Scripture: Luke 4:14-21
I suspect you will find the sermon this morning to be…unusual. I found myself in the mood to experiment a little this week, so instead of making my ordinary effort to gather up my thoughts, sort through them, and present them to you in some more or less organized fashion, I decided to talk to you in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style, so I just want you to know that I’m doing that intentionally this morning. It’s not that I tried to be organized and failed. Also, what I’ll be saying is a rough representation of what I was thinking about as I was preparing for this sermon, so it’s more like a pre-sermon or a preface to a sermon. Anyway, such as it is, here is the result of this experiment.
So let me see. What should I preach on this week? Maybe let’s do just some Biblical reflection with no predetermined theme. I’ll be preaching again on some themes in February. I wonder what the lectionary readings are for this week. H’mmm, let’s see. Hebrew Scriptures: Nehemiah. Might be fun to deal with a writing probably not too many people know anything about. I could use some brushing up myself. Passage might have some possibilities. Pretty remote from anything though. Take a lot of effort to connect it to something I care about much less something anyone else cares about. So…I don’t think so, but we’ll see—maybe I’ll come back to it.
New Testament: First Corinthians 12, body of Christ. Just did that. Two weeks in a row using Romans. Too similar. Gospel reading: Luke 4 Jesus beginning his ministry reading from Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me…bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…set free the oppressed.” Yes!! One I can work with, not only work with, one that I really like, not just like, but think is right at the core of what the gospel is about and of who Jesus is. Jesus basically says so himself. So that works. No need to look any further. Works for me. Works for Sojourners. We’re Christians who believe in setting free the oppressed, not just how we can get into heaven. This is one of our passages. I’ll go for it.
So OK. How am I going to approach this? I don’t want to just give a sermon that basically says it’s good to seek justice. We know that already. That’s why it’s a good passage for Sojourners. In fact it’s such a good passage for Sojourners that, mmm, maybe it’s not a good passage for Sojourners. Maybe I need to deal with a passage that’s a little less comfortable for me. Something that challenges me a little, challenges all of us in some way, has a little creative tension in it. In fact, since this is a passage I like, maybe I’ve preached on it too much already. I wonder how many times I’ve preached on this at Sojourners. Better check. (check…check…check). Well, I’m surprised. Just twice in seven years. I know I’ve mentioned it a lot more than that but actually preaching on it, just twice it looks like. So I think I’ll stick to it. Don’t want to go looking for some other passage. No, I settled on this one. Let’s just see what happens with it. Besides, does it really hurt for us to be reminded that seeking justice, bringing good news to the poor, setting free the oppressed is our business as Christians? Are we supposed to believe that, but only so long as we don’t say it out loud very often? Is there something wrong with repeating that message? Can we really say it too often? God knows, in the total spectrum of the Christian church calls for justice aren’t heard nearly often enough. Shouldn’t those of us who believe in that message be saying it as often as we can? Isn’t it pretty sad if we think we’re going to get bored by that message? Yup, that would be very sad. Don’t want to admit that possibility. So Luke 4 it is. That’s my story for the day and I’m sticking to it. Still it would be nice to have some kind of a fresh approach. Fact is, I can bore myself if I think I’m just repeating the same thing over and over again. At some point it all becomes just words, and that’s not good either.
So, let’s get on with it. What am I going to do with this passage? Well, if I’m going to really explore a Bible passage and not just refer to it, I suppose I better give a little background, explain the context—don’t need a lot, but some. Be good to establish that this really is an important passage in understanding Jesus, not just one that happens to fit with our prejudices here at Sojourners. So I’ll at least need to place this story in the context of the larger story about Jesus.
Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. The very beginning, before he’s done very much of anything else. He gets done dealing with the devil in the wilderness and maybe sets up a temporary headquarters in Capernaum. He’s ready to start living his life—that is the only part of his life that we know about, what we refer to as his ministry—but before he goes out and starts gathering disciples and preaching and healing and all that good stuff, he checks in at home. Goes back to Nazareth, maybe to say good-bye. Goes to church—synagogue. Somebody probably asks him to read since they won’t see him for awhile.
He does—from Isaiah chapter 61. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he sat down and there was silence for a moment and then he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, as I hear him, he was saying this passage says what I am all about—starting now. God has called me to be about exactly the kinds of things our beloved Isaiah was talking about—blessed be the name of God. It was his keynote address. His mission statement. Yes, I’m going away but not to see if I can make good in the big city but to do what Isaiah said. That’s what Jesus said about himself. That’s why this is such an important story. It’s just crucial to who Jesus was—and therefore crucial to Christianity. That’s the way I’ve always read the story anyway. It’s what I still think. Doesn’t hurt to say all that, even if some people have heard it before.
But gotta finish the story too. When Jesus was done, there were smiles everywhere, heads nodding with approval all over the place. And everyone said. Isn’t that nice. Look at him all grown up. He speaks well, doesn’t he? Joseph’s son, right? He looks so, well I don’t know authoritative when he’s in front of people. A lot of poise that young man has. He’ll do well, whatever he does. He might get tired of setting free the oppressed, grow out of this youthful idealistic phase he’s going through. Settle down into a profession. But he’ll do well. You just wait and see.
I’m reading this and about how the people in the synagogue responsed and suddenly I realize that this part of the story gets me back to the same kinds of thoughts I was having before. Thinking about this part of the story puts me in the position of hearing the story today. As hearers—like the people in the synagogue—how are we going to take this? Me. How do I take it? I mean what’s to keep us from just smiling and saying “that’s nice”—or, since we’re more cynical here in the 21st century, what’s to keep us from saying yeah, yeah, heard that before? Let’s go on to something else.
Actually, I guess one possibility would be to confront the cynicism in us, beginning with the cynicism in myself. The tendency to treat calls for justice as just the same old same old, the same thing we’ve heard many times before, not really challenging us or inspiring us in any way, just there as a right thought and a nice sentiment. What becomes of us when we don’t allow words like these to get to us in some way? Or do we just hear them, smile, nod, and go home. OK, but I sort of feel like a sermon along those lines could easily turn into a sermon that beats up on myself and all of us for not doing enough, for not taking Jesus to heart, for not being good enough Christians. There might be a time and a place for a sermon like that. I’m not altogether against bringing guilt into the picture. After all, complacency and just patting yourself on the back for being progressive is not very healthy either. But mostly guilt is not so very constructive, and more importantly it’s not how I’m really feeling right now. If I tried to preach along those lines this week, it wouldn’t be authentic. So I don’t think I’ll go there.
There is the question of who are the oppressed. When Jesus talks about setting free the oppressed, is he just talking about people who are poor or who are the marginalized and the outcast, or might he be talking about all of us in a sense. Aren’t there all sorts of ways to be oppressed? Can’t people be oppressed by, let’s say, depression? Or by an addiction of some sort? Is it possible for some people to be oppressed by wealth as much as others are oppressed by poverty? Aren’t most of us oppressed by various kinds of fears, some of them very personal fears, others widespread fears affecting our whole culture? Aren’t there lots of kinds of oppression, and aren’t we all probably oppressed in some way? Maybe we are not so much the ones doing the setting free as the ones needing to be set free. Or maybe we are both.
All those questions are worth reflecting on, it seems to me. It’s worth asking myself in what ways I am oppressed. Trouble is…I really don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. And interpreting oppression in this very broad, sweeping way somehow seems to do an injustice to people who really are oppressed by bigotry and entrenched structures of discrimination, or who live on the edge of survival. For me to compare my oppression to theirs is…I have to call it immoral. And it certainly takes the edge off of the call to set free the oppressed. Jesus meant the edge to be there. I’m pretty sure. And it makes me uncomfortable to say the least to be talking about how we all might be oppressed in connection with this particular passage. I can’t do that. Not this week with this passage.
There’s another angle to talking about oppression though. What’s that quote that Beth Elliott has at the end of all her emails? Let me look it up. Beth won’t mind if I use it. An Australian aboriginal woman is quoted as saying, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound to mine, then let us work together.” That’s not saying that my oppression is just as good as someone else’s, that I have as much right to claim that I am oppressed as the next person. That’s saying that my oppression is connected to theirs, and so my liberation is connected to theirs. When I work to set free those who are truly oppressed in the way I believe Jesus meant it, I am working to set myself free at the same time. That’s not a new thought either. But it’s a true thought. Definitely one that’s worth repeating. And someday I’ll be ready to give a whole sermon on how and why I believe that to be true. Right now it’s more like a faith statement for me. I really need to be able to talk about that more than I am right now, but that’s going to require more time than I have this week. So I’ll just offer the sentiment again, because it’s worth offering again, without trying to make a whole sermon out of it. I need to do that though some day, for myself—make a sermon out of it.
And here’s a thought that’s pretty different from all this about oppression and being set free. As I keep reading the story, it goes on to tell about how Jesus—here’s how I interpret it—Jesus senses that amid all these smiles and compliments that people aren’t hearing what he’s saying. They’re not getting it. So he makes some comments about how prophets aren’t accepted in their hometowns, and maybe about how sometimes the people who are supposed to know you best, don’t know you very well at all, and one thing leads to another and pretty soon the smiling, nodding, approving crowd turns against him and runs him out of town.
Makes me reflect on this whole question of being known. Our need, our desire to be known, for there to be someone who understands where we hurt and why and what will comfort us and what matters the most to us—things like that. I reflect on what I have always understood to be the loneliness of Jesus, because it wasn’t just the people of his hometown who didn’t understand him, it was the people who presumably knew him the best of anyone, the disciples who traveled with him, rose in the morning, ate breakfast, walked with him, observed his every move—they didn’t understand him. The gospels are at pains to tell us that. We don’t know about his parents, but we know about parents in general, who even if they love us unconditionally, often have to love us unconditionally if they are going to love us at all, because they don’t really understand who we have become. Jesus’ loneliness. Our own loneliness. Whether God, if God is real enough for us, overcomes our loneliness. My mind is drifting in these directions now.
But I stop it from drifting too far. It’s not that it’s not worthwhile to think about such things. It’s that these kinds of thoughts are taking me way far away from what the passage was about, where Jesus read from Isaiah and talked about release to the captives and setting free the oppressed. Thoughts about understanding and being understood and loneliness are all worth having. But they not only take the edge off of anything Jesus has to say about seeking justice. They give us a way for us to ignore what he has to say altogether. Better not go there either. I wouldn’t feel good about it.
Sometimes, I say to myself, you know, you just have to hope that what the scripture says will somehow stand on its own. Yes, I’m going to figure out something to say about it, but in the end what I’m really hoping is that what the scripture says, just on its own, will commend itself to us. Sometimes you have to hope that, and this may be one of those times.
‘He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone were fixed on him. He said, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’”
This is a story of the beginnings of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. May God give me the ears to hear…and the heart. Amen.
jim Bundy
January 21, 2007