Jesus then comes down from the mountain, to this "level place", performs all these healings and then begins what is known as "the sermon on the plain". Three weeks ago we heard that Jesus opened the scroll in the synagogue and read from Isaiah saying God "has appointed to me to bring good news to the poor". Well, we are now at Jesus' first public act of ministry, his first public sermon and what does Jesus do: he says "blessed are the poor"....In the synagogue Jesus says "I bring good news to the poor" and in his first public sermon the first thing he says is "blessed are the poor". (Luke is being very ordered and thematic here. In fact, the physician Luke is known for his orderliness and our Scripture today exemplifies that as we have four sets: poor-rich, hungry-full, weeping-laughing, rejected-accepted. The first, poor, hungry, weeping, rejected being blessed and the latter, rich, full, laughing, accepted as suffering woe.)

So Jesus comes down off the mountain and he starts his first sermon, his first teaching to the people gathered there, this great multitude. Imagine this scene, this vast group of humanity staring at Jesus: tall-short, skinny-not so skinny, Jewish-Gentile, rich-poor, happy-sad, successful-not so successful. A real mix of humanity. And Jesus starts off saying something unexpected: blessed are you who are poor, you who are hungry, you who weep, you who are hated/reviled/rejected. Imagine hearing those words in a world were those people, the poor, the hungry, the hated are the lowest of the low. Luke is showing, at the very beginning of Jesus' public ministry, that things are not going to stay the same in the Kingdom that is being declared: life will be different, it will be topsy-turvy. We will hear later on that Jesus demands action and not just speech, but that is toward the end of these 29 verses of this sermon on the plain. What we have today is a focus on a different view of the world. This is really very scandalous because all our conventional expectations are completely reversed. Jesus is not idealizing the poor, nor is he glorifying them, he is simply saying that God has a commitment to the poor.

But "blessed"? The nuance to that Greek word could be translated "Oh, how fortunate" you are. How fortunate is it to be poor? The liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez has said "God has a preferential love for the poor not because they are necessarily better than others, but because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God's will. The ultimate basis for the privileged position of the poor is not in the poor themselves but in God." Luke is forcing us to look at the poor, at the hungry, at those who weep or are excluded and he is saying Jesus wants us to reorder our priorities in our lives with those people God loves so much in mind.

We are about to baptize Gloria Jean Hunt into this community of faith. In that beautiful ceremony we are about to participate in there are a number of vows taken but I want to ask that we all pay very close attention to the part where we, the Body of Christ, all of us here, welcome the newly baptized by saying "We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection and share with us in his eternal priesthood." By receiving the newly baptized into our household all of us are pledging support for this new member of our community, this new member of the Body of Christ. And I think this has a direct link to the blessings and woes we heard about in today's Gospel.