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Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Today's Frontline Devotion Upside Down March 5, 2010 |
A daily |
Frontline Devotion for Friday, March 5, 2010 by Mike Martine
Luke 6:20-25 Looking at his disciples, he said:
"Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when men hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.
"Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets.
"But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
Upside down.
When I was little—really little—Pineapple Upside Down Cake was a staple of the holidays.
The women in my family all made it the same way—they put a mixture (I can’t pretend to remember the exact recipe) of brown sugar & butter together on the bottom of a cake pan. Then, they put pineapple rings (with maraschino cherries in the center) in the mixture. Then, while they cooked that a little, they made the cake batter and then poured it on top of the fruit and sugar in the pan.
The attraction of the cake, I think, came mostly from the fact that, when you took it out of the oven, it looked like a boring yellow cake. But, when you turned it over to take it out of the pan—shazam!¬—you had something totally different. A very fancy looking cake (worthy of rum sauce!).
It turns out, as we see in this lesson, that the world is a little like an upside down cake.
When we look at life, it seems pretty simple. The bottom is the bottom; the top is the top. The poor stay that way, the rich get richer, and that’s the way it will always be.
But, Jesus says the day is coming when the cake will get flipped.
So what to do?
Jesus seldom told those who were well off to rid themselves of all of their riches. He did not reject the feast, but reveled in it. So the answer is not necessarily to give up all we have (which, of course, most of us won’t).
The answer is to live for the bottom of the “cake.” To keep the needs and purposes of the poor before us, and to bring them a measure of the “good news” of Christ.
The answer is to live for a better day for all people, not just for wonders and riches for a few.
The answer is to remind one another of our blessings, and of the fact that the poor are all around us, even when we do such a good job of hiding them from our sight.
This is the answer—otherwise, woe to us.
Remember the poor. One day, the cake will be flipped.