United Parish of Bowie: Sermon -- Inaugural Address (Luke 4:14-30)

Biblical Reading:

¹⁴Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. ¹⁵He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. ¹⁶When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he 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,
¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

²⁰And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹Then he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. ²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, Is not this Joseph's son? ²³He said to them, Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ²⁴And he said, Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. ²⁵But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; ²⁶yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. ²⁸When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. ³⁰But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Luke 4:14-30

What in the world could have made the people turn so quickly? That's the question I'm stuck with when I read through today's gospel text. This is the beginning of Jesus' public ministry in Luke's gospel. Right after he was baptized, he was led by the spirit out into the desert where he was tempted for forty days. When he came back to town, this is the scene that was set… He began to teach in the synagogues of the surrounding community and was praised by everyone. But then he went to his hometown and things got a little dicey. By the end of our reading today, the people in Nazareth were ready to throw Jesus off a cliff… but it didn't start out that way.

At different points in our reading, the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him they spoke well of him and were amazed. He read from the scroll of Isaiah… what we now know as the beginning of the sixty-first chapter. It was in a sense his inaugural address. This was his plan… it was the agenda he laid out for his ministry. He said, this is what I'm about: Bringing good news to the poor… proclaiming release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free, and proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor.

When Jesus began his ministry, he turned to scripture… (remember what we usually call the Old Testament was the Hebrew Scripture, it was the only bible Jesus or the people in Nazareth ever knew.) According to one scholar, Isaiah's vision had sustained the people as they struggled to rebuild their community after exile in Babylon, it gave them hope as they suffered under the heel of the Roman empire and it reassured them as they looked forward in faith to a day when God would make all things right and whole again. And that's the vision Jesus appealed to, that's the scripture Jesus turned to, to say to the people gathered, the day that you've been waiting for is here. God's promises are coming true, right before your eyes. And they're coming true in me.

On the whole, I would say it was a successful inaugural address. The people agreed with his message and they identified with his agenda. For the span of about two verses it seemed like Jesus was on top of the world. Of course for many of us, what he said might have been enough to make us think that he was a little crazy. But the people who heard him seemed to be open to the idea. When he finished reading the scroll was the point in the story where they spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth… they may have been a little confused… isn't this Joseph's son, haven't we known him all his life, haven't we seen him grow up, how could he be the fulfillment of God's promise? But at that point they weren't upset… yet.

It seems like Jesus could have closed his mouth and walked away, content to bask in their praise. That certainly would have been the easier route. But he didn't. In fact in some ways it seems like he provoked them. The tone of the exchange went from pleasant to hostile so quick that I almost got whiplash reading it. It's not like Jesus walked through the door and threw away all of their customs. It's not like he called them names or said they were crazy… If he did that, it would be easy to see the offense… but all he did was to continue preaching, telling stories from their scripture and so we're left with the question of what made the people turn so quickly.

Of course different authors say different things and people interpret the anger coming from different places… it's likely that we won't ever be certain… but of all the explanations I read, the one that stood out to me pointed out that Jesus stopped short. When he quoted from Isaiah's scroll, he stopped short of what the people hoped for. The beginning of the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah is word for word what Jesus said, but Isaiah continued by proclaiming the day of the Lord's vengeance as well… The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he 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, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God.

It seems likely that part of what the people were looking for in the promises from Isaiah's vision was that they would beat their enemies… the people who had wronged them would finally get what they had coming to them. But Jesus left that part out of Isaiah's reading… maybe he missed it by accident, maybe it was oversight… If Jesus had stopped talking when everything was going well, we might never know, but he didn't.

He continued by saying you, the people of my hometown, the people who know me, you won't get it. And then he told two stories from the Hebrew Scripture… if you want to look them up, the first one comes from First Kings chapter seventeen, the second one comes from Second Kings chapter five. The story about the widow of Zerephath is a story of God's providence the story of Naaman the Syrian is a story of God's healing. But the important thing for us to realize is that both are stories of how God reached out to Gentiles even though there were many Jews who faced the same need. Of course in the understanding of people who would have been in the synagogue in Nazareth that day, Jews were considered inside the circle of God's grace and Gentiles were considered outside of it… and probably more to the point, in general, Gentiles represented those enemies who would finally get what was coming to them on the day of God's vengeance… which was the part Jesus left out of Isaiah's vision. The people in the synagogue that day couldn't imagine a messiah who would proclaim the year of God's favor without coupling it to the day of God's vengeance. They couldn't imagine a God who would erase the lines they had so carefully drawn to determine who was in and who was out. They couldn't imagine that God's favor would lead to anything other than them on top of the pyramid rather than somewhere in the middle or toward the bottom of it.

And so Jesus was right when he said that they would reject him, because they would have preferred that the messiah was for their benefit alone… they would have preferred that the messiah was good news for them — and not as the angel announced on Christmas eve, Good news for all people. So they tried to throw him off a cliff. And I fear that too often we have pretty much the same reaction. In our consumer culture it's almost too easy for us to ask the question, What's in it for me, God?

But the beauty and the challenge of being followers of Christ is that we are all in need. As much as people who were physically blind were made to see as a result of Christ's words and actions, people who are spiritually blind are also made to see the truth by Christ's words and actions. We are all always in need of God's grace. When we recognize that need and when we ask for that grace it will transform us. It will transform our relationships with other people and it will transform our relationship with the world around us because we are invited to become agents of a new creation.

The mission Jesus laid out in his inaugural address was a mission to the people on the margins of society… it was a mission to the economically impoverished… it was a mission to the blind, whether physically or spiritually… it was a mission to people held captive whether they're literally in prison or if they feel trapped by circumstances in their lives… it was a mission to people who were oppressed or held down by someone abusing their authority. And I would venture a guess that most of us have found ourselves described by one of those phrases at some point in our lives. Some of us are there now. And for those of us who are I hope and pray that we who walk with you on the journey can be a source of good news, that we can help you see, that we can proclaim freedom and that we can proclaim release. Because the mission Jesus claimed in his inaugural address is still to this day the mission of the church — to serve.

And at the same time, for those of us who aren't in the place of poverty or blindness, captivity or oppression, the invitation is clear. We're invited to join in the work of that mission. The specific task may look different depending on whether the blindness we are drawn to address is a physical blindness caused perhaps by a lack of vitamin A or whether it's a spiritual blindness that could be caused by any number of emotional scars. But the specific act of service is less important than the fact that we are serving where God has put it on our heart to do so. Because the mission of the church is not to serve itself… but rather to love the world in every possible way… that's service… to love the world as God did and as God does… that's service… and friends, when we're able to live that kind of service, the kind that was Jesus' mission whether the people liked it or not it'll be the best demonstration of who God is and what difference that makes in our lives, it will be a powerful witness to the truth we've been given to carry and it will enable us to say that the spirit of the Lord is upon us too, as we share the good news with the world God loves so much.

Amen.

The foregoing sermon was given by Rev. Dan Holland at the United Parish of Bowie on January 31, 2010.