Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; I Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
As a child, I would play the game Red Rover. Maybe you remember this game—the class would divide into two lines and hold hands, then one side would say, “Red Rover, Red Rover send whoever, right over. The team that did the calling would then brace themselves, gripping one another’s hands tightly as the person called would run to their side, strategically aiming for what they thought was the weakest link in an attempt to break through. Often they would be repelled, flung back into the middle of the fray, and thus absorbed into the opposing team’s line. If they were successful and broke through, then they got to choose someone to return back to their side. There was obviously some strategy involved.
I must admit I didn’t love this game as a child. I was scrawny and weak, rarely able to break through anything, more often just getting bruised across the ribs. I was also one they usually aimed for, knowing that I was going to be the weakest link and they would bust right through the arms of whoever I was holding hands with and if it was a boy they would hold my hand even more tightly and squeeze so hard that I thought my hand might break. It was painful either way, running to try to bust through on the other side or standing solid with your teammates. The physical pain was one thing, but it was also embarrassing if you couldn’t bust through, and you felt like you let your teammates down. You would look back over at them when you joined the opposing teams, and see their faces and shaking heads. It was tragic on an elementary school level.
As an adult, I’m not really sure I understand the point of the game. As far as life skills, it didn’t really teach me anything more than survival and winning equates with strength. Sure, there was a certain amount of strategy in identifying the weakest members of the opposing team but that just fed into the survival of the fittest motif even more. The whole game seemed to value the use of force in making others join your group.
Dividing folks into two and then trying to force the other side to join you seems a common approach to our world today. We even do it with the Bible and Christianity. Consider the blessings and woes we read this morning in Luke’s gospel. Upon a cursory reading, it certainly seems like Jesus is separating people into two categories: the poor, hungry, weepy, hated ones versus the rich, full, laughing, respected ones. He reverses these sides—the poor, weepy, hated ones become the ones who are blessed. Whereas those who are rich, full, happy, and respected ones who better watch out.
We often read this as an either/or set of guidelines for who gets into heaven and who doesn’t. And because we are the rich, full, laughing, respected ones—the ones who should woe—we either skim over the second half of this passage and try to reconcile it in some other way or we simply ignore it. We might recognize Jesus’ preferential option for the poor, but we ignore any warning he might offer us, “Surely not me Lord, I’m much happier being in the status quo.”
In part we do this because we are reading scripture as moral code, a set of rules to govern our behavior. As long as those rules are easy to live by or, at least, don’t offend our sensibilities, we work to conform to them. As soon as those rules become less pleasing, we glance over them. We do this not simply because we might be offended by them, but because we are living in the wrong act of the Bible.
Samuel Wells says that the Bible is a five-act play. Act one is the creation story. Act two develops God’s relationship with his people, the Israelites. Act three extends that relationship to us through Jesus Christ. Act four is the Church. And act five is the end times. Wells believes that Christians think they are living in the end times when in fact, we are living in act four—the life of the church. The problem is that when we get the act wrong, we also get the motivation for how we live wrong and that can have significant consequences.
If we are living in act five, the end times, then the thing that drives our decision making and behavior is assurances around our eternal life. We take a less communal approach to life because we are more concerned with our individual salvation—whether or not we will go to heaven or hell when we die. In the Red Rover game of life, we become the one who has to either break through the line or be absorbed by it. When our individual concerns become more important than the concerns of the community, we not only lose perspective, we begin behaving in ways that harm our community and, eventually, ourselves. We hold a preferential option for ourselves and lose touch with who Jesus is calling us to be. When we read the Bible as moral code about what we should or should not do versus understanding its power and purpose for us, we lose touch with the transformative purpose of God in our lives and the world.
If we can remember that we live in act four, the time of the church, then we might have a better grasp of our purpose as part of this community called the body of Christ and its power to transform the world. When we live as the church, we are less inclined to see scriptures like the beatitudes as either/or and instead begin to embrace the blessings and woes as a both/and. Instead of pitting us against one another—the poor threatening the rich, the rich threatening the poor—a both/and reading of the blessings and woes helps us to embrace the knowledge that to be blessed or to know woe is part of our common human experience. We are not broken if we are poor or rich, hungry or full, weeping or laughing, hated or respected. We are broken when we live in the place that denies the feelings and experience of the other.
Being poor, hungry, sad, or hated does not give a person a fast pass to heaven. Just like, being rich, full, happy, or respected doesn’t assure us that we go to hell. Jesus offers this reversal of how we understand the world as an invitation into our common humanity. He extends that invitation while sitting amongst the crowds on a level place: healing them, teaching them, seeing them with compassion for who they are. He rearranges their world and invites them to hope and trust in God as a way of forming their relationships with God and one another. Not trusting in their experience that divides them from one another.
When we treat our relationship with God and one another as a game of Red Rover then we are just concerned about winning not the inclusion or care of one another. Jesus gives us a different way of thinking about the world—one in which winning and losing don’t really matter and we don’t have to worry about whether we go to heaven or hell. In the Beatitudes, we are invited to release the need to win and embrace a desire to care.
The blessings and woes are not two sides of a game of Red Rover in which one side might win over the other. They are not about dividing us or what will happen to us after we die. They are about how we see one another and how we lift up one another in this life, in act four—the life of the church—the body of Christ.
Amen