Then he looked up at his disciples and said: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Luke 6:20

This will sound worse than it was, but a couple of years ago I personally experienced religious warfare for the first time. Mel Gibson's blockbuster hit The Passion of the Christ had just been released, and I mentioned to an evangelical friend of mine that I was not interested in seeing it.

He was stunned, even a little offended. The interesting thing is that neither one of us had actually seen the film, but our opinions about it quickly hardened into spiritual concrete. He was convinced that the movie portrayed the heart of what Jesus was all about; indeed, that it portrayed for the whole world to see the extent to which God went to reveal to us God's love for us.

Privately I wondered how sending one's only begotten Son to be beaten and bruised and eventually killed could be construed as an act of love. But I respect that a great many people understand the crucifixion in that way, and that this is very sacred ground, so I did not express that thought.

Rather, I simply noted that I disagreed with Mr. Gibson. And that in my view if you wanted to know what Jesus was about, then you ought to make a movie about his ministry and his teachings. If you want to see what God's love looks like in action, what God's love looks like incarnate, then that's where you should look, to his life.

I'll confess it later occurred to me how ironic it was that we should be fighting about what Jesus was about, given his teachings. Given what he says that we should all be about.

And that starts here. This section of Luke --- the so-called Sermon on the Plain, and it's equivalent in Matthew --- the Sermon on the Mount (and, yes, we will come back to that difference in a minute), these passages are the clearest and best and most extensive expressions we have of Jesus' teaching.

For this material is not a sermon by someone else about Jesus. It's not a commentary written about him, or some scholar's interpretation of what he was about. These are Christ's own words. Red letter words, as Jim Wallace calls them, after those red-letter sections in some Bible translations.

If you want to know what Jesus was centrally about, this is the best place to start. If you want to know what his passions were - the passions of the Christ, as opposed to the passions other people feel about him - they are documented unambiguously here.

And they are not at all what you would expect from God's own emissary. Not if you believe, as almost everyone did in the first century, that God favored the rich and was on the side of the powerful.

For the hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people gathered there that day, these words we've just read would have been dumbfounding, a total and complete shock--like Bill Gates announcing on live television, Blessed are those who sell their computers and revert to a life free of technology. Just incomprehensible.

But to us, to modern readers, there's no surprise here. Earlier in Luke, Mary's Magnificat is the first hint that something's up, that something new is afoot. That the God who is about to be revealed in person on earth has a different set of values from the values of those who've been making the rules so far.

My soul magnifies the Lord, Mary sings, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savoir. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.

Shortly thereafter, as we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus gives us his own vision for his ministry, his own account of who he's fixin' to be and what he's fixin' to do: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives . . . and to let the oppressed go free.

But it doesn't stop there. His fame is spreading and now a crowd has gathered to hear him. It's like the first-ever Billy Graham crusade. A huge crowd has gathered to hear a sermon by this powerful new preacher. They've come to be healed and saved and set free, and here's what he says:

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh."

They are among the most confounding words Jesus ever utters. No one has really ever agreed on how to understand them, how to respond to them. Some people make needlepoint pillow covers with the Beatitudes inscribed on them. Some people read them and start homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Some people hear these words and turn and walk away, never to look back again.

C. S. Lewis once asked if Christianity is hard or easy. George MacDonald, one of his British cohorts, said that it's impossible to know, since Christianity as Jesus envisioned it has never really been tried.

And you're tempted to think the reason for that starts here. Blessed are the poor? And the hungry? The things most of us spend most of our lives trying to avoid - these are good things? In that case why would anyone try?!

Actually, it's not really fair to ask whether the Beatitudes are hard or easy. For in the end, they are not ethical commands. The ethical commands come in a minute, and they get hard really fast, starting with the command to love our enemies.

But the Beatitudes themselves are not ethical teachings. It's not like you have to do these things to get your license to follow Jesus.

They are, instead, pronouncements of blessing. And they use a form that anyone in that time and place would have recognized, for this kind of pronouncement was commonplace in Jesus' day.

Blessed are those who hold their tongue, for they will not have to apologize later.

Blessed are those who invest in olives and goats, for they shall retire well and early.

So these pronouncements are familiar on the one hand. But of course on the other hand they are totally, radically and profoundly unfamiliar. In our time, it's old news to say that Jesus turns the values of the world on their head, but that is what he has done here. He has pronounced as good, as blessed, states of being that most normal people try to avoid.

How is that good news? How can this be gospel?

For starters, there's one thing we've got to be clear about. There is no romance here. If you think Jesus idealizes poverty, read again. It's evident from this sequence that Jesus understands exactly what he's talking about. Those who are poor are likely gonna weep. Those who are poor are likely gonna go hungry. He's clear as a bell about it, and makes no effort to idealize these uncomfortable states of being.

The only question is can we take it? Can we hear these words and live with them?

And the truth is that not many of us can. Happily, we're not alone. Luke's own gospel-writing counterpart, Matthew, apparently could not.

Listen to what Matthew does to soften the blow. Blessed are the poor, in spirit. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Maybe if these blessings are about spiritual poverty and spiritual hunger, well, then maybe more people will listen. Who isn't hungry spiritually, after all?

But that's not Luke's take. In his version, Jesus makes no attempt to spiritualize these states of being. Blessed are the hungry, period.

It's interesting, too, that Matthew and Luke locate this startling homily in different places. In Luke, it's the Sermon on the Plain; in Matthew, it's the Sermon on the Mount.

That seems like a contradiction, but in fact, the actual site where this sermon is thought to have been preached is both: it's a flat spot at the bottom of a slope, a natural amphitheater.

Sermon on the mount or sermon on the plain, it's sort of both. And that makes sense to me, for I think how you hear these words depends very much on where you stand.

If you stand on the mountaintop, at the top of the heap of power and privilege, you're likely to hear these words one way. You're likely to shake your head in disagreement and disbelief and to become one of the rich As Mary sang about who have been sent empty away .

But if you're on the down low, if you live out there in the flat country, or sit at the back of the bus, well that's different. If you're literally hungry, or literally thirsty cause water's out of your reach, cause you lived in Mississippi in 1950, or South Africa in 1980 and the water fountains--well, the best ones were for white folk and you're not white--then imagine how you might hear this sermon.

Is it any wonder that multitudes came out to hear these astonishing words? I'll bet Rosa Parks couldn't have been Rosa Parks without them, and that Dr. King couldn't have been Dr. King without them. Same with Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Even Mahatma Gandhi, who found a little later in this sermon the very key to his non-violent revolution.

You have no idea how much I wish I could get this point across to students these days---that every single one of these spiritual giants traced their inspiration to this revolutionary sermon.

I can't also help but wonder, maybe Anna Nicole Smith would not have become Anna Nicole Smith if these words had somehow gotten a hold of her before the love of money and fame got a hold of her.

Yes, but what about us? If these teachings are not ethical commands, what are we to do with them? And if we are rich, which, frankly, most of us are relative to the rest of the world, then how should we hear them?

Well, maybe in the end they're not meant to tell us not so much about ourselves. Maybe they're meant to tell us about God. So that when I look in these texts, I don't see who I am, rather I see who Jesus is, and what he's about.

And if that's so, then maybe our job is not to run from these haunting words, but to be changed by them. To let them change how we see God and how we see the world.

I was on a trip to India once and our bus stopped at one of the major attractions. As always happens in India, hordes of children immediately swarmed around the bus. Most of our group saw them as beggars, and walked straight past them with steely resolve.

But a buddy of mine who'd had some experience living among the poor, he saw the kids differently. He got out a ball he'd been carrying and he threw it into the air. Pandemonium ensued! The kids squealed with joy and instantly forgot all about begging for pennies or candy.

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Friends, the poor aren't threats to our personal security or to the national budget. They are God's own treasures, and I believe it's up to us to bless them.

Amen