"On Christian Poverty," a sermon by Dr. Anthony Baker, Assistant Professor of Theology, given on November 1, 2006, in Christ Chapel

All Saints' Day

Texts: Luke 6:20-26

Psalm 149

What’s so great about being poor? Or hungry? What exactly is it that is desirable about weeping?

If you read that set of verses I grew up calling the beatitudes (a title which, by the way, lends itself to several not so clever puns), you’ll read a passage of scripture that has been revisited from time out of mind as the central articulation of the revolution that Christian faith introduces in the world. It’s quite easy to preach the beatitudes, really. They nearly preach themselves. Bonhoeffer summarized them better than anyone else I’ve ever read, and it took only 11 words: “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

And yet Luke’s particular run at these teachings give me, I confess, some difficulty. If you read this set of verses in Matthew and then flip over and read the corresponding verses in Luke, the change is obvious. Matthew says “blessed are the poor in spirit”; Luke says “blessed are you who are poor.” Say what you will about Matthew’s tendency to “spiritualize”– in fact, I find his message to quite consistent: the first gospel speaks of a deep longing of Israel for her messiah, and an awareness on the part of the faithful that nothing else will satisfy, their spirit’s will remain impoverished, their bellies rumbling for righteousness, until the messiah comes. Matthew’s “blessed are yous” make sense as the yearning for the filling up of poor, hungry, and sad spirits: But Luke stops at poor, hungry, and sad. And I’m not sure I get it.

What bothers me about Luke’s list of blessed is simply this: poverty and hunger are not blessings. Not, at least, at their most intense, when starving children rip food from each others mouths like ravenous wolves, or mothers trample one another in an attempt to get clean water from a delivery truck. We could say the same thing for sadness: given the choice between weeping and laughter, St. Augustine asks, Why would anyone choose to mourn?”

I’ll admit that an answer that seems plausible on the surface is one that parses the First and Third gospels like this: while Matthew’s gospel is centrally about Christ recapitulating Israel’s messianic hope, Luke is primarily concerned with social justice. On this reading, Luke’s Jesus stands for God’s general recognition and honoring of the poor and downtrodden. The Good news to the poor is simply that God, in Christ, comes in solidarity with them, and shares in God’s blessing upon them. Luke’s gospel is certainly raw and gritty, and launches with Mary’s “magnificat anima mea dominum….” which celebrates the bringing down of the powerful and the uplifting of the lowly. But it is not just any lowly that are uplifted: It’s still the poor of Israel, and Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord, finally, because all these upheavals begun in her will fulfill the promises to Abraham. Straight through from Zechariah to the Emmaus Road, Luke tells us that the one who has come is not simply a social revolutionary—he is this because he is first and foremost the culmination and the Signified of Moses and the Prophets. In other words, the good news to the poor in Luke is never a generalized celebration of poverty, but always a specific recognition that poverty, hunger, and tears function somehow as means of grace that connect a people back up with the God of Israel.

Now, with that in mind, I’d like to attempt a random of act of hermeneutics in this pulpit here today in the presence of God and you good people.

What is blessed by Christ in the beatitudes? Matthew gives a rather exhaustive list of 9 blesseds; Luke gives only four, paired up with four woes as their mirror image: “Blessed are you who are poor, who to you who are rich; blessed are you who are hungry now, woe to you who are full now; blessed are you who weep now, woe to you who are laughing now.”

Let’s interrogate the beatitudes with a set of three questions. If this is not simply a general celebration of the worst that befalls humankind, then the first question to ask is who, for this gospel, is the poor, the hungry, the one who weeps, the one who is hated?

Recall that the second chapter of Luke gives us the only detailed birth narrative of the gospels, complete with the stable, and the shepherds—the Christ is a child born among rags and filth. Chapter four gives us the temptation narrative, pointing out that after 40 days of fasting, Christ was famished. Later on in that chapter, we are told that Jesus withdrew to a deserted place—not, this time, to pray, as Matthew always says, but here simply that he withdraws into solitude. It’s difficult to avoid the impression of a soul overcome with sorrow, like we’ll be shown explicitly in the later scene when he withdraws before his arrest. Chapter four also gives us the account of his “triumphal” return to Nazareth, where his ill-fated “good news to the poor” sermon nearly gets him thrown off a cliff.

So, by the time we get to the sermon on the plain, those predications—poor, hungry, mournful, hated—are not simply abstractions, or generalized blessings thrown aloft for any to whom they might apply. For Luke’s gospel, Jesus is the poor, he is the hungry, he is the one who weeps, he the one who is hated.

And now the second question: to whom does he offer these blessings that mirror his own embodied experiences?

Notice the second person pronoun, missing in Matthew’s account: Blessed are you. Who is Jesus talking to? V. 20 says he looked up at his disciples, which in Luke and in Mark are different from the Apostles. The 12 were chosen out of the crowds of disciples who followed him. So when he offers the blessed are yous and the woe to yous, he’s speaking directly to all those who wish to follow him, and is, presumably, telling them something about how to do this.

Here, I believe, is the key to reading Luke’s beatitudes: who is poor? Who is hungry? Who weeps? Who is hated? It’s Jesus himself. And the beatitudes are invitations to his disciples to become as he was, so that those promises made to Abraham can be fulfilled in and through them. To be poor is to be with Christ in the stable; to be hungry is to be with Christ in the wilderness; to weep is to be with Christ in the solitude of the desert; to be hated is to stand with Christ before that angry crowd in Nazareth. So it’s not that Luke tells us that poverty is blessed, so Christ becomes poor. Rather, the reverse: Christ comes poor, so poverty is the means to a blessing. Luke’s Christ, we might even say, invents true poverty for the very first time. And now poverty, hunger, and tears can become the virtues of the Christian life, and hatred the expectation. Christianity practices these virtues in the rules of almsgiving, fasting, and the confession of sins. And it even practices the expectation of hatred by celebrating, on days like today, the Saints who were persecuted or martyred—who were counted worthy to be hated as severely as Christ himself was hated.

But a third question still remains, for me: why this list—poverty, hunger, tears, hatred? Are these things good in themselves? Granted that they are addressed to disciples, and regarded as the means—the cost—of discipleship. Still, why are these the means by which disciples mirror their Lord? Why didn’t Jesus come with plenty, and share it? Does Jesus simply decree, for no discernible reason that day on the plain, that poverty is in, plentitude out? Listen again:

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for--because-- you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, 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

There is an undertow here: satiation comes as a result of hunger, inheritance through want, laughter through weeping, rejoicing through defamation. This double movement puts me in the mind of that arresting turn that today’s Psalm took, when the ones who came out playing the tambourine and lyre end by executing judgment on the kings of earth and on the nations. “Let the high praises of God be on their lips and a two-edged sword in their hands.” To engage in the praise of God is at once to bless and to curse: to make music in Zion is to refuse to dance for the Lords of Babylon. Praise is always a sacrifice, in which we burn the grain stored up in our barns, and refuse to bow to kings, and humbly refuse the praise of men and women, because our trust is only in the Lord our God. The sword at hand is for cutting the safety net that our wealth, our “plenty,” our entertaining divergences offer—a sword for judging ourselves, that is, as much as it is for binding the kings, the powers and the principalities. The praise of God is a dividing and judging sword that divides and judges us; one that, I suppose you might say, we often find inverted in our hands, and it’s our flesh that comes under the blade.

It’s in the tradition of this Psalm, I believe, that Christ speaks here. In a world of rich and poor, Christ came poor. In a world of the full and the hungry, Christ came hungry. In a world of laughter and weeping, Christ came weeping. In a world of the accepted and the hated, Christ came hated. Into this world comes the naked Christ, refusing every false support, refusing the wealth that fills our lives and bellies, the praise of men and women that overtakes the whisper of the Father that can so often only be heard in the desert.

And it’s to this poverty that Christ calls us. Not because suffering itself is a blessing, but because to fill our bodies with the food of earth is to deny ourselves the chance to hunger for the bread of heaven; to rest at ease because our bank accounts are stable is to forget that our hearts will be restless until they find their rest in God; to fill our halls with easy and hollow laughter is to come up short of ever actually rejoicing and being glad; to set out to be well-liked by men and women of power—CEOs, academics, politicians; bishops, peers, vestries—is to forget that Christ came not to bring peace but division; it is to forget that, for all its pleasantries, the world in which we live is still the one that hated Christ all the way to the cross.

To follow Christ in this world is always to follow with a tambourine in one hand and a double edged sword in the other—praising with words and actions that will slice straight through the nets we’ve woven to protect ourselves from the terrors of hunger, poverty, and the hatred of the world. And so, if we come after Christ in this way, we will fall: We’ll fall from self sufficiency, from independence, from the suspended somnolence that food, drink, and the praises of thankless men and women will afford us.

The grace offered to disciples is a terrifying thing: it will hack away all those false supports that keep us aloft, and, then, mercifully, it allows us to fall on the famished, poor, hated figure that is our only hope of salvation, once we’ve realized that saving ourselves is a hopeless endeavor.

Luke’s gospel is, in the end, not all that ambiguous. Camels get stuck in the eyes of needles and rich men don’t fare well in the parables, because their trust is in their barns, linens, riches, reputations—all the self-made nets that keep them from depending on God alone. On the other hand, consider the lilies. They have nothing but God’s grace—which is of course, the only thing one should ever really want.

So measured in terms of earthly delights, the cost of discipleship is high. Woe to us if we avoid the way of the cross in order to laugh at the shoulders of those who know how to win friends and influence people; woe to us if we avoid falling on God’s mercy by catching ourselves in well-padded bunks of straw; woe to us if we fill ourselves so completely that we forget what it means to desire; Blessed are you who are hated by a world of false adulation. Blessed are you who mourn like the daughters of Jerusalem on the way of the cross. Blessed are you who are poor.