Epiphany 6C: By Streams of Water--Leafing Shade for the Least of These

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Epiphany 6C: Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26

The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge

Last week, in our reading from Luke, we heard Jesus’ call to the disciples—Simon, John, and James—to leave everything and follow him. We talked about what it might mean to drop our nets—all the ways we trap God in preconceived ideas—in order to make a little room for God to be God to us. Setting out in the deep waters means leaving behind all the ways we’ve constructed our lives, our perceptions of others, and God on our own terms and letting God live God’s life in and through us. The calling of the disciples is a sign for us of the radical re-orientation that is at the core of the life of Christian discipleship—the turn from relying on ourselves to placing our trust in the one who is all beauty, truth, and goodness: the one who makes a way out of no way; the one who when the waters of daily life rise up to our necks open a strip of dry land; the one who when the flames get a little too hot walks with us free and unbound drawing new life from apparent dead ends; the one who, to shock and amazement of the women at the empty tomb, has gone ahead of them into Galilee (but not before making his bed and leaving the sheets nicely folded).

This week we continue with the theme of discipleship, what it means—as individuals, as a church family, as a community, as a nation—to follow after Jesus, to put love first and live from that love for others. This week we get a glimpse of the life of blessedness, of what love looks like in human form. We see it first in the one whose life we are, by grace, to make our own. If the beatitudes seem like an impossible thing to fulfill, that’s because they are for human beings unaided by grace. The beatitudes are the life the Christ, but that doesn’t let us off the hook so that we can content ourselves with “being good” or “nice Christians.” Our Baptismal Covenant reminds us that to the extent we accomplish anything of the life of blessedness, it is only with “God’s help.” The beatitudes aren’t a call to individualistic moral self-improvement, but a radical reorientation of our entire lives—placing our entire trust in Him and letting all the other ways of making sense of the world fall away. The beatitudes are a call to open ourselves to the life of Christ, that He might live His life in and through us as instruments of his peace.

Our passage from Jeremiah and from Psalm 1 set this squarely before us. Jeremiah tells us, “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.” These rather stark lines sketch out with unvarnished realism life with ourselves at the center—the logical consequences of a life centered on power, prestige, and possessions. Jeremiah is not so much a doom and gloom prophet of destruction here, as a sharp-eyed diagnostician of the human condition. Live for power and you’ll send your life looking over you shoulder for the one who inevitably more powerful. Live for prestige and you’ll find yourselves blown this way and that on the changing winds of with praise and blame. Live for possessions and… well all you have to do is look at the great recession for an indication of who transitory and passing that reality is. Hardly a strong rock, a castle to keep us safe. Hardly a firm foundation on which to stand when the inevitable chances and changes of our life come our way.

Placing God at the center of our lives, turning to Him instead of to mere mortals is what allows us to navigate the ups and downs of our fragile, contingent, human existence. The peace that passes all understanding is not a poetic turn of phrase. It speaks of a reality, a place, a space, a stance, a disposition, a way of being in and for the world, that imbues us with what the psychologists have come to call “resilience” these days. The peace of God that passes all understanding speaks to the reality of planting ourselves in God, being watered with the water of God’s unconditional love for us. It speaks to the fruitfulness and beauty that result when allow our lives to be “rooted and grounded in Christ” that we might in some small way by grace become what Christ is by nature—a little more like him, a little more like the shape love takes in human form when it comes among us.  

“When heat comes,” Jeremiah says, “its leaves shall stay green.” It’s not that our life will be a magic carpet ride to bliss. There will be loss. Sickness. Sorrow. Disappointment. Death. That’s simply what it means to be human. Rooted and grounded in the streams of water of God with us, God for us, however, we find a way to muddle through knowing that there is a fourth figure free and unbound walking amidst the flames drawing forth new life, new possibilities, new relationships, new shoots of growth from what appeared to be a dead stump.

It’s essential to realize then that the beatitudes, and the outline of the spiritual journey laid out in Jeremiah and the Psalm aren’t just abstract moral imperatives to be blindly followed. The beatitudes, like the giving of the law to the Israelites, are gifts to us that show us how to be happy. The very first word of the Psalter is “happy”—this is God’s deepest desire for us—to be happy, to know in our bones the peace and rest that come from life in him. Abundance, fullness of life, joy—these are the grand destiny for which God created human beings. And the way to that joy is upside-down in the eyes of the world. The topsy-tursy story of God’s action in the world in and through God’s people shows us that happiness lies not in hoarding as private treasure that which God so freely gives, but in sharing things in common with others. It consists not in building walls, but in welcoming the widow, the orphan and stranger, and taking care of the alien in the land. It shows us that happiness lies not in fearfully huddled self-enclosure, but in going towards those others from whom we’ve been taught to recoil—to touch the untouchable, visit the lonely, sit with the sick, and feed the hungry.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was imprisoned and executed by the Nazis just three short weeks before the end of the war for his impassioned resistance to the evils and madness of that regime, reminds us that “When Christ calls a man [sic], he bids him come and die.” In Bonhoeffer’s case that death was a literally one. He died on the gallows on April 9, 1945 after preaching his final sermon—“This is for me the end, the beginning of life.” For us, however, the death to which Christ calls us, might not be an actual, physical death. Rather, it bespeaks of the basic pattern of our life together in following after the one who calls, “Follow me.” It bespeaks a life that slowly, haltingly, and with all sorts of detours and eddies along the way, turns away from the self at the center of the universe to God at the center of everything—"God whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere” (Nicholas of Cusa). That shift from self at the center of everything to God at the center of everything is the death the desert fathers and mothers spoke of as a kind of “white martyrdom” encountered in the silence and solitude of their cells in the Egyptian desert—the gradual turning away from the pursuit of power, possessions, and prestige as providing us with any lasting happiness, peace, or joy worthy of the name.

In this light, it becomes clear why it is that those who apparently have nothing are pronounced as “blessed” by Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain. The poor, the hungry, the mournful, the reviled have all seen the bankrupt impossibility of trying to secure life on their own terms. They’ve died to that self. They’ve had the shell of their illusory self-reliance cracked open and have opened to a larger reality, the reality of God, and the blessedness of life in him. It’s not, of course, that we shouldn’t work with all our strength for a more equitable and just society where people are housed, and fed, where people have access to medical care, where the dignity of every human being is honored and celebrated, where we stand in solidarity with the least of these as the hands and feet of God in the world. We shouldn’t be so heavenly-minded that we’re of no earthly good” as Johnny Cash reminds.

But the beatitudes remind us that neither should we be so earthly-minded that we are of no heavenly good. The beatitudes remind us that material poverty spoken of here is also a sign for an inner disposition, an openness, a receptivity, a yielding and allowing that makes a little room for God to live God’s life in and through us. Rich with ourselves, our plans, our ideas, our theologies, we crowd God out. It is in letting God get at us, in becoming like a little child, poor, needy, calling upon the Lord, that a strength, a peace, and joy that the world of getting spending cannot comprehend, burbles up—like a stream of fresh water. And we, the surprised and unexpected insiders in the life of God find ourselves like wind-gnarled cottonwoods along a dusty draw leafing out as shade and shelter for the least of these.