Now
Luke 6:17-26

February 11, 2007


I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was being ordained a deacon in the United Methodist Church in the overwhelming and un-Methodist setting of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I had been a Methodist all my life as had both of my parents (except for those 11 or 12 years that my mother was officially United in PEI). We were all around 23 years old or so having finished our first year in seminary. I was the outsider - I have never “belonged” anywhere - having gone to a west coast seminary 3000 miles from the home Wesley Seminary down the road. During the service there were stern instructions from John Wesley himself, almost all of which I have violated in the last 35+ years.

The one I remember most had to do with how you used your time. Wesley insisted that time was not to be frittered away, that you had to account for every minute to God, to the church, to your congregation, to yourself. Wasting time is easy with Wesley, for if you do not have a plan for every part of your day, then you are not fulfilling your calling. Wow, I didn’t know if going to the reception afterward the service, drinking Coke and eating cookies, was considered “wasting time” or not. Were we supposed to be eating cookies for the kingdom of God? Rest assured, I got over it. Got over being Methodist too. In time I learned to understand and appreciate time in a more generous way.

John Wesley was right, however, that time is too important to waste and not use effectively, but not because it is God’s time. Human beings invented the concept of time and time is one of the things that most characterizes us as human beings. God is outside of time, yet how we use our human measurements of time does define how we understand and treat one another and how we treat God in time too.

Reading or hearing the Gospel stories one gets the feeling that Jesus is always pressed for time, always in a rush, trying to accomplish as much as he possibly can in the shortest time possible. In most instances this is an illusion from the compact way the story was recited and handed down and eventually written, almost like a movie camera focused on Jesus, leaping to the next scene omitting boring interim minutes and hours.

Jesus had a habit of going up into the hills to pray all night. You aren’t rushed for time if you pray all night, if you remember from the last time you did that! When day broke Jesus formally chose 12 of his followers - there were obviously many more who had become his disciples - to be apostles and then led them down from the mount to a level place. On the plain, the prairie even, they were engulfed by all the other disciples and followers and a gigantic gathering of people from all over, Jews and Gentiles, clean and unclean, who came to be healed. They strained to touch him for there was a power issuing forth from Jesus that appeared virtually infinite as he healed them all. That had to take a lot of time.

Jesus begins to teach and preach the famous sermon, and as in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, he is talking to his disciples with a multitude of others hanging around, certainly listening in. Jesus moves on to Capernaum when he finishes “all his sayings in the hearing of the people.” Was Jesus only talking to his disciples, or is it that when you hear Jesus speak you cannot act as if what he says does not apply to you also?

Jesus speaks to them in the blunt and brutal present tense. He is speaking in time, in the Now. Blessings and woes, they have traditionally been called: beatitudes that are not beatific; curses that are not immediately obvious. All are strange to the ear.

Blessed are you who are poor right now. Blessed are you who are hungry right now. Blessed are you who are weeping, full of tragedy and injustice. Who in their right mind feels blessed being any of these things? If I don’t have enough money to pay for food, I can’t feel blessed. If I don’t have enough food and am getting malnourished, I don’t feel blessed. If I am beaten down by the cruelties of life and of other people, I don’t feel blessed. And whenever people hate and exclude me, put me down and call me evil, I don’t feel blessed. A lot of religious people think I should be satisfied because it’s in Jesus’ Beatitudes, but the time is now and none of these circumstances are anything to be proud of or happy about in and of themselves. The problem is that we all have the time wrong.

Forget what I said about God not being involved in time; God is, in God’s time and there is no mathematics to calculate it. In God’s time there is hope and the possibility of a real new world. I may not be blessed when I am poor, but I can still say this condition does not define me; only my status as a child of God defines who I really am. It is not a blessed event when I am seriously hungry, yet I can say that there is more to my story than my condition. When people revile me because of my relationship to God, I can still say that I have a God!

In a way then, Jesus is only talking about Now partially. Now you are poor, now you are hungry and mourning and hated, but that’s not Who you are, nor What you shall be. Now, this is your condition, but there is a future where you will be different and new.

Then Jesus turns the hand on all these blessing and is even more firmly rooted in the present of Now. “Woe to you that are rich now, woe to you that are full now, woe to you that laugh now, woe to you when everybody speaks well of you.” Jesus doesn’t define rich, somebody else does, but right now that’s your blessed condition. Oh the prophets and the social crusaders have had a field day with these “woes” as the RSV and NRSV have called them. Eugene Peterson gives us a little more of the dynamic character as he begins each of these, “there’s trouble ahead....” But I still prefer Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch translation: “It will be hell for you rich people, because you've had your fling. It will be hell for you whose bellies are full now, because you’ll go hungry. It will be hell for you who are so gay now, because you will sob and weep. It will be hell for you when everybody speaks highly of you, for their fathers said the very same things about the phony preachers.”

Jordan adds a little footnote to explain why he rendered “woe” by “hell.” The original word is actually one of those words meant to imitate the sound of someone groaning, “oh-oh, woh-woh,” suffering great afflictions as if they were in hell. Watch out how you use the word “woe” next time, especially if inclined to say, “Woe is me!”

Personally, I don’t want to be defined by who I am now. I know I have a lot of work yet to accomplish. I have too many faults that have to be worked on and fixed up. I know that there is something different and better for me ahead that I cannot imagine. Your wealth is defined by your poverty, your fullness is not measured by how hungry you are, your happiness is not destroyed by your sadness and mourning, and your self-worth is not judged by your popularity.

Jesus was not trying to get us to forget about Now and ignore our suffering and ignore the ways in which we might be making others suffer. No one concerned about God’s justice can ignore now the injustice surrounding and in our midst. But you and I, poor or rich, hungry or satisfied, full of tragedy or full of joy, are not to settle for what we are Now, for through faith, we have yet to see what we will be Now in God’s time.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan