Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, February 16, 2025: Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26; Psalm 1
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the Lord. . .Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
It’s all about where you put your focus. What do you count on? I know we all want to say we trust in the Lord, but on a day to day basis, I am not sure I do. That is certainly true in the small things in life: shopping, going to work, and so on. I just do it. And I suspect that’s true for most of us.
But what about the bigger things: we worry about the health of those we love, about people we know who are ill. We lament the victims of war and violence throughout the world. We see right now the attempt to destroy the whole machinery of government, from research on cancer, to national parks, to information. Do we trust in the Lord to make it right? We go to the doctor when we are ill; we work for peace; we vote, reach out, and demonstrate when we have political grievances. We hope that some group of people will help us.
Jeremiah is warning us that if we put our trust in a powerful person, we are making a mistake. The person in power “who makes mere flesh their strength” is interested in power, not doing the work of the Lord.
Yet to trust in the Lord is not to be passive about the things we care about. We may trust in the Lord, but also work to change things: if we care about the hungry, we can help the Lord’s work by feeding people. The Lord does not work through magic, fixing problems we see; instead the Lord uses us as his hands and feet in the world. Those who trust in the Lord, Jeremiah tells us, “shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream“. The roots are how we nourish and feed the world. When we let our roots work together, we can start to address the needs of the world.
Jeremiah is concerned with whether we trust in God, but Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain (Luke’s much shorter version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount) is concerned with people’s condition. He is speaking to a large crowd, which has come from all over Judea. People are pressing around him, touching him to be healed by the power that came out of him. Now he preaches.
Jesus first singles out for blessing the poor, the hungry, those who mourn, and those who are persecuted. He promises that their conditions will be reversed. The poor will have the kingdom of God, the hungry will be filled, those who grieve will laugh. Those maligned for their faith will have their reward in heaven.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not necessarily happy with rewards in heaven. It seems a long way off, and does not do anything to stop injustice and persecution in the world today. But Jesus is more concrete with the hungry: they shall be filled. And those who weep will laugh.
Jesus does not end there: he says “Woe” to the rich, those who are full, those who are laughing and those who are praised. Woe is that they will experience the opposite. This is not celebrated, just acknowledged. Those who are full will be hungry, those who laugh will weep and mourn. Being rich is great, but that’s all it does for you. This insistence on “woe” is not a curse, but a description. This is the reality. What is now is not the story forever.
There’s another piece to this: those who are full of food may be hungry for the spirit, for connection. We may laugh at some things, but weep at others. Many of us are in the group of those who get blessings from Jesus, but are also promised woe. We are not all one or the other.
Both Jeremiah and Jesus remind us that God’s system of values is not ours. Jeremiah tells us to trust in the Lord, not the powerful in the world. Jesus is telling us that God is with us when we are most in need. God is working through us and those around us. The presence of God there is a blessing, even in the darkest time.
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