Sermon preached January
24, 2016
Texts: Luke
4:14-21
Over
years of watching television, commercials are among the memorable moments. I would guess many of us know who Flo is –
the woman from Progressive Insurance, or Jan, the Toyota spokesperson. I have enjoyed the GEICO commercial where we
have a scene from an action film, some kind of agent battling the bad guys on a
roof with a helicopter flying overhead.
His phone rings and we see a woman in a house calling. “If you’re a mother, you call at the worst
times, that’s just what you do.” This
line as the mother is discussing squirrels in the attic with her spy agent
son. “It’s noisy there. Are you taking a Zumba class?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QElh81jdEo
Television
ads can stay with you for a long time.
Some of you probably remember the Alka-Seltzer ad: “I can’t believe I
ate the whole thing.” An ad for a burger
chain became a tag line in a presidential political debate. “Where’s the beef?” Then there was the spaghetti sauce
commercial, Prego. “It’s in there.” Fresh herbs and spices – it’s in there. Chunks of garlic – it’s in there. Fresh tomatoes – it’s in there.
Do
you want a single Scripture that seems to wrap up the central features of the
Christian faith? How about this text
from Luke, Jesus reading at his hometown synagogue? When we think about what the Christian faith
is about, I think it’s in there.
There
is God. “Jesus, filled with the power of
the Spirit, returned to Galilee.” Jesus
reads in the synagogue, choosing a text from Isaiah 61 which begins, “The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
Christian faith is about God, but more later. Bookmark that.
What
does the Spirit encourage, the sharing of good news. Sometimes we use the term, “gospel” to
describe the Christian message. “Gospel”
is simply another word for “good news.”
Christian faith is about good news, and this good news has both personal
and social dimensions to it. Need good
news for your life – it’s in there. Need
good news about the larger world – it’s in there.
“He
has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” The good news has something special to say to
the poor. What’s this about? The poor rarely get good news. Often they are castigated for their
poverty. Surely it was something they
did – not enough initiative, didn’t pay attention enough in school. There may be truth in some of this, but does
it help those in poverty find a way forward?
Are they condemned to be there forever?
Yet little good news is offered about a way forward. Not enough words are spoken about the
complexity of poverty, or how difficult it can be to get beyond it. Perhaps there is some good news when people
are willing to at least question whether a world in which the 62 richest
persons have as much wealth as the bottom one-half of humanity – 3.5 billion
people (Oxfam, Duluth News Tribune,
January 19, 2016) Isn’t there something
amiss in this, particularly when since 2010 the wealth of the 62 has increased
44% and the wealth of the bottom half has decreased 41%? The good news is that God notices, and that
God calls humanity to something different.
It is not that the fabulously wealthy are bad, it is that we have a
system that allows such accumulation for the few and provides too few
opportunities for the many. Challenge to
injustice – it’s in there.
There
is also being poor in a spiritual sense.
Sometimes our inner resources for life are at a low ebb. We are discouraged, downtrodden, been down so
long it looks like up to me. Some days
it feels like crisis after crisis until we have little emotional energy
left. God notices that too, and God
seeks to wrap us in love and care and bring us together into community so that
we can find inner resources for life.
That’s in there too. It is
interesting that Jesus quote from Isaiah 61 differs from what you read when you
turn to Isaiah 61. There you also read
about binding up the brokenhearted.
Being broken hearted is a kind of spiritual poverty that is addressed by
God’s love and care. It’s in there.
The
good news is about release for the captives, or freedom for the prisoners. For many of us this is a scary thought – just
open the doors of the prisons and jails?
Recall that in the time of Jesus, people could be sent to prison for
their debts. Again, the poor were given
little opportunity to change their lives.
In the time of Jesus, one could be imprisoned for sharing ideas seen as
threatening to the empire, not unlike all too many places in our world today. God notices this kind of captivity, these
offenses against freedom, and God envisions something different – freedom. It’s in there. We may also want to ask about this verse in
relation to the enormous incarceration rate in our country. Prisons have gone for-profit, and the effect
is not always socially beneficial.
Again, concern for justice, it’s in there.
But
captivity takes many forms. Human beings
lose their freedom when destructive patterns of behavior become habit –
addiction, learned emotional responses that cut off life-energy and limit
freedom. God notices this kind of
captivity too, and God’s Spirit is about setting us free. Inner freedom, it’s in there.
The
good news is about recovering sight. How
often our sight is limited. How often we
fail to see the big picture. Our seeing
can become habitual, blinding us to important parts of reality. We can become persons who see only what we
want to see. God’s Spirit seeks to open
our eyes so that we can see the world more truthfully in all its wonder,
beauty, mystery, tragedy, destructiveness and tenderness. To see only the easy beauty or good can set
us up for deep disappointment or being taken advantage of. To see only the ugly side of life leads to
protectiveness and cynicism. God’s
Spirit invites us to see more fully so that we can live more fully – with
gratitude for beauty and wonder and love, with determination to make right the
destructive and unjust. A change of
heart and soul, an invitation to deep reflection – it’s in there.
The
good news is about letting the oppressed, “the burdened and battered” go
free. Again, this is personal, for we
are sometimes the burdened and battered.
Again, this is social, oppression for reasons of race, ethnicity,
gender, sexual orientation remains very real.
God notices and invites us to work for a different world. It’s in there.
“Jesus,
filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee.” Jesus reads in the synagogue, choosing a text
from Isaiah 61 which begins, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” Christian faith is about God, and it is time for
me to return to that as I said I would.
The good news that is at the heart of Christian faith and life is good
news about a God of love who acts to heal and free, who is at work in the world
to make our lives more free and whole and our world more just and free. This God of love has always been about
healing and freeing. Jesus stands in a
long tradition, stretching back centuries to the prophets like Isaiah, who were
themselves rooted in an even older story about a God who heard the cries of people
enslaved in Egypt and acted to heal and free.
The
good news of the Christian faith is that God is love, and this God of love is
at work to heal and free. This God of
love has always been at work to heal and free.
When we know this God of love we can think more deeply, dream more
imaginatively, pray more playfully, live more freely, work for a newer world
more joyfully. It’s in there, in this
text, in life lived with this God of love.
And
one more bit of good news, now is the time to reconnect with this God of love.
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” God’s time is always now. God’s Spirit calls and invites us in every
present moment to hear and live and be good news. Today, we can hear the good news again. Today we can be good news.
Want
to know what Christian faith and life are about, it’s in there in Luke 4. And the words of Jack Kornfield about the
Buddhist Dhammapada apply forcefully here.
“One page, one verse alone, has the power to change your life.” This story from Luke has that power if you
will open yourself to it today. It’s in
there. Amen.
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