The Rev. Josephine Robertson
All Saints, Bellevue
Feb 13th 2022
Readings
I love Luke, whoever was the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts was a consummate story teller. The whole of Luke’s account of Jesus has been a spreading melody from Mary’s prophetic song:
“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.”
Luke’s Gospel lives into the hope that Mary’s song is possible. That God’s dream doesn’t include kings and subjects, doesn’t look like a hierarchical org chart. In Luke’s vision of God’s Kingdom there is no mountain top revelation, no pronouncement from on high.
Instead there is a song of hope, rising up from the valleys. There is a teacher seated on a level place. This teacher, sent from God does not look down on anyone.
Jesus echoes his mother’s words. I like to think he was raised on her song. Because today he sits down among a multitude, power flowing freely. Notice: unlike the healing of the women with a hemorrhage of blood here people touch him, and power goes out of him and there is no questioning, no surprise. Jesus expects that all will come and drink of the well, all will come and partake of God’s power, all will come and be healed.
And that’s the scene as we join the story this morning. I imagine we have just come upon Jesus, on that wide open place, sitting on the ground with a healed child in his lap. Because the next moment he looks up at the disciples. Literally in the Greek, he focuses his eyes (ophthalmoi) on the disciples. He sees them.
We talk a lot of being able to see God in Jesus. Of how God is revealed (this is Epiphany after all) in Jesus’s life and teaching. But here, in this story and in this flat level place Jesus sees us.
There is something about being really seen. Not the face we offer to the world; the face inside our skin, the private face we might not have even shown ourselves in years. Most of us are afraid of that self being seen. Whole industries are built around helping us present the face we want to the world. And yet, we are seen. God focuses on us.
Here is a Jesus who stands on our level, who touches us, who walks among us and who sees us. And our worst fears do not come true. When we are seen, we are not rejected. God does not wrinkle up God’s nose and turn away. Jesus does not throw up his hands in disgust and head off somewhere with a better sort of people.
Jesus gives it to us plain to turn a particularly bad pun. Jesus sees our hearts. He sees the shame and judgement that all too often accompanies poverty, illness, and hunger. And he promises that God will heal those things. He sees the false pride, the gluttony, and the hardness of heart that walks hand in hand with worldly wealthy, plenty, and success. And he promises that God will heal those things, he does not promise that this healing will be comfortable.
Jesus sees us, and he gets how our hearts work. It has been said that for those with privilege equality feels like oppression. For those who have gorged themselves on rich food while others starved just enough might indeed feel like going hungry. For those who mocked, taunted, and rejected others? The full knowledge of what we have done may indeed make us mourn and weep, this is the way to healing.
Years ago someone did the math, that Mark Zuckerberg could end homelessness in America and still be a billionaire multiple times over, these days you could add in ending child poverty, and hunger and he would still be a multiple billionaire. It is that obscene imbalance, that divide that Jesus sees on that wide plain. And none of us are exempt, with our warm houses, and our full fridges. But here is where God and human beings diverge.
Human beings get revenge. Human beings want to inflict the same suffering on others that we experience ourselves. It’s what every oppressing power throughout history has been most terrified of. But our scriptures today paint a different pictures. The wealthy, the full, the powerful, yes there is woe coming, yes they have a reckoning to face but it isn’t the wicked who God rejects, it is their ways.
The way of the wicked is doomed. God does not doom people, God dooms the corrupt twisted ways we build our world. Because God sees us, straight into our hearts. God sees the fear that keeps us stuck, and loves us enough to want us to be better.
When God sees us, God really sees us. All the broken bits we obsess over, all the hurt, fear, anger, or bitterness or whatever it is we’ve got buried down deep. But God sees more than that. God sees the bright light of love God made us out of.
God sees every bit our potential, every bit of our beauty. God sees what we were, and are, and will maybe be. And because God has seen us fully, because God has known us fully: God chooses to see less than we see. To see us spotless and beloved.
Jesus’ sermon on the plain shows us the world in which we live. But more than any sermon: what Jesus does shows us what could be. He shows us a world where the sick and made well, where we all stand on the same level (even he), where we are seen and known and safe.
We expect the sermon on the mount, Jesus above us, and we humans arrayed at various heights all very orderly and proper. The sermon the plain though, that is the promise of Mary, Isaiah, and the other prophets. And it is our invitation.
In the challenge and invitation of the Gospel remember: God sees us, all of us, and loves us.