Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
February 11, 2007
The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C

The Reverend Peter R. Carey
Jeremiah 17: 5 - 10
Psalm 1
1 Corinthians 15: 12 - 20
Luke 6: 17 - 26

     “Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil... Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy....”

     In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

     There are two sets of beatitudes in the New Testament. There’s the longer set found in Matthew and then there’s the shorter set we heard today, found in Luke. Each beatitude begins with the words “Happy are you...” or as they’re sometimes translated, “Blessed are you...” The Lucan version is shorter and has only four beatitudes and they are coupled with four woes, which begin, “Woe are you....” The beatitudes are blessings and the woes are warnings.

     But all of the beatitudes, whether they be the short ones or the long ones have this in common: they are all eschatalogical sayings. By that we mean a way of talking and preaching both about the present and the future at the same time. About this life and the next life. About the “already” and the “not yet.”

     It was with eschatalogical preaching that Jesus almost always spoke about the Kingdom of God because the Kingdom of God or the Reign of God was for Jesus both a present reality and something that needed to be brought to completion in the future. It was “already” and it “not yet.”

     This was a way of teaching and preaching that was familiar to the people who first heard such sermons from our Lord’s own lips, but it is perhaps less familiar to us. Still, at the end of the day, it’s not all that difficult to understand.

     Jesus is speaking to the poor, to whom he had a special mission, to the hungry, to the marginalized and the excluded, to the suffering, to the sorrowful and he is saying to them: “You may be experiencing all these things, you may be feeling all these things, but you are still loved by God. “Blessed are you.” Blessed are you because God loves and cares about you and will make a place for you at the abundant table of his Kingdom. God will wipe away all your tears and make right all that is wrong with the world.

     Jesus’ message is most certainly about the future. One day there will be a great reversal of things, he says. In the future Kingdom of God, at the end of time, the poor will be rich and the rich who have made idols of their riches, will be poor. The mighty will be brought low because they cared nothing for the lowly. Thus, the word of courage and comfort spoken to the poor by Jesus is that God stands on the side of the poor and the persecuted and that God, at the end of time, will make everything right.

     This message comes across with special clarity and emphasis in Luke’s Gospel, which is often called the “Gospel of Good News to the Poor.” In Luke, more than in any other Gospel, Jesus preaches comfort and courage and concern for the poor and persecuted while at the same time issuing a warning to the rich and powerful.

     But doesn’t this strike you as a message of cold comfort? What kind of comfort is it that Jesus is offering? It sounds at first as if he’s just offering pie in the sky when you die? Isn’t Jesus in effect offering nothing to the poor and the suffering and the excluded to alleviate their present misery except the promise that some day they will die and go to heaven? Isn’t that why Karl Marx called religion the “opiate of the masses”?

     And as a matter of fact, Marx would be right if that’s all the beatitudes meant. But it isn’t. The beatitudes are eschatalogical sayings. They are not only about the future, they are also about the present. They’re concerned not only about the “not yet” but also about the “already”. The beatitudes give hope for the present, for this world--and not just for the world to come.

     But how?

     In Luke’s Gospel, in the particular way he frames the beatitudes within a larger context, Luke’s hope for the poor and the suffering lies in the fellowship of a new community, where justice, equality, and compassion are living realities.

     What the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel offers the poor and the powerless is a community where the needy are cared for and those who suffer injustice are advocated for, where, as the Acts of the Apostles says, “There is not a needy person among them.” (Acts 4:32-39) In fact it is particularly in the Acts of the Apostles (which, as you know, was also written by Luke) that we learn about how this community of selfless love and of social concern was actually and concretely preached and lived out. How the rich shared with the poor, how widows and orphans were cared for, how the doors were kept open not only to men, but also to women, not only to Jews, but also to Gentiles, not only to the strong but also and especially to the weak. In the early church of Jesus’ first disciples there were no outcasts.

     So the beatitudes are not just pie in the sky. Far from it. They gave to those who first heard them--and they give to us today--not just hope for the future, but concrete hope and courage for the here and now.

     This is what the church, at its best, has always done and been: the community of those who are trying to live out the life of the beatitudes and in doing so who give hope to the poor and oppressed.

     I want to illustrate what is meant by the church providing hope and courage to the excluded with a true story about Bishop William Thomas Manning, who was the English-born and very patrician Bishop of New York from 1921 to 1946.

     In October of 1932 a controversy errupted at All Souls Church, which is at 114th St. and St. Nicholas Ave. The racial composition of the neighborhood at that time was changing as Harlem moved further south and more and more black people were moving into the neighborhood. All Souls was rapidly becoming (to use the phraseology of the time) a “negro parish.”

     The rector, Father Rollin Dodd, welcomed the newcomers to the parish, but the senior warden and a majority of the ventrymen--and the vestry at that time consisted of men only--emphatically did not. They felt that the traditional character of the parish was being threatened and that the remaining white people of the parish, if the trend continued, would soon leave. They weren’t demanding that the parish’s long-standing black members be sent away , but they did want Fr. Dodd to direct any future black applicants to one of the so-called negro parishes further uptown.

     This Father Dodd categorically refused to do. The vestry remained adamant and to force the rector to follow the vestry’s policy, first they cut off his salary, and when that didn’t work, they simply closed the church down by putting a chain and a padlock around the front gate of the church until such time as they could bend the rector to their will.

     Dodd went to Bishop Manning for advice, who told him to assemble the congregation the following Sunday morning on the sidewalk outside the church.

     That next Sunday, Bishop Manning put on his biretta, his episcopal robes and his academic hood and, accompanied by his chaplain, walked the few blocks from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to All Souls Church.

     There he found the rector, the vestry, and a large contingent of both black and white people--some of whom were members of the parish and some of whom were not. The news had spread. There were also twelve reporters present. We know the details of what happened that Sunday morning because a story about it appeared the following week in Time Magazine.

     Bishop Manning demanded the key to the padlock from the warden, who flatly refused to turn it over, insisting that he and the vestry were fully within their rights to close the church. With that, Bishop Manning turned to his chaplain and said, “Father, the ax please” and with that the chaplain produced a large ax.

     Then, with a single blow, Bishop Manning smashed the lock to smithereens and after he had led the people to the doorway of the church, he turned and said, “You are all welcome.”

     The warden in the meantime was nearly apoplectic and shouted, “We’ll see you in court!” and the Bishop replied, “Excellent!”

     Now obviously the church’s advocacy of the poor and the marginalized and the excluded is not usually as dramatic or as confrontational as the example given in our true story. On the contrary the church’s care and advocacy for the poor and marginalized is, as it should be, more like what goes on here in our parish where the hungry are fed day in and day out with no fanfare and with little publicity.

     Still, there are times--there are times--when the church and its leaders can and should stand up and be counted on behalf of those whom others seek to marginalize and to exclude or to forget about or to exploit. There are times when the church needs to hear--to really hear--the words of Jesus, “He has annointed me to preach good news to the poor” and we might add: to the hungry, to the sorrowful, to the sick and suffering, to the wounded and to those who are hurting, to the excluded and to those left behind. Good news for today and good news for tomorrow.

     I can also remember another example of how a great church leader stood up to be counted. It was Bishop Moore’s press conference on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1985. I had nearly despaired that the church--any church--would ever support the issue of gay civil rights. The day before Bishop Moore’s press conference, Cardinal O’Connor held a press conference on the front steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A press conference in which he vigorously urged the defeat of the then-pending legislation before the New York City Council that would protect gay men and women from discrimination in housing, public accommodation, employment and rent-related affairs. The following day the great Paul Moore stood on the steps of his own cathedral and urged in the strongest possible words the passage of that legislation and the following week it was passed. On that day too we rejoiced and we leapt for joy.

     But obviously the church and the leaders of the church--including our church--don’t always do what they are called to do by the beatitudes. Don’t always hear the words of Jesus. But when the church does, oh when it does, we rejoice on those days, those happy days, and we leap for joy.

     In the meantime, when times are tough and when the Kingdom of God seems a long way off, what can we do? What can we personally and individually do and what can we do as a community striving to live by the beatitudes?

     Well, for one thing we need always to try to share our abundance with others. This is a major theme in Luke’s Gospel. And we need to care with tenderness and affection for those who are sick and frightened and for those who are down and out in any way. And we need to become advocates of those who are suffering unjustly or who are excluded. And finally we need to oppose in every legitimate way we can all the systems and schemes that perpetuate social injustice and war and inequality in our world.

     When we come here to this church and we hear the beatitudes--really hear them--we can no longer sit on the sidelines. Certainly the beatitudes are among the most beautiful and yet challenging words given to us by our Lord. When we hear those words, as we did today, our task becomes clear. The beatitudes call us to stand on God’s side, with Jesus, as advocates of the poor and the oppressed and the marginalized and the sick and the sorrowful and the excluded, remembering that the very hope of the poor and the oppressed for the present time, for the here and now, lies in the community of faith. We must not fail them. And with God’s help we will not fail them, for as long as women and men hear the beatitudes and strive to live by them, there will be hope in the world.

     Amen.