This sermon was never preached to a congregation. I wrote it for practice for the Feast of the Birth of the BVM 2021 and preached it over Zoom to a friend.

Gospel: Luke 6:20-26
Epistle: Colossians 3:1-11

“Woe to us”, says Jesus.

A difficult start to a sermon, but one that seems to be necessary. We are the rich, full, laughing ones to whom Jesus says woe. You’re either hearing this over Zoom or reading it on my blog, which drastically increases your odds of being —globally speaking— rich, full, and happy. So, Jesus says emphatically, woe to you.

One of my teachers at vicar school had a question to ask of texts that he would preach on: “What is the good news in this?” because if you haven’t found the good news, you aren’t preaching the gospel.

Since this is a sermon, let’s try and find the good news in the passage.
The good news seems to be directed to the poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed. How then, can this be good news to us?

One tempting way to make it good news is to become one of those people to whom Jesus promises blessing. This verges on masochism though, and encourages us to present our faith in such ways as to deliberately provoke and upset those who hear. This doesn’t seem to be in line with Jesus’ teachings. How else then, can we hear this good news?

We could try and alter our perceptions so that we find ourselves in those categories without anything different actually happening to us. This seems to be the route taken by many affluent, comfortable Christians with persecution complexes. It simply isn’t the case that we English Christians are being persecuted in any real sense. To claim so is to warp our perception so dangerously, that we lose sight of those who really are poor, hungry, and weeping.

“What then, is the good news?”, my preaching teacher asks. I would offer this:

Blessing is coming. Blessing is coming to the poor, the hungry, and the weeping. We who have wealth and privilege can either be part of that blessing, or we can get in the way of it. We cannot stay neutral on this. If we, the rich, full, and laughing, read these words and do nothing to bless the poor, hungry, and weeping, we make a lie out of the Gospel.

We can get in the way of it by aggressively insisting on our own persecution, or by idly standing by and pretending we’re in the blessed category, or we can be part of the blessing that is coming.

I’m not talking about some top-down blessing either. We don’t get to retain our comfort and be part of this blessing. This blessing doesn’t occur, leaving intact the existing unjust structures. Jesus is very clear: woe to us. We have to genuinely draw alongside those with less privilege than ourselves. We have to be good allies and find the ways in which we can leverage our privilege —often at personal cost— to become the blessing of the coming Kingdom. We have to partake in the woe that our siblings feel now, so that they can be blessed.