What Did You Expect to Hear?
the Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis
February 16, 2025
Text: Luke 6: 17-26
Some of you might remember that my oldest sister passed away from COVID during the pandemic. At the repast following her funeral, my siblings and I gathered, surrounded by nieces and nephews, to share stories about her. Naturally, any conversation like that brings up tales of our late father, the pastor patriarch of the Davis family, a man of profound and courageous faith. However, on this occasion, my older siblings shared a story I had never heard before. My parents started their life together as sharecroppers, farming on former slave plantations to share profits with the white landowner from selling the crops they raised. This practice emerged after the Civil War and was notoriously exploitative and oppressive. But now I would learn the specific circumstances that led my family to escape an exploitative situation in search of a better life.
With a growing family and preparing for his ordination to the ministry, my father had finally reached his limit with being cheated and exploited by the white landowner. He confronted the landowner, pointing out all the times money owed to him was withheld and all the times the landowner sold the crops my father grew for a higher price than he had claimed. In the 1950s in Mississippi, my father was risking his life by questioning a white man and demanding fair treatment. The landowner stormed off. Betting that this would end with only hurt feelings was unwise. So, my father and mother gathered their three young daughters and whatever they could fit into their car, escaping as quickly as possible. They stayed with my grandparents and others from the church for several months, hiding until the immediate danger had passed. I did not expect to hear this story about my father, but it clarified the ministry of service, justice, and fairness he exemplified for his family and the members of his church.
What would make my father take that kind of risk? Is there something about faith that makes injustice so intolerable that you are compelled to act? Did Jesus’ message of good news to the poor, release for the captives, and freedom for the oppressed inspire a fight for liberation for himself and his family, even if the consequences had been fatal? I think about that story often. The womanist theologian Yolanda Pierce provides insight into how God’s liberating message impacted Black people during slavery and Jim Crow, which helped me understand better what may have been going on with my father and others whose faith inspired them to act courageously: “personal transformation [had] far-reaching community effects. A personal experience of an individual’s relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community.”[1] Perhaps faith and discipleship fire the resolve to see ourselves and others from God’s perspective, recognizing that injustice is unacceptable.
Today’s Scripture lesson comes immediately after Jesus called and named his twelve apostles. What were they expecting to happen next? What did they expect to hear from this man, whose notoriety had grown because he went around healing people of paralysis, skin diseases, and unclean spirits while teaching with authority in their synagogues? I don’t know what they anticipated hearing from Jesus, but the first thing they encountered was what scholars call Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. We may be more familiar with the Gospel of Matthew’s version of Jesus’ pronouncements of blessings, known as the Sermon on the Mount. However, in the Gospel of Luke, we find the Sermon on the Plain, a location that can accommodate the large audience Luke reports had gathered to listen to him. The apostles joined a great crowd of disciples whom Jesus touched and healed, and a multitude of people from the surrounding area on a vast, accessible, and open expanse of land to hear and be healed.
And what Jesus gives them is an epiphany of the God of justice. Jesus does not offer spiritual platitudes that have no effect on the lived experiences of the people gathered to hear a word from God. He doesn’t speak cautiously, sensitively, or respectfully to avoid angering those in power. No, he acknowledges the harsh realities of poverty, oppression, and deprivation, and he proclaims where and with whom God’s heart and abundance will be found. God is in solidarity with the losers, the foolish, and the overlooked. He places God in the spaces that the honorable and the privileged wouldn’t dare to be found—with the disinherited, dominated, and demeaned.
God’s blessing, God’s solidarity, God’s priority is on those who are living in poverty now, those who hunger now, those who weep now, and those who are excluded, reviled, and defamed now. Just because society has disinherited them, refuses to take care of them, and will not advocate for their liberation doesn’t mean God has forgotten them. In contrast, there is trouble for those who have benefitted from the status quo, those who are rich, those who have so much, those who’ve been living the good life, those with status, prestige, and popularity.
The stark contrasts in God’s perception and treatment of the poor and the rich that Jesus lays out upends that accepted understanding of how the world works. These blessings and woes are an epiphany of the God of justice, a shocking reversal of expectation and business as usual for a people and culture that assumed that the order of things was natural, normal, and neutral. It was a wake-up call. It is a call to choose: live a life reflecting God’s vision for how things should be or accept inequality, injustice, and oppression as just how things work. The epiphany of the God of justice requires a response. It is not just information about the world. It is not a spiritualization of poverty and inequality. It is not even a call to a life of poverty or giving up wealth. It is a radical vision of how things are in God’s eyes, in God’s economy, in God’s reign. It is a vision of the world that reverses the prevailing order of things? How will they live and act accordingly?
All in earshot of these blessings and woes, this reversal of fortunes, face the question of how they will live and act in light of this epiphany of God. That was the question I faced last year. In a national election year, the cultural, political, and economic discourse revealed a world filled with cruelty, oppression, and vengeance. Politicians, candidates, and their supporters aimed their insults, harassment, and violence toward transgender individuals, seeking to strip away their healthcare, deny them access to public accommodations, and expel them from the military. The initial attack on teaching Black history, under the guise of critical race theory, expanded into a broader assault on efforts for diversity, equity, and inclusion—implying that any Black person, woman, or person of color is unqualified for their jobs. Every economic challenge, every failure to care for the well-being of the people, and every cynical political and ideological move that ignored poverty, hunger, or homelessness seems to be accepted as natural, normal, and neutral. What does it mean to live and act in a way that reflects God’s blessing, God’s solidarity, and God’s priority for those living in poverty, those who hunger, those who weep, and those who are excluded, reviled, and defamed?
So, I prayed to God, reflecting inwardly on how to respond to the epiphany of the God of justice. I sought clarity in the plain. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. There were simpler, easier ways to respond, but they all felt too safe, too inadequate, too complacent. I thought about that Black preacher in Jim Crow Mississippi who desired a better life for his family, who understood that any form of injustice contradicted God’s vision, and who risked his life for a truth of the inherent worth and dignity of his family that society denied. I believe he went to that plain to hear the epiphany of the God of justice and acted without concern for his safety. When the question was posed to me for perhaps the twentieth time: do my work, my voice, my ministry reflect God’s vision in a city that has become stuck and polarized and in a nation that is growing more illiberal and autocratic? What am I willing to do? I had a wake-up call. I wanted to respond in a way that would reflect God’s blessing, God’s solidarity, and God’s priority for the people.
When I accepted the call to ministry, I committed to going wherever God sent me. There have been many times when I hoped to hear something easy. I admit I craved uncomplicated arrangements and wanted to ignore the challenging and significant problems, to know the bliss of ignorance. And yet, I want to be faithful. I want to be faithful to the call. I don’t want to live as if the injustices, the oppression, and the domination of the most vulnerable is natural, normal, and neutral.
[1] Yolanda Pierce, Hell Without Fires.
