Sermon — February 16, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
I often wish that I were a magician. Not a magician like my Grandpa was, when he would entertain us at birthday parties with a black cape and top hat and a wand. But a real magician, the kind that don’t exist. I often wish that I were a magician because I often wish that I could wave a magic wand and fix something. I wish that I could cast a simple spell to repair a broken relationship. I wish that I could whip up a quick healing potion for a chronic illness. I wish that I could create a protective shield around the people I love that would make sure that no harm could ever touch them.
I’m not the first person in the world to have this wish. The allure of wizardry has always been that if you could only learn the secret method, if you could only find the magic words, you could make things right. Magic, at its heart, is a kind of technology: once you learn the spell, once you’ve got the ingredients for the potion, you can reproduce it again and again. And amid the uncertainty and fear that human beings have always faced—this has always had a certain appeal.
Now, most people know that magic isn’t real. They don’t go in for pointed hats and wands. But there’s a kind of magical thinking that’s very common, nevertheless. Sometimes it comes with religious belief: If I believe the right things, many people hope, if I go to the right church, if I take part in the right rituals in the right way, then God will bless me, God will make things good, for me, now. If I pray, earnestly, for the people I love, then surely God will help. And even when religious belief falls away, this magical thinking is often what remains: and so you’ll hear otherwise-secular people talk about “manifesting things” in their lives or “speaking things into existence.”
And there’s nothing really wrong with this. What do we do when someone is sick, or mourning, or recovering from a surgery? We pray for them, of course! It’s a natural response. It’s a good and comforting thing. But like all good things, it can go bad. And this impulse to prayer, this desire to take comfort in the idea that good things happen to good people, becomes a problem when we begin to extrapolate—when we begin to think that if good things happen to good people, and bad things are happening to me, or bad things are happening to someone else, it must be my fault, or their fault.
You can see a bit of this in our first reading and the psalm today. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,” Jeremiah says, “[their] leaves shall stay green… and [they do] not cease to bear fruit.” (17:7–8) “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,” the psalmist sings, “everything they do shall prosper.” (Psalm 1:1, 3) But “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals… whose heart turns away from the Lord… [they] shall not see when relief comes.” (Jer. 5:5–6) “They are like chaff which the wind blows away.” (Ps. 1:4) And it’s so tempting for us human beings to read these words and think, “Great! I have a choice! I have some control. Choose goodness and I will prosper like a tree bearing good fruit; choose wickedness, and life will be hard; my leaves will dry away.” It sounds like a kind of magic: a tried-and-true recipe for making good things happen in this world.
But it doesn’t really work. We all know good people whose lives have been much harder than they deserve. You may know people for whom it’s the other way around. And these Biblical texts recognize exactly that. They don’t quite promise that these blessings and curses will arrive in this life. Divine justice extends beyond this world. So the Psalmist doesn’t say that people who do evil will be punished in this life—it says that they won’t stand upright “when judgment comes.” It’s not as simple as “good things happen to good people.”
But there is still a very clear sense of division: good and evil, blessed and cursed, us and them.
Jesus picks up that theme… But he changes it in a very specific way. For one thing, he doesn’t buy the magical thinking at all. Riches and fullness and laughter, for Jesus, are not the signs of God’s blessing, bestowed as a reward for a life of faith or for saying your prayers. It’s the other way around. Those are the woes. And the outward signs of poverty and hunger and weeping are not signs of God’s disdain—no, people who are poor and hungry and weeping are the ones Jesus says are blessed.
But there’s another difference here, as well. In these Beatitudes in this Gospel of Luke, there is no “us” and “them”: there is only “you.” There is no “happy are they” or “cursed are those”—there are only “blessed are you,” and “woe to you.”
There are no good people and bad people, neatly divided into groups. There’s only you, sometimes blessed, and sometimes… Woe! Jesus is talking to his disciples, face to face. And the geometry of the scene is important. Last week, I mentioned Jesus standing on a boat to preach. You’ve probably heard of the “Sermon on the Mount.” On a mountain or in a pulpit or on a boat, you are lifted above the crowd. Sound travels further. And the physical distance creates some conversational distance, too. A preacher is often looking out into the congregation, but it’s a kind of only-halfway look—I’m looking at you, but I’m only very rarely looking at you. You can’t have a real one-on-one conversation with an altitude difference—that’s why my posture is so bad.
So Jesus comes down from the mountain, to a level place. And he looks up at his disciples. He looks at this group of faithful people who have chosen to follow him, and he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” “Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled.” “But woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” “Blessed are you who weep now…blessed are you when people hate you… for your reward is great in heaven.” “Woe to you who are laughing now… woe to you when all speak well of you,” for you will mourn and weep.
And he’s speaking to the disciples. To you. He’s speaking to us. He’s not making promises, he’s not making threats. He’s not saying what will happen if we’re good or if we’re bad, if we pray or if we don’t. He’s acknowledging the truth that a prayer is not a magic spell that brings prosperity. A life of faith is not a surefire way to become healthy, wealthy, and wise. Our lives will be full of many blessings, many real moments of joy. And they will also be full of woe. We won’t live them without tears.
And in fact, it’s more than that. The Christian life is a life in which we will sometimes choose what Jesus calls the more blessed path. We will sometimes choose to make ourselves a little poorer to help the other citizens of the kingdom of God. We will sometimes choose to go hungry, so someone else can be fed. We will sometimes see someone else weeping, and not turn away, but turn toward them, and listen to them, and find that we are weeping too. If we are faithful to the good news of a loving and merciful God, we will sometimes be reviled and mocked. And yet it’s in these very moments that Jesus say that we are blessed.
We celebrate a baptism this morning. This child’s parents and godparents will make promises on her behalf, promises that she may one day take as her own, promises that all of us this morning will renew. Promises to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread.” Promises to “persevere in resisting evil.” Promises to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving [our] neighbor[s] as [ourselves],” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”
These promises don’t lead to the easiest possible life. They lead to a life that requires some self-sacrifice, some willingness to give up some of our own comfort and prosperity when times are good to support others for whom times are hard. They lead to a life of compassion, a life in which we will sometimes weep.
The life of the baptized Christian is not an easy life, but it’s a blessed life. Not because, if we do these things, we will be rewarded with God’s blessing. Not because the promises we make and the prayers we say give us a magic wand that we can wave to make the world right. But because the measure of the good life is not how comfortable we are, or how easy life is—but how deeply we love one another.