Preaching Good News

Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Hinton, WV on 1 Aug 2010. Text: Luke 4:14-21
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Imagine with me for a moment. Imagine that you are sitting in a sanctuary, just before worship, at a church you have attended for years. It may be this one; it may be another church with which you are more familiar. This is a place, though, where you know everyone else in the room. You can look around and see familiar faces surrounding you. You have watched the children here grow up; their parents, too, you have known since birth.

Imagine now that one of these young men you’ve known since infancy walks into the room. He’s been gone for the past month or so; it’s good to see him again. You make a mental note to chat with him after the service. He sits in the very front row, and when the time comes for the Scripture reading and the sermon, he steps forward.

He reads from a well-known prophecy, something for which the entire community has been anxiously waiting. He opens his mouth to speak, and the first thing he says is this: “I am the one who has come to fulfill this prophecy.”

How do you react? Do you nod in approval? He always was a good boy. Do you scoff in disbelief? You did, after all, see him running around his parents’ house naked when he was a toddler. Do you do a double-take, not trusting your ears? Wait, what? Do you hear the rest of his message?

This is about how things went when Jesus preached in his home synagogue, the writer of Luke tells us. The people there had known him all his life—Nazareth is “where he had been brought up”—and they didn’t quite know what to do with his words. More interesting to me than the crowd’s reaction are the words that Jesus speaks: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your presence.” These words are not the whole of what Jesus said, merely the beginning, but it is enough for the writer of Luke; it is all we are given.

This is often called Jesus’ first sermon; that is what I came to the text thinking, for sure. But just before he went to Nazareth, we are told that “news about [Jesus] spread through the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues.” Jesus has been preaching all through Galilee on his way home. Nazareth is still a first, though. It is the first time Jesus’ words to those in the synagogues are recorded. It is, then, the first sermon we get to hear.

It is, in fact, perhaps the only sermon of Jesus that we hear. Matthew 4 tells us “Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’” This is the repeated call of Jesus, his continual sermon. This is what he says as he is in Capernaum, and as he continues through his path in life. This may or may not be any particular instance of preaching. Besides, he wasn’t in a synagogue at this point in Matthew’s telling.

On the one hand, preaching is preaching no matter where the sermon is given. I was at times preaching to the folks at Bluestone as much as I am preaching here today. At the same time, though, there is something more official about the preaching that happens within a house of worship. Perhaps it is simply the formality of it; perhaps we are simply more attuned to listening for a word from God in houses of God.

There is also something to be said for the fact that the author of Luke skims over Jesus’ prior preaching and pushes this to center stage. The combination of place and time—in the synagogue and the first reported sermon—looks like a red flag to me. “Look here!” the author says. “Pay attention to this! This is important.” It makes me look once more at what is being said.

“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus announces. It is an identification of Jesus with the one about whom the prophet has spoken. So who is Jesus saying he is?

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus here is self-identifying; he is the one sent to preach good news to the poor, sent to grant freedom and sight, to end oppression, and to declare the time of Jubilee. Likewise, the author of Luke here is setting up the entire story of Jesus for us: Jesus will be a man whose main interest is the poor, the afflicted, the oppressed. Jesus will be a man concerned with the physical realities of life. This is not simply the spiritualized Jesus who deals with inner, personal conditions, but a Jesus who digs his hands into hard social realities, and seeks to change things for the better.

The scripture Jesus reads comes from Isaiah; it is in fact a combination of two passages in Isaiah. It begins with words from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This sounds much like the beginning of what Jesus reads, and then the reading switches to Isaiah 58. The full verse here reads: “Is not this the fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”

These are words from God to the people of Israel as they are in exile in Babylon. They are the captives, the prisoners, the oppressed. They are the ones who have been waiting years, decades, for deliverance—and these are words assuring that deliverance. For Israel, this has a very practical promise to it. They will be released from the bonds of Babylon and given their freedom once more. They are indeed released, but do not retain their freedom; in Jesus’ day, they still lived under the thumb of an oppressive regime. This one just went by the name of “Rome.”

Some of Jesus’ contemporaries were waiting for a political messiah, one who would throw off the Roman shackles and set free their people once more. Jesus, though, did not do this; he did not buck Rome, did not create a free Israel. He could not. Besides, that’s not where his focus lies.

Those who were waiting for a mighty messiah thought their problems would be solved by political independence; a top-down solution. Jesus looked to solve problems from below, starting with the individual. Jesus met people where they were, alleviating their individual pains and sufferings. He had a more person-based outlook on the situation. “I am here to help the poor one, to release the oppressed one, to give sight to he who is blind,” Jesus says. And that is exactly what he does.

Throughout the gospels, and particularly in Luke, Jesus meets people’s needs as he comes across them. Real, physical needs. In the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus proclaims that he has come to be an actor of social justice, and those words define his actions throughout his ministry. For Jesus didn’t simply go to the socially acceptable of his day and help them, but to those no one else wanted to talk to or touch. To the outsiders. To those who were oppressed in their own ways.

What is this business about the year of the Lord’s favor, though? This is part of the Isaiah reading; part of Jesus’ mission is to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The reference here is ultimately to a set of commands given by God and laid out in Leviticus, to what is called the Year of Jubilee. It is part of God’s schedule of rest for the people and the land: every seventh day is to be a Sabbath day, every seventh year a Sabbath year, and every seven Sabbath years a Jubilee. Thus, the Jubilee was to be celebrated every 49 years.

“Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” the Levitical instructions for the Jubilee begin. What follows is a series of actions designed to bring equality to the land. Those who had become slaves because of their poverty were to be released. Debts were to be erased. Land leased due to poverty was to return to the original owner. The land itself was given a rest, and no crops were planted. In short, it would be a return to equality. Those at the bottom of the social pyramid would be raised up; those with undue power lowered. By allowing the fields to lie fallow, they were given a chance to regain their nutrients, so that they could continue to produce fruitful crops. A year of rest meant renewal and revitalization.

Can you imagine what this would look like? I would have to hope that a Jubilee year came quickly, and erased my student loan debt. Can you imagine the kind of grace this would require? The radical kind of faith in God that insists on equality. I have a hard time picturing a Jubilee year. Which is probably why there is no evidence the Jubilee ever happened. Power was prized above equality; production above renewal.

This, too, is what Jesus proclaims he is bringing. Equality. Revitalization. Freedom in yet another way. And so he gives his life to women, to outsiders, to those beyond notice of “good” society. He lives the Jubilee, embodies the words of Isaiah. “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

What does this mean for us—for those of us who make it the goal of our life to continue the mission of Jesus, to be his disciples even millennia after his death? It means, for one, that Jesus’ words are still in the present tense—not only was the scripture fulfilled there, in Nazareth, but it is fulfilled here, in Hinton. As we are called to follow Jesus, we are also called to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor; not only to proclaim it, but to live it.

Too often we want to spiritualize the message of the gospels, to make it all about the soul and salvation and sin. And while this is certainly part of the message, it is only part. The gospel is also about suffering and sanctuary and service. The gospel is about believing, but it is also about acting.

The blessing and the curse of a global society is that we can see ever more clearly who in this world are the oppressed, the poor, the prisoner. They are the women pressed into slavery to grow and produce the chocolate that we take for granted. They are the children who work for nearly nothing in sweatshops, trying to help their families in whatever small ways they can by producing fabrics and clothing.

They are the factory farm animals, eating foreign foods and living in spaces too small to turn around in, so that we might enjoy our hamburgers and chicken nuggets. They are the forests that are cut down for the paper that we so casually throw away. They are the men whose livelihoods depend on the coffee beans they grow, yet are not paid enough for those beans to support themselves and their families. They are all those around us who work minimum wage jobs, struggling to make ends meet.

We are called to act, to bring freedom to these who have none. And the good news is that action can be easy. We can help stock a food pantry, so those near can get the extra measure of supplies they need. We can find resource to help with power bills, because no one should have to choose between heat and food.

We can become conscious of what we buy, and who is affected throughout the world by what we buy. I often come back to Fair Trade, because I have been researching it, and it just keeps looking better to me. Fair Trade products promise that the hands involved in the creation of that product were treated as humans and given respect. That those hands can then go home and take care of their families as they deserve. Organic foods, aside from being healthier for us, relieve the pressure on the soil, allowing it to recover from the chemicals that slowly destroy it. There is a beauty for me in products that are both organic and Fair Trade; they are a promise that both the people who work the earth and the earth that feeds the people are treated as they should. It is an emblem of the interdependence of the world, a sign of hope that there is another way.

We can buy recycled products, reusing the materials we already have rather than going after virgin resources. We can learn to live as actors of social justice in our society, just as Jesus did.

And this is my prayer today: that each of us might find ways in which we can live out Jesus’ mission, ways we can bring good news to the poor and declare the year of the Lord’s favor. It might be something small, and it might not seem like much, but every step counts, and we can only take one at a time. I pray that we will be given the courage to take that step, and that we might support one another as we walk along the path of justice. I pray that, as individuals and as a community, we can practice following Jesus, in action as well as in word. Amen.