ten worst-dressed people. But the king’s chessboard tells me that I had better break the chain before the Internet is occupied full-time just passing this letter around. If you send me a chain letter, I will not forward it. Just so you know that it’s not personal; it’s a matter of principle.

Another less fun example of exponential growth is what happens when a virus against which we have no immunity enters our bodies. The virus invades a cell and uses the cell material to make more copies of itself which then enter other cells where the process repeats. Until what? Until it kills its host, which is a really stupid thing for a virus to do. If it should succeed in killing every human on the planet, what then? A well-adapted disease does not kill its host, but settles instead for making its host miserable, like the virus that causes the common cold.
The third example of exponential growth is an unmitigated disaster: a thermonuclear explosion.

Why should the Church take as its image of growth a process shared by chain letters, virulent diseases and thermonuclear war? Is it possible for the Church to grow to include everyone on the planet? Would that even be desirable?

That is assuming, of course, that we know how to grow the Church that way. But we don’t. I’ve been around the church growth movement for most of my career, although I have to confess that the king’s chessboard keeps me from taking it too seriously. My overall impression of the literature that this movement has generated is that we have some pretty good ideas about how to grow new churches in growing suburbs of growing cities. That, quite frankly, isn’t saying much.

About turning one hundred forty year old stable congregations in stable communities in rural Iowa into growing congregations we know hardly anything at all. Our denominational leaders keep telling us that we should grow and they keep shoving at us the latest packaged program guaranteed to make us grow.

I’ve been around just long enough to have learned a secret which I will share with you, if you promise not to tell anyone else. Do you promise? Here it is: No one knows what they’re doing. No one knows how to make congregations like ours grow. Oh, sometimes it happens. I assume that it has something to do with the right combination of pastor and people at the right moment in history in the right place in the space-time continuum. The trouble is, I’ve never seen anyone bottle it, turn it into a method that anyone could simply apply, with a few adjustments, to another combination of pastor, people and opportunity. There are no methods, only stories of people who experienced it, and, truth to tell, very few even of those. No one knows what they’re doing!

No one knows how to grow First United Methodist Church. Our superintendent Anne Lippencott is a pretty savvy pastor, but she doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. Jaime Glenn-Burns is a gifted consultant, but she doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. Bishop Trimble is a fine pastor and bishop but he doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. And I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the salespeople who bother Rhonda trying to get to me so they can sell the latest thing that’s been working wonders in Dallas, Texas, they for certain don’t know how to grow our congregation. I don’t know how to grow our congregation.
That sounds like it should be bad news, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s news that can set us free. That’s because Jesus didn’t talk about growing churches. That wasn’t what his message was about.

After all, the point of salt is to flavor food, not to take over our cuisine. A little salt goes a long way. Too much, and salt stops being a seasoning and starts trying to be food. The point of a lamp is to illuminate a house, not set fire to it.

Jesus talks about salt and firelight on the way to talking about something else. We are salt, he says, and we are firelight. We can’t help being salty and we can’t help shedding light. It’s who we are. It’s not something we have to learn or strive to do. We really can’t help acting according to our nature.

On the other hand, he is also telling us that we need to act in certain ways and live in a certain direction. Our “righteousness” must be greater than that of the Pharisees and scribes. Or at least that’s what our translation says. The trouble is that we could get the idea that being “righteous” means being “better” than other people. We have this terribly small idea of what righteousness is. A righteous person we imagine refrains from doing certain things, like using coarse language for example. In an earlier day we would have said that a righteous person doesn’t play cards, dance or drink alcoholic beverages. A righteous person does certain things, like going to church every Sunday and reading the Bible all the time.

But this is a small notion of what the word means. Really, the word that is translated as “righteousness” would much better be translated as “justice” because it contains the idea of settings things right. So Jesus told his disciples that “their justice must exceed the justice of the Pharisees and scribes.” And when Jesus told them that he was appealing to a long tradition.
They didn’t have to guess what he meant. They didn’t have to make up stuff about being lights so that other people would want to be lights, too, and then they could report a net gain in membership to the bishop.

Jesus was appealing to the prophetic tradition that is as well represented in today’s text from Isaiah. Isaiah had some very strong words about “setting things right,” about justice in other words. The people of his day were careful in their religious observance. They participated in ritual life. They kept the rules. They even prayed and fasted. They were righteous in that small sense of the word. They were respectable. But God was not listening to them.

That’s because God was not looking for respectability. God was looking for justice. God wanted to see them loose the bonds of injustice. God want to see them undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. God wanted them to share their bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into their houses. God want them to clothe the naked when they saw them, and not to hide themselves from their own needy family members.
God didn’t have a plan for their growth. God had a plan for their faithfulness and it was built around justice. This is the tradition that Jesus evoked in this part of his sermon. Jesus calls us not to growth but to faithfulness.

Jesus calls us to loosen the bonds of injustice. Jesus calls us to let the oppressed go free. Jesus calls us to share our bread with the hungry. Jesus calls us to make sure that the poor have shelter from the weather and a place to call home. Jesus wants to make sure that every child is protected against the brutal Decorah winter. Jesus wants us to care for the sick and visit the imprisoned. Jesus wants us to welcome strangers even when they look like strangers.

If we will do these things, we will season the life of this community. If we will do these things we will shed light into the shadows. In Isaiah’s words, “Then [our] light shall break forth like the dawn...[our] light shall rise in the darkness and [our] gloom be like the noonday.”1

There are people who aren’t a part of our congregation who would like to being doing justice. If we don’t shut the door in their faces, if we don’t put too many barriers in their way, they’ll join us. I don’t know if there will be enough of them to yield net growth, but I guarantee that there will be some who want to be part of a congregation that does justice and loves mercy. But even if it weren’t so, I would still urge us to be faithful and let bishops and God worry about the numbers.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Blessed? Really!? (Matthew 5:1-12)

4th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Matthew 5:1-12
January 30, 2011

Blessed? Really!?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

These Beatitudes are not among my most favorite parts of the Bible. Maybe it’s because I had to memorize them when I was in confirmation some forty-six years ago. I am a still a part of the church in spite of, rather than because of, my confirmation experience. The classes consisted of thirteen weeks of Wednesday after-school meetings with the pastor, an imposing man of whom I was afraid. The twelve or fifteen of us sat around a square of tables and listened to him drone on about that week’s chapter in our textbook. That mind-numbing boredom, though, came as a blessed relief. The first thing that happened each session was that each of us would take a stab at the weekly memory assignment. All together, we had nine memory assignments: the books of the Old Testament, the books of the New Testament, the names of the twelve apostles, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, Psalm 23, Psalm 100, the Apostles’ Creed, and, yes, the Beatitudes.

There is nothing wrong with memory work, but it was mortifying to stand up in front of the class and individually struggle to recite our latest piece, especially when I was not prepared, which, let’s face it, was most of the time. Once, in fact, I procrastinated so thoroughly that Wednesday came around and I hadn’t even looked at the assignment. What made it worse was that this particular Wednesday happened to be my birthday. I regarded this predicament as a lousy gift from the universe, so I appealed to its Maker. I prayed something like, “God, if you’ll get me out of this somehow, I promise I’ll do all of the rest of the assignments on time.”

If you ask me I will tell you that this is not a good way to pray. Making bargains with God is a bad idea on several levels. But I’ll say this: that Wednesday was the only snow day I remember from my elementary school days! I learned a valuable lesson from this: Whenever I am in a jam of my own making for which I—and no one else—am entirely responsible, I can always pray and somehow God will get me out of it, even if it means redirecting global weather patterns.

I’m kidding! It’s not true. But that was the lesson I took away and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to unlearn it. So, kids, do not try this at home. And do not say to me, “But you said...” Just make sure you remember all of what I said.

Okay, back to the Beatitudes. I find them impossible. They stand my world on its head. The don’t make any sense. “Blessed are those who mourn...blessed are the meek...blessed are the merciful...blessed are the peacemakers...” Remember, “blessed” isn’t a word that describes some other-worldly thing. The word describes, according to my dictionary, “the privileged recipient of divine favor.” Another translation of the word is simply “happy.” “Happy are those who mourn...” What? “Happy are those who mourn?” Jesus, are you kidding me? “Those about whom people say all sorts of nasty things are the privileged recipients of divine favor?” Really??

I guess we should be grateful that we aren’t stuck with Luke’s version of these. How about this?

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you...¹

And, just in case there was any doubt, just in case we thought we saw a little wiggle room there are four woes to match the four blessed’s:

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when all speak well of you...”²

These are hard words for us. We like to laugh. We like to have people speak well of us. We like a good meal with plenty of the foods that we like to eat. We may not aspire to being rich, but we like having a little money. We don’t want to be grief-stricken, to have the people we love stripped away from us. We don’t want to be hungry, I mean the hunger we have when we haven’t eaten for a day or more and don’t know where our next meal is coming from. We don’t want to be hungry like that. We don’t like it when people say nasty things about us. In short, it’s really hard for us to call the state the Jesus describes for us as something to be sought after, even if we would then be “the privileged recipients of divine favor.” If that’s divine favor, I think I’d rather go without.

Scholars are pretty much agreed that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (with matching Woes) is older and lies closer to Jesus than the version in Matthew. We can certainly sympathize with the members of the early Jesus followers who read Luke’s words and said, “Are you sure this is right? Are you sure that’s what he meant?”

When Christians who were well enough off not to be able to call themselves poor—we think maybe in Antioch—when these better-off Christians first heard someone say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit...” and “blessed those who hunger and thirst for justice...” we can easily imagine them saying, “Oh, so that’s what he meant! The poor in spirit.”

We all have our little tricks, you know, to avoid the more uncomfortable ways of reading the text. The move that the members of the First United Methodist Church of Antioch made even has a name. It’s called “spiritualizing.” We take a text that has a clear economic or political message and we turn it into something spiritual and therefore safer and more comfortable.

More comfortable, maybe, but not entirely comfortable.

We can turn these words into pretty little plaques. We can embroider or cross-stitch them on fine cloth and frame them for our walls. We can even decorate them with cutesy Precious Moments figures. But the words are still hard: meekness, mercy, purity of heart, poverty of spirit—these are not in vogue today. Meekness is not a useful virtue on Wall Street. Poverty of spirit is not what we look for in our leaders. Mercy is not a trait that is valued in a time of war. The paparazzi do not swarm around the pure of heart. These are all profoundly counter-cultural aspirations.

The Beatitudes describe someone who has been stripped of everyone and everything they love and depended on: these are those who mourn. They describe the state of someone who has so little to lose that they are willing to risk whatever is left for the sake of justice. They hunger and thirst for it. They want it so badly they can taste it.

Standing outside of that state, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like inside. I suppose we’re seeing some of it on our televisions and in the YouTube videos from Egypt. We’re having a hard time imagining a state in which the present is so bad that we would be willing to risk what little we have left—our bodies and our lives—for the sake of a better future for our poor and shackled nation. But Janis Joplin sang it right: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”³

If we were free, free enough to enter the world of the Beatitudes, we might find that we were able to become that rarest of human beings, the peacemaker. Wouldn’t that be something to see? And wouldn’t that be something for the world to see?

I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I am afraid of the world that Jesus offers us. I have so much to lose, you see. But I’m also unwilling to let go of Jesus’ words.

Or maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. It’s never really been up to me to decide whether to hang on to them or not. They won’t let me go. They hold out a dream that won’t die. I am haunted by the “blessedness” that Jesus describes and offers. So I have hope that grace will overcome my fear.

I have hope and I have something else, too. And so do you, if you want to be a part of this. We have each other, you know. We have each other to encourage each other, to egg each other on, to exert some positive peer pressure on each other.

So here’s the deal. I promise to take some risks in following Jesus. Will you promise to egg me on? I will urge you on if you take some risks in following Jesus. Will you promise to take some? If we do this, if we encourage each other in the profoundly counter-cultural gesture of following Jesus, we have Jesus’ promise that we, too, will be the oddly “privileged recipients of divine favor,” that we, too, will be blessed. It sounds scary. But it also sounds good.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Luke 6:20-22.

2Luke 6:24-26.

3Kristofferson, Kris and Fred Foster, “Me and Bobby McGee,” Combine Music Corp., 1969, recorded by Janis Joplin for her album Pearl in 1970.