THE GOOD NEWS AND THE BAD NEWS

February 16, 1992

.8:30-and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Jeremiah 17:5-8
Luke 6:17-26

"Blessed are you who are hungry... Woe to you who are full."
~Luke 6:21, 25 (NRSV)

Sometimes the news is bad as well as good.

William Sloane Coffin, former chaplain at Yale, minister of
Riverside Church, and highly visible social activist, likes to
tell about the time in the early 1970s when he was preaching ina
large, substantial suburban church about the Vietnam War and
economic justice. Afterward, shaking hands with the worshipers,
a woman of obvious affluence, took his hand between her two
gloved hands, leaned forward as if to pay him a generous compli-
ment and growled "Coffin, you no-good..." (you can fill in the
blanks).

Every preacher who heard him tell about that laughed because
something like it has happened to all of us. For me it was in
the South, in a large, substantial church. I had been invited to
Speak on the Hagar/Sarah story in the Old Testament and how it
relates to women's issues in the 1990s — which I did. After-
ward, in the line, I was introduced to a woman whose family had
been in the congregation for generations, whose great-great
grandfathers and uncles ~ Elders and Civil War Generals
whose pictures adorned the hallway gallery. She was charming,
gracious and she said sweetly, shaking my hand, "Dr. Buchanan, it
waS so nice of you to come all the way down here from Chicago to
be with us. That sermon was awful. I just hated it." Ana
continuing to smile Sweetly, off she went. No one had heard her.
I, of course, said, "Thank you very much."

Allowing for the possibility that it was indeed an awful
sermon, there are topics and there are texts which we do not
particularly like to hear, in fact, don't like at all. If, as
historians of religion observe, one of the functions of religion
is to support the prevailing values of the culture, there are
whole major pieces of Biblical religion which do the exact oppo-
Site, namely Challenge the culture - and they always make us

uncomfortable. And take it from me, it is no more fun for the
preacher than the congregation. To work with the text, to under-
stand it at all, is to stand under it, as one of the people; to
hear it, first of all addressed to oneself personally. Besides,
as Jim Forbes said here two weeks ago, church-goers have become
adept at dealing with and dismissing that: brand of polemical
preaching on the tough topics which he called "Homiletical Manip-
ulations." That's when the preacher announces God's judgment
from the safety of the sidelines - or the height of a Gothic
pulpit. The preacher knows better than anybody that he/she
stands beneath the "woe to you" as well as the "blessed are you,"
the bad news as well as the good news.

In fact the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not exclusively good
newS. A better way to say that is - there is a sense in which
you can't hear the gospel until you know some bad, or at least
ambiguous, news. There is a sense in which the truth about God
is only accessible when something or someone helps us see that
the truth about humankind is not very pretty. There is a sense
in which you can't appreciate, enjoy or even taste the bread of
life until you have experienced and explored your hunger. "You
have created our hearts restless until they find their rest in
you," St. Augustine observed. And the meaning is clearly that
there will be no resting until a person acknowledges and begins
to own.up to the restlessness.

The Christian religion becomes trivial when it confines its
energy to proclaiming good news without calling attention to the
bad news; when the best it can do is hand out therapeutic advice
about developing self-esteem, when it refuses to acknowledge
suffering and evil on history and on life.

Reinhold Niebuhr was remembered at a scholarly symposium in
New York City last November on the 100th anniversary of his
birth. Niebuhr was a professor of theology at Union Theological
Seminary and was recognized in a Time magazine cover story in
1948 as America's most influential political philosopher.
One of the great philosophical contributions he made to the
public discourse about the state and future of the nation and the
world was rearticulating the Judeo-Christian notion of the human
condition - which is not always rosy and optimistic. In the ashes
of World War II, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima,
Niebuhr suggested that Christian religion has a viable way to
discuss the human condition, namely its propensity to selfish-
ness, self-centeredness or, as it used to be called, "“old-fash-
ioned sin," and how relatively innocent, guileless individuals
can get caught up in systemic evil - like Naziism or the systemic
racism we've been thinking about - which nobody seems to intend
or mean. The Judeo-Christian tradition knows something about the
nature of humankind, Niebuhr asserted. Some observations
the world is inclined to ignore because the news is often bad
before it is good.

2/16/92

Nowhere is this dynamic clearer nor more sharply experienced
than when the New Testament gets around to talking about poor
people and rich people. | Throughout the Bible there are a lot of
nice things said about poor people and a lot of not-so-nice

- . things said about rich people. -The poor are held up as models of

piety; the rich are used as examples of greed. The poor get.
exalted; the rich are brought low and in one memorable text
compared to overweight cows. God, some have said, seems to
prefer the poor, all of which makes those of us who are not poor,
very uncomfortable, sometimes angry even. Bob Lynn, astute
theologian who worked a while for the Lilly Endowment, said that
the matter of affluence is the greatest theological challenge
facing the American churches. We must do one of three things he
said: find a way to ignore a major Biblical motif, or become
poor, or try to figure out what it means to be Christian and not
poor.

Now let's look at what's happening in the text. It is Luke
who told us about the Shepherds at Bethlehem, who introduces the
topic in Mary's Magnificat.

-"God has brought. down the powerful from their.
thrones...lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry
with good things and sent the rich away empty."

And then, almost at the beginning of the story of Jesus!
public ministry Luke tells about the time when he was orienting
his newly appointed apostles and said:

"Blessed are the. poor.

Blessed are the hungry.

Blessed are those who weep,

Blessed are those who are excluded, reviled and
defamed."

Which is all right until he continues.

"Woe to you who are rich.

Woe to you who are full.

Woe to you who are laughing.

Woe to you when people speak well of you."

It is not exhortation. Luke is not saying that Jesus said,
"become poor.- become hungry." The form is descriptive. Blessed,
happy actually, are the poor. Woe to the rich who have received
their consolation, i.e. they already have what they want.

There are justice issues here, but more.:importantly: there
are spiritual issues. Ina happiness contest between poor people
and rich people, Jesus said the poor are more likely to be happy.
The rich are - well, rich.

2/16/92

-Robert Bellah, University of California sociologist has
edited a new book, The Good Society. Bellah spoke to a National
Council of Churches | Conference on the New World Order and did an
interesting thing with the Biblical notion of the poor and the
rich... . Bo -

‘Citing the. work of another scholar, Albert Borgmann, Bellah
observes that Biblical poverty and contemporary poverty are very
different phenomena. There were, of. course, occasional famines
in the ancient world, but in Israel with its strong sense of

community and its tradition of caring for the outsiders, the
truly poor did not starve to death.

By contrast Bellah describes two types of modern poverty.

"Brutal poverty," he defines as "the terrible unnecessary
poverty in a world economically and technologically capable of
eliminating poverty." .

It's the poverty you can see a few blocks from here, in
plain view of one of the most visible concentrations of wealth in

the world... children, living in third world conditions, with
underfunded and inadequate education, virtually no health care...
young men listlessly standing on the corner... teen-agers, a

virtual army with walkie-talkies protecting the drug dealers who
have clearly won the war we so bravely declare on then every
election year. Systemic poverty. Nobody's fault poverty. We
don't mean it poverty. Brutal poverty.

Of equal importance is something Bellah identifies as
"Advanced poverty..." This is the poverty of the rich, the
"spiritually debilitating affluence" of those who have. what they
want, who "have their consolation."

This is the poverty described by a psychiatrist in’ Time
recently as the success syndrome, the depression which results
from accomplishing one's goals and having an enormous amount of
money.

This is the poverty produced by a society which has defined
the meaning of life, blessedness, if you will, in terms of having
things, a society which has lost touch entirely with one of its
founders! favorite concepts, namely sufficiency or "enough" or
having what one needs. The trouble is a culture which has not
yet’ come to terms with the notion of limits.

Bellah reported that 70% of the American people know there's
something wrong, that we're off the track. He calls it a social
and cultural and spiritual recession. And, of course, he's not

_ the only voice crying in the wilderness. Cartoonist Jules Feiff-
er wrote a little book during the 80's called Tantrum in which a

2/16/92

forty-two-year-old man becomes a two-year-old again, entirely
devoted to gratifying his needs and desires... an image of the
culture, Feiffer proposed. He wrote, "There must be something
more to life than having everything."

Those wonderful New Yorker: cartoons: address the topic regu-
larly.

in one a cigar-smoking tycoon gazes out of the window of his

huge and elaborate office at the smoke stacks of the industry
over which he presides anda says, "You may not be able to serve
God and mammon, but it doesn't hurt to put a little away for a
rainy day."

And just last week, poking fun at our tendency to define all
of life - even its delectability in terms of profit and loss -
businessman is sheepishly handing his wife a folder as she says
"Gee, Jeffrey, an annual report on our marriage is a novel anni-
versary gift, but I was hoping for something a little more roman-
tic."

More seriously President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia
said,

“We live in a spoiled moral environment. We have
become morally ill. We have learned not to be-
lieve in anything, not to care about each other,
to worry only about ourselves." {See Bellah, p.12]}

The Biblical argument with wealth is not that wealth is
evil, or that it is wrong to have enough food. There is nothing
more useless than feeling guilty for simply being who one is -
and to cultivate that guilt is a theological cheap shot. The
Biblical argument is that wealth sometimes, more often than not,
convinces people that they are self-sufficient, self-made, need-
ing no one. The poor, on the other hand, are under no such
illusion. The poor often depend on God because there is no one
else. And that, the Bible says, or perhaps its most dramatic and
profound prescription, is the secret of blessedness: not having
everything, knowing one's dependence on God and neighbor.

It is, I would propose a very timely word. We've been
thinking a lot recently about national self-sufficiency primarily
in terms of the manufacture and sale of automobiles. But the

world has become interdependent. one of the most popular Ameri-
can automobiles is assembled in Germany and Britain as well as
the U.S.A. from parts manufactured in Spain, Italy, Japan and
Brazil. Ninety-five per cent of the baseball gloves sold here
are made in Japan, out of American.cowhide which is first shipped
to Brazil for tanning.

2/16/92

The future of the world depends on our understanding and
coping with interdependence. And suddenly the ancient words of
scripture make a great deal of contemporary sense.

It is not merely a matter of political revolution, not
merely a matter of taking from:therich.and giving to the poor.
As we have watched socialist economies collapse and fail to
provide basic goods and services, we know that the market, the
generation of profit and capital contains the energy to feed the
world.

But it is not, finally, a matter of politics and economics.
It is a matter of spirituality. Bellah has a particularly wise
word here.

"If the basic problem is turning the have-nots
into haves, the political and economic struggle is
central and the churches have a minor role to
play. But if our problems have to do with the
whole notion that having is the meaning of life,
then the teaching of the Bible may be more deci-
Sive. Biblical poverty, the notion that we must
let go of everything we have and depend only on
God and our neighbor, may be the only thing that
will save us."

What the Bible suggests is that you don't have anything you
can't give away. In fact, if you can't give it away, it has you
- you are owned, shaped, influenced and determined by what you
have given your life to get.

In fact, if you can't give it away, the Bible suggests you
aren't even able to enjoy it.very much.

Bellah, the sociologist, suggests that we pray. not merely
for political and economic change, but more essentially, for "a
conversion of ourselves and our institutions."

If you think you are self-sufficient the bad news is that
you are wrong. But it is also, at the same time, the good news.

Because to Know your needs, to know your poverty is to be
open to God's blessing.

It is to know and celebrate, not your autonomy, but your

belonging to the human race. It is to know that to have every-

_thing you want and to be alone is to be lonely, and that to have
nothing but people you love is to be very wealthy.

Blessed are you - God's kingdom is yours - when you forget
about yourself and live for others.

2/16/92

Blessed are you when you purchase a gift and give it away
and enjoy the delight of the person to whom you gave the gift
more than you would have enjoyed receiving it.

Blessed are you when the.people you love. are happy.

Bliessed are you, not when you have everything, but when you
have enough for yourself and are in the process of using the rest
to affirm your membership in the human family.

Blessed are you where in the middle of listening to great
music or standing before great art you suddenly know your own
smallness, your own poverty which allows you to be touched by the
mysterious beauty, and the greater reality to which it points.

Blessed are you when you know you are not self-made geneti-
cally, emotionally, physically, morally; that you are not self-
sufficient, that you live by grace and forgiveness and accept-
ance.

_ . Blessed are you when you can open. your hands and let go .and...-
your hands, now empty, are ready to be filled with God's gifts of

love and grace.

So, Good News and Bad News - or better said, what sounds at
first like bad news is the good news, the very best news of all.
Blessed are you when you simply know who you are; when you know
your dependence on God and your neighbors. Blessed are you then:
yours is the Kingdom.

2/16/92.