Sermon 20131103
St. John’s Church Downtown Yonkers
Sunday After All Saints’
Pineapple upside down cake is a wonderful thing. It is cooked with the top on bottom, the
pineapple rings and cherries on the bottom slightly caramelizing and browning
to make a wonderfully delicious and attractive top to the cake once it is
turned upside down.
Luke’s Gospel is a kind of pineapple upside down cake. He sees much of what goes on in the world
upside down to what our normal human understanding tends to think.
In Luke’s gospel the Baby Jesus, savior of the universe, is
born in a stable. Angels announce this wonderful birth not to kings or to the
entire world on the BBC but to poor shepherds, the poorest of the working poor. When Mary sings her song in thanksgiving for
the child she bears, the “Magnificat”, she says the poor have been filled with
good things and the rich sent empty away, the mighty have been cast down from
their thrones and the lowly have been lifted up.
And as if this was not enough we have another great upside
down turning today in Luke’s version of the beatitudes which we have just read. Jesus says that the poor, the hungry, those
who weep, those who are persecuted are the ones who are blessed. And he says that those who are rich, have
plenty to eat, who laugh and have a good time, and are praised by all are
unfortunate. Woe to them!
Of course all the gospels have the greatest turning upside
down of them all, Christ comes to us in this world bringing healing, wisdom,
truth, compassion and fellowship with God and rather than being welcomed like
the Red Sox were in Boston this weekend with a parade, he is outcast, executed
as criminal.
I think there is an attraction for us when Luke turns our
normal thinking upside down. We deeply sense that the world is not what it should be. Though humanity has done many wonderful
things, no matter what our accomplishments, we watch as injustice, hatred,
violence, greed, back stabbing, intolerance, cruelty, snobbery, indifference
infect our lives like mold in bread which sends its ugly smelly putric tendrils
all through the loaf making what is good repulsive.
Humanity has a sense that the world lacks something it
needs, and much of our private and corporate lives is spent trying to put our
finger on it, and seeking to correct. The
writer of the book of Daniel, who wrote our first reading, also had this sense.
He was brought up on Moses and the Prophets and he saw the
world as a place where God was the center of life, the king subordinate to God
in order to serve the people, and the priests and peoples live in peace justice
and harmony as a community. The law of Moses even has periodic correctives to
any imbalance that might happen with years when the slaves were to be freed when
debts were to be cancelled and ancestral lands returned to the correct clan. They had an idea of what it meant for there
to be “Shalom” in the world, rather than this mold we experience.
But dream goes unrealized.
Kings misbehave. Neighbor
exploits neighbor. foreign armies and kings conquer the land, exile or kill the
people, and destroy the temple. The
beasts in our first reading represent a series of empires which upset the
balance of the people of God in this way, with the most cruel being the fourth
empire, that of Alexander the Great and his successors, who even set up statues
of foreign gods in the very midst of the temple.
But Daniel has more to say not in today’s reading. He also sees one like the Son of man coming
to restore the Shalom, the order that should be for God’s people, with God in
the center, and the king and people serving God. He calls it the kingdom of God. And this is the hope the prophets create, an
expectation for a king, a messiah, an anointed one, who will set all right, who
will establish the kingdom of God.
But Jesus and Luke insist that we see upside down. Jesus and Luke tell us we need to change our
expectations, set them up as God desires.
A great king cannot come to impose order on the people. The kingdom of God cannot be top down. That
simply leaves the very mold of force and coercion in the very fabric of society
which spoils the dream every time.
Jesus and Luke turn it upside down by saying that shalom
comes not from outside, but from inside us. The kingdom enters not with the king but with
the subjects who choose the shalom of the kingdom of God. It is not by forcing others, but by opening
ourselves to God that the kingdom of God takes place. When we commit ourselves to the process, and
it must be a great commitment, the world begins to be put aright, it gets
turned upside down in the correct way, like pineapple upside down cake, because
we are allowing the kingdom of God to take place in our lives.
This is visible in the lives of saints whom we celebrate
today. When we think of saints, we think
of the extraordinary ones. But we know
that Sainthood is not only heroic acts. If
sainthood was about heroism it would not make sense of the Beatitudes and the
woes. Sainthood is a quality of heart, a
humble heart before God, open to God’s healing.
Most of the saints who have gone before us remain unnamed. They may not have done great heroic acts, but
they allowed the kingdom of God to take place in their hearts and lives. They became the kingdom of God in the world,
just as Christ did, through the Holy Spirit.
It is not a quick fix. It is not
like taking a pill. It is more like
athletic training, it is more like marriage.
St. Ephraim of Syria says that when simply one person allows
the heart to be fixed on God the resulting benefits touch the lives of
thousands.
We at St. John’s are asked to be that for Yonkers. In our simplicity, and in our humility, we
are asked to let God touch our hearts and make us the kingdom of God in the
middle of a world off track.
In just a moment we
will be asked to renew our commitment to Christ. And we will be asked to renew vows concerning
our whole lives, vows which we know we can only keep with God’s help. And we will pray for God to enable us to keep
these vows. I challenge myself, and I
ask each and everyone of you to take these vows and these prayers very
seriously. Yonkers needs saints, not
necessarily heroes, but people humbly open to God. And I believe God is asking us to be those
people. In..
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