Hilton Head Island, SC – June 2, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 6:20-26; Luke 6:37-42
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.” Luke 6:20a
Last Sunday we began a series of sermons based on Luke, chapter six. It contains what scholars call The Sermon on the Plain, which is Luke’s equivalent of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, except that the Sermon on the Plain is much shorter. For example, it has only four Beatitudes, whereas Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount has nine.
Today we shall look at the second of Luke’s beatitudes. He has Jesus say this: “Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.” Matthew has Jesus say, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” The two statements do not mean the same thing. They are similar to a limited degree, but they are essentially different.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now” addresses people with a physical hunger. They want food. If they are hungry enough, they will eat any kind of food, even Brussels sprouts or Limburger cheese. “Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness” speaks to a quite different kind of hunger. Their hunger is to acquire goodness or righteousness or ethical acceptability. The first hunger is essentially physical, while the second is moral and spiritual.
Some people are hungry nearly all the time. If they are sufficiently affluent, they can satisfy their hunger by eating some of the food they always keep in ready supply. Whether it is wise for them to eat whenever they are hungry is an issue which shall not be addressed in this sermon. In any case, they are not the kind of people to whom Jesus was referring when he said, “Blessed are you who hunger now.” Most of the people to whom Jesus spoke were perpetually hungry, not simply because their stomachs craved food, but because they never had enough food to eat. They were desperately poor.
I know a woman who gets hungry periodically throughout the day. Apparently she has a small stomach, and she also burns up food as though it were dry tinder next to a match. That wasn’t the problem of first-century Judeans. Most of them never got enough food. Hunger was always with them because they were so poor they couldn’t afford to have a constant supply of food on hand.
In this beatitude, at least according to Luke, Jesus isn’t talking about spiritual hunger. He is talking about actual visceral pains in the stomach because there simply was never a sufficient amount of food for people to eat. The peasants of Judea were afflicted with what economists and sociologists now call “extreme poverty.” In today’s monetary terms, these are families who are forced to live on the equivalent of two or three dollars a day. People in those circumstances cannot possibly have enough to eat every day, because they have other needs besides food.
It is hard for people on Hilton Head Island to believe that anyone could be that poor, or that anyone here is hungry because of a scarcity of food in their homes. Nonetheless, there are local children who are hungry every morning when they go to school. There are families who cannot feed their children enough to keep them strong and healthy, and to enable them to grow properly. If you doubt this, go to the Deep Well Project and speak to the staff and volunteers who work there. Go to the food banks of the island churches. Hunger exists in our posh community.
Go to The Oaks on William Hilton Parkway next to Pineland Station (or whatever is the new name of the re-developed Pineland Station, which itself was re-developed from the old Pineland Mall.) The Oaks used to be called The Spanish Oaks, but maybe somebody decided that might attract only people who speak Spanish to live there, so now it is The Oaks. Whatever its name, it is one of the few places in this affluent community where the really poor can afford to live, if they can even afford The Oaks.
Our congregation used to be involved in a program called Family Promises. I think they dropped us as volunteers because we could not provide enough people on a regular basis for them to be able to depend on us. Family Promises was established to serve homeless families on Hilton Head Island and in Beaufort County. For a week, the sponsoring congregations would house the parents and their children in a church. (Almost always they were mothers.) They had to be a family; they couldn’t be single adults or lone teenagers. All such agencies have their rules. The families also were given breakfast and supper each day for that week. Families couldn’t use Families Promises forever, but only for a few months. There were never scores of needy people, but there were always a few to several to a dozen or twenty. And this was on Hilton Head Island, with some of the wealthiest zip codes in South Carolina.
“Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.” But how would that happen, either in first-century Judea or twenty-first century America? Basically, there are two solutions to the problem of hunger: the American solution and the biblical solution. The American solution is to work. If you’re hungry, go get a job and earn some money. It’s the American way. And work works, if you’re able to work. Work always works, if it works.
Nearly everyone would prefer to work to have enough money to put a roof over their heads and food on their table. There are relatively few genuine deadbeats. Many people claim that an in-law is a loafer, or possibly even a blood relative, but most people, for their own self-esteem if nothing else, are very willing to work to earn a living, however meager it may be.
But what if you’re not able to work? What if you’re too sick, or too weak, or too old? What if you have few or no work skills? What if you have little or no education? What if you can’t read the language on the employment application, because you weren’t born in this country? What if, in tough times, there are nowhere nearly enough jobs to go around? What then?
Fiscal conservatives insist that everyone, with very few exceptions, should have to work. And they’re right; they should. Fiscal liberals say there are some people who cannot work, and that others have to provide for their welfare. And they’re right; in every society there are always a small percentage of people who cannot make it on their own. In that case, who will feed and clothe and house the desperately or extremely poor?
That brings us to the biblical solution, and to Jesus, and to the kingdom of God. The biblical solution is not for everyone, meaning that most people probably don’t need it. In addition, not everyone would avail themselves of the biblical solution were it offered to them.
In both the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus was talking about the kingdom of God. In Matthew, however, Jesus never uses the term “kingdom of God;” there he always talks about the kingdom of heaven. What can I say: he who writes a Gospel that gets accepted into the New Testament gets to use whatever terminology he wants, and not necessarily what Jesus intended to say. Therefore all of us are forced to do the best we can to interpret what Jesus very likely meant.
My two-cents-worth says that Luke, not Matthew, was right on this one, but it is worth only two cents, and from Jesus’ time to the present time, inflation has turned my two cents into almost nothing. So you pay your own money and you make your own choice.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that Jesus never talked about the kingdom of heaven, but only about the kingdom of God. But what does “the kingdom of God” mean? Jesus always spoke about it in vague terms, and not in words everyone understands in an instant. But one of the reasons I think Matthew used the phrase “kingdom of heaven” is because Jesus usually implied the kingdom of God was coming in the future. Sometimes Jesus even suggested it was coming at the end of time, in the Apocalypse or the Eschaton or the Last Days. On one occasion, and one only, Jesus said, “The kingdom is among you,” but he did not go on to explain exactly what those words meant. Therefore most people who heard Jesus assumed God’s kingdom would be a future, world-ending event, in which, perhaps, everyone would be swept into heaven.
It didn’t happen. The world did not end soon, as Jesus indicated it would. Two thousand years later, it has not yet ended. So what is the kingdom of God? And who brings it into existence?
Clearly God does not wrestle His kingdom into being against the resistance the world perpetually raises to prevent it. If God’s kingdom is among us, WE are the ones who make it happen. When the poor are cared for, when the hungry are fed, when the despondent are lifted out of their doldrums, and when people stop hating those who are trying to do God’s will --- then is when God’s kingdom comes on earth, as it is in heaven. We are kingdom builders, you and I, potentially if not actually . Everyone who conscientiously seeks to do God’s will is laying the foundations and raising the walls and constructing a roof over the kingdom. All people of faith and even those without faith who nevertheless do God’s will are kingdom builders.
The kingdom of God operates on very loose business principles, but on very lofty altruistic principles. Jesus urged us never to become overly concerned about the worthiness of those to whom we extend Christian compassion. Instead Jesus said, “Give to everyone who begs from you, and of him who takes away your goods, do not ask them again” (Luke 6:30). And remember, Jesus was saying this to people, most of whom didn’t have two nickels to rub together, if they had nickels back then to rub together, which they didn’t. To the poor peasants who listened to Jesus, he said, “As you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31). If he had the nerve to say that to poor people with a clear conscience, imagine what he might say to us!
This past Wednesday afternoon, exactly at the time when I was writing this sermon, either by chance or in the providence of God, I was called by a woman who was soliciting funds for the Salvation Army. Every few weeks I receive a mailed request for money from the Salvation Army, and unless it is Christmas time, they all come from the regional headquarters of the Salvation Army in Houston. That is because a few years ago, when one of the hurricanes flooded thousands of homes in the Houston area, The Chapel took up a special offering for hurricane victims, and half of it went to Texas and the other half to Puerto Rico. We got on the Houston solicitation list.
I explained to the very kind lady that it was not I who contributed that donation, but that you were the ones who did it. I told her I always give a contribution to our local Salvation Army chapter at Christmas, and that probably it would be best if the Houston headquarters took my name off their list. It would save them a little money. People who make telephone solicitations for church organizations or academic institutions are not nearly as pushy as those who are paid to solicit for the firemen or police or heaven knows what else. I told her I was writing this sermon at the moment she called, and we both had a good laugh about the serendipitous nature of that.
I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to help in the construction of God’s kingdom by contributing at least annually to the Salvation Army, the Deep Well Project, Volunteers in Medicine, Habitat for Humanity, Second Helpings, and/or to local church food banks or to any of the other local or national organizations which minister to the kinds of people in need Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes, either in Matthew or Luke. And when you give, don’t kvetch to yourself about whether the people who administer the funds will give careful scrutiny to everyone whom they seek to help. That is their choice to make, not yours. They are experts at deciding.
I want to reiterate that everyone who is capable of earning their living should do so. But sometimes circumstances prevent some people from having enough to eat or homes in which to live, and they need the assistance of others to survive. When that assistance is provided, the kingdom of God is made visible.
The Rev. Frederick L. Hosmer was an American Unitarian minister who served churches in five states, ending up in Berkley, California, where he retired. (It is my considered opinion that Berkeley would be an excellent location for a Unitarian pastor in which to serve and retire.) He wrote poems which were utilized in many hymns, most of them, I suspect, in the Unitarian hymnal. I am familiar with only one of them. It is called “’Thy kingdom come,’ on bended knee the passing ages pray.” It isn’t in our hymnal, or otherwise I would force you to sing it, even though it is probably totally unremembered by most of you. Still, I have no doubt some of you have sung it at least several times. In any case, part of its text is worth hearing in this context.
“Thy Kingdom come,” on bended knee
The passing ages pray;
And faithful souls have yearned to see
On earth that Kingdom’s day.
The day in whose clear shining light
All wrong shall stand revealed;
When justice shall be clothed with might,
And every hurt be healed.
When knowledge, hand in hand with peace,
Shall walk the earth abroad;
The day of perfect righteousness,
The promised day of God.
Perfect righteousness shall never occur in an imperfect world. But we can always do better than we do. When the poor are clothed and sheltered, when the hungry are fed, when prisoners are treated with more compassion, there shall God’s kingdom come on earth. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done. We can become the purveyors of God’s blessings.