According to Luke Jesus had just spent the whole night in prayer. In morning he found himself surrounded by people. Some where already sold on him; some were still making up their mind. All of them had heard of Jesus’ power and how all you had to do was get near him and the demons would fly right out of you.

If you had a fever he could make it go away and if your leg didn’t work he could fix it. Some said he could even help your business. There was a story going around about Peter and Andrew taking him out in their own boat and they caught more fish than they could haul into the boat.

So everyone was crowding in on him. He didn’t seem to mind. Sure, it wore on him but he gave himself to them anyway. Then he sat down and asked them to sit down as well. He had something he wanted to say to them. What came out of his mouth were those things people call the Beatitudes.

It was a common enough form. People had heard them all their lives. A simple two-part thing summing up common knowledge about how to live the best life. In their most generic form they go something like this:

“Blessed are you who have IRAs you won’t go hungry in your later years.

Blessed are you who floss for you shall keep your teeth.. . . That kind of thing.

So, the form of what Jesus was saying was familiar to them But the content Jesus used to fill this familiar form rocked them – it blew them away.

He said, “Blessed are you who are poor ?
Blessed are you who are hungry
Blessed are you who weep now
Blessed are you when people hate you, or revile you or exclude you . . “

Hearing this was like being handed a glass of lemonade, sipping it and finding that it’s really vinegar. It was a shocking substitution of bad things for good

Blessedness, according to Jesus, was equated with those things people were doing their best to avoid: poverty, hunger, grief, even hatred. And in every case Jesus made those equations stronger by tacking on a reversal of fortune:

Blessed are you who are poor -- for yours is the kingdom of God

Blessed are you who are hungry now -- for you shall be filled

Luke, unlike Matthew, adds to the beatitudes a few “woeitudes.” These were mirror images of the beatitudes. In which woe is equated with what people do their best to achieve: wealth, food, laughter, esteem.

So, in the same way Jesus made the bad things sound good, he now makes the good things sound bad. Now, since you and I are so used to hearing these sayings the surprise and the edge they had originally is missing. We can’t hear it.

But if he had said: “Blessed are you who have cancer for you shall be made whole,”
Or, “Blessed are you whose prayers are not answered for you shall see God face to face.

And on the flip side – “Woe to you who drive Volvos (which, incidentally I happen to drive) for you shall walk on foot” or, “Woe to you with college degrees for you have already received your reward,” we’d get it. We’d get the edge.

Of course the impact of these woes and blessings has everything to do with who you are. If you’re hungry this Jesus stuff sounds pretty good. If you are well fed it’s a different ball game.

So what I’m saying is that when we hear such “good news” we normally file it with all that other nice Christian advice that no one we know personally will ever follow.

But what I want you to know is that these sayings have nothing whatever to do with advice. Jesus is NOT telling people what he thinks they should do. When Jesus gives advice it’s hard to miss.
He says stuff like, “why worry; behold the lilies of the field. . . .
Love your enemies, bless those who curse you. THAT’S ALL ADVICE.

The beatitudes are not advice. In the Beatitudes Jesus is just describing different kinds of people hoping that his listeners will recognize themselves. And then he makes a promise to all of them that the way things are now, in the present, will not be the way things will always be.

Life is, as I have said before, like a great WHEEL OF FORTUNE. It just keeps moving
Jesus’ point is simply that those at the top with the wind blowing in their hair will have their turn at the bottom. And those at the bottom in the mire will one day fly with the eagles. They may not think so. Being at the bottom is debilitating, but things change even when you are there in the pit.

So, this teaching is not ADVICE. It is not even JUDGEMENT! It is simply the truth about life, produced by someone who empathizes with everyone, no matter where they find themselves on the great wheel.

What trips us up about this is the blessing and woe language. Whenever we hear words like blessing and woe we automatically think: REWARD and PUNISHMENT.
And we think, “Gee, Jesus would say that something’s wrong if we aren’t on the bottom.” That’s not the case.

Barbara Brown Taylor who put me on to this idea that Jesus is not Ann Landers, has said, “The beatitudes do not tell us what to do. They tell us who we are, and more importantly they tell us who Jesus is.”

If someone had come out to hear Jesus because they thought Jesus was a winning ticket in the lottery they should go home. What he had to say would not help them get on top of life’s wheel or stay on top forever.

No one gets to stay on top of the wheel forever. Everything that goes around comes around. Now, again this is not advice; it’s not judgment. IT’S JUST THE WAY THINGS ARE.

Of course, it offers hope to those on the bottom.

Anna Kamienska has written a wonderful poem for those on the bottom called,
“ Those Who Carry.”

Those who carry grand pianos
To the tenth floor wardrobes and coffins
The old man with a bundle of wood hobbling beyond the horizon
The woman with a hump of nettles
The lunatic pushing her baby carriage
Full of empty vodka bottles
They all will be raised up
Like a seagull feather like a dry leaf
Like eggshell scraps of street newspapers

Blessed are those who carry
For they will be raised.

This poem echoes for me a defining moment of my life. During one year in my time in seminary I took a job as furniture delivery man in Marin County. It was hard work. But the day that was most demanding for me was a day when we went into San Francisco to deliver a hide-a-bed. We took it in to an apartment in a project somewhere and, of course the apartment was on the top floor and there was no elevator. We had to carry this hide-a-bed (made of iron) up the fire escape, our floors. I was on the bottom. When we got to the outside door on the top floor the words, “Kill Whitey” were spray painted on the wall. They live in my memory. I remember thinking, “Well, I can only go up from this moment.”

Blessed are those who carry grand pianos to the tenth floor, for they will be raised.

I was never a stranger to hard manual labor growing up. In fact, it got to be kind of an issue for me when I got to high school. I was always painting or roofing, or mowing lawns for money. But I had a friend named Paul who lived around the corner from me in our comfortable (but not fancy) California suburb. My friend, Paul’s mother, had gone to Stanford University. His father had not and there was a feeling in their house that I picked up that his mother had under-married. But Paul would fix that for them. He was going to go to Stanford. That was decided before he was born. Paul was not allowed to do manual labor. He was fine with that, actually.

He did things that didn’t occur to me to do. He spent the entire week before the SATs at home studying for them. Studying? I didn’t get that you could actually study for them. Bit then I lived totally outside of his world. Yeah, my parents wanted me to go to college, but that was all they said. “You’re going to go to college.” They never did.
And I went to Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. A little Presbyterian school some friends of mine had gone to and loved. There was nothing special about it. It was just a generic church related college. And it was easy to get into. You just applied and paid the tuition.

I went there at a good time. Desperate to survive, they had taken a chance and hired a very progressive leader – an executive with North American Rockwell, to run the school. Money was found to bring in many luminaries of the day. It was a great day.

Now, in a school that took anybody, I found myself, for the first time in my life, to be a top rung student. There was no competition. Besides, I’ve always been a late bloomer. My teachers wanted me to be in their classes. I got attention I had never gotten before. That has made all the difference for me. I got a confidence in those years that has never left me.

Since then, whatever I have wanted hard enough to work for, I have gotten; a publication, a prize, a grant for a sabbatical -- it hardly ever misses for me. I don’t know what ever happened to my friend, Paul. I just know that he went to Stanford. I suppose he came out just fine, but had I gone to an Ivy League school or Stanford I think I would have continued to live under the cloud of being just another kid.

I look back at my years of delivering hide-a-beds with a certain gratitude.
But a person’ can react in several ways to his or her past. Listen to this first-person story by a man from San Rafael.

My father is Dutch and grew up in Indonesia when it was a Dutch colony. His family had a huge colonial-style home filled with expensive antiques and art brought over from Europe. They had cars and many valuable books. My grandfather brought home orphaned tigers, bears, and monkeys to raise as pets, and my father’s childhood home was always bustling and full of beauty.

When, during World War II the Japanese invaded the islands. My grandfather
threw the family heirlooms down the well minutes before the Japanese kicked open their door. Everything was confiscated, except for what they could fit into one
suitcase apiece. The Japanese sent their Dutch captives to concentration camps, where prisoners received one cup of rice per day to eat. The women and children went to one camp, and the men to another. When my father turned ten, he was sent to the men’s camp, along with his best friend, who was so heartbroken at being separated from his mother that he stopped talking, drinking, and eating. When he died, the Japanese guards gave my father the contents of the dead boy’s suitcase.

My father was able to trade these toys and clothes for an extra handful of rice a
day. He was also able to get bananas from natives through the fence, and when he became weak, he traded the fruit for lighter work assignments. While others died of starvation, my father stayed alive.

When U.S. troops finally liberated the Dutch prisoners, my father returned to
Holland with only the clothes on his back. He later immigrated to the U.S.,
worked his way through college, married, had three children, and bought a
large house overlooking the Pacific in southern California.

My father is now in his seventies. I visited him a few years ago, while my mother
was on a trip to Europe. When I opened the cupboard in his kitchen, I found rows
of used Styrofoam cups, plastic “sporks,” and neatly stacked fast-food French-fry
boxes. A drawer was filled to the brim with corks.

I was emptying hundreds of corks into the garbage when my father came
in and saw me. He flew into a panic and scooped the corks back out. “You wait,”
he fumed. “One day you’ll need these.”

Exasperated, I shouted, “For what?” “One day, you’ll need to burn the ends
to make charcoal,” he said. “So don’t come running to me when you have nothing to write with!”

Thankfully I have never known absolute poverty, the loss of everything and
everybody familiar, the sort of deprivation that would make someone hoard
corks in a million-dollar house.

True enough. It’s a hard thing to know absolute poverty. And it’s a hard thing, carrying part of the wheel along with you, so that you fill a million dollar house with corks. Better than anything is to make friends with the whole wheel. To use the effort we’d put in on holding it in one place for making peace with the one who created the whole amazing scheme of things.

One more story pf someone who did that and found that only when you do, can you truly savor all the little moments of grace that come to us no matter where we find ourself on the wheel – This one comes from a woman in her 30s.

At 26 I wasn‘t prepared to be hospitalized with lymphoma in my chest, fevers coming and going, after my first round of chemotherapy. It was a week of specialists and blood draws. It was also a week of beloved friends and family taking turns sleeping on the roll out cot, helping me pass the long nights full of doubt and fear. Sometimes I was certain I would die. Other times I was sure that the fear of dying itself would overwhelm me.
It was June in Washington D.C. and I was stir-crazy, but my immune defenses were so low I could not leave my little germ-free room on the oncology floor. One night, I stood a single step outside the door , just to experience a different air, different sights.

And then one day, I was released from the hospital. I will always carry with me the intoxicating dsmell of that humid June day, how I could not get enough of its scent, its heat, its life. I wanted to driunk the air and live for a long time.

Eight years later I am a resident doctor myself. I am sometimes confined for a very different purpose in these white hallways. Whenever someone laments the stifling summer heat outdoors, I remember that day and think what any of us would give for a small breath of precious summer air if we couldn’t have it.

Neither the going up or coming down is in our control. But wherever we find ourselves at a given moment, the grace of God is fully available to us.

Amen