Jesus' Inaugural Address, Part 2
The Rev. Mark Sherwindt, Pastor
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church
Epiphany 4: January 27-28, 2007
Well, here we are again. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” We were here last Sunday listening to this line in Luke 4, and rather than just pondering the uneventful, our text continues with the added elements of skeptical disbelief and doubt. “Is not this Joseph's son?” The truth is that skepticism and doubt here in Luke is actually an improvement over the slight-handed ridicule and insult we found in Mark. In Mark's Gospel the question has a different focus. “Is this not the son of Mary?” [Mark 6:3] Referring to Jesus in this way was a social slur, implying that there were doubts about his father; and in Mark's Gospel that is precisely the point. God is His Father, which is what it means to say that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.
Luke has a longer narrative in mind. Joseph is Jesus' link to his lineage, to his hailing fans the house of David. That's what Luke told us with the Nativity story in Chapter 2. “All went to their home towns to register. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea the city of David called Bethlehem, because he [Joseph] was descended from the house and family of David.” [Luke 2:4] Joseph was the link to Jesus' claim to being what Paul calls in Romans, the royal Son of David according to the flesh. His self-reference as the son of Mary anticipates what the resurrection would reveal, that Jesus is none other than the Son of God. Both Mark's Gospel and Luke's Gospel make good points, but our interest should be fixed on understanding what Luke is trying to do.
We were talking in Sunday School last week about truly memorable passages in the Bible. For John Davis it was Matthew 11.28: “Come unto me all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” For orange-haired football fans across the country, it's John 3.16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” For Bob Lancashire it was Matthew 22, the double command: “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” For some it is love in John. For others, love in Matthew. For still others, it is Paul's focus on love in 1st Corinthians 13, our Second Lesson: “Yea though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…. Love is patient and kind; it is not envious or boastful, nor arrogant or rude.… Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice when the other is wrong, but when both are right together. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” The kind of love we're talking about when we're talking about God's love, the kind of love that is ours in Christ, that kind of “love never ends.” Now this has got to be the most memorable revelation of love, one of Scripture's earliest love songs, penned by Paul to the praise of God's glory.
Luke 4 certainly is not one of the passages that come to mind when many are thinking of memorable Scripture passages. The Sermon on the Mount, the 23rd Psalm, the great “I Am” sayings in the Gospel of John: these are worth recalling when we're thinking about getting back to the Bible's basics. But this is exactly what Luke thinks he's done here with Jesus Inaugural Address in Chapter 4. We skipped over the temptation sequence, which began with verse 1, although we'll get back to that with the beginning of Lent in about a month. With our text this morning we hear that the folks in Nazareth were very happy to hear of Jesus' mission and they were looking forward to the good news that would follow the messiah's coming as predicted with Isaiah 61. Their primary concern is that he focus his work on them. They cautioned against being like the proverbial carpenter who works on everybody's home except his own. Don't be like the doctor who is concerned with everybody's health except the health of his own family. Work your messianic miracles here with us. Take care of your friends first. Saving the world is a good thing, but better still, why not start your reign by improving the lives of those you know right in your neighborhood! Jesus makes it clear, however, that God's people will need to focus their attention on those pivotal moments in the Scriptures where God's reach extends beyond friends and neighbors to the stranger and even the enemy, beyond “us” to “them.” That's the mission as God's Son. That's their mission as God's people.
You know, I don't often invite you into the process of preparing a sermon, but I reached a point in my reflections where I knew I had read a cute story to illustrate this point about the controversies that can grow out of the wide embrace of Jesus' love and his preaching about a kingdom that stood for inclusion of those who for any number of reasons were regarded as outsiders. So I began looking for it, and I thought for sure that it was one of the Herb Brokering's I-Opening Parables (Concordia, 1974). I haven't seen this book in years. I was surprised that I still had it. But there it was under one of the many piles in my office. I didn't find the story there, but I found another of Herb Brokering's eye-openers that really hit home. It's not about the Gospel, but it seems to say a lot about the Second Lesson. It talks about love and marriage - surely not your marriage, but it made me think of me and mine. “Once there was a minister who counseled people who struggled with breaking up. He always had them join hands and do a hand-lock. They pushed and pressed against each other in the dark until the hand lock broke. They would fall into each other's arms exhausted and laughing. Then he would always ask them, 'Do you give up?' They answered, 'I do.' And he would pronounce them man and wife again.” I thought it was funny. I sure hope Marilyn does!
As it turned out, it wasn't Herb Brokering but William Willemon, now a Bishop in the United Methodist Church, who wrote a book with Stanley Hauerwas when they were both at Duke entitled Resident Aliens. Now, that's a book I really have lost track of. But while looking for it in my office I ran across this other book that I haven't seen for years. It's Tony Campolo's The Kingdom of God Is a Party: God's Radical Plan for His Family, the Church. As it turned out, this book (written by a now-retired sociologist who taught at Eastern College in Pennsylvania, a speaker whom I heard at the Lutheran National Youth Gathering in Atlanta back in 1994 when he wowed the gathering of almost 40,000 Lutherans in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Well, this book turned out to have a lot to say about our Gospel text. In fact, it had a lot to say about the Good News in general, which is why the author thought the idea of a party captured the spirit of the great news we've been gathered to celebrate and to share. Here's what Tony Campolo has to say about our text in his book, The Kingdom of God Is a Party (Word, 1990).
“The scene was set by the return of Jesus to his home town after having earned a reputa-tion as a teacher and a miracle worker south of Nazareth in the region of Galilee. As was the custom in ancient Israel, visiting rabbis were always given the honor of reading from the Scriptures as part of the Sabbath worship service in synagogue. When they called upon Jesus to read the Scriptures, he asked for the scroll that contained the writings of Isaiah, turned to the passage cited above, and read it. Then he took his seat, even as every eye in the place was fixed on him. What followed was the real shocker. Jesus shot back over his shoulder this incredible announcement: 'Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.' Nothing could have been more dramatic than the announcement that he saw himself to be the fulfillment of the prophecy made by Isaiah 61. The crowd was faced with a decision. Either Mary's son was the One sent by God, or he had just committed blasphemy. They decided that the latter was the case, and they took Jesus out to the edge of town to throw him off the cliff. What followed was awesomely dramatic by virtue of its simplicity. The Son of God did not call down an army of angels or suddenly disappear. Instead, in a scene that would make John Wayne seem like a sissy by comparison, Jesus turned on them and walked at the crowd. There must have been something powerful about his bearing, because the crowd that had been bent on killing him simply stepped aside and let him go without so much as laying a hand on him.” [pp. 19-21]
The importance of all this, according to Campolo, is that Jesus made the declaration of “Jubilee” [referred to in our text as the acceptable year of the Lord] central to his mission. Jesus was saying that salvation not only includes deliverance from sin, but also involves such things as economic well-being for the poor, inclusion of outcasts, freedom for the oppressed, and love for the downtrodden and disinherited. “The main problem with this image,” according to Tony Campolo, “is that the biblical concept of Jubilee requires too much explanation and background to hammer home its meaning to most people.… Something that will give a more immediate picture of what God wants to do in the world is needed. And while no word or image can do the job as well as it should be done, I want to try out a word that conveys an immediate image to anyone who hears it. The word is party.” [p. 21] Hence, the title The Kingdom of God Is a Party.
I like what Campolo does with the image when talking about church and teens in particular. “Every year for the past ten years in central Pennsylvania,” he writes, “I have spoken at a big Jesus Festival called Creation … About four thousand people, mostly in their teens, camp out together for four days, groove on Christian rock music, listen to gospel preachers, and have an overall good time.… A couple of years ago, I was invited to preach at a Lutheran church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a couple of days after the festival ended. Word got out, and a lot of the people who attended the festival showed up in large numbers and packed the place. I don't know what the pastor of the church made of the huge turnout, but I believed he was somewhat surprised…. Dressed in his formal robe with its velvet decorations, he took his place behind the pulpit. He opened the gilded pulpit Bible, stood back with a dignified flair … and called the people to worship by saying, 'Let us make a joyful noise unto the Lord!' With that, someone in the balcony yelled, 'All right!' and stood up clapping. That outburst was followed by several hundred young people who followed suit by jumping to their feet with shouts of praise and wild applause. The pastor was visibly startled. I don't know what he was expecting when he told the people in the church to make a joyful noise unto the Lord. But I do know that the last thing he expected that Sunday was that anybody actually would!” [pp. 68-70]
“The fact that this particular church service was wildly exciting makes it exceptional … because generally, church services [according to most teens] are devoid of excitement. Ask any teenager who doesn't want to go to church on Sunday morning why, and you will get a standard answer: Church is boring!” [p. 70] One of our own kids at Zion even came up with a unique form of measurement. She called it the borometer! Well, let's get back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Tony Campolo. “They are not simply knocking the sermon. There is no sense that something spontaneously joyful is about to erupt. There is no electricity in the air. Certainly, going to church is nothing like going to a fun-packed party, and that's a shame.” [pp. 69-70] For Campolo the “party is not simply an event. It is an attitude, a disposition carried by Christians wherever they go.” This sense of joy and celebration was part of what made early Christianity so infectious. Whatever Christianity may have gained or lost since that first generation of believers, the loss of this joyful spontaneity, an emotional quality that Revelations actually compares to a teenager's first love, is sorely missed when absent from worship. It is this joy that contributed so much toward providing what Jesus called the abundant life. [pp. 113-114]
I'll admit that I'm not that sold on the notion that the kingdom of God as a party, but I like this sense of joy that breathes life into this new community we call the church. I don't think Campolo is going anywhere with an image of Christians as a new kind of party animal, but I like what he does when he calls attention to the fact that “a Christian is not simply a person who accepts some biblically proven propositional truths” about who Jesus was, and is. Being a Christian also “involves a personal decision to surrender to Jesus, to allow him to invade your entire life. Becoming a Christian means being permeated by the presence of Jesus…. Something happens when we realize that Jesus is not just an objective fact in history but a personal presence blazingly alive in the very ground of our being.” [pp.114-115] Paul called it the miracle of new creation. Jesus called it the gift of new life. That's what the Bible is talking about with its talk about the kingdom of God. That's Luke's point and God's promise. The kingdom of God has broken into our world, and is alive within us, among us, and through us, as we surrender to the presence of Jesus' life and ask to be filled with the power of his love. Amen