A sermon preached at St. Bede’s Episcopal Church, Los Angeles on February 17, 2019

SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, Year C: Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26

The Psalmist says, “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, . . .

They are like trees planted by streams of water, . . .

everything they do shall prosper.”

Jesus says, “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.

Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.”

The prophet Jeremiah says, “The heart is devious above all else;

it is perverse—

who can understand it?”

We have an interesting collection of texts here—I almost said “interesting conflictof texts.” These texts—from the Psalm, from Luke, from Jeremiah—put us right in the middle of one of the most basic debates in scripture. And it concerns a topic of fundamental importance for our lives.

Let me start with the Psalmist here, who’s echoing an idea that’s found in many passages of scripture: “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked. . . /They are like trees planted by streams of water . . . /everything they do shall prosper.” Put more baldly: Be good and everything will be just fine. It’s not true, in fact. Virtue doesn’t guarantee prosperity, doesn’t even protect us from our enemies. The virtuous are not spared the sufferings of humanity at large. 

One Psalmist, the author of Psalm 37, stretched the idea to absurd lengths: “I have been young and now I am old, /but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, /or their children begging bread” (v.26). I remember once standing next to a rabbinical student at a synagogue service and noticing that he fell silent during that verse. When I asked him about it later, he said, “I’m still young, and I already know it’s not true.” 

The idea isn’t just untrue. It can actually lead to a corollary that’s not only wrong but vicious. We may begin to think that, if prosperity is evidence of virtue, then the rich and powerful must be very good people. People have fallen into it again and again in human history. It’s still very much with us today—along with its opposite, the assumption that the rich are all intrinsically vicious, also untrue. In reality, there is no guaranteed relationship between the two.

And yet, there’s a genuine insight here. True righteousness—I don’t just mean respectability, just keeping your nose clean and going to church on Sunday, but a life shaped by the great commandments: the love of God and the love of neighbor—true righteousness is good both for those who practice it and for all the world around them. It won’t guarantee an easy path through life. But it fosters in us an integrity of soul and spirit that is the only foundation for true human happiness and it gives us the opportunity for deep and humane relationships with other people. True righteousness helps give us a life worth living in the context of a world worth living in. 

I’m talking about a kind of life that practices honesty, that takes some responsibility for one’s community, that cares for the future of the world in which we live, exercises generosity toward those in need, sees wealth not as a goal in itself but as a means to a more humane life for all. It is the opposite of the dog-eat-dog, money-is-the-measure-of-all-things, celebrity-is-true-greatness, boastful, grasping, stingy, angry world we seem to be living in of late. Think what a difference it makes when we do find public leaders who “have not walked in the counsel of the wicked”!

So the Psalmist is onto something. We make the society we live in and it, in turn, makes us. Which would you choose? A society where you have to be on guard at all times or one that is more inclined to share than to grab? What the Psalmist is offering us may not be a law of economics. But it is a recipe for a world worth living in. 

Still, Jesus almost seems to be turning the Psalmist’s words upside down when he tells the crowd in Luke’s Gospel that not prosperity, but their poverty, their hunger, their tears are the path into that world. “Yours,” he says to them, “is the kingdom of God.” Why the shift?

In part, Jesus is attacking the misconception that we already mentioned: if the virtuous are guaranteed to prosper, why, then, the prosperous must be virtuous, mustn’t they? Even the Psalmists know how wrong that is, and we could find dozens and dozens of places in the Psalms where the writer is complaining to God that the wicked have all the power and money in the world and the righteous are in desperate need of help. What’s worse, the wicked make a big show of how pious they are, boast about their virtues, and show their contempt for the righteous. We know more than we might wish to know, nowadays, about how the wicked may hide behind a show of religion—whether sexual abusers in clerical collars or Evangelical preachers playing hard-ball politics in the name of Jesus in order to make life difficult for those who disagree with them. 

But Jesus tells us, in these Beatitudes, that we’re more likely to reach the truly blessed human life, the life of the tree growing by the waterside, the life that he calls “the kingdom of heaven,” if we have known something about suffering. Why would that be? 

Prosperity, in itself, so easily lulls human beings into exalted notions of our own goodness, our superior understanding, our strength. We think we have full control over our own lives, that we are self-made. And a self-made being has no reason to care about others, especially those who are less prosperous and therefore, obviously, less deserving. The great commandments, the love of God, the love of neighbor begin to have compelling force for us as we realize that we all belong to one another, draw on one another, need one another, depend on one another. It’s our moments of poverty, of hunger, of weeping that help us learn that and stay conscious of it. 

So, here we have two sides of an argument that you will find running from one end of the scriptures to the other. And that’s because it’s an issue with deep roots in the human soul and spirit. It’s not enough just to split the difference and say, “Well, I guess sometimes prosperity is a bad thing, sometimes poverty and suffering can do us some good.” No, deep down, we want to believe that we can control it all—and we can skip the suffering part. 

Jeremiah points us to the real problem in those alarming words from our first reading this morning:

The heart is devious above all else;

it is perverse—

who can understand it?

He’s talking about our power of self-deception. The heart so longs to feel worthy, to feel capable, to feel in control, to imagine itself secure in its little castle. It is skilled in hiding from anything that might question all that. We so much want to feel invulnerable—and we’re so good at protecting that feeling. 

Without some experience of suffering, without interruptions of our prosperity, we may find ourselves powerless against our own devious and perverse hearts. It’s our moments of weakness that remind us that we are creatures made to live not just by our own excellence, our own talents, our own prosperity, but by the mutuality of a life of love. From that weakness, true righteousness, the righteousness of love, can grow. The devious heart can learn honesty. The tree planted by streams of water can grow. And the life of kingdom of heaven, the life of love for God and neighbor—can become a reality even in the awkward and sometimes deeply discouraging age we are living in.