And here I thought that preaching, and reflecting on the gospel, in our changed and changing context through the ups and downs and losses of the COVID-19 pandemic was tough.  How little I knew…

Because, while we continue to experience the cost to Canadian families and communities of 5 million cases of COVID in this country, the nearly 60,000 deaths, and those still contending with long-COVID… the fact is that there is no prospect of a vaccine on the horizon for the kind of thinking behind the invasion of Ukraine bringing war to Europe, for the slaughter in Gaza, threats of annexing Canada, or for the pervasive callous, indifferent, ruthless new template for political leadership and economic insatiableness seen in countries on every continent – and picking up speed over the last month in the US.  One Canadian columnist, who is not known for hyperbole, wrote this weekend, “I wonder if we have underestimated the gravity of the situation the democratic world faces… Even now, as the United States hurtles toward autocracy… The United States… has not just stepped outside international law… it is engaged in an all-out assault… It has become an outlaw state.  And in this regard, it is aligning itself with dictatorships.”

A headline this week in The Guardian was succinct:  “The world reshaped, again.”

This is not about an individual, not even one who is President of the United States, with his shock and awe strategy of endless executive orders and saying things that are not just nonsense but are weaponized nonsense…

It is, in fact, a timely challenge.  Because we are finding that, as those working for the common good, for a just society and for peace, mobilize their voices and focus their resources, faith communities have in many ways become numb – caught off-guard, unsure of what to do or say in the face of a re-emerging reactionary and hostile global reality.  Our “job”, as it were, as churches, had for many decades been made easier by the steps taken by democratic, diverse, somewhat progressive societies.  Faced with this new reality we’re finding that maybe we’ve lost our edge, our prophetic clarity, our courage to stand apart.

Does God have a word for our time?  I sense that we aren’t sure.

And how would we know God’s word for us, given that Christians appear to have decided that either every word in the Bible is literally true or none of it is… Or have so accepted a secular worldview that we have emptied the world of mystery and wonder in order to bring the holy into line with scientific measures of truth.  And so, people like us, in the United Church of Canada, are left without a clear word to speak to the powers – we’ve lost our voice.

We lost confidence in the story, and its power to inspire, to transform, to give us hope.  We lost the courage to believe in wonder, and awe, and in the spirit of God alive and dancing in our midst.  We lost the courage to say no to those who seek to deceive us, to oppress us, fool us, divide us.  In an age when calls to make Christendom great again are growing deafening… we have lost a powerful tool in undermining and overturning that twisted picture of the world and the way things work because we have let go of the belief that God among us still has something to say.  Still speaks.

Jesus, too, is at a critical turning point as he confronts the powers of his day with a new word from God.  In Luke’s alternative telling of the story, less well known than Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount version, Jesus has just spent the night on a mountainside, praying, before choosing his inner circle of twelve followers.  As morning dawns, he and the newly called twelve descend from the mountain onto the plain – he brings them, and us, onto this level place, an expansive place, to find a crowd waiting.  People in need have come… seemingly from everywhere! And Jesus — in his element, power literally pouring out of him — heals them all. Everyone.  I’d never noticed that.

When I think of the healing stories in the gospels, I think of stories of individuals – the woman who reaches out and grabs the hem of Jesus’ garment; the man whose friends lower him down to Jesus through the roof, and so on.  But here the crowd gathers, Jews and Gentiles from across the land, with every type of physical and mental ailment… and all of them are healed.

Jesus alleviates suffering.  He does not value misery for its own sake.  Pain, in and of itself, is neither holy nor redemptive in this story.  Jesus’ ministry is all about healing, abundance, liberation, and joy.

So, first things first.  Healing.  Then teaching.  Standing on this level place with the crowd, Jesus tells his would-be followers what life in God’s upside-down kingdom looks like.  What comes is an in-our-face, hope-filled, faith-rattling declaration of Jesus’ central teaching – a vision of a peaceable and just world that is the way God would have things be.  It is a dramatically different way of looking at the world.  And it’s difficult for most of us to fathom, still.

Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, sad, and expendable.  Woe to you who are rich, full, happy, and popular.  This week’s Gospel in a nutshell.  Boom.

These words do not align well with the values of a capitalist society, or our personal goals for a fulfilling life, and for happiness.  It’s hard to hear for anyone who believes that happiness is a worthy goal in life – and one that God would surely wish for us.

We’d rather be rich than poor, rather be full than hungry.  I’d rather laugh than weep.  And I’d rather be spoken well of than be hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed.

Do we imagine that Jesus is saying to the poor, the hungry, the broken…. There, there now, it’s okay, your reward is in heaven.  No.  When he begins speaking, Jesus’ words aren’t prescriptive.  He isn’t imposing rules on how to behave.  His “sermon” is not advice at all.  And it’s not judgement.  It is simply the truth about the way things work.  Jesus is describing the pattern of our lives.  Our lives are complicated.  They involve blessing and woe, cycling back and forth in the living of our days:  poverty, hunger, weeping, and insult; richness, fullness, laughing, and being spoken well of.

What Jesus does, is to lay out his vision of a new community.  How we choose to live has consequences, he says.  And what is clear in our world, in this time, is that when the gospel becomes bad news to the poor the oppressed, the broken-hearted, and the imprisoned, and good news to the proud, self-righteous and privileged instead… then it is no longer the gospel of Jesus.

Jesus’ words and healing actions connect wholeness, finitude, struggle, and mortality with being blessed.  The blessed know their need.  They immerse themselves in creative and nurturing interdependence because they know they are not in control.  They can’t use their privilege to fly over the valley of the shadow of death, they must walk through it – with God and others as companions and support.  The person most pitied is the rugged individualist, needing nothing and no one.  It’s an illusion felt by billionaires, presidents, the 1% – until life confronts them with the realization that mutual interdependence nurtures, rather than blunts, personal agency.

The virtues of interdependence, of mutuality, are humility, gratitude, compassion, empathy, generosity, and love.  Connected with one another, the energy of the vine flows through us, we are nourished as we nourish each other, and there is always room for one more at the table.

The beatitudes do not tell us what to do.  They tell us who we are, and they tell us who Jesus is.  As the US novelist and Presbyterian minister, Frederick Buechner writes of Jesus’ upside-down world:  “The world says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and Jesus says, ‘There is no such thing as your own business.’  The world says, ‘Follow the wisest course and be a success,’ and Jesus says, ‘Follow me and be crucified.’  The world says, ‘Law and order,’ and Jesus says, ‘Love.’ The world says, ‘Get’ and Jesus says, ‘Give.’  In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks they can follow him without being a little crazy too is labouring less under a cross than under a delusion.”

So, what are we to do?  Tragedies in life are not signs of divine judgment, nor is wealth a sign of blessing.  Good and bad things happen to both good and bad people.  Nothing is as it seems, Jesus insists.  The playing field is far more equal than we think — in God’s way of doing things, the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed.  “Blessed are the poor,” overturns the hierarchy, the structure of blessing.

But, if I turn again to our current dark times ahead moment… Jesus’ words on that level place are a statement that God takes sides and loves with a love that is not impartial.  If we are going to be with this God, Jesus implies, we’ve got to get down on God’s level ground, on the plain.  In 1934, Confessing Christians in Nazi Germany who opposed the German Christian movement, that had corrupted the German Protestant churches by making them subservient to the state and its Nazi ideology, adopted the Barmen Declaration. I n it, every credimus, “We believe…” is followed by a damnatis, “We reject…”  At a time when the German church was called to say “No!” it had lost the theological and ethical means to know where there was something that demanded rejection.  They lost the courage, rising up from a living experience of God’s Spirit alive in the world… to say “No!”  Churches today too struggle to hear what God’s Spirit is saying.  We don’t have much of an idea of how to listen because we have lost much of a sense of God speaking to us – not in cartoon word bubbles in a cloud, but communicating… fluently, purposefully.

“Jesus came down from the mountain with them and stood on a large area of level ground.”

A few years ago, the English theologian and priest, Samuel Wells, wrote a book called A Nazareth Manifesto, where he proposes that the heart of the gospel is that “God is with us.”  It’s not a leap for those familiar with the United Church, because the words “God is with us, we are not alone,” conclude our creed.  But Sam Wells is about something more than an affirmation of faith.  The title of Wells’ book – A Nazareth Manifesto – is based on the fact that Jesus spent about 90% of his life—the part not written about in the gospels—in Nazareth, simply being with people.  Apparently miraculously born, son of God, angel choirs, magi, the whole bit and then… he’s just hanging out with people.

We may still have a notion that being with God, hearing God speak in these days, means getting elevated, looking up, engaging in some superstitious expectation that a voice will sound like thunder, and make everything clear.  Being “with” God means accompanying.  Being present, in the everyday moments in life that are filled with meaning – not a clear-cut announcement of a way, a path, an outcome… but an attunement that informs, shapes, and nurtures a knowing that is deep and certain.  The knowing that comes with love, that speaks truth fearlessly – a knowing that is felt in the marrow of our bone.

Being with, in a world of cruel inequality and violence, also means – for one example from Jesus’ words in Luke – being with the poor, which is so much more difficult than working for the poor.  It means experiencing in one’s own life something of what it is to be poor, and oppressed, and disempowered.

This is the way God works.  Not by blessing us with prosperity, or cursing us with poverty, but being with us in the times of hunger and plenty, good reputation and slander, affirmation and self-doubt, weaving it together into a wholeness that is humble, open, and also courageous and resilient.

We think this world is just the way things are.  We think this world is normal. But it’s not normal.  It is not right.  It is not the way God intended.  Everything is upside-down and backwards.  We live in a bent – and a beautiful! – world.

The first month of this President’s term have not shown his strength.  He may believe he has the power he is claiming.  That would be a mistake.  But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of the world – and us – to believe he has power he does not have.

God is with, us.  That’s the voice that is speaking that we need to learn to hear.  Again.

May it be so.