February 16, 2025

“With Them On A Level Place”

Passage: Jeremiah 17:5-10 Luke 6:17-26
Service Type:

“With Them On A Level Place”

Jeremiah 17:5-10          Luke 6:17-26

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, Year C February 16, 2025 rm

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

In trials and triumphs, we learn what it means to be fully human as a spiritual being. Life involves a balance between dignity and humility, of the low lifted up and the proud brought down. Even in our own lives we see a wrestling between the faculties of rational, mental structures of our egoic mind (many of which have become deficient) and the operations of heart and soul inviting spaciousness beyond concepts, a spiritual depth that’s intuitive and inherent. We could, perhaps, call this the journey from our small self into our Larger Self.

The prophet, Jeremiah shares something that reflects this dynamic, saying, “Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the LORD. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes.”

If we translate “mere flesh” as ego limitations, if we are a product of our own unexamined thoughts, we are limited, even diminished, like a parched bush with no help in sight. This tyranny overwhelms our heart, and it’s because the heart is turned away that desert imagery resonates, and relief isn’t recognized.

But if we cultivate our heart and don’t turn our heart away, then, like deserts after a rain, our heart is transformed. When a transformed heart unites with a renewed mind, this allows the creation of a new organ of spiritual perception, one that can receive what it is that sustains us through all things, like a tree planted by streams of Living Water.

This doesn’t mean thoughts are bad and feelings are good. It’s not that simple. What it means involves balance and unity of a renewed mind and transformed heart. This centered balance leads to blessing for not only “those who trust in the LORD,” but for those “whose trust is the LORD.”

Did you pick up on that quality in Jeremiah? Their trust is in the LORD and their trust is the LORD. God is more than a thing. God is. This is similar to how love is not so much a noun, but more a verb. Love is not a static thing which can be measured, only an action that has no beginning or end. This love reveals, and is, divine Presence. Love casts out fear and heals us from our own delusions.

This is the blessing Jesus experiences as he’s moved by the Spirit in the desert; comes into his own as someone well grounded and yet not attached to a rigid identity as he teaches in Nazareth and surrounding villages. Jesus is open to the flow of radiant life as he shares with the crowds on a level place.  In Luke we see Jesus embody Christ’s unitive consciousness, even as he is surrounded by the dualistic splits and barriers of either/or separations that we settle for in our world. We see this right off in verse 17, which is more than introductory. This verse does a great job of setting the tone and context not only in terms of geography and culture, but phenomenologically, in terms of our experience of the phenomenon of life.

Here's that verse, a verse at the core of existence, at the center of life: Jesus “came down with them and stood on a level place.” Isn’t that amazing imagery? It’s so Gospel According to Luke! Jesus, standing, the full stature of a human being, who earlier was described as growing in wisdom and stature, and here he is, standing with a great crowd around him.

He “came down,” which is partly because he’d spent the night on a mountain in prayer and in the morning called his disciples and chose the twelve. He “came down with them” and they all stood together.

“Came down” can also be symbolic, a visual image of humility, reminding us of John’s gospel about the Cosmic Christ, the Word that becomes flesh and dwells among them. This is Jesus, the Christ; and this Jesus, along with his disciples, have humbled themselves, responding to God’s call to be “with them.”

“On a level place.” Verse 17 starts with an amazing promise, a heavenly vision: the twelve recently handpicked disciples and Jesus, along with a great crowd of other disciples and a great multitude of people…so far, still rather heavenly. “He came down with them.” Jesus is with them, not in a compassionate way, like he has pity for the little people, but in a solidarity way. Jesus is “with them” because Jesus is part of the poor multitude. These are his people. Jesus is not a wealthy class, political elite, not a priestly power broker with prestige in the Temple. Jesus is working class, a peasant, someone who is considered in that society as a nobody, and he’s surrounded by the nobodies. Rome doesn’t care about them, for they are, as Richard Rohr calls them, “expendable.” (https://cac.org/no-one-is-expendable-2022-01-26/, by Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, a daily online meditation). Jesus shows us that in Christ, no one is expendable.  Everyone and everything belong.

Then we hit the speed bumps, the potholes; jarring realities we face in the world as distinctions come into view. The great crowd is “from all Judea (yes!), Jerusalem (yes!), and the coast of Tyre and Sidon (what? No way! How could they!) But yes, in Luke we see healthy religion doing its job, like ligaments that knit bones together, uniting all the parts of the larger body.

The culture war of wealthy coastal people of Tyre and Sidon, who charged the inland peasant Jewish farmers high rates to get their crops out of those port cities, is overcome. The rigid religious, economic, and political distinctions of these groups fall away and they’re all together, on a level place. This is an inclusive vision, filled with diversity, and justice and healing are shared by renewed minds and transformed hearts, in Christ.

Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place. “Power came out from him and healed all of them.” In Christ, humanity has capacity to rise above inequality and injustice, but not in the same mentality that creates these. The poor peasant farmers and the wealthy port city folks. They all come, and Jesus shares blessings and woes because these people, and us, need both. The elite need humility, to wake up from selfish delusions. The poor need to awaken to their inherent dignity. Like that crowd where “all in the crowd were trying to touch him,” we know there is a spiritual necessity for real transformation to occur, we too yearn for a stable center, and this is needed in everyone’s individual lives and as a species in our shared humanity.

Jesus mentions what “ancestors did to the prophets” and “false prophets.” Jesus declares that a prophetic life does involve suffering, but it is transformed into a joy that cannot be touched by that suffering. Those who deceive themselves and do not suffer are false prophets and they will be hungry, mourn, and weep. No one is exempt from the fullness of life’s lessons. Whatever context we’re in, like Jeremiah reminds us, “I the LORD test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.”

This is not all doom and gloom prophet stuff; this is not God writing off some and accepting others. Inclusiveness includes everyone. Equality means there is no hierarchy of superiority at play when it comes to love’s unconditional covenant. But these words and lessons are pointers, indicators, or wake-up calls. Woes to the rich for they have received their consolation means wealth inequality only gets us so far, and then it doesn’t help. That the full will be hungry and those laughing will mourn and weep just shows us that the same old thing leads to the same old thing. Today’s perpetrators and conquerors are tomorrow’s victims as cycles of domination, power, revenge, and control loop and overlap and come up empty.

Did you notice something else about that scene of Jesus on a level place? Even as Jesus and the diverse crowds were gathered on a level place, it was the Earth that held them all. They are all standing on the level ground. As blessings and woes have their way in the world, the Earth herself holds us. One of the things the biblical writers intend is for us to look past the surface level. Even if things are going well, there is always an invitation to go deeper and discover more meaningful aspects of life. They hold out a vision of something more, of life’s interconnections, not only to live into our humanity, but to claim our place and responsibility as planetary creatures.

We have much to learn and many wounds to heal, and as these biblical stories ripple in our own lives, we are called by, empowered through, and held within a sacred, divine union. May God help us receive Christ’s transformative gift of divine Love that is entrusted to us so we may learn to live more than spiritual beings having a human experience, but as participants grounded and centered in the living, Cosmic Christ. This is nothing less than a planetary, transformational life of wholeness and healing. As we come alongside those first disciples to follow Jesus, as Divine Mercy renews our mind and transforms our heart to help the wholeness of our soul emerge, may God be glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.

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