1-27-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Nehemiah.

All the people of Israel gathered together into the square before the water gate.

They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel.

Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly, both men and women, and all who could hear with understanding.

This was on the first day of the seventh month.

He read from it facing the square before the water gate, from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women, and those who could understand.

And the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people.

And when he opened it, all the people stood up.

Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, Amen, lifting up their hands.

When they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.

So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation.

They gave the sense so that the people understood the reading.

And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people, said to all the people, This day is holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn or weep.

For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.

Then he said to them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink sweet wine, and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared.

For this day is holy to our Lord, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks to you.

Although they have no words or language, and their voices are not heard.

Their sound has gone out into all the lands, and their message to the ends of the world.

In the deep, God has set a pavilion for the sun.

It comes forth like a bridegroom out of his chamber.

It rejoices like a champion to run its course.

It goes forth from the uttermost edge of the heavens and runs about to the end of it again.

Nothing is hidden from his burning heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul.

The testimony of the Lord is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent.

The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice rejoice the heart.

The commandments of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clear and endures forever.

And the Lord are true and righteous together.

More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold.

Sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.

By them also is your servant enlightened.

And in keeping them there is great reward.

Can the people tell often they offend?

Cleanse me from my secret fault.

Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins.

Let them not get dominion over me.

Then shall I be whole and sound and innocent of great offense.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.

O Lord, strengthen my reading.

A reading from First Corinthians.

Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.

For in the one spirit we are all baptized into one body.

Jews are Greeks, slaves are free, and we are all made to drink of one spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member, but of many.

If the foot would say, Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, that would not make any less a part of the body.

And if the ear would say, Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body, that would make it not any less a part of the body.

If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?

If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?

But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as he chose.

If all were a single member, where would the body be?

As it is, there are many members, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable, we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect.

Whereas our more respectable members do not need this.

But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.

If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.

If one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.

And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, and various kinds of tongue.

Are all apostles?

Are all prophets?

Are all teachers?

Do all work miracles?

Do all possess gifts of healing?

Do all speak in tongues?

Do all interpret?

But strive for the greater gifts.

The word of the Lord.

Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.

He began to teach in their synagogues, and was praised by everyone.

When he came to Nazareth, where he'd been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day as was his custom.

He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.

He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it is written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

God 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 Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.

The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him, and then he began to say to them, Today the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

The gospel of the Lord.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our fortress and our strength.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Welcome back as we continue to celebrate or try to discern epiphanies in the life of Jesus.

And just as a reminder about what these are and what they aren't, part of my New Year's thing is to do some yoga classes.

So I was doing yoga this week, and you're supposed to pull your knees into your chest, and the lady says, roll side to side and massage your back.

That hurt my spine.

I mean, rolling around in your spine is not what I'd consider a massage.

But I had this wake-up moment because one of our members took me over to do Pilates, and the lady at the Pilates studio said, Gina, listen, you need to like straighten your spine out and curl your tailbone under.

And I realized when I did that, it kind of did feel good because I wasn't riddling on my spine anymore.

I was riddling on my back muscles.

That's not an epiphany.

That's like an aha moment.

I might call it a eureka.

It's better than knowing that there's two different kinds of Clorox bleach and one smells better than the other.

I mean, and this is like a step above that because I probably won't forget that I don't have to hurt my back anymore in yoga class.

But it's not an epiphany.

An epiphany is a moment of changing the entire way we interact with the world.

And consider, we've we've seen a few already, the inclusion of these wizards when they discover the child Jesus and Jesus' baptism and his presence at the miracle of turning the water into wine last week.

And then here we have Jesus' first sermon, and man, it's a short one.

This is the shortest sermon you're ever going to get.

I'll tell you, it's interesting to think about the punch.

And I won't go too long today, don't worry.

I'm just going to try to mimic this thing for Jesus.

It's helpful maybe to consider the way this is supposed to work at the time of Jesus.

You go to a synagogue and there's a reading and you have some agency in selecting.

And then when you sit down at the synagogue, and these aren't professional clergy, they're not paid priests.

I mean, they're like lay leaders and lay volunteers.

After all, good Jewish boys grew up going to the synagogue and learning their faith.

So what they're supposed to do when they do a reading is sit down and say, well, Rabbi Akiva says it means this, but Rabbi Gamaliel says it means this, and Rabbi Joshua says it means this.

And that's that.

So they raise up this commentary from other rabbis.

I've been to many sermons that go this way.

You get to hear a lot of what other people think, and then that's that.

Maybe there's some really nice quotes, there's some good one-liners, and that's the explanation.

And you know, there's no reason to think that Jesus actually hadn't prepared to do that.

It's very possible Jesus had studied up so that he could compare what the rabbis say.

And then I want you to consider that maybe the epiphany Jesus has when he reads the Isaiah text is that it actually is not just written to some people long ago about something that may have once been true, but maybe the epiphany of Jesus this week is that the scriptures can be fulfilled in him.

Now, you know, the year of the Lord's favor happens every 50 years.

It's called the Jubilee.

And our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters do celebrate this.

The last Jubilee year was in the year 2000.

We don't really do it right like it is in the book of Leviticus.

So just as a quick reminder in Leviticus, every seventh year you're supposed to let your pastures go fallow.

You give the land a Sabbath so it can rest and recover, and you don't outstrip the land like we did in the American South with cotton, right?

We basically took all the nutrients out of the land and gave it no rest.

So the idea is you rest the land every seven years, but every seven, seven years, you give there's an extra year.

So it got a Sabbath the year before, but in the year of Jubilee, there's an extra Sabbath for the land.

Everybody who owes money their debts are forgiven.

I mean, the Jubilee would be about, well, canceling the third world debt.

That's what it would be like.

Lands belong to people ancestrally, and if they couldn't pay their bills, they'd sell their land.

Or they would sort of become indentured servants or sharecroppers.

Every Jubilee year, they get their land back.

And that's so that poverty is not institutionalized.

That's so that it's only for a generation that you live in poverty, but then you get to start over every Jubilee year.

Now, this is in Leviticus.

We're not sure they ever did it.

You know, I mean, I think most people would be very loath to return land that they paid money for, don't you?

It's a really interesting concept, though, isn't it?

That's the year of the Lord's favor.

And when Jesus is teaching, we have no idea whether it's the first year in the 50th cycle or the 49th.

But I wonder, again, if the epiphany of Jesus is.

Oh, like whether it's the first or the 27th year, this could be the year of the Lord's favor.

Interestingly, Jesus stops reading the Isaiah scroll because the next line, the next line is, and to proclaim the vengeance of our God.

A lot of scholars think that the crowd ends up getting kind of upset with Jesus because he leaves out the vengeance part.

After all, these were people who were kind of being subjugated by the Roman Empire.

The taxes were onerous.

You know, I've told you Herod the Great's temple was literally the eighth wonder of the ancient world, and the way he built it was by paying.

I mean, that the taxes levied on people were astronomical.

So they had this beautiful temple, and then they had really nothing left.

They probably wanted more than anybody, well, the vengeance of their God.

And Jesus said in his excitement, well, he leaves that out.

What's funny if you read all of Isaiah 61, that's where this comes from, is that there really is no more mention of God's revenge.

There's just this one line, and as you read the rest of the uh 61st chapter of Isaiah, uh you'll find that the year of the Lord's favor is when all of the scattered, all the people who have been moved around throughout the diaspora, get brought back together into one community, one body.

What if God's vengeance is like that?

Gathering together the scattered.

That sounds pretty different from my vengeance.

Usually my vengeance is about getting even.

Well, it's about getting worse than even.

It's not about winning, it's about, well, destroying my opponent, right?

It's not about tackling them, it's about ending their sports career with a tackle.

That's what my vengeance looks like.

Sometimes that's what ours.

So I wonder if Jesus doesn't get a little bit excited here.

And he says, whatever year we are in the 50th cycle, we can make the year of the Lord's favor.

Now, this is a small thing, because you know, we come to church every week and we get to hear four readings, and sometimes, I mean, I listen, I've been to seminary.

Sometimes I have no idea what the reading's talking about.

And sometimes I think that is as far as the East is from the West from applying to anything I do.

But sometimes, and I'll tell you, I think that's sometimes why I usually sit in the same seat.

I'm one of the worst people.

I sit in the same chair every week, unless the bishop comes.

I had a friend of mine who said, the reason we do this, we sit in the same seat, is because one time we came, and in that seat, maybe it was the lighting or the music or the sermon was short, or you know, we saw this image in the glass, something happened in that seat, and we come back to it, so it might happen again.

I think that's why we do these readings, because it might come to you.

It might come to you that in the middle of sometimes an arcane genealogy or some strange ritual description of how we're supposed to be purified, it might be this moment where you hear from Scripture, God, that could be about me.

I might be involved in proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor.

I wonder if that isn't why we do this.

The churches I grew up in, we read two voices, two verses of scripture, and then we heard a long sermon, usually about nothing.

We got four tries here.

We get four tries every week to hear that God's, that this scripture might be about us, might be about us this year, that we might not just think about it, we might fulfill it.

And it's interesting to think about the other three readings in that context.

There's this reading in Nehemiah.

Listen, the people, they don't know their Bible, they haven't been to Sunday school, uh, they've been living actually in New York City, and then they've come back to, well, Lake Glenier, which is not really the same economically or as an urban plan.

And uh while they were living in New York City, they didn't really know what it meant to follow the Torah.

So Ezra and Nehemiah read it and they hear how they missed living God's plan for their life, their whole life.

These are people who have not celebrated the Passover, they probably haven't circumcised their kids, um, they didn't do the kudi wash we talked about last week.

They hear it and they weep because they've missed out.

And how interesting.

The preacher gets up and says, Stop mourning.

Don't let the judgment of God, don't let the fear of God motivate you.

No, the joy of the Lord will be your strength.

Boy, that'd be an epiphany for me.

The joy of the Lord to be my strength?

I'll tell you, like those people, I grew up hearing that the judgment of the Lord is to be my motivation.

Because if you didn't play it right, well, there's hell waiting for you, and if you didn't save your friends, there's hell waiting for them, and that'll be your fault.

That was judgment.

Strong motivator for me.

The joy of the Lord is to be your strength, the release of captives and prisoners and sight to the blind.

Maybe that's an epiphany.

There's an African proverb that says, God created this because God thought we would enjoy it.

What a New Year's resolution that can be.

That the purpose of this is enjoyment, not to escape judgment.

Anyway, we read this thing in in um Corinthians.

Last week we got to talk about some of the spiritual gifts and how there's compliments, and then Paul has this really radical vision that the body of Christ is like, well, a body made of many, many parts.

Forgive me for this, but in youth group we always talked about, I wonder who is the butthole in the body of Christ.

That sounds kind of profane, but I want you to know, I think that's exactly what Paul has in mind, because he says the members of the body that we consider less clean are the ones we treat with special favor.

I mean, after all, I'm much more prone to clean my armpit than I am my neck after I exercise.

Because it needs it.

And there's this interesting thing where we often think this body of Christ business is about, well, just the people we know who um believe like us, or maybe we just think about it as our little congregation instead of thinking that this body of Christ image Paul uses is really about.

I guess it depends.

Maybe this is the epiphany criteria.

It depends on who you think is in the body of Christ.

Episcopalians?

People who go to St.

Thomas?

Paul?

Of God's children.

Depending how we do it, you know, it becomes a lot easier to have elective surgeries and remove members of the body of Christ we don't need.

There's this sort of icky word out there called vestigial organs.

Now we all know you can survive without your appendix, and sometimes when it ruptures, your appendix is gravely dangerous for you.

Why not just cut it out?

Isn't that an interesting idea?

Why not just have an elective surgery and remove people from the body of Christ who are threatening, threatening our health?

I think because Paul says even those members that we consider to not be helpful, or those members that just seem to get inflamed all the time, are part of the organism.

And I will tell you, interestingly enough, there's been some recent studies on this, what the effect of things like anesthesia does to you cumulatively.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but having surgeries and hat receiving anesthesia takes a toll on your body.

Even if removing some structure seemed temporarily good for you.

By the way, if your appendix ruptures, you should remove it.

No doubt about that.

But the toll of anesthesia is a little bit unknown.

Sometimes I wonder if we remove members from the body of Christ at an expense we don't even realize.

I wonder what it would be like to think that the people that we think are really different from us, even in this group, belong to the body of Christ like we do, which means when they irritate us, there has to be some care given because we function as one.

And what is bad for one member of the body makes the entire body suffer.

And I wonder if that isn't what Paul is trying to do.

I mean, listen, in general, um I think my opinions are right.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have them.

Which means that if we disagree, I probably think yours are wrong.

Maybe that's okay.

I mean, that's sort of how opinions work.

But I wonder if there doesn't come a point where our hearts harden and we become presumptuous and we think, listen, if you're not going to vote the way I vote, then we just do belong in the same body.

And I'm pretty sure when we do that that we're wrong.

And maybe that's part of our invitation today to think that the year of the Lord's favor is not about separation and getting more and more authority and ownership.

It's about restoring balance.

Just two more short thoughts.

There used to be, and this is still true, do you know who the owner of the owning denomination of the greatest amount of missionary capital in the world?

Do you know which denomination that is?

It's the Southern Baptist Church.

Now, a way long time ago, this is very interesting, like 20 years ago, 25 years ago, Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky was academically superior to Harvard.

And about 25 years ago, members of the Southern Baptist Convention decided that the bandwidth of the Southern Baptist Church was too wide.

There were too many left-leaning people.

So what they did is they read the bylaws very carefully, but this is documented, this is not my opinion.

The people who do this have set gone on record and said this is exactly what they did.

They figured out how to essentially stack the National Convention with delegates of a similar mind and take over the whole Southern Baptist Convention with one ideological slant, that being Christian fundamentalism.

They did it.

They did this.

Paige Patterson wrote about it himself, and he's the one who engineered it and became president of the convention.

And once they did that, they started putting creedal tests not just on seminaries, but on congregations.

So students would go to Southern Seminary and they would record professors surreptitiously or openly, and if a professor said anything that lied outside the theological bounds of Christian fundamentalism, they lost their job.

And that turned Southern Seminary well into no longer the Harvard of the academic world.

Interestingly enough, I went to a Baptist school in North Carolina where many of the professors had fled so they could have academic freedom.

So what happened is the body decided that half of it was wrong.

Half of its own denominational body was wrong.

It was like having a lobotomy that cut the left hemisphere of your brain off.

Sure, they lost some liberal ideas and they also lost social justice and creativity.

And so then church was no longer a place where there was an opportunity to grow and have conversation.

Church was a place not to be confirmed in your faith, it was a place to be conformed in your faith.

And if you wouldn't conform, you should go.

And it's a pretty sad development for us who grew up Baptists, thinking about how we own the most missionary capital in the world.

And then all of a sudden we decided we didn't like our body anymore.

Now there's a new denomination that's grown out of it, and you know, I'm pretty sure God's purpose goes on.

Sometimes in spite of us, sometimes because of us.

We've done that unpleasantness in the Episcopal Church.

We did it.

We pretty much have done it.

That's what I should say.

We decided, if you're going to think that way, then we have nothing to do with each other.

I think we've pretty much gotten over that.

I hope so.

And what a loss that we decided we couldn't stay together and disagree as adults.

And I wonder if that isn't what Jesus is talking about.

For us to get out of our heads that it's us against them, it's either me or it's you.

Instead, it's the year of the Lord's favor.

And quite honestly, we often focus too much on our opinions instead of releasing captives.

I don't know where you are today.

I don't know what these scriptures are doing for you, but my prayer, this epiphany, whether it's today or next week or next year, is that wherever you sit, one of these scriptures you'll hear today that you could fulfill.

One of these scriptures about release or being delivered from presumption, or the joy of the Lord being your strength, or that we don't have to wait for the 50th year cycle for God to be active this week could be fulfilled in your hearing, in your body, in your family.

Of course, when we do that, we don't just have an epiphany, don't you see?

Just like Jesus, we get to be one.

This season is not just about our learning about other people's discoveries, it's about us instigating them for the rest of the world.