God Is in the Poor




Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I was raised in a Pennsylvania German Lutheran congregation that valued education, worship, and active service at every stage of life. It was a place where I felt safe to ask any question, even more so than at school. A place both of reverence and of mirth. My family’s was a deeply healthy religion: love of God, love of learning, love of neighbor. And to this day I must continually remind myself, to my own dismay, that many if not most American Christians have had a very different experience of religion.

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “I recognize the widest possible difference.”

The one thing that Jesus cannot seem to stomach, in our Gospel narratives, is hypocrisy—especially the hypocrisy of religious insiders who, by all rights, ought to know better. Learned scribes, pious Pharisees, even the reverend High Priest, often find themselves at odds with Jesus.

It isn’t that He’s against learning; far from it. Jesus Himself is clearly educated. Nor is He against piety; Jesus faithfully keeps the Law. Nor even does He reject the Temple, as so many of His contemporaries do, for its evident corruption; the Temple is for Him His Father’s house. Yet like the Prophets before Him, Christ cannot condone the disconnect between the learning and the piety and the ritual on the one hand, and their dismissal of the poor upon the other.

When personal religion is divorced from public good, then all the pomp and circumstance, the feasting and the fasting, it all amounts to naught, to impotent play-acting. We become like whitewashed tombs, as Jesus warns us, full of bones inside. And just to state the obvious: Jesus is deeply religious. This isn’t a rejection of the faith in which He was raised. “Do not think,” He states baldly, “that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

Because the Law and the Prophets for Christ are very clear: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That is the heart and the whole of the Law; it is to that the Prophets called the people to repent. The remedy to bad religion isn’t no religion, as though that were even possible. Rather, the remedy to bad religion is good religion, true religion, and for Jesus that means faith lived out in love.

“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees,” He declares, “you will never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that’s a scary statement. That’s what Lutherans call a Word of Law. But let’s unpack it for a moment. Because Jesus isn’t saying that you have to be more learned than the scribes, more scrupulously pious than the Pharisees, or else I’m going to send you all to Hell.

No, He’s saying that these religious insiders, these religious authorities, have forgotten the core of the faith, the most important part. And because of that, they can’t see the Kingdom of Heaven right in front of them: the Kingdom of the poor and the sick and the crippled and the orphaned, of the possessed and of the dispossessed, who have gathered around Jesus at this Sermon on the Mount.

People look for God in their books and their rituals and their religious paraphernalia, none of which is bad within itself. But they miss the God who’s standing right in front of them, begging as their neighbor in her need. As St John Chrysostom masterfully put it: “If you can’t see God in the beggar at the door, then neither will you see Him in the chalice.” Christians cannot claim to love Jesus while hating other people, because that’s where Jesus lives: in other people.

And look, I get it. People are a pain. You’re speaking to a lifelong introvert. I personally would much rather seek for God in the privacy of my study. But that’s just tough. Because God has chosen to meet us, chosen to reveal Himself fully to and for us, in a Crucified Rabbi who claimed to be a King. And as our King, He sends us out, to be salt and light for a world in need of Him: to reveal truth, to preserve life, and to resurrect the goodness and the beauty of this world.

We are to love the unlovable, to forgive the unforgivable, to bring sight to the blind, release to the captives, and voice to the voiceless. And it doesn’t have to be flashy stuff. Even a cup of water, Jesus says, offered to a little one, receives both His notice and reward. It’s not that we have to prove our faith by good works in order to receive our salvation. Rather, our faith naturally bears good fruit, and that itself is salvation; that itself is the Kingdom of Heaven. We are already there, in Christ, already and not yet.

And the Good News is that none of this is a command. Did you notice that? Jesus never says, “Become the light of the world; become the salt of the earth.” No, He says to us that we already are: “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” And what good is salt if it loses its saltiness? Well, that’s impossible. It’s absurd. Salt is a mineral, a rock. It doesn’t go bad. It cannot lose its saltiness, cannot be other than what it is. And neither can you.

Moreover, He says that our light cannot be hidden, anymore than could a city on a hill. No-one, indeed, lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel basket—because the basket would go up in flames! You’d burn the house down; plenty of light then. Jesus isn’t telling us what we each must do. He’s reminding us of who and whose we are. We are Jesus’ Body, the temples of His Spirit. Together we are Christ for all the world. So don’t try to hide Jesus from His other children; if we do, He’ll just burn right through us.

We didn’t learn this through human wisdom. We didn’t learn this by observing the ways of the world. We were made to see the Kingdom of God when He breathed His Spirit into us, in our Baptism. The Holy Spirit, St Paul writes, searches even the depths of God. And this is an astonishing claim to make. For God the Father is infinite, eternal, utterly absolute, and beyond the ken of any finite creature. The only way for the Spirit to know the hidden depths of God is for the Spirit to be God, His very life and breath.

That same Spirit, Paul insists—the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ—dwells now within you. You have God inside of you, and that makes you the Kingdom of Heaven.  This is how our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees: because it isn’t our righteousness at all! It’s Christ’s righteousness, Christ who is God in the flesh.

Quite the paradox, isn’t it? We are the beggars, the sinners, the fallen and forsaken, each of us in need of Jesus’ grace. Thus He gives to us more than we could imagine or deserve. He pours out for us, and into us, all that He has and He is—His Body, His Blood, His Breath—such that there is now no division between Jesus and His Church, just as there is no division between Jesus and the Father. For when we are one in Christ, then we are one with God.

The lowest of the low become the highest of the high. By nature, we are worms. By grace, we are gods: gods within God. Thus does the Kingdom of Heaven stoop to dwell within the least, for God is in the poor.

My brethren and my sistren, my fellow children of God, you are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. You are the shining city upon a hill. You are the Kingdom of God. All of which are ways to say that we, together, are Jesus for a world in need of Him. And we show them who we are by Jesus’ love.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.







Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026

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