February 16: the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

If I walked up here and immediately sneezed, what would you all say to me? Bless you…or God bless you. When someone sneezes, we have this custom that is so second nature, it’s pretty much an automatic response. God bless you. This expression has several supposed origins, but one of the most popular that has stuck around is that it arose from the plague. In fact, some will date it back to this very day, 1425 years ago, February 16, 600, when Pope Gregory recommended “God bless you” as the appropriate response to the sneeze, when the plague was at its height in Europe, and the hope was that this blessing would help protect the sneezer from death, death that often came from the plague which often was first recognized by a sneeze.

As people of God, we are a people who wish for God to bless us and the people around us. May God bless you, as you sneeze, in your sickness, in your health, in your living, in your dying, in your jobs, your families, your marriages, your travels. God bless you. This kind of blessing we hope for is about God’s action in our lives in a unique way. It’s a verb.

Which is different than the term “bless-ed” which appears in our gospel reading today. It’s an adjective. This is obvious when you think about it, God bless you, an action word, and here, blessed are you, a descriptive word, and I don’t mean to insult your intelligence. But I do think it’s a helpful reminder when approaching this well-known passage, Luke’s version of the beatitudes, where Jesus gives his sermon on the plain. He speaks to the crowd, and he describes them. He says, “blessed are you who are poor, who are hungry, who weep, who are hated because of me.” Blessed are you. The most accurate translation of the Greek here is happy.

Happy are y’all who suffer. Not, God bless you who suffer, not Jesus prescribing a specific action of God upon these folks. but blessed are you, happy are you, describing them as they are…. To keep following through this logic, the next verses that say, “woe to you,” they aren’t about God’s action either. I myself have incorrectly read this before as Jesus prescribing God’s curse upon the rich, full, the laughing, the well liked. But, no, Jesus is describing them as they are, not as something God will do to them, and the closest translation for woe is, well, woe. It’s a word that sort of means what it sounds like. Whoa, an exclamation of grief, or even warning. Sort of like “yikes” or a grimace. Ouai (oo-eye) in Greek, oh vey in Hebrew.

Y’all know I don’t normally get this pedantic, I maybe mention “the Greek word” once a year, but I am now because I think it matters. It matters greatly to go from reading Luke’s beatitudes as Jesus’ prescriptive sermon, “God will uniquely bless the poor and uniquely curse the rich,” to a descriptive one, “Happy, fortunate, are you who suffer… yikes, oy vey, y’all that seem to have it all together.”

Hear this modern-day paraphrase …

You’re happy now that you’ve lost it all, because God’s kingdom is right here for the finding.

Y’all who are literally starving seem pretty happy, too, now that you’re finally ready to be filled with the bread of life.

Yay, you, whose cheeks are stained with tears, for you will soon know the depth of the joy that comes with the morning.

Whoa, some of y’all have given all you have to accumulating your wealth and accolades, that won’t offer sufficient comfort or peace for the days ahead;

Oy vey, you who are just full of yourself, because yourself will not satisfy you for long.

Yikes, you folks who laugh and dance across the surface of life; no one escapes suffering, and when hard times come, you may be caught flatfooted.

We humans love to judge. We are a part of a people who think we have the right to determine who is in the right and who is in the wrong, a trait that dates almost back to the beginning of time. We even do it in the Church, even though we are best suited to understand that none of us has the power to judge another, since God has got that all taken care of. Too often, I and other Christians use scripture and passages like this as ammo to say “God favors these people. God curses these people. These people are in. These people are out. God loves these folks. God hates these.” But that’s not what going on here in Luke, and that’s not the Christian’s job to think we have the insight into someone’s true heart or the power to judge where another stands in God’s eyes.

This sermon that Jesus gives on level ground, amongst his brothers and sisters, is not him prescribing God’s judgement on this group of people or that group of people, thereby encouraging us to do the same. Jesus is describing what it is like for those who suffer and reminding them of the promises of God and the reality that it is when they are empty that God has room to work; when they struggle, they finally see the power of God. And he is describing what it is like for those who fill their lives up with things that take the place of God, warning them that all of that really just won’t really do the trick, and giving them the reality-check of what it’s like when we don’t leave any room in our life for God.

And still, this is not grounds for us to determine who is on which side of things. Because if we are honest with ourselves, and if we take the time to really know each other, the truth is that we are all a mix of blessed and woe-ed, happy in God and distracted by the world. No heart achieves perfect sanctification without being fully reunited with God on the other side of the grave, and no soul is completely cast out without first meeting God and having a chance to reconcile, face to face.

Each of us will know pain and hunger and meet God there. Happy day. Each of us will look for comfort in the size of our retirement accounts and find that our savings doesn’t save us. Yikes.

Each of us will live complicated, beautiful, messy lives, and hopefully we learn sooner rather than later how to draw more from the spirit of God and rely less on the things of this world. Hopefully, we realize it’s a happier day when we let God’s grace and Jesus’s way fill our emptiness; hopefully, we remember it’s a harder road with more dead ends when we are distracted by ourselves.

And, dear God, help us to remember that our salvation is not tangled up in all of that. Help us to remember that as we work through life and hit bumps and make U-turns and take the high road and take the low road, we are not working our way to receiving your blessing or your curse, because where we stand with God is based on God’s action in our lives, and not the other way around, and that work has already been done.

If we pay attention here in Luke, we noticed Jesus came down, level with the people, and out of his own power, he heals the people. They were cured. Then he lets them know the complicated reality of this life.

And if we pay attention to our story, we remember that Jesus came down from his place with God, leveled himself with us as one of us, and out of his own power in conquering his own death, he cured us of ours, too. And even so, we live these messy lives.

And what Jesus did for us cannot be undone because of our wrongdoing, nor can it be secured because of right doing. Being united to him in our baptism, nothing separates us from the once-and-for-all-ness of God saving God’s people.

And that doesn’t mean we are saved from being both saints and sinners, both beautiful and broken, a mix of yay and the oy-vey. But it does mean that we can let go of any existential angst about our place before God, and it means that we can let go of figuring out everyone else’s. And it means that, instead, we can focus on living more fully into the happiness that comes with being emptied of ourselves and filled with the spirit, and seek to see that same happiness, that deep blessedness, fill the corners of this earth and the crevices of every human heart. Amen.

The Rev. Kilpy Singer