February 17 2019 Ellene
Brandt *Luke 6.17-26, Jeremiah 17.5-10 “Blessed Love…Cursed Love” Pastor
Jacqueline Hines
Instead of being high on a hill, verse 17 says Jesus
came down with the people and stood on a level place, level ground. [ slide # 1 Jesus teaching]
Level is good. Jesus comes to us on level ground, insisting on the justice of a
level playing field. Level is good. When things are on the level, we are
blessed. [slide # 2 not level playing field]
When we are blessed,
even poverty is overcome by the riches of the Kingdom of God which are
righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. How can we be poor if we live
right, if we have a peace that surpasses all our understanding, and if we have
the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in our hearts? Even the richest person on earth is
poor if they do not live right, or do not treasure the peace and joy of Jesus. [slide # 3 joy of Jesus…heart]
When we are blessed, we
may be hungry, but we need never be food insecure. We know that it is just a
matter of time before our faithful God will provide a feast for us. We know
that we are not forsaken or forgotten, but that God will fill us. We know that God has a purpose and a plan that
is not only tasty, but sweet and satisfying. [slide # 4 taste
and see…]
When we are sad and
have suffered loss after loss after loss, we know that weeping may endure for
the night, but joy comes in the morning. [slide # 5 weeping….]
Though a sorrowful and broken spirit can dry up our bones and sap our strength,
a joyful heart is good medicine; the joy of the Lord is our strength. Joy is a
blessing of the fruit of the Spirit.
In verse 22 Jesus tells
the leveled crowd “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude
you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man, on account of
Jesus who is as human as can be. Mark such days on your calendar because those
are windfall days. Those are days when you win the lottery, when your ship
comes in when you are rewarded a special gift from Heaven, from that vault in
the sky where good and Godly things come to light and a higher power is working
out justice and mercy beyond our imagining. [slide # 6 great is your reward…]
Jesus continues the
conversation in verse 24 with some tough love through woes and warnings. A woe
is a warning of the consequences. A woe is a reminder that certain paths are
risky, cursed, unproductive, unfruitful, and that traveling in that direction
leads to heartache, misery, distress, failure, and unhappiness.
Jesus warns us that if
we choose to find our comfort in money and fail to comfort others who have no
money, that comfort we give ourselves will not be sustainable; it won’t be deep
enough to diminish the inevitable pains of life.
“Woe unto the one who
is full, for later they will be hungry.” Let not the eloquent poetic language
distract you from Jesus’ directive in verse 25. “Woe unto the one who is full
for later they will be hungry.” It is a blessing to be full and overflowing
with good food and the goodness of all things good. It is a curse to be full of
ourselves, to be full of it, to be full when others are hungering and thirsting
for light and love, not to mention hungering for food and safety.
“Woe unto you who are
laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.” Laughter is medicine. [slide # 7 Norman Cousins]
Norman
Cousins was a longtime editor of the Saturday Review, global peacemaker,
receiver of hundreds of awards including the UN Peace Medal and nearly 50
honorary doctorate degrees.
In
1964 following a very stressful trip to Russia, he was diagnosed with
ankylosing spondylitis (a degenerative disease causing the breakdown of
collagen), which left him in almost constant pain and motivated his doctor to
say he would die within a few months. He disagreed and reasoned that if stress
had somehow contributed to his illness (he was not sick before the trip to
Russia), then positive emotions should help him feel better. With his doctors’
consent, he checked himself out of the hospital and into a hotel across the
street and began taking extremely high doses of vitamin C while exposing
himself to a continuous stream of humorous films and similar “laughing matter”.
He later claimed that 10 minutes of belly rippling laughter would give him two
hours of pain-free sleep, when nothing else, not even morphine could help him. (Wikipedia)
Filmmaker Anthony
McCarten of New Zealand (slide
# 8 McCarten) suggests that
laughter indicates our primitive recognition that animal danger has passed! Laughing
together is awesome because it makes us Inducers of hope, embracers of
strangers, eradicators of hopelessness, physicians and peacemakers. If we can
laugh together, we can live together because jokes connect us, embrace us and
in sheer and spontaneous gratitude, our mouths open, our chest fills with air
and we make a sound made by no other creature in the universe.
He affirms that comedy
is the clash of one point of view colliding with another…one sensibility with
another…high with low, east with west, light with dark, old with young; a
collision of two world views, of two civilizations, and like two pieces of
flint being struck together, a life-giving spark is given off, and with this
spark, you can light a fire.
We all can agree: Laughter
is good and our meetings and minds do well to be filled with healing laughter. Not
all laughter is healing as we know. There is a laughter that hates, hides, humiliates,
and horrifies. Jesus warns that mourning and weeping come with that kind of
laughter.
Finally, the last of
Jesus’ warnings can be the most perplexing. “Woe to you when all speak well of
you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” We want to be
liked. We want to be showered with compliments. The day comes, however, when we
as three-dimensional human beings, see a side of ourselves that needs work and
repair, healing and help. God sees and loves all of us. Others may see us and
love all of us. We need to see ourselves and love ourselves.
If those closest to us
only know one side of us, they are not in a position to really care about us.
Flattery is fraud, designed to use and abuse. False prophets are prophets /messengers/
leaders who do not accept that they may be in error. When we do not want to
hear the truth, those who do not want to fight may just settle for telling us
what we want to hear. False prophets may
hear the truth spoken in love about their lives but they do not work to change.
I am curious about the
shooting this week in Arora Illinois. During the 15 years he worked he was a
felon. Did management implement healthy boundaries? Was he spoken the truth in
love. It is a new day in this world and I am appreciating the boundaries that I
see. A basketball player was fined $25 thousand for cursing. A hockey player was
benched one game as a penalty for …was it fighting?
Ted Bunch tells the
story that his neighbor beat up his wife and while she was in the hospital, he
and a couple guys went over and said, we heard what you did to her. We don’t do
that here, so don’t do it again. He says if guys would do that on their
jobs…and on the golf course saying, we do not do that here and this is the last
game we will play with you if you do that again. Giving a dose of Jesus’ woe
unto you brings mercy and justice.
Those who care, see all
sides of humanity and prayerfully become agents of healing and hope, learning
to speak the truth in love until our love is strong [slide # 9 heart] enough to make a
difference! Amen. [slide #
10 …lacking no good thing]
