Week of Sabbath I, Day Six, Morning Devotion

Prayer for hope and healing:

Lord of light,
Shine on me. Fill me with your love, shower me with your mercy, and deliver me from the darkness of sin and despair. You are my rock--the foundation of my life. I rest upon your strength, and I lean upon your wisdom.
Amen

Reading: Luke 6:20-23: “Blessed are you”

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

Meditation:

On the way to church last week, we passed a man gathering up his makeshift bedroll and his meager belongings underneath a freeway overpass. It was a striking snapshot of homelessness—a man living in the richest nation on earth, who spent the night sleeping on a pitched concrete slab.

In the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus beatified that man. He lifted up his eyes on the man, and called him “blessed” (Latin: beatus, “blessed” or “happy”—that’s how the “beatitudes” get their name). I could almost imagine his words reverberating across that concrete, gathering that man in, as the man gathered his tattered things. “Blessed are you!” Jesus shouts at the man.

Did that man feel the blessing? Or did he feel more strongly the ambivalence of all of the people who drove by while he tried to sleep?

Surely some of those people were moved, as we were. But, like us, none of them stopped. We had places to be. Places other than the presence of that blessed one.

Prayer of joy:

Lord of All,
You have compassion for the invisible ones. You call blessing upon the least of these, the ones who are overlooked. May the world begin to embrace all of those whom you embraced, and to bless those whom you blessed so long ago.
Amen