Scripture: Luke 4:14-21
In the space of roughly forty hours last weekend, I heard two sermons based on Luke 4:14-21. It’s not all that often that I get to hear sermons at all, especially since I don’t usually go to church when I’m on vacation, so I don’t hear too many sermons period. For me to hear two sermons the same weekend is very unusual. I guess it happens at the UCC conference annual meeting, but I can’t think of any other occasion in the last ten years when that would have happened. To hear two sermons the same weekend that happened to be on the same scripture passage is truly a startling occurrence…but on reflection maybe not quite as startling as you might think.
The first sermon I heard last weekend that was based on Luke 4 was by John Deckenback, our conference minister. It was the first meeting of the Central Atlantic Conference Board of Directors, my first meeting as president of the board, and I wanted to set the business we had to do in the context of our being church, being people of faith, so that we would not just be attending to institutional and organizational matters without remembering what kind of an institution we are and thinking about what our purpose ought to be. So I asked our conference minister, John Deckenback, to speak to us as our conference minister, rather than as our conference chief executive officer, which he also is according to the bylaws. I asked him to actually preach to us, the 25 or so of us gathered around meeting tables, to give a sermon, not a report, a sermon that would set the tone for the weekend and more broadly for the year, that would speak to how we ought to think of what we are about as the Central Atlantic Conference Board of Directors.
The passage John chose as his text was Luke 4:14-21. He recalled how he came into the ministry in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s in times when many young clergy had as their primary frame of reference and their foremost passion the civil rights and peace movements, not so much the sedate Sunday morning church life many churches tried to maintain even in tumultuous times. He noted how the praise and support offered to the young preacher, Jesus, quickly turned to conflict and hostility and recalled how for many people, including himself, the support typically offered to young people going into the ministry turned so often to controversy and open hostility. He noted that the words of Isaiah that Jesus read and embraced for himself spoke of the values that had led him into ministry and that sustained him through times of conflict. And he went on to say that those values continued to be the core of his call to ministry as times changed and as he moved into denominational work. And these were words he read as part of a religious service on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration.
Those words had proved to be an abiding presence through his time in the ministry and he offered them as words that he hoped would guide and sustain our work as a board: “To bring good news to the poor…to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” This is my editorial comment: It is not always easy when you’re doing the work of the church at the conference level, the local church level, at any level, to see a direct connection between what we are doing and the centuries old but always fresh words of Isaiah and of Jesus, but if we don’t hear them somewhere in the background, we may no longer be on a journey but just wandering.
The second sermon I heard last weekend on Luke 4, as many of you know, was given here at Sojourners by Jenny McBride as part of the worship service put together by our prison ministry social justice group, for which I am grateful—the worship service as a whole, Jenny’s sermon, and the conversation following worship. In a way I guess you could say that the choice of the passage from Luke 4 was sort of a natural choice: “release to the captives” seems like a kind of obvious theme for a prison ministry Sunday. But Jenny’s reflections on the passage were not simplistic. She did say—these are some things I heard her say, you may have heard other things—that the passage suggests that we at least ask some questions about captivity in the sense of incarceration. Do we need prisons, or do we need always more prisons? What are prisons for anyway? Is prison always the best option? That kind of thing. But then she went on to say that asking questions can be the easiest of responses on these matters, especially in a university community, but that when our questions are asked not in a kind of abstract or distant way but arise out of actually visiting people who are in prison, as Christ suggested was one important way for people to respond to him, when questions grow from real human contact and personal relationship, that is when they become more relevant, more numerous, more urgent, more profound. Indeed questions become more like prayers.
And she said, in my hearing, that when that visiting step is taken “release to the captives” can come to have other meanings besides literally getting out of jail. Being released from the isolation that being a prisoner often brings with it, for instance. Being released from the isolation that those of us on the outside of prison walls can also feel. The end of her sermon, as I recall, focused on that aspect of things, how she had been freed, released from her own forms of captivity as a result of her relationships with people in prison. I must confess I didn’t hear everything at the end, because I had gone off a bit into my own train of thought, my own little world. I heard some of the things she said. I sort of half heard others. But I was also beginning to think about all the different ways we could think of ourselves as captives, all of us in one way or another, and how in various ways we stand in need of release. I began to think of how I might need to be released from various kinds of captivity. Which brings me back to the question of how surprising it really is to hear two sermons on this passage in one weekend.
Pretty surprising in one sense. Two very different preachers independently choosing this scripture to be read in two very different settings. A bunch of people gathered around table to look at budgets, work plans, personnel issues, problem situations. A worship service focused on prisons and prisoners and building relationships in that context. No particular reason for the same scripture to pop up in both contexts. On the other hand… There are some scriptures that are just very basic to who we understand ourselves to be as Christians, scriptures that we keep coming back to, scriptures that we keep being drawn back to, specific scriptures that give you a way of looking at all of scripture. For me, you know, one such scripture is from Micah chapter 6: “And what does the Lord require but that we do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with our God?” I know it’s not just me, that many others have that as one of their favorite scriptures, except the point is not that it’s a favorite scripture for some of us, words that are particularly eloquent or beautiful or that for some reason just appeal to us. Favorite isn’t the right word in such cases because it’s not so much a matter of liking but of holding those particular words to express the essence of who we are and aspire to be. It’s a lot more than a favorite scripture for me, for many.
The same thing with Luke 4. The incident comes at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. When he takes up the scroll of Isaiah and reads and says at the end essentially that he intends to give flesh to those words, that they are to be fulfilled not in the sense of coming to pass all at once but in the sense of coming to life off the page, when Jesus does this he is making a statement as to what his ministry is to be all about. It’s a kind of a keynote address, if you will. And it tells me that this is how I should read the rest of the gospel stories. They are not biographies of Jesus that tell us about all the great things he said and did. They are not a set of instructions about what we are supposed to think, believe, or do if we want to call ourselves Christians. They are stories of liberation, release to the captives. Every part of them is about that. Everything Jesus said or did in the gospel stories is about that, about release to the captives—the physical healings, the social healings (restoring people to their place in the human community), the emotional and spiritual healings—all of it is not about Jesus working miracles. It’s about release to the captives. Everything Jesus said, whether about anxiety or material possessions or revenge or anything else, was about all the things we can be captive to and was about preaching release to the captives.
And recovery of sight to the blind. In some cases there were stories of the restoring of physical sight, but in many other cases a recovery of vision, in the sense of hope, in the sense of something to hope for, in the sense of something worth hoping for, and a recovery of some larger vision of what it means to be a human being. We hear Jesus better if we listen with that thought in mind, I believe. We are oppressed, it seems to me, by smaller questions: Is this or that right or wrong? What is the dogmatically correct thing to say about Jesus? We are set free from that oppression by asking always about release for the captives, which always includes me, us, whoever is doing the asking. What is it that will release us into a vision of life that is larger, more loving, more abundant than where we are now? Luke 4 is where the phrase is written: “release to the captives”. But release to the captives is everywhere in the gospels. It is what the gospels are about. It is the lens through which we can look at every gospel text.
For that matter, I would extend what I’m saying to the whole of scripture. It’s not just the gospels that are about release to the captives. It’s the Hebrew scriptures too. For some people what we from a Christian perspective call the Old Testament is filled with primitive and often violent stories and with a bunch of religious rules often referred to as “the Law”. It is often Christians who see the Old Testament this way; they can then go on to contrast the New Testament to the Old, where instead of a religion based on law and a judgmental God, we have a religion based on grace and forgiveness and a God of love. But that is all a way of viewing the Old Testament which Christians promote in a self-serving way. It is not a necessary way, or in my view, a right way.
For others, for many, especially for people who know themselves to be captives, it is the story of the Exodus, the escape of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, the story of their journey toward freedom, the story of all journeys toward freedom that is the basic and fundamental theme of the Hebrew scriptures. It echoes through much of the Old Testament as well as the new. It is picked up explicitly by prophets like Isaiah and then in turn by faithful Jews like Jesus. People, individuals, whole peoples emerging from their varied captivities, their oppressions, their failures of sight and lack of vision into some larger life. It’s not the only way to read scripture. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that. But it is a way to read scripture, all of scripture. It seems that it was the way Jesus took in his own scriptures. He read, and then he turned his eyes and set his heart on release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, setting at liberty those who are oppressed. Honestly, I think the battle over scripture in our time is not only over whether to take the Bible literally or not. It is also a question of what stories or themes you turn to as fundamental to your faith. There may not be any absolute right and wrong answers as to where to turn to find what is most basic to a Biblical faith, but we have some pretty strong clues. We know where Jesus turned and we know what he chose to lift up as he set out on his journey.
And so to come back to the question of how surprising it should seem that two very different preachers in two very different circumstances preaching within a few hours of each other chose Luke 4 as their text, my answer would be, as I suggested at the outset, maybe not so surprising after all. Really if you are trying to be basic and suggest what we are all about (like at a CAC board meeting) other than budgets and programs and so forth, or if you are trying to be basic as to what a prison ministry is really all about, or what any ministry of the church is really all about, I hope Luke 4 would be a passage that any preacher might consider as his or her text.
That passage is basic, fundamental you could say. My purpose this morning in preaching on this coincidence that is more-than-coincidence that I experienced last week is simply to let myself be reminded, and thus to remind you, of how central to our reading of the Bible that passage is, how central to our faith that passage is. I don’t really want to do more than that today. As for how my mind wandered at the end of Jenny’s sermon into the kinds of captivity I and maybe others may need to be released from, I intend to speak to that in October. For now, may Christ’s words linger among us and within us as we go about our work individually and together: “to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” With the condition always that we know ourselves to be among those referred to, I believe those words to be at the heart of the gospel. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 27, 2009