Domes - Our Monthly Newsletter
Dunbar UCC
February 11, 2007
Luke 6:17-26
Sermon #2
- Two weeks ago we saw how Jesus preached his first sermon to his home town and how the people he grew up with tried to throw him over a cliff. Today, we heard his second recorded sermon. In this one, Jesus is outside, standing on a “level place.” Maybe he wanted to be sure there were no cliffs around. And from the content of the sermon, I imagine that the poor people loved it, but anyone who had money or property was probably looking for a cliff, again, to throw Jesus over.
- It’s a funny thing, in Bible Study, that we were studying the Old Testament for over a year and some of the group was getting tired of all the “negative” stuff in the Hebrew Bible: infidelity, incest, murder, lying. There was the idea that the Jewish Bible was “negative” but the New Testament had the more “positive” themes of love and forgiveness. So we left the Old Testament and studied Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and discovered that the church there was having an incest problem. Oops. OK, then we studied the book in of Acts. We saw Stephen stoned to death, Peter and Paul fighting with each other, disciples stealing from the church and being struck dead. An angel of the Lord struck King Herod and he was eaten by worms and died. Later Paul was stoned, flogged, arrested and imprisoned. The Gospels -- the good news -- are filled with violence. John the Baptist was beheaded. Herod killed all the male children in Bethlehem two years old or under. And after only one sermon, many people wanted Jesus dead.
- So what we see in the Bible is that people are people, whether they are in the Old Testament, or the New. Every crime that we can commit is in both Testaments. As soon as Moses came down from Mt. Horeb with God’s law, people were breaking it. Not just bad people -- “good” people too! People are people. We are what we are and we can’t change ourselves no matter how strong our will power. That’s the gospel truth. But if we’re lucky -- or blessed, as Jesus says -- God will break us, and allow a new spirit, the spirit of Christ, to grow in us. According to Luke, only when we are poor enough, hungry enough, sad enough and hated enough, are we ready to receive this new spirit, which is Christ. And that’s heaven. So my good news to you this morning is that The Kingdom of Heaven is right here in Hamden. Heaven is any place where Christ’s Spirit is in us, guiding us in the way of compassion and forgiveness for all people.