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Luke 6:17-26 · Blessings and Woes
The Politics Of The Saints
Luke 6:17-26
Sermon
by Larry R. Kalajainen
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During the last presidential election, you may have seen the comic strip "Frank and Earnest" where Frank is sitting on an airplane with a worried look on his face, and he asks the stewardess, "Are there any air bags on this plane?" She replies, "There are a couple of congressmen up in first class."

By the time the presidential election campaign wound down to its final hours, most of us were eagerly looking forward to a little relief from listening to the air bags. All those speeches that said nothing. All those hours of prime-time television advertising. Really the whole thing could have been carried out much more efficiently. Each of the candidates could have boiled down all their windy rhetoric to one simple slogan. President Bush, for instance, could have just gotten up in front of the television cameras and said, "Taxes and trust." Governor Clinton could then have had his moment in the limelight and said, "Time for change." Then Ross Perot could have come forward and yelled "Deficit!" Think of how much time and money and energy we could have all saved. It's no wonder politics has such a bad name.

The reality is, however, that there's no part of life that is not concerned with politics. I'm not talking about this partisan orgy of mud-slinging and rhetorical hype that we call a presidential election. Nor am I speaking of politics as the arena of public life which is concerned with government. That's politics in the narrow sense. I'm talking about something much more basic.

Politics is about people and the relationships between people or groups of people. The word politics comes from the Greek word polis which means city, or its derivative politeuma which meals commonwealth. Politics has to do with the way in which we live in society and order our lives for the common weal or good. Life itself is political, and there is virtually no decision I can make, nothing I can say, no action that I take that does not have political consequences, for I do not live in isolation from other people. When I sneeze, my neighbor catches cold.

So the question becomes not will I be political, but what kind of politics will I practice? How will my words or my actions or my decisions affect the lives of other people around me? What message will I be sending? The same question applies to groups and organizations as well as to individuals.

All Saints' Sunday is a good time to think about politics in this broader sense. For on All Saints', we take time to remember that Christians are not isolated individuals who live in this world alone, passing through it untouched by anyone or anything and not having any impact or effect on anyone. We are a people, a politeuma, a commonwealth. We're connected. We affect each other and we affect the world around us in so many ways.

On All Saints', we also pause to remember those of our politeuma, those fellow-citizens of the household of God, who are no longer present among us in body, but whose memory we hold dear and who have now joined that larger city, that larger politeuma toward which we are all travelling, and in which we already hold citizenship, the New Jerusalem, the City of God.

In remembering those of our fellowship who have died in the past year, we also call to mind their impact upon us, and our own impact, as the people of God, on the world around us. In other words, we consider our politics.

It would be impossible to listen to the words of Jesus as recorded in our gospel lessons and not realize their political impact. The stately and dignified language of our English translations which make for suitable reading in public worship can sometimes camouflage the raw impact of the words themselves. "Blessed are you poor," sounds somehow pious and dignified. But we lose the ironic force, and even the gallows humor present in the words themselves. "Congratulations you poor, for yours is the domain of God" would get us much closer to the real spirit of Jesus' words. "Congratulations you who are hungry now for your turn is coming to be filled. Congratulations you who weep now, for your time of laughter and joy is coming. But woe to you who are rich; you've already gotten all you're ever going to get. Woe to you who are full now, for your own day of hunger is coming. Woe to you who are laughing now, for sorrow and pain is just around the corner."

Who can deny the shocking impact of those words? Who could deny their political implications? Imagine yourself in the audience who heard Jesus say those things. How would you hear them? If you were one of the poor or hungry or mourning, perhaps you would be cynical of the promises in Jesus words. "Sure," you might reply. "Another politician telling me how lucky I am to be poor." Or perhaps you would be moved with revolutionary fervor. "Right on!" you would shout. "The revolution is coming." But if you were a comfortable, well-fed, hard-working middle-class person with a good job, a house with your mortgage nearly paid off, and good health, those words would have a very different impact, wouldn't they? They might be rather unsettling, causing you to feel some guilt or some sense of unease. They might plant a small seed of doubt in your mind, that maybe your comfortable life is really a house of cards that could come tumbling down without warning. Or they might be highly offensive. "Why doesn't somebody shut this guy up?" might be your reaction. Well, in Jesus' case, somebody did. Jesus was not crucified because he poked some mild fun at the religious establishment or because he did some good things for people like curing their illnesses. People don't crucify stand-up comics or faith-healers or even mild social critics. People who get crucified are people who are perceived as threats, as dangerous subversives. The Romans crucified Jesus because they feared him as a political subversive. They recognized that the politics of his words and deeds had the potential for overturning their world.

What would happen if there existed a significant group of people within any society, who suddenly began to preach that we should love our enemies and do good to them and pray for them, and actually began to do that? It sounds good, doesn't it? Well, I suppose it depends on where you sit whether it sounds good or not. If you're the CEO of a major defense contractor, I doubt if you'd welcome much talk about loving our enemies. That's a very political issue, isn't it? And what would happen to our entire banking industry and the stoc_esermonsk market, the whole foundation of our economy, if suddenly there were a significant group of people who preached and practiced lending to others without charging interest, and even without forcing them to repay the loan? Would that turn the world upside down or what? Do you wonder that Jesus was crucified?

John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite theologian, wrote a well-known book back in the early '80s called The Politics of Jesus in which he explored some of these very issues. Those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus cannot get away from the fact that following Jesus means practicing a particular kind of politics -- the politics of love, of non-violence, of non-retaliation, of generosity, of mercy. And that brand of politics will set us squarely against the grain of a world which practices a very different brand of politics. The world says "The strong survive, the weak perish." It's the law of nature, and we make it the law of society. Christian politics says, “The strong have an obligation to defend and protect the interests of the weak, so that the weak become strong." We don't practice survival of the fittest, but care for the neediest. The world's politics says, "Grab all you can and hang on to it." The politics of Jesus says, "From anyone who wishes to take away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt." The politics of the world says, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." The politics of Jesus says, "If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other to him also." The world says, "You've got to look out for Number One, and devil take the hindmost." Jesus says, "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful."

That's a pretty tough program, isn't it? These words of Jesus are very hard for us to hear. Even harder for us to put into practice. Maybe if we were all Mother Teresas, we could, but we're just ordinary Joes and Sallys. We're just trying to provide for our families, get our kids educated, live a decent life, and do as much good along the way as we can, but we're not heroes. We're not Mother Teresa or Joan of Arc or Saint Francis of Assisi. We're not saints.

Ah, but we are! That's precisely how Paul and other writers in the New Testament refer to the Christian community -- as "the saints." The word saint means "holy one," and the word holy doesn't mean especially pious or religious or heroic. The word holy means "set apart." It means "called out from." It means "distinctive." We are God's distinctive people. We are God's called out ones. Or as the older English versions translated it, "God's peculiar people." Well, it is pretty peculiar to practice the politics of Jesus -- to return good for evil, blessing for curse, generosity for selfishness, liberality for greed, mercy for ruthlessness. The words of the song that many of us have sung say it in one line: "They'll know we are Christians by our love." That's us, or at least, that's what we're called to be -- saints, peculiar people, people set apart by their practice of the politics of love.

Perhaps that's why on All Saints' Sunday, we don't primarily remember the great heroes and heroines of the faith, but we remember the ordinary Christians who have been part of our own company of saints. We remember how they struggled to live faithfully; we remember their gifts which they offered to the service of Christ and to the rest of God's people. We remember their humility, their love, their service. And in remembering them, we find courage and faith to try, however difficult it may be, to be faithful ourselves in practicing the politics of Jesus.

We're not under any illusions that we always get it right. Nor do we think it's easy to practice the politics of love. In fact, we know that it is sometimes the hardest thing of all -- to love another person or to love a whole group of persons for Christ's sake. The cost can sometimes be very high. We may be exploited or misunderstood. We may stir up resentment or frustration. We may risk being trampled on. Nothing is harder in this world than loving others, particularly those who are enemies or strangers or aliens. It's not natural. But it is what saints do, or try to do, and that's why we need to do it together, why we must do it together. We can never do it alone.

Being a people set apart usually means being a people in conflict with the values and structures of the world around us. In the closing lines of George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, the story of Joan of Arc, a ghostly Joan who has just discovered the church has made her a saint some four centuries after that same church had burned her as a heretic, prays, "O God, who madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready for thy saints?" Anytime we really set out to live the politics of Jesus in this world, we're bound to wonder the same thing. Is our distinctiveness having any effect? Is it worth the energy, the risk, the dangers of always swimming against the current? Is the world ready for love?

The people for whom the visions in the Book of Daniel were written were wondering the same thing. They are trying to live faithfully and yet the powers of evil seem to grow stronger. Daniel's vision offers them a new perspective on their situation. It lets them see that there is a deeper dimension to reality than what meets the eye. By faith and hope, they can grasp it. It can only be described in visionary language. But it's no less real for that. Most of the great truths can only be described in figures of speech. The seer, in his vision, sees one like a Son of Adam, a human being, coming on the clouds with power and glory, and a voice from heaven tells him the meaning of this vision. "The saints of the most High shall receive the kingdom, and they shall possess the kingdom for ever and ever" (Daniel 7:18). That same ability to grasp by faith and hope what is hidden from our eyes is what is necessary to penetrate those ironic and powerfully political truths of Jesus. It takes faith and hope to see the poor as possessing the kingdom of God, the hungry satisfied, and the mourners rejoicing. This is not a promise of pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by; rather it is a description of what is real and true. It is a call to obedience and action; to live in the light of God's truth, in the light of God's reality; to practice the politics of God's domain even in the midst of the politics of this world. And when we dare to take the risks such action demands, we discover that what we have grasped in faith and hope, is, in fact, the only solid foundation under our lives.

And so we gather around the table to remember who we are -- God's politeuma, God's commonwealth. We gather to recommit ourselves to practice the politics of heaven in the midst of this world. We gather to eat and drink the bread and wine of heaven to gain strength for the rigors that follow that calling will bring upon us. And we remember those faithful ones who have gone ahead of us to that domain of God where faith is swallowed up in sight, where what we see only in hope and by visions, they see face to face.

CSS Publishing Company, Inc, Extrodinary Faith For Ordinary Time, by Larry R. Kalajainen