The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday February 19, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O Lord, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
When I was in university studying English literature one of the key skills we learned was how to apply different interpretive approaches to a single text. These approaches were kind of like reading glasses that allowed us to see different things.
Say, for example, you wanted to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. You could imagine spreading all those glasses out on the desk in front of you and then picking them up and putting them on one by one. You could then read that sonnet wearing the glasses of historical critical interpretation, or Freudian interpretation, or structural, or feminist, or, or, or.
You could even be really fancy and wear a couple of different pairs at the same time.
Each pair of glasses provided a unique way of seeing that sonnet and opened up new ideas and interpretations.
Each pair of glasses obscured elements in that sonnet making them difficult, or even impossible to see.
When I was a child, one of the first books I was taught to read was the Bible and no one ever mentioned to me that I would never be able to read the Bible objectively, I would always read it wearing a very specific set of glasses that I could never take off.
No one told me I was reading the Bible wearing the glasses of a white, middle class girl.
And those glasses were going to help me see some things, and they were going to obscure some things as well.
Even though I now know I’m wearing them, I still can’t take them off, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as long as I don’t ever forget that I’m wearing those glasses. As long as I don’t start to believe that the way I see things is the only way to see them. As long as I don’t start to think that every single person who has ever read the Bible has read it wearing the exact same glasses that I am wearing.
No one has ever read the Bible objectively, but throughout history most of the people who have publicly interpreted the Bible for us – by preaching or writing theological textbooks – have been middleclass white men and they tend to forget that they are reading the Bible with white middleclass man glasses on. And, not only did they forget, pretty much everyone else forgot too. Their interpretations became the only interpretations.
That doesn’t surprise me, partly because of my academic training and partly because the fact that we are wearing different sets of glasses often becomes crystal clear to me simply because when I read the Bible, I often see very different things than those men do.
But that doesn’t mean they are mistaken and I am correct. Their viewpoint is valid, it’s just not the only one. And I am just as likely to forget that my perspective isn’t the only perspective as they have been. I am just as likely to be taken by surprise when I realize that other people read the Bible looking through a very different set of glasses – the glasses of poverty, or environmentalism, or indigeneity or a combination of all three.
These people see things that I don’t.
These people have things to teach me.
One of my best experiences of studying the Bible was doing so with a diverse group of people, including an older Mennonite man who’d worked as a farmer for his entire life. He was able to pick out and explain all the imagery connected to farming and growing things that I had always just glossed over. He could see things, I couldn’t.
In our gospel reading, Jesus is trying to tell people that the glasses through which they are used to looking at the world, are not the glasses through which he looks at the world.
We sometimes refer to this as Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, noting that Jesus came to turn our norms and expectations upside-down, but I like N.T. Wright’s insistence that Jesus’ way of seeing is in fact right side up, and it is ours that is up side down.
For example, we tend to see scarcity everywhere we look, whereas Jesus sees abundance.
I think it’s a good idea to regularly view the things we think of as “normal” with suspicion, because if we don’t, it’s likely we’ll live into upside-down thinking. The very kind of thinking Jesus came to challenge and to put right-side up.
Today’s gospel reading opens by telling us that Jesus is with a “great multitude of people” who come from a wide range of places. Some we might recognize like Judea and Jerusalem, and some which might not, like the pagan seaports of Tyre and Sidon.
These people have come from a wide range of places to this “level place” to listen to Jesus and to be healed of their diseases and unclean spirits. (18-19) And they’re not waiting patiently in a line to be healed either, Luke tells us that “All in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out of him and healed all of them.” (19)
I do not envy Jesus at this moment. This is an entirely unappealing scenario to me – to be in the middle of a crowd where everyone is jostling and trying to touch me.
No thank you.
And when does this crowding and touching stop? It’s not clear. Are people crowding in and jostling each other for a chance to touch Jesus the entire time he is speaking?
Because of my particular set of glasses, I have always imagined that when Jesus was giving this famous speech, when Jesus was listing the people who are blessed, that it looked a little bit well, it looked a little bit like what is happening right now in church.
I imagined that Jesus was standing at the front of the crowd looking at them because that is the position I expect a teacher to be in. I also assumed that there was a reasonable amount of personal space between him and the people, and they were calmly listening to him as he spoke.
But that might not be what was happening at all. It’s entirely possible that the entire time Jesus is trying to talk with his disciples about who is blessed, people are pushing into him, jostling each other, talking, making noise, and totally ignoring what he is saying because all they really want is to touch him and be healed.
It might very well be a grittier, more chaotic scene than the one I have always imagined.
And in case it’s not perfectly obvious, it can sometimes be difficult enough for me to get coherent thoughts out when we do have this sort of structure, when I stand here and you sit quietly there, so I can’t imagine what it would be like to continue to preach this sermon if you all decided to start rushing the front and touching me.
And let’s all agree to never find out.
And so as the crowd is pushing and reaching out to touch Jesus and be healed, what is Jesus trying to tell his disciples?
He’s telling them the same thing that Mary sang about in the Magnificat – the poor will inherit the kingdom, the hungry will be satisfied, those who are weeping will laugh.
God’s way is not our way. If we want to see the world the way God sees it, we need a new pair of glasses.
Our way of thinking is upside-down; God wants us to put it right.
This winter, on Thursday nights, I’m taking a course on Canadian history from an indigenous perspective. It’s part of the Anglican Church’s commitment to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.
And if ever there was an experience that can emphasize that the glasses through which you see the world dramatically influence your perspective, comparing the way I was taught Canadian history in high school to how I’m learning it now is a pretty good one.
Because the differences are stunning.
For one thing, I honestly believed when I was studying history in high school that almost all of the indigenous people in Canada died not long after they first made contact with European explorers and the few that may have survived peacefully assimilated into Canadian society.
Now I know that around the time that European settlers were first coming to Canada, the Christian church was enmeshed in some pretty upside-down thinking. They’d forgotten Jesus’ message in tonight’s gospel reading and replaced it with a series of upside-down messages that said:
“Blessed is European culture, blessed are our values, blessed are our methods of governance and ways of organizing society, blessed is our white skin, for God is on our side.
And woe to anyone who looks, or thinks, or acts differently than us.
And if when exploring the world we find land, we can take it, for God wants us to and the Pope has assured us of this through the Doctrine of Discovery.
And if when exploring we find land and it has people on it, but the people do not look and act like us or use the land in the ways that we use land, then we can still take it. Because God wants people to look and act like us, and anyone who does not use the land in the ways that we use land is just wasting it anyway.”
And the people who thought and acted in these ways didn’t realize that they were mixing up the glasses of colonialism with the glasses of Christ’s teachings and not only did this cause tremendous damage, it continues to do so, and it will take a long time and a lot of effort to begin to heal these distorted ways of thinking and damaged relationships.
When Kyle Mason spoke at our last Idea Exchange event – which was recorded and is available as a podcast – he spoke about treaties and territorial acknowledgements and how something as simple as acknowledging that treaties were once signed between diverse peoples detailing how this land was to be used, how just acknowledging those treaties, can help us all to begin to see things in a different way. It can help us to begin to see through the glasses of reconciliation. It’s a small but powerful thing.
There is so much more that can be done, but each and everything we do matters and can make a difference.
Now, here’s another thing my worldview may be obscuring in this gospel passage. After sitting with it all week and thinking about what to say to you, I took off my interpretive glasses, cleaned them, and looked again. I looked at the text and I looked at all the words I’d already written and I realized I was still missing something.
Earlier I told you that I’d made an assumption about where Jesus was standing and the distance between him and the rest of the people, assuming it was similar to the way we’re situated right now and I told you that wasn’t what the text actually says.
But even after having written that, I still looked at what Luke says Jesus said, and I assumed a sermon – the kind of sermon where people are placed into various categories and some are good and some are bad, and everyone generally just needs to try a little bit harder.
But now I’m not so sure that that’s what was actually happening. What if instead of giving a speech, Jesus is looking at the people who are clamoring for his attention, and he is simply blessing them?
What if as they are reaching out to touch him for healing, he is reaching back to offer a blessing? What is when he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, he isn’t thinking about an abstract group of people who will receive a blessing in the future, but he is looking at people who are actually poor and is actively blessing them right then and there?
And what if the same is true of that list of woes? What if while he is blessing the people who are desperately trying to get close enough to touch him, he sees other people who are stading a little bit further off. People who think they have it all together. Who think their riches or their happiness or their full bellies are things they have earned and deserve and will last forever. People who think they are independent and don’t need anyone, including God. What if Jesus see those people and wants to warn them that they are deceiving themselves?
What if blessing really looks like the realization that we need God, and woe looks like fooling ourselves into thinking we are God?
Jesus is doing a lot of things in this gospel reading and we certainly can’t cover them all tonight, but one thing he is doing is warning us about our capacity to deceive ourselves. When the church is more reflective of the list of woes than the list of blessings, then we are surely missing the point.
For the many places we have missed the point in the past, we need to repent and seek forgiveness, for all the ways we have the capacity to mess up again in the future, we need to do our best to see not as the world sees, but as Jesus sees, because that is the only way we will every turn our upside-down thinking and our upside-down world, right-side up again.
But we never have to do anything without first asking for and receiving Christ’s blessing. A blessing that is always freely and willingly given. We just have to ask.
Amen.