Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

Death too often calls the tune to which, sad to say, so many of us feel compelled to take the dance floor.

But I’ve got news for you—regardless of how it looks to you at present or who you think is in charge, Jesus is almost finished with his Lenten journey. And while the path he takes will ultimately lead him to a garbage dump on the edge of town called the “place of the skull,” the truth of the faith we profess is that that dump—which too casually deals in the art of death—is not the final destination.

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Being born blind is the definition of a pre-existing condition. But according to Jesus, it should never be a pretext for finding an excuse for why helping that person to find healing is wrong.

According to today’s Gospel lesson, if you’re more concerned about who doesn’t deserve help than actually helping, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Jesus has a fundamental problem with how you view the world.

You can talk about having compassion for the most vulnerable. But if you spend more time worrying about who should be blamed for their vulnerability than finding ways to protect them, Jesus is going to be something of a disappointment to you.

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He could play it safe—you know, suck up to the religious bigwigs, make friends with the influential political high-rollers. But instead, he seeks out the last, the least, and the lost—because he’s not interested in establishing some kind of stable empire where everybody has to come and kiss his ring because he's so important.

But instead, he drops any ambitions he might have had about being a big shot, walks down the first dark alley he sees, and starts having theological discussions with the invisible folks everybody else would just as soon forget.

But when Jesus ventures down dark alleys looking for those who creep around the edges, he redefines the edges so that the margins are set in the center; and it’s the folks who usually occupy the center who risk finding themselves on the margins.

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But because God loves the world—even with all its fear and distrust, God sent Jesus not to condemn the old world, to throw it on the scrap heap. Instead, according to the translation in your pew Bible, God sent Jesus to “save” the world. The word for salvation is probably better translated “healing” here. In other words, Jesus comes to transform the lower world from above and usher in a new reign, a new realm, a new world that looks like heaven right here on earth.

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In Matthew’s hands, the devil is supposed to be a clever stand-in for Caesar and his empire, who argues that all the kingdoms of the world are his to dispose of as he sees fit.

So, the question posed by this story to the congregation at Antioch struggling with where to put its trust, given the annoying fact of all of Caesar’s persistent and humiliating reminders of who’s in charge, is: Where does the church place its trust?

Does the church trust the old regimes and their systems of domination to solve people’s problems, or does it trust the means of producing equity and abundance available in God’s new realm where power remains in God’s hands and never in the hands of the giant babies who holler like scalded cats to let everyone know they get to be boss?

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Peering into the dark valley ahead—the one Jesus has just announced—the thought of camping out on the mountaintop with the Palestinian Justice League sounds like a pretty safe place to be, doesn’t it?

Ever feel like that?

You’re getting ready to graduate; the kids are getting ready to leave home, or the nurses are prepping you for surgery. As tough as it was in the past, the future seems way scarier. Even if the past was hard, at least you lived through it. You’re not sure you’ll survive what feels like the Zombie Apocalypse coming at you from around the next corner.

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And this is a crucial point to make for people whose purpose for existing requires them to live as agents of God’s love. We’re salt and light. We are who we are, not because the situation calls for it or because of how others treat us, but because through the eyes of the God who created us, we’re already everything we need to be because God made us this way.

And through the eyes of an executed carpenter, we’re able to see a vision of a new world that embraces us—all of who we are … garbage heap and unexcavated treasure. No matter how hard we fight it, we can’t crush it out of existence, and we can’t run far enough away from it.

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So when Jesus says that those who will be blessed are the poor in spirit in God's kingdom, he’s not talking about the fainthearted. He’s talking about those who are actually poor, those who are so far down the economic ladder that their spirits are characterized by the constant despair that they’ll ever be able to go to bed at night without the gnawing horror of hunger to keep them awake.

When Jesus says that the new world God is creating will bless those who mourn, he’s not suggesting that people go out and find things to be sad about—the people whom Jesus grew up with, and lived and worked with, didn’t have to go searching for sadness. On the contrary, the very nature of their existence meant that sorrow, suffering, and grief had already built an evil home among them. No, what Jesus is angling at is that because oppression isn’t what God intended, it should be mourned. And the people who mourn oppression will be blessed because they’ll be part of a new realm set up with them specifically in mind, one that conquers oppression.

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But this new realm Jesus announces is the kind of good news that appeals to everybody else—the other 99%. In fact, the news is so good that, according to Matthew, "Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in [the] synagogues and proclaiming" it—healing the social, physical, and economic disease in the land.

Because this new realm is best exemplified not so much by Jesus' rhetorical gifts but through his traveling about and “curing every disease and every sickness among the people."

In other words, the “kingdom of heaven” concerns itself with healing instead of domination and violence. It seeks out not the most powerful but the people everybody else walks past without noticing—the sick, the poor, the hungry, the houseless, and those who've lived virtually every day with the fear of what tomorrow holds for them.

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