An elderly woman is planning to celebrate
her 90th birthday, but due to constraints, none of her three
children will be able to join her for the big occasion. All three have done well in life and each
plans to give her a lavish gift. The
first child sends tickets for a month-long cruise in the Mediterranean. The second has a local car dealer deliver a
brand new Mercedes complete with a chauffeur (she is 90 after all!). The third, remembering how mother used to
love to read the bible before her eyesight went bad, buys her a truly
remarkable parrot, trained for 12 years by a cloistered monk to recite the Holy
Scriptures word for word from beginning to end.
There is nothing else in the world like it. As you might imagine, it costs the youngest a
fortune, but no amount of money is too much compared to a mother’s joy. A couple of months after her birthday the children
are able to be together with their mother.
She shows them beautiful pictures of her cruise and thanks her first child
for making it possible. She tells the
second how much she enjoys being driven around town in her stylish, comfortable
new car. And she says to the third,
“Thank you so much for the chicken. It
was delicious!”
The Prayer Book’s Outline of Faith uses a question and answer format to articulate what
we Episcopalians believe. One question asks,
“Why do we call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God?” The answer, “We call them the Word of God
because God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us
through the Bible.”
An interesting thing happens when a group
of Christians comes together and opens the bible. God speaks.
Or at least godly conversation ensues.
We find our talk is infused with something that otherwise would not be
present. As we listen to its words and
yield to its authority we find ourselves hopeful and challenged, healed and
stricken, guided and confused. In short,
reading Scripture changes us. You cannot
listen to Scripture and engage in conversation about it and remain the same. That is how it is now and that is how it was
two millennia ago.
Today we read of Jesus returning to his boyhood
hometown and attending worship in the synagogue where he grew up. He is given the honor of selecting a reading
from Scripture and speaking on it. He
asks for a scroll containing the words of the great prophet Isaiah who
proclaimed a message of hope at a very dark time. Jesus unrolls the scroll, searches for a
specific passage, locates it, and then reads these ancient words:
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
The original context is not lost on those
present. Isaiah spoke during a time of
exile to a people who were oppressed, who had never even set foot on their
ancestral land. Isaiah proclaims this
bleak period is about to end. “I am here
to tell you a new day is about to dawn.”
Isaiah’s was a bold message because nothing
about the time looked hopeful. God’s
people had settled into their lives in Babylon and while they did without much,
over the years they had learned how to make due. But Babylonian power was beginning to wane
and Persian invaders from the north were ceasing territory at an alarming rate. The handwriting was on the wall. The people in exile were living in a city
about to be overrun by another force who would subject them to who knows what.
While most anticipated this development
with dread, Isaiah saw in it something different. He saw the hand of God at work in the Persian
army because Cyrus, its leader, had an established policy of letting exiles
return to their homeland. This, in fact,
is what happens. The exiles receive
permission to return to the holy city of Jerusalem where they repair the broken
walls and gates (securing the city) and rebuild the Temple (this work of
restoration is the setting for today’s first reading).
Everyone in the Nazareth synagogue hearing
Isaiah’s words almost five centuries later associates what Jesus is reading
with these events. And each person
present must ponder his current misfortune with the plight of those to whom
Isaiah preached. The people of Nazareth
are subject to the occupying Roman army.
They are forced into servitude and taxed into poverty. They witness their sacred traditions being
defiled and their cultural identity being dismantled. They long to be delivered.
Jesus knows the longings of their hearts
and he knows the heart of God, who desires for all people to live free and to
flourish. And this passionate desire at
the very core of God’s love burns in the heart of Jesus. The way Luke writes his Gospel, today’s
reading serves as the inaugural event of Jesus’ public ministry. The passage he chooses to read functions as a
statement of his mission. Everything
Jesus will do from this point forward will serve a singular agenda. It will proclaim and demonstrate that God is
acting now to make all wrongs right.
It is a hopeful message and initially it is
well received by those who have witnessed Jesus grow from child to adult. The only problem is they do not know what
they need in order to be set free. They
do not realize that a change in their outer circumstances needs to be
accompanied by an inner transformation.
I just finished reading J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Eulogy. He describes his life growing up in a small
Ohio town in an extremely dysfunctional family whose roots are in Appalachian
Kentucky. Vance is one of the few people
from his background to overcome the odds against those from poverty and
brokenness. But even though he goes on
to serve in the marines, graduate from The Ohio State University, earn a law
degree from Yale, and go on to a successful career and a happy marriage, he
writes eloquently about the way his childhood experiences marred the
achievements of his adult years.
He had to unlearn all the old responses to
chaos and violence. He had to confront
his own sense of identity, which was forged in the conflicted environment of a
loving family system that broke down time after time. He knew how to be a hillbilly (which Vance points out is not without its blessings and
benefits), but he had to learn the ways and rules of a very different world in
order to make something different of his life.
Although Vance was exceeding everyone’s wildest dreams for him – his outer
world – he could not be free until he made sense of his inner world by
confronting what held him back and embracing what was worth keeping.
This is the kind of work Jesus sets out to
do through his ministry. He knows how
the years of oppression have damaged the soul and diminished the spirit. He knows how sin and suffering have left a
mark on each and every person he encounters.
And he knows God’s favor will not rule in a person’s outer world if it
does not reside in a person’s inner world.
It was true then. It is true now. It is a hopeful truth. And it is a hard truth. You cannot be whole until you are healed from
the inside out. Winning the lottery will
not fix you. Earning a degree from a
prestigious Ivy League school is not a magic elixir. Not to pick on a particular politician
because most of them pedal the same promise, but you cannot make America great
again through public policy alone. For
any of these things to make a difference, something has to be different about
you. Not about your circumstances. The difference has to be in your
essence.
As I say, this is a hard truth. Next week’s gospel reading is a continuation
of today’s and it will bear this out.
But it is a hopeful truth because inner transformation is the work God
wants to do. God’s very words, “You are
my child. I love you”, lay a foundation
for something new. Jesus’ every action
and every word demonstrate God’s love for you.
And the Spirit’s work and moving is a force you can invite or
discourage. The choice is yours.
The reason Jesus chose the passage from
Isaiah to read to the people of his hometown has not changed all these years
later. He saw in it a message of hope
and a message of challenge, a call to celebrate and a call to change. The word of God remains living and
active. God still speaks through it and
not one of us is ever quite the same when we hear it.