“I’ve Come by here to Say Blessed are the Poor!”Luke 6:20a NKJV
Then He lifted up His eyes toward His disciples and said: “Blessed are you poor,
Growing up very much in the church tradition when a traditional down-home preacher gets to one of the high points in their message, they can be heard to say something Like I just Came by here today to say.
And today this Holy Wednesday as Jesus is making his way to the cross, I imagine he might have said look Yawl Blessed are the Poor.
Can one imagine Jesus or any of the biblical prophets ever speaking about the poor without compassion and love, anger and outrage, much less complaining that they are not as poor as we thought?
Yet many of America’s Church Leaders and officials have done this without shame or remorse. Many Political Leaders, Pay Day Lenders, and Yes too-big-to fell Bank Cheats have developed ways of making it seem right to rob the Poor for the sake of the rich.
I mean, just recently, we past legislation for Millions of people across this country who are being impacted by the end of the pandemic waivers for Medicaid and the end of the extra SNAP benefits, which for some seniors will mean going from $283 per month down to $23 per month overnight.
Today, this time, of course, we can't take apart all the beatitudes and reflect upon them individually. Each is so important, though: hunger and thirst for justice; be peacemakers -- those who go out to reconcile, to draw back and give up violence; be sincere of heart.
All of these. But today, let's look at what is the foundation for all of them and for the whole value system of Jesus?
I think it's found in the very first one. As Matthew puts it, "Blessed are the poor
Rather than acknowledge the many reasons for poverty that are out of poor people’s control, people tend to blame the poor victims for their plight.
Here again, their practice is counter to the politics of Jesus. I mean how can you blame a poor person for their poverty when here in Florence County 33% of the citizens can’t read above a fifth-grade reading level. 10% can’t read at all.
No matter how downtrodden or degraded a person was, Jesus never condemned the person; he reached out to heal the circumstance or lift the person out of it.
Nor did Jesus ever blame victims for their own abuse and exploitation.
Instead, he blamed their victimizers, as in his Mark 5 indictment of “Legion”—signifying the Roman military occupiers of Israel—as the cause of the young man’s self-destructive impulses rather than any misdeed on the part of the young man himself.
This way, Jesus echoed the biblical prophets, who consistently blamed the powerful for the people's poverty and exhorted their societies to compel those of wealth and power to deal with injustice.
Indeed, in the Sermon on the Mount, rather than blaming poor people for their poverty, Jesus pronounced them “blessed,” not only to counter the devaluation of their worth by the wealthy elites but also to remind the downtrodden and the needy that their poverty was not of their own doing. Neither was it their natural lot in life.
In Luke's Gospel, it just says, "Blessed are the poor," and sometimes people think, "Well, Matthew modified that. Poor in spirit -- that takes a little bit of the edge off of it." But it really doesn't. It simply helps us to realize that when Jesus is talking about "Blessed are the poor," he's talking more about an attitude, a way of knowing one's need for God, which is a disposition of the heart and not simply economic inequality.
I like Blessed Are the Poor and could probably stop right there, But I’ll go on.
Ill: In the summer of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. visited homes in the hamlet of Marks, Mississippi.( not far from where they had the Tornadoes a few weeks ago)
Later he remembered and spoke on the hundreds of children who lacked shoes. A mother told King that her children had no clothes for school. The Nobel laureate wept openly. “They didn’t even have any blankets to cover their children up on a cold night,” he recalled. “And I said to myself, God does not like this.” Then he vowed, “We are going to say in no uncertain terms that we aren’t going to accept it any longer. We’ve got to go to Washington in big numbers.”
Dr King went on to say about American What Jesus Said about Rome and Jerusalem. He said:
America’s sickness was spiritual—and would be terminal, King insisted, unless we experienced a “radical revolution of values.” A shift to the left or the right could not save us; only a movement that changed the moral narrative could refocus our priorities on building a society that honored the dignity of every person. This country had to be born again—not only in budgets and policy decisions but born again in spirit.
I know we have had a bunch of Preaching during this Lent season with a bunch of ideas and ideals, but I want to leave you with this It’s Time to be Born Again.
I had spent some time working on this sermon and ending with explaining the theological differences in saying Happy verse Blessed but forgetting all that at the core. What I think Jesus was saying was you are happy when you are with the poor; in other words, your blessing is with the poor.
There’s this cooking show called High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America in the show Inspired by Dr. Jessica B. Harris's book of the same name, High on the Hog takes this idea to incredible heights, exploring food, culture, and American history in a way that is accessible, powerful, and often emotional. It begins like many food shows, by shopping for ingredients. This is what happens they show how slaves and poor persons took the straps from the table and made meals that were far superior to the main dishes.
Rodney Billups owner of Herman’s who’s food pulls out all the stops, adding pigs feet, oxtails, neck bones butter beans, boiled okra, collard greens to a bar in Nashville.
Made this point about his perception of soul food,” Billups says, “is if it takes a little more time to cook and you put your love and energy into it, then that’s soul food.”
Let’s me clarify every year for thanksgiving we have pulled pork we have a big family everyone come home you cook a whole hog or two few turkeys that’s what you do. That’s the main meal but while the main meal was cooking all night long, though the midnight hours, one of my uncles would start a pot of Perlo Rice simply thawing back meat, some sausage some spices, In a pot to eat while we cooked the food. However over the years Ive come to realize this was the better part of the family tradition scooping down Into the rice pot and basically eating not the high meats but the poor scraps.
Happy Blessed are you when you learn to fest with the scarps, when you can eat with the poor because that’s where your true blessing are with real people with soul food with soul people. That’s what Jesus was teaching that’s what our ministry should be about also.
