Sermon Notes — February 16, 2025
Luke 6:17-26
The Gift of Warnings
Rev. Terry Carty
February 16, 2025
We have been talking about Gifts of Faith for several weeks now. We started this season with the gifts of the Magi – the gifts of the wise men who had come to worship the newborn king. Many of the gifts in this worship series are easy to find joy and delight in – like the gifts of love, worship, scripture, God’s Spirit. I think you could call all of these ‘blessings’ because they bring us promises of good things and happiness. But today I want to talk about the ‘gift of warnings.’ I have approached this sermon topic with a lot of caution. After a four-year-long election campaign season, I have heard so many warnings of dangers lifted up by so many candidates that I am wary. By election day I had stopped listening to what I considered insincere promises and supposed consequences. Since the election I have become almost numb to news reports of woe and doom. So how can I even talk about warnings as a gift? Blessed are the very poor who have nothing to eat, are sad, and who are hated because they follow the meager ways of Christ. Woe to those who are very rich, filled with too much to eat, living extravagantly, and getting more than their share of popularity because of their wealth.
I have spent a lot of my time lately in prayer and discernment about how I should think and act first and foremost as a Christian in the midst of our national chaos. While I consider myself to be patriotic, I am more than that. I am a disciple of Christ. I want to think and live in a Christ-like way. So, I have begun to see the value in the blessings and the warnings in the Bible – especially in the Gospels. In fact, I have come to think of them as a “Gift” to living a balanced life in Christ’s way. These curses and woes make up the most under-read verses in the Bible. After all, who wants to hear the bad news? As we read scripture, we tend to try to identify with the blessings and skip over the woes. Or the woes sometimes serve as a way to judge other people – but not ourselves.
The Old Testament prophets issued far more woes and threats of curses than they did words of blessings. I once considered the Old Testament warnings not to have much meaning for me since they often refer to Hebrew laws. But I still struggle with the condemnations and warnings in the New Testament. An obvious case is (today’s reading of) Luke’s account of the Beatitudes. It pairs 4 ‘blessings’ with 4 opposite ‘woes.’ Luke uses the word for ‘woe’ 15 times in his gospel. And the other gospels are also filled with warnings.
As for the Beatitudes, I have been fine with the blessings of the poor, the undernourished, the chronically sad, the hated. God is good after all, and I am glad to be able to help God bless those occasionally. How fortunate they are to be God’s special interest. But I have never considered myself to be poor, undernourished, chronically sad, nor hated. In fact, my life has been filled with happiness, and I have not had to worry about where my next meal would come from nor a place to stay in out of the weather. I think that my reputation has been good, and people generally speak well of me.
So is Luke telling me, woe to me because my good days may be behind me, the laughing may end, and I may be eternally hungry? It has turned out that I have adjusted my understanding of the curses and woes a bit. The curses from the gospel are not curses of cruelty or vengeance, but of potential consequences to our own behavior. These warnings can function as gifts that function as boundaries that can keep us spiritually centered and experience the life God has for us.
Share a mental image of boundaries – our family had a young dog that we loved dearly. He ran and tumbled with the children, and he loved to be hugged. (Well, that was before he grew stinky. Then we scratched his back.) The problem with our beloved pup was that he was prone to wander and visit the neighbors’ yards. That didn’t seem to be a bother to them, but we lived in fear of him being injured by fast cars that travelled on our street. We tried to build a fence for him, but he got big and just pushed it down. So, we settled on an ‘Invisible fence’ – that was a radio signal set to reach the line that you want to be his boundary. The dog then wears a collar that senses the edge of the boundary and sends an impulse to the dog. Now wait, the impulse didn’t shock the dog, but it really irritated him. In fact, I had first put the collar on my wrist and so I could feel what the dog would feel – not hurt, just strong vibration. And I put little red flags along the boundary. To train him, we lovingly put his new collar on and walked him on his leash within the boundary area. Sometimes we took him close to the line so he would feel the impulse. Within a few days, we went out to play with him with his collar on but without using a leash, and he stayed nicely within the flagged area. Within a few weeks we were able to remove the flags because he no longer needed the visible reminder. He knew his boundaries and stayed within them. After a few months, we turned off the electronics in his collar, and soon just removed it. Our pup grew to a ripe old age knowing his boundaries and staying safely inside them.
The warnings in the New Testament function kind of like that. God’s grace – loving and forgiving – does not mean there are no boundaries. We have plenty of affirmation of the loving blessings God has given us. And we are free to roam within the universe God has created. But the warnings help us to remember that we are created to share the blessings of that universe. If we take more than our share of wealth or power; if we create suffering for others; there are consequences. The Holy Spirit is with us to guide us to the good and to avoid evil in our lives. The scriptural warnings are the red flags that show us where the boundaries lie. A recent devotional blog reminded me that Jesus didn’t issue warnings like this to scare us or to make us feel insecure about our place in God's heart. The blogger feels that these words of warning invite us into a deeper, better way of living. The gift of these words can bring us hope, and they can prompt us to reflect on whether or not we are willing to obey God.
Some of Jesus’ warnings are difficult to understand, especially when they come in the way of parables. But these from Luke’s Beatitudes are clear to me.
• Don’t hoard your blessings,
• Live a life that does no harm to others,
• And no matter what the cost, try to live the life that Christ laid out.
If you do that, you will be well within the boundaries.
William Barclay, a 20th Century New Testament scholar and Church of Scotland minister, wrote that the challenge of the Beatitudes is this, “Will you be happy in the world’s way, or in Christ’s way?”
I ask you to accept the challenge of the Beatitudes, bordered by both blessings and woes, to be happy living in Christ’s way.
Prayer: Lord, help us find the joy in living your kingdom life. And thank you for the gift of warnings that help us stay in the happiness zone of the life you have given us. Amen.