If you’ve taken some time to read through the Gospel of Luke in the past month, you probably noticed how often circumstances change for people: the sick are healed, the blind receive sight, the lame walk—and even the dead are given new life.

Or maybe you remember the words that Luke gives to the pregnant Mary: “God has brought down the powerful and lifted the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

The coming of Christ brings a reversal of fortune: those who seem to be left out gain the abundance of life that God desires for all people.

So when Jesus begins to teach those who would follow him, we are shocked, but not necessarily surprised to hear:

            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.

In Luke’s gospel, these words of Jesus are concrete and physical. It’s been said that they are “scandalous because they overturn every conventional expectation.”[1] These words are so shocking that others in the early church began to revise them, spiritualizing them, seeking to tame the scandalous gospel of Jesus.

So the Gospel of Matthew addresses those who are poor in spirit and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And Matthew’s Gospel speaks of those who mourn, or hunger and thirst, keeping them at an arm’s length.

On the other hand, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus addresses you: you who are poor, you who are hungry, and you who weep. Jesus draws near to you who have little or nothing at all. He speaks to you who don’t have enough money in your pockets, you who know the pain of an empty stomach.

Sitting here in a Congregational Church in the heart of Iowa City, most of us might wonder, then, if Jesus has anything to say to us—as prosperous and well fed as we are. We face the frightening prospect that Jesus speaks to us when he says: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”

As troubling as it might be, if we are going to listen to Jesus, we must begin to listen from where we are—with a sense of wealth and satiation, even if the economy is still a little unsteady right now. And yet we can also recognize our emptiness and sadness, our longing for something other than life as we find it much of the time.

You know I don’t talk a lot about myself in sermons, but this morning I have to share one of my favorite “Bill stories.”

One summer a several years ago now, I was at home in Wisconsin on a Sunday evening, channel surfing through the early evening T.V. shows. Stumbling upon Sixty Minutes, I paused. There on the screen was someone I knew in high school. He was from Missouri and I was from Illinois, but we had attended the same debate workshop one summer at Southern Illinois University in the early 70's.

As I watched I discovered that he had become the Attorney General of Missouri and was prosecuting some case that 60 Minutes was profiling. As the story continued, I began to get depressed over the differences between the two of us. He was the Attorney General of an entire state. I was the pastor of a small church in Milwaukee. He was famous—being interviewed on national television. I watched him, unknown, on my small portable T.V.

As I said, this was in the summer, and the show was a rerun. So at the end of this segment one of the anchors came on to tell what had happened to some of the people since they first reported the story. My friend, the attorney general, it turned out, was serving time in a federal prison for misuse of campaign funds.

I on the other hand was free to go out for a walk on a beautiful early evening in Wisconsin.

I laughed.

I laughed not with some sort of schadenfreude over my acquaintance’s misfortune. I laughed at my own foolishness for daring to compare myself with someone else, daring to sit back and judge my life instead of living it. I laughed because I was all too ready to declare success and failure.

I laughed because the situation could be described as ludicrous—that great word from the Latin ludus, to play. I remembered that when we invite God to play in our lives, we will often be surprised at the directions we take. And yet we will always be sustained through difficult times like trees planted near the water.

Blessed are you that weep, Jesus says, for you will laugh.

This is not the nasty laughter of revenge, the chuckle of glee that you give out when somebody gets just what you think they deserve.

It is the laughter of a joy that comes from understanding how much life does go on through difficult times. It is the laughter of a joy that comes from understanding how much life does go on beyond the difficult times.

Blessed are you that weep, Jesus says, for you shall laugh.

These words don’t brush the sorrow or the suffering aside. In some way they allow us to take our sadness and grief most seriously. For they remind us that God's power is constantly at work in the world and in our lives.

Think of the times that we weep:

            Someone we love dies and the tears come. Sometimes right away. Sometimes several months later. Often both.

            We see the pain of someone else—maybe we see it in the ongoing reports from Haiti, maybe we see it in a son or a daughter. It hurts and we cry.

            We run into one of those brick walls of life—failure, fear, the unknown future that serious illness can bring and find ourselves weeping.

Blessed are you, Jesus says. Blessed—that’s how we translate that Greek word for
“happy.” But the word means even more than that. It suggests people who are the privileged recipients of God’s special gifts. It is a word that says God is for you, not against you.

Those times of great sadness are not times when we have been abandoned by God. They are times when, by entering that sorrow, we might discover the healing power that we call God.

Blessed are you who weep, for you shall laugh.

This affirmation is at the heart of our faith.

And it is often difficult to hear. But down the road, there will be laughter.

These words speak of a divine reversal—we can’t judge because God is still at work. Sometimes they remind us that happiness is still ahead, allowing us to be drawn toward what we cannot yet see but can certainly hope for. It takes a leap of faith to do this, of course. But it is also a leap of faith to assert that sorrow or hunger or poverty will continue unabated.

Sometimes God's goodness is shown in those terrifying reminders not to be so absolutely certain about riches or fullness or gleeful laughter because they will not last. If we listen, we will look for something beyond our wealth, our happiness, our success, something that can sustain as water sustains a tree even in times of heat and drought, with leaves that are green and much fruit.

I would be less than honest to suggest that these words always make sense to me. Often when I try to understand them I can’t. The tears of those who cry because of grief, the tears of those who weep when they see the news, the tears of those who are poor, hungry, and hated are real. We can only hear the blessing if we listen as we cry. But once again this week they have come as a challenge to me—a challenge to move forward in hope.

These words are spoken in distress not to calm us down, to make us passively accept a bad situation but to give the assurance that God's favor is with those who weep and that a reversal is certain.

If we can hear these words of blessing from where we are, perhaps we can work from that place to fulfill the promise of blessing to those who are poor, those who are hungry, and others who weep. We took a step in that direction this morning with our offering for relief work in Haiti. Let us continue to walk toward those to whom Jesus speaks words of blessing.

Christ comes into our world, into our lives, bringing a reversal of fortune.

Ultimately we see this in the Easter reversal of life conquering death. Resurrection is God’s divine comedy. Resurrection invites our laughter as the powers that destroy are themselves destroyed.

May we laugh. May we be counted among those who are blessed.