Sermon St. James, Texarkana
Imagine with me a great hall, alabaster, bathed in morning light from great clear stained-glass windows. Shaped like a cathedral, it is empty but for a great chair at its center, and seven more seats in a semi-circle facing the throne. It might remind you of the room some describe in a near death experience., or more recently, of the empty train station where Harry Potter, dead, sees Dumbledore and Voldemort. Is it in time or beyond, made of stone or spirit, in the earth of the future or in heaven or in your mind, it is for you to decide. All is silent, until the one on the throne says these words…
‘Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ his voice resounds like a waterfall, as Revelation says. And each time he speaks one more human being walks the length of the great salon and sits in one of the chairs. They recognize the Master’ voice, as it speaks these same words, although to each hears their import in a slightly different way.
You ask, ‘who are these?’ they are the saints who have answered the summons to be ‘the blessed poor.’ Let me introduce them to you.
The first is a tall gaunt man, wrapped in a cloak. He had left the chaos of a declining empire. When he heard the words about the poor, he went to a mountain top and began a community of prayer. In the following centuries his monasteries would spring up across Europe. His name is Benedict. The poor are the brothers in work and devotion, and they lived alongside the peasants, and taught them to farming and herding wherever they lived.
Second in is a man wrapped in the saffron robe of an Indian guru. He too is wizened from years of fasting. His name is Sadhu Sundar Singh. He was a Christian but he heard the voice of the Master’s call with an Indian lilt. The poor ins spirit? Self-denial, deep meditation, the surrender of the ego. He was a wanderer, finally lost somewhere in the Himalayas.
The third to enter the hall has a high German accent, and old-fashioned farm clothes. She hailed from the Midwest. She was Amish, and she distrusted the wiles of the modern world (and I have days when I envy her). The poor are those who do not run after the false gods of possessions and the latest fashion of one kind of another decadence or another. She sat with an open but serious gaze.
The fourth in was a proper English gentleman, with a high collar and a morning coat. His name is Charles Simeon, a proper Anglican. You know of him, even if you don’t. For he believed, as one of the earliest evangelicals, that the poor in the spirit are those with a converted heart, who have turned away from efforts to save themselves, and trusted in grace alone as Paul taught in his letters. He never left Cambridge and London much, but had a hand in inventing Sunday school, the mission society, seminary, and university ministry. He had no use for the intricacies of high church liturgy. He lived as a cultured man of his time, but that blessedness of which Jesus spoke was in his heart. He helped raise the money to convert, by God’s grace, a continent.
Fifth striding up that great bright hall lived here in the United States, a little later in the nineteenth century than Simeon. She was a pioneer student in seminary, then spent a life time in the slums of Chicago, one of the first social workers. She won a Nobel prize for her labor at Hull House among the struggling working immigrants of her generation. Her name was Jane Addams, and blessedness was working hands on for social change among the poor. The voice summoned her to her a social gospel, a serving, active gospel written in deeds more than words.
Six, a Latino, in scarlet cassock and rosary, is the martyr bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, finally killed like Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket, eight hundred years before, by a death squad as he stood at the altar. He had spoken up for the poor campesinos against the violation of human rights by the land owners, against the violence of the fascists and for a liberation theology. He was himself a man of peace, but had heard the voice of Jesus speak of the beatitude of the poor and the woe of the rich later in today’s passage.
We are missing one more, the seventh, to fill out the seven virtues and the seven stars in the crown in Revelation. This one looks different for each of us onlookers, with a different name and face. For me it is an old Armenian man from the parish where I was a young curate. His name was Kachador and he was dying of throat cancer. After every sermon he would whisper in my ear, in the line to shake hands, ‘way to go’ in the whisper from what was left of his throat. Blessed meant dying, and in pain, for him, but turned in a simple and human way to care about others. That simple gesture I remember forty years later.
There is a debate among New Testament scholars about our Gospel. You see Luke has a sermon on the plain, which is remembered in some subtle differences from Matthew’ sermon on the mount, but has also remembered parts not found in Luke’s version. Both say ‘blessed are the poor’, but then in Matthew added ‘the poor in spirit’- how much freight should that difference carry? Is Luke turned more turned toward the world, while Matthew’s memory of Jesus more interior? Similarly Luke has woes to match the blessings, denunciations of the rich and those at ease like Dives, not concerned with the poor man at his gate. Matthew recalls the positive side, though he does share with Luke the memory of persecution which the followers of Jesus in the ancient world faced. Likewise you can see how our different saints heard Jesus’ one summons in variable ways. You can see that who ‘poor’ are differed- living the lowly life in community, or dwelling in things unseen, or giving oneself to social work, or standing with the oppressed, or showing a converted heart, or renouncing the vanity of this world, or suffering, and dying with an out-turned heart. Which is it? well yes, the passage gives different answers, though with Jesus it is always Yes, as Paul says.
Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth- what does this array of saints tell us, beyond the fascination of their own unique lives? The important and shared thing is the Master’s voice, as well as the power of that voice to change us, to turn us. That voice they all recognize, as sheep hearing their shepherd, says Jesus in john’s Gospel. And there is always more to hear in his word. Each of their responses is right, and not the whole tale. Each must listen to the rest of the Scripture. For Jesus will also say that even the rich man can be saved, since with God all is possible. He will tell us to take the flawed culture of our time captive. He will tell us that the social work is discipleship, but so is prayer together on the Lord’s day. He will tell us to praise famous men and women, and to realize the least, the widow with the mite, is sainted too. Blessed are all those called into the kingdom, all by grace, but the how and when requires the vast witness of Scripture, the whole of life, to see more and more of how he reigns over us, in weal and woe. And to this end you and I are called together, an array of struggling saints indeed, to this place, on this Lord’s Day, Amen.
