Hilton Head Island, SC – June 9, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 30:1-12; Luke 15:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.” – Luke 6:21b (RSV)
The Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, has nine Beatitudes. The Sermon on the Plain, in Luke, has four. Luke’s third Beatitude, “Blessed are those who weep now, for you shall laugh,” is not in Matthew at all. As I said last week, if a Gospel writer managed to get his Gospel accepted into the New Testament, he could write whatever he wanted. For whatever reason, Luke believed Jesus included a Beatitude in his Gospel which Matthew left out of his.
What, exactly, might Jesus have meant when he said, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh,” if he actually said that? No one can know the answer to that question for certain. However, this morning I want for us to contemplate what Jesus may have intended by making that statement, if indeed he said it, which I choose to believe he probably did.
In both of the Gospels which contain beatitudes, the first Beatitude is this: “Blessed are you poor” (or “Blessed are the poor,” “for yours in the kingdom of God” (or, in Matthew, “heaven.”) In other words, the entire focus of both sermons, the one on the plain or the one on the mount, is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was the essence of what Jesus always preached.
So how does “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh” relate to the kingdom of God? What I now am now going to say is not something which is inerrant or undeniable. However, it does make sense to me about the nature of the kingdom of God in the context of Luke’s third Beatitude.
Jesus grew up in a relatively new and impoverished village in a relatively poor and unimportant section of a relatively small province in the Roman Empire. Very likely Joseph, Mary, Jesus and his brothers and sisters lived hand to mouth. The religious establishment, the economic system, and the Roman government extracted income from them in a variety of ways. It was a subsistence existence for nearly everyone who lived in Judea in the first century. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, life would have been “nasty, brutish, and short” for Jesus and most of the people he knew.
Therefore, in this third Beatitude, Jesus made a remarkable statement to people who lived in crushing poverty: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” Poverty breeds depression. Deprivation breeds sorrow. Not everyone who is desperately poor weeps all the time, but some weep frequently, and with good reason. They see no way out of the perpetual scarcity which nips at their heels every day. When they get sick, they are more likely to remain ill than those who have the means to seek health through the best means possible. When they run out of food, they stay hungry. When their children need something and they don’t have the money to buy it or the materials to create it, they have to go without.
Such conditions, which never relent for some people, depress many of them. They feel broken or morose or withdrawn. But if they were to become enveloped by what Jesus called the kingdom of God, wouldn’t they feel better? Instead of weeping, wouldn’t they then laugh? Instead of living under a constant dark cloud, might they not be drawn into the bright sunshine?
Our Old Testament reading was Psalm 30. Verse five says, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Verse eleven says about God, “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing; thou hast loosed my sackcloth” (the clothing worn in times of sorrow) “and girded me with gladness.” These are verses, I think, that echo what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” It is God who overcomes our tears with laughter; it is God who turns our sorrow into joy.
But how does God do that? Does He snap divine fingers, and all is well? Does He shake His magic wand, and Voila!, everything is suddenly fun and games?
The kingdom of God is made manifest through US, through us! That is the primary way, and perhaps the only way, that it came come about.
The kingdom of God is not a location; it is a condition. It is not a proper noun; it is fundamentally a change of attitude, our attitude. We are the ones who see the poor and do something to relieve their poverty. We are the ones who encounter hungry people, and feed them. We see dispirited people, and try to bring happiness into their lives. And how do we do that? By thinking less about ourselves and own concerns and more about others and their concerns. That is why, later in the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus says we should give to those who ask of us and loan to those who want to borrow from us. When we become kingdom builders, we change our attitude toward everyone else and also toward ourselves. We become more open to others and less protective of ourselves.
On the bulletin cover this morning is a quote from Lord Byron: “Grief should be the instructor of the wise; sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth.” A Chinese proverb says, “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” Robert Browning Hamilton wrote, “I walked a mile with Pleasure/ She chatted all the way/ But left me none the wiser/ For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow/ And ne’er a word said she/ But oh, the things I learned from her/ When Sorrow walked with me!”
Our natural inclination is to turn away from those who weep, because we feel inadequate to assist them. We don’t know what to say. We’re not sure what we should do.
However, when our attitudes towards others and towards ourselves is transformed, we become more attuned to the tears of others, and we are more inclined to try to become agents for their happiness. Then the kingdom of God is constructed, and it happens because of what we do. That means that God’s kingdom is realized through us. We are its carpenters and bricklayers and roofers.
Our New Testament reading is Jesus’ famous parable of the lost sheep. In his commentary on that parable, William Barclay talks about the nature of sheep. Dr. Barclay lived in Scotland in the middle of the last century. Back then, there were many shepherds and many sheep in the Scottish Highlands, though there are fewer of both now than there were then. Willie Barclay claimed that when a sheep becomes lost from the rest of the flock, and the shepherd cannot find it, the sheep will lie down and begin a doleful bleating until someone comes along to find it. Driving through the Highlands on several occasions, I have heard many sheep bleat, but never a lost one. I can imagine, on the basis of normal bleating, that a lost sheep’s bleat is really a sorrowful sound.
The third verse of the old hymn “Blest be the tie that binds” says this: “We share each other’s woes/ Each other’s burdens bear/ And often for each other flows /The sympathizing tear.” When the kingdom of God comes, “Blessed are those who weep now, for you shall laugh” means that we will become God’s agents to make that happen. To hear what William Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity” is to respond to those doleful notes when we hear them in our families and among our friends and neighbors. When the attitudes of kingdom-builders are transformed, things happen.
For the remainder of this sermon, I want to identify the two primary methods that exist for human beings to help bring God’s kingdom into existence on earth. Everything in the first two sermons in this series and everything up to now in this sermon is about private efforts to establish God’s kingdom on earth. This connotes individual efforts that are expended to serve others. The second method involves public or governmental efforts at kingdom-building, although religious people should not ever attempt to explain it in those terms. God’s kingdom is certainly not primarily a public works project, although it also can involve public projects.
What, specifically, do I mean, then, when I talk about public efforts to improve the lives of the poor, hungry, sorrowful, persecuted, and so on? I refer to what governments can do to assist such people in their needs. Religious people should never publicly promote government assistance for human needs on behalf of religious values per se, but rather on behalf of humanitarian values. However, religious values should always also be humane values, but it is unfair and unwise for religious people overtly to promote human values as religious values, because not everyone in any nation is religious. Further, all those who are religious are not religious in exactly the same way.
So what does all this philosophical background actually mean? To try to explain, let me offer some more philosophical background. Some people believe that all humanitarian assistance to people in need should be funded through private donations, not through government programs. If there are poor people, religious and philanthropic groups, not government, should take care of them. If they are hungry, these groups, not government, should feed them. According to this concept, the same is true for assisting people in prisons, victims of warfare, refugees, and so on.
Up until the eighteenth century, that notion was adopted by nearly everyone, because the governments of nation-states were financially unable to do much, if anything, to assist the truly needy. And because most governments were monarchies, they were not inclined to do so anyway. Then, with the American and French Revolutions, and with the many democratically-inspired revolutions which followed in many other countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “the people” decided that government should step in to help certain kinds of people with certain kinds of needs. We won’t go into the particulars of what that might mean, but we will simply note that it happened.
That leads into the other means by which assistance is given to people whose circumstances necessitate assistance from outside themselves. And that means that most contemporary governments in most contemporary nation-states provide at least some assistance to such people. The people who are helped are like the great majority of the people to whom Jesus preached. They are the poor and hungry and forgotten. However, the laws and regulations that enable this to happen now vary greatly from one country to another. Briefly, it depends on whether those nations operate on a Limited-Government or an Expanded-Government philosophy.
In “limited-government” governments, the government does as little for its citizens as the citizens allow or require it to do. In “expanded-government” governments, the state does what it deems private humanitarian efforts cannot do for the citizens who need the most help. Who does what for whom are political decisions for secular citizens, and all of us are secular in our citizenship. For religious citizens, though, those decisions may be theological as well as political.
Let’s look at some examples. There is an old aphorism which goes something like this: “If you give a man a fish, you have fed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he can feed himself for life.” That’s true, if government passes laws on the limits of fish anyone can take in a day or week or season, and if it passes laws and regulations to see that the supplies of fish are not depleted by the destruction of the aquatic environment, and so on and so on.
Is it humane or inhumane to allow same-sex marriage? If two men or two women want to marry, and laws prevent it, are they more likely to weep because of those laws, or to rejoice?
If a woman becomes pregnant, is it humane or inhumane for her early on to end the pregnancy? If you believe that human life begins at the moment of conception, then you will say she cannot end the pregnancy, and you’ll vote for politicians who agree with that position. But if you believe it is the woman’s right to decide, you will vote for politicians who agree with your position. Nonetheless, both sides believe their decision is fundamentally humane.
If physically or mentally some individuals simply cannot earn a living for themselves, is it humane or inhumane to insist that they must nevertheless fend for themselves? And if it is decided it is humane, and private philanthropy cannot cope with the numbers of people who therefore are hungry, is it humane for government to turn its back on the incapacitated?
Since its inception, the nation which became “America” has always been a magnet for people from other nations. Should government welcome such people, or should it make it as difficult as possible for them to enter? What is the humane policy in such an instance? And should humanitarian concerns even be an issue in whatever policies are adopted?
In a democracy, if you want politicians who favor limited government, you vote one way. If you favor a larger government, you vote the other way. If you want politicians who believe our nation should operate on the philosophy that it is every individual for himself or herself, then you vote one way. If you think we are in this together, then you vote the other way. If you think self-reliance is the answer to most of life’s problems, then you vote one way. If you think group reliance or interpersonal reliance is the way to go, then you vote another way. Of course none of this is as clear and unambiguous as all these statements may imply. There needs to be much discussion as to what policies are decided and the basis for those decisions. Still, the two basic choices nonetheless are at least fairly clear, and they suggest two quite different approaches.
The kingdom doesn’t come because of votes or voting. But voting influences whether government does or does not do the things Jesus talked about when he talked about the kingdom. Ultimately, however, it isn’t about what Jesus does or doesn’t want. It’s about what God wants. After all, it is God’s kingdom. Years ago the letters “WWJD” were ubiquitously popular. “What Would Jesus Do?” they boldly asked. The real question is WWGD: What Would God Do? Jesus talked very little about what he wanted, but he spoke a great deal about what God wanted.
God wants a radical re-thinking of what our priorities are. When our priorities become God’s priorities, then shall the kingdom of God exist on earth as it also exists in heaven. And then shall those who weep begin to laugh.