“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”

Luke 6:21b

Dear Middle Church family,

Here we are: It's Presidents Day Weekend. God help us. And in today’s text, we are promised that God, who is love, will.

In Luke 6:17-26, Jesus comes to the people and tells us that those who abuse power will not win in the end.

Jesus says that we who hunger will not ultimately starve, and those who are stuffed while others go hungry will not be sated. To we who lament, who wail, who can’t look at the news and can’t not look at the news and so are left with a sense of woe the size of all wickedness - Jesus says that that is not how the story ends, that woe will not have the last word, that we who weep will leap for joy.

How is that going to happen? How do we get from here to there?

When you are in the belly of the whale, whether in the book of Jonah or in Chile last week, how is it that you can imagine that you will ever escape? When all you have known is enslavement, how can you believe in the possibility of emancipation? When you are a government worker witnessing all that you have trained for, all that you have labored to protect, the pledge you took to the nation you committed to bringing once and for all into being, trashed, why would you not give up on the idea of freedom and liberty for all? When your church has burned to the ground, how is it that you can find the strength to believe that you will ever come home again?

The author or community who wrote Luke was writing 100 years or so after the liberator Jesus was crucified. The Roman Empire was still oppressing. Religious leaders were still privileging personal piety over justice and compassion just as they did in Jesus’ time. Who was going to care for the vulnerable?

Answer: We the people are. In the story, it's those who gather around Jesus. In the early Christian community, it was those who gathered around to listen. It was the people then and it’s the people now - moved by love, committed to sharing it far and wide.How exactly does that happen?

It isn’t rocket science. We share our resources. We feed each other with whatever loaves and fishes we can find. We accompany and console one another until our tears are cried out and then we rock or laugh a little or have a piece of toast. Right? Isn’t that the history of every oppressed community? Of every people’s movement?

We work to emancipate even though we may not know it in our lifetime. We take our commitment to the nation that has never been, but might someday be, and movement-build. We tell stories of whales spitting us out and of love winning, and in the telling of these stories we remind each other that salvation is possible, that liberation is ours, that love wins in the end, and we get to work to make it so.

Today’s passage tells us that, for those who go along to get along, the going is going to get rough in the end. But for we who are scorned because we speak out and act for love and justice, we will leap for joy, love will be and is ours now and forever. Amen.

In it together,

Macky Alston
Executive Minister and Chief of Staff