We Should Be Very Careful
February 13, 2022 + Sixth Sunday after Epiphany + Luke 6:17-26 + Seminarian Liz Kuster
I wonder if any of you are familiar with the former radio show, A Prairie Home Companion? From 1974 until 2016, writer Garrison Keillor created and hosted this radio variety show, keeping audiences delighted by music and laughing with comedy skits like “Guy Noir, private eye.” It’s a show dear to my heart as I grew up listening to it. Perhaps the most memorable part–and my favorite part–of the show was the part when Garrison would come out on stage in front of the live theater audience and deliver “The News from Lake Wobegon.” Lake Wobegon was a fictional town whose residents were the inspiration for and whose landscape was the backdrop for almost all of Keillor’s stories.
There’s one story in particular, that Garrison tells that I have been thinking of lately. In this story Garrison describes being a little boy at the Fourth of July Beanfeed and being the sole witness to snow falling on the Fourth of July. And as a boy, he knew, in this miraculous moment that only he saw, God was speaking. And God was calling him to be a prophet.
And Garrison responds to God and says…NO. People don’t like prophets, people HURT prophets. “Prophets have an approval rating of about 5%.” It is not an easy line of work. He would rather be in his line of work: writing stories, creating fiction…you know. Lying. And he has been congratulated by the world for it for many years! Garrison says, ”God was disappointed in me at first, but more and more they’ve come to see it from my point of view.”
But humor aside and despite this absolute rejection to be like a prophet, Garrison does not withhold what he thinks a prophet would say. And he says, “We should be very careful.” And what follows is a critique of prosperity, wasteful abundance, lack of empathy, and war. “America is a country that God has blessed, so much, we have not suffered as other people have.” “We should be very careful,” he says. To reign down death on other people from our comfortable location of privilege is not becoming in God’s eyes. We should be very careful…
I wonder if that warning to be careful could also apply to our scriptural readings today. Because today the Word is full of curses and woe untos and blessings. In Jeremiah, “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength…Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.” Here in our Gospel passage in Luke, “Blessed are you who are poor…woe to you who are rich” and “Blessed are you who weep now…Woe to you who are laughing now” We should be very careful, when scripture as scripture so often does, sets us up with this binary.
Perhaps you’ve been sitting here wondering which end of this binary you fall on. Am I blessed? Or am I woed unto? In his story, Garrison calls us “blessed” for being such a prosperous country that has not known much suffering. Perhaps we would not describe ourselves as rich; however, relative to the rest of the world, I think we all may be rich here–or at least relatively comfortable. And yet–even the “comfortable” have their own kind of poverty.
Woe unto us for we are comfortable–but wait a second, couldn’t we just as well be blessed because I know that we have mourned, if we aren’t presently mourning. Because I am sure many of us are exhausted. Perhaps to the point that we are too fatigued and overwhelmed to even weep. Because many of us are not happy. I wonder, Is it like a scriptural math equation where x amount of wealth multiplied by Y amount of mourning equals…? Does our misery cancel our comfortability out? Or wonder, are we getting caught up in the binary and missing the point? Are we getting caught up in what seems to be beyond our culture’s practical comprehension about wealth and happiness?
There is a professor of Psychology at Yale, Dr. Laurie Santos,who teaches Yale’s most popular course, “ Psychology and the Good Life” that explores human cognition and cognitive biases that impede better choices that lead to happier lives. On a podcast I recently listened to, she spoke about the world we live in as one that has commodified what it means to be blessed and happy. It is a world of “toxic positivity” in which we are told “treat yourself” and do more “self care” in order to lead more fulfilling lives. But, she says, in study after study on happiness, happier people don’t actually prioritize the media suggested and often capitalistic versions of “self care;” rather, they prioritize care for others. They are volunteering their time. They are donating to charities. They in fact are achieving “self care” through “other care.”
And isn’t that what Jesus is talking about in our scripture today? Care for others? Isn’t that the counter cultural idea that we are being challenged to engage in? If it's one thing that Jesus knows how to do, it is to reject the cultural ideals that we hold onto like idols of promise. The doctrine of social media, of politics, of attractive bodies, of standards of normal and good. Woe to us if we find ourselves false prophets of these religions. Woe to us if living by the letter of the law of these or any religion keeps us from living by the good news of the gospel promise that we are given today. The promise of grace and mercy and hope that we have been freely given by God and that is embodied in the Word, our baptism, and the meal we are about to receive at the table. And the promise of grace and love that we get to embody with all we meet. We should be very careful.
And so today I challenge us to be very careful, that we do not build up our walls of comfort and security too high, that we might isolate ourselves from the rest of the body of Christ. That we are not to be so full of our own joys and pleasures, that we avoid the suffering of others for fear we might let it taint us. That we not let our own good fortune turn us into false prophets. And that we let go of cultural ideas of what it means to be blessed, and enter into relationship with those that Jesus calls blessed. Amen