“Built for Mercy”

Luke 6:28-38

February 24, 2019

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

At this very moment there are over a thousand United Methodists gathered together in St. Louis for a General Conference. 864 delegates from all over the globe plus alternate delegates, observers, reporters, lobbyists, and other interested parties are gathered for four days to receive recommendations created by a special commission charged with forging a resolution to decades-long conflict in the UMC over human sexuality and gender identity.

I was raised in the United Methodist Church. I attended a United Methodist seminary. Many of my friends are United Methodist clergy and my mom is currently in St. Louis serving as an alternate delegate to this conference. For the past several weeks, I’ve been praying - daily and emphatically - for those who are gathering in St. Louis. Because when a gathered body of Christians gets together to make decrees on whether or not some human beings have inherent dignity and worth, I think we should all be praying mightily that grace and love and justice and mercy will prevail. The United Methodist Church is the second-largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. and is also spans the globe. Their discrimination against LGBTQ is a major problem with dire consequences that affect all Christians, not just United Methodists.

And so, on this morning when Jesus has several challenging things to say to us about how we deal with the more painful and ugly parts of our humanity, I want to begin this sermon by pausing for a moment to hold our United Methodist kindred in our prayers.

(Silence)

God who draws us beyond boundaries again and again, draw your infinite circle of love tightly around St. Louis in these coming hours and days. May those who are LGBTQ know they are fiercely loved and created in your image. May the delegates there feel your warm embrace and may the power of your love cause them to be bold and brave and strong for their work. May they seek to love even their enemies. May they walk in the ways of your mercy. May justice prevail. Amen.

Just as the United Methodist delegates are currently leaning into pain with the hopes of coming out the other side in a few days filled with hope for the future….we, too, are called on a similar journey if we wish to engage seriously with the second part of Jesus’s Sermon the Plain that the lectionary committee served up to us today.

A quick recap for those who weren’t here last week….Jesus has just come down off of a mountain and comes to stand on “a level place” with his disciples and people from all over the world. Jesus does not pontificate from on high but comes into the everyday mess and muck of humanity to gently but firmly teach us hows and whys of finding our better selves. In a continuation of earlier themes from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus continues to give preferential treatment to those on the margins of society. He lifts up the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the despised. And he cautions everyone who has it good to remember that no one has it easy forever. Our accomplishments and failures do not determine our worth as human beings...only God has the power to name us as blessed….and God is very much about the business of blessing.

God is so much about the business of blessing, in fact, that Jesus wants us to very seriously consider what it might look like to not only accept the Good News that we are made in God’s image in an intellectual way….but in a way that deeply transforms our living.

To be blessed….to allow ourselves to embrace that notion that we humans carry within us the imprint of the Divine…..is apparently not just about feeling good. It also carries with it some very difficult demands. Demands that Jesus is now ready to explicate.

If we’re truly going to understand the revolutionary power behind Jesus’s words here, I think we have to grapple with some of the very basic concepts that are the building blocks of Jesus’s sermon.

Building Block #1: Enemies

When Jesus is speaking of our enemies, I think it’s critically important to realize he’s not talking about people that annoy us. He’s not talking about John in accounts receivable who chews his gum too loudly over in the next cubicle. He’s not talking about our neighbor who consistently refuses to rake their leaves, thereby rendering our own raking pointless as soon as the wind comes sweeping down the plains. He’s not talking about our cousin Rachel who shows up at Thanskgiving dinner espousing political views that are counter to ours. He’s not talking about the faceless person in the SUV who cut us off in traffic yesterday. Those folks can all be annoying….and I feel certain that Jesus would approve of us loving them.

But when Jesus says we are to love our enemies, he is talking about people who are more than annoying. He is talking about those who wish us grave harm, those who abuse us, those who question our humanity, those who want to do violence to us, those who want to see us annihilated, those who hate and despise us.

Now….it occurs to me that some people in the room today may not actually have enemies. Some people may not know what it feels like to be despised or hated. But there are others here who absolutely do know what it feels like to be hated…..to know that there are people who want to see you fail, who are trying to make your life a living hell, who curse and revile your very existence.

If you know what that feels like, then you have enemies. Enemies that Jesus says we are supposed to love.

That brings us to Building Block #2: Love

Jesus wants us to love our enemies….so what does that even look like? You know, if you try to look up the definition of the English word love, you’ll mostly find a definition about warm fuzzy feelings, attraction, enjoyment. That kind of thing.

But the Greek word used here, agape, actually has very little to do with our emotions. Agape is not primarily about warm fuzzy feelings or even liking another person. Instead, agape is about our behavior. Agape is rooted in the love God has for humanity. Out of that unbreakable, unconditional love we are called to extend charity, grace, mercy to every person we encounter. No exceptions.

A note on abusive relationships, because when Jesus says “pray for those who abuse you” it seems we could quickly veer into dangerous territory. God does not want us to stay in abusive relationships. Full stop. You can leave an abusive relationship and still pray for the person you’ve left behind. By asking us to pray for those who have abused us, I think Jesus is inviting us to consider how God can partner with us to find our own healing.

Agape also frees us to love people we don’t like. We don’t have to have any warm fuzzy feelings at all. We can disagree with people vehemently. We can even condemn their behaviors, calling them towards their better selves….while still loving them. Because agape is not primarily about being nice or making other people smile. It’s about witnessing the God-given dignity in each person, holding their complexity in the light of God’s love, and choosing always, always to emulate God’s mercy.

Which brings us to Building Block #3: Mercy

The crux of this entire passage is verse 36: “be merciful, just as God is merciful.”

This entire endeavor of loving even our enemies is about imitating God. If we are blessed, if we are imprinted with the very image of the Divine, then we are both empowered and expected to emulate God. We aren’t called to agape because it’s easy. We are called to it because it is our birthright as humans created to point the way to the Holy. We are called to it because we were built for mercy.

Mercy is at once simple and confounding. Mercy is the radical resistance to giving people what they deserve. We live in a world that is so firmly steeped in the notion of quid pro quo that it becomes easy to even realize it’s there, operating in the background. If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. If you work hard, you should be able to get ahead. If I do the right things, I should be rewarded.

But this is not God’s way. God is like the merchant at the end of today’s passage….we go to the market and walk up to a stranger in a booth, ready to buy grain. We ask her to please fill up a container with grain. She fills it, taps it down, filling every nook and cranny, making sure we get the very most grain possible in that container. She shakes it, adds a little more, and then carefully pours just a bit more on the top. We pay her the negotiated price, she dumps the measure of grain into our apron and we carry it home, wondering just what we did to deserve her kindness. After all, the price was set. Five dollars for a container of grain. The merchant would make more money if she just hastily poured some in...maybe even filling it slightly less than full. Why on earth did she go to all that trouble to make sure we received more than we deserved?

Mercy. That’s mercy. Giving others not what they deserve but better than they deserve. Treating others the way we wish we would be treated. Extending radical and confounding hospitality. Suspending harsh judgment. Giving freely, expecting nothing in return. This is the way of God. She is the merchant who freely pours out more than we’ve asked for, more than we’ve earned, simply because mercy is her essence.

And it is in this way that Jesus asks us to shape our lives. Doing the confounding, difficult work of agape….not just when it’s easy, but also when it’s very, very hard.

In this invitation is a reminder of blessing. Jesus would not ask us to do this if he felt it were impossible. He invites us into the task of transforming the world because he sees God in us and believes we have the capacity to bring about God’s realm here and now.

And so...we build the road by walking. We mend the world by choosing to love….in big ways and small, again and again and again. And we do so because God first loved us.

May it be so.

“Name. Bless. Connect.”

Luke 6:17-26

February 17, 2019

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

If you’re the type of person who loves trivia nights at the local bar or just enjoys watching Jeopardy at home, you might want to take notes on the first part of today’s sermon because I’m going to lay some serious Bible trivia on you.

Fun fact #1: you might not have heard a sermon on this passage from Luke in a while. For churches like ours that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, we only come to a particular text in the Bible once every three years. But...it’s been longer than three years since we last heard this text because of the long Epiphany season we are having this year. Since Lent and Easter fall later in the calendar, we have a longer Epiphany season which means we get to hear some texts we haven’t heard in a while.

Fun fact #2: if this passage sounds familiar to you, but also seems like it’s awfully short, that’s because most of us are more familiar with the version from Matthew. If you want to look it up to compare and contrast you can grab your Bibles and look up Matthew 5.

In both versions, Jesus begins a longer teaching with a series of statements about who is blessed. In Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount goes on for three chapters. In Luke, it’s usually called the Sermon on the Plain and it’s a little shorter.  

In Matthew, there is a longer list of beatitudes….and we don’t have the “woes” immediately following. In Luke we just have a few short statements of blessing, followed immediately by cautionary statements. That word, “woe” is meant to be an attention-grabber. A “hey, watch out!” or “Warning! Danger ahead!”

Biblical scholars have frequently noticed a key difference between Matthew’s “blessed are the poor in spirit” and Luke’s “blessed are the poor.” Those feel different, don’t they? The poor in spirit is a broad category that could include people who are feeling down and out for any number of reasons. “The poor,” when given without any other qualifiers as it is in Luke, typically makes us think of those who are economically vulnerable, who may not have enough resources to meet their basic needs.

Some have noticed that Luke’s version of the beatitudes is a continuation of earlier themes from this gospel. You may remember a few weeks ago, when we looked at Jesus’s opening sermon in Luke 2, his mission statement, he pulled directly from the prophet Isaiah….”the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

And in those words from Isaiah, we also hears echoes of Jesus’s mother’s song in Luke 1. Mary sings, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; the hungry are filled with good things, and the rich are sent away empty.”

So the author of the Gospel of Luke continues to build on this theme of God lifting up the dignity of the poor….first, Mary’s song; next, Jesus’s first sermon; and now with this sermon on the plain.

And that’s another fun fact: in Matthew’s Gospel the beatitudes are given on a mountain, the Sermon on the Mount. But let’s notice where we are in Luke. Jesus has just come down from a mountain, where he went to pray. But now, we hear Jesus “came down and stood among them on a level place.”

Further, he is not with just his disciples as he is in Matthew. In Luke, there is a much larger crowd of people, including folks from “all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.” Those last two places, Tyre and Sidon, are important because they remind us that Jesus came not only to teach faithful Jews, but also to reach Gentiles and other outsiders.

That Jesus, I tell ya. Every single time we try to draw a circle and mark some people as outsiders, Jesus reminds us that every single person is made in God’s image, and erases the circle. Every single time. Following Jesus always means seeking Christ in the face of every other person we encounter...whether we want to or not.

And because we often fail to do just that, I find the fact that Jesus delivers this sermon down on “a level place” to be very good news, indeed. Biblical scholar Ron Allen explains that the Greek word translated “level” here “often refers to places of corpses, disgrace, idolatry, suffering, misery, hunger, annihilation, and mourning.” [1]

In other words, Jesus sees us humans struggling in the mess and muck of our lives and Jesus comes and meets us right in the middle of it. Jesus doesn’t hover above us on a cloud. Jesus doesn’t look the other way. Jesus comes right into the middle of our messed up lives, meets us here, and begins to teach.

And, Holy Moly, what he’s teaching here is mind-boggling. When he says that the poor,  the hungry, the weeping, the excluded are blessed, he is saying they are respected, dignified, worthy, beloved, made in God’s image. The word here, “blessed” isn’t like they’re lucky or #blessed. It’s way deeper than that. It hearkens back to the passages from the First Testament that we heard a few minutes ago. Jeremiah says those who trust in God are blessed. The Psalmist is talking about the same thing when they write “blessed are those who turn away from the advice of the wicked.”

This “blessed” is not about being popular, good-looking, lucky, or having the best toys. This blessed is being a person who is deeply respected, admired, looked up to as a pillar of the community. A leader. A person that we can learn from. A person that we should try to emulate.

The poor are leaders, Jesus says. The hungry are teachers. The weeping deserve our attention. Those who are despised because they follow Jesus should be our heroes.

And the caution is for those who are rich, who are full, who are laughing, who are spoken highly of….the caution, the warning, the “woe” is a reminder that so many of the things we think of as our “worth” are temporary. Our successes, our health, our wealth, our beauty, our good fortune...none of these things are forever. And none of these things have anything at all to do with whether or not we are blessed.

In God’s realm, every single person is blessed because every single person has something to share, something to teach, something to offer. We humans keep looking to a small group of people who mostly look the same….wealthy, powerful folks in fancy suits to solve all of our problems.

But when we place our trust in a small group of people, we are doing two things. First, we are forgetting the wisdom of the prophet Jeremiah, and so many others, who teach that our trust must be in God and God alone. Jeremiah says that when we trust in God we become like healthy trees planted next to the water….trees who have roots that go down deep, trees that grow in strength and beauty, trees that flourish in good years and persevere in hard times because their foundation is firm.

Second, when we only see a small group of “acceptable” folks as our respected, admired, wise leaders we miss so much wisdom from others that we think don’t look the part. We might even start to believe that we don’t have anything to offer.

I want to close with a brief story from the Rev. Mike Mather, who is a dear friend of mine and the pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis. Mike recently published a book, Having Nothing, Possessing Everything: Finding Abundant Communities in Unexpected Places, which includes many stories from his decades of ministry in communities filled with people who are often cast aside and overlooked.

When Mike became a pastor, he wanted to help the people who lived near his church. He had been taught that Christians should see needs and then meet them. He did all the regular things we think of churches doing...food pantries, free Vacation Bible Schools, basketball leagues for “troubled” youth, tutoring programs, etc.

But over the years, Mike began to see that Jesus calls us to celebrate the gifts each person has to share. Every person, created in the image of God, has talents and skills to offer. Every person wants to be useful and needed. So Mike started asking what people had to give, not just what they needed. When people come in to ask for financial assistance, Broadway doesn’t give them rent money….but they will ask them what they love to do, what they’re good at, what they might be able to teach someone else. And then they will give them seed money to start sharing their talents with the community.

When Mike met a teenager who was in danger of flunking out of school, he asked him what he enjoyed and was good at. What he might be able to teach someone else. He learned that Adrian knew a lot about fixing bicycles. So Mike connected him with an adult in the neighborhood who was also good with bikes. Eventually, Adrian and his new friend created a bike shop. They taught bike repair classes to folks in the neighborhood and got a lot of people’s bikes up and running. As his confidence grew and he was able to channel his skills into something useful for the world around him, Adrian’s troubles at school lessened. Imagine that.

What Mike did wasn’t rocket science, exactly. Any of us could do it. But many of us would see only the need, not the gifts. Many of us might see only a poor kid….not a blessed being created in the image of God.

Mike says that our job as followers of Jesus is to name, bless, connect. We need to look around and name not only the problems in our communities, but the opportunities, too. We need to remind one another that we are blessed - created in God’s image. And then we need to help each other connect to others who might benefit from someone we have to offer, or who might help us grow.

Name, bless, connect. This is what I think Jesus is doing in this sermon on a level place. Naming the pain of those who struggle and the naïveté of those who think they have it good. Blessing every single human present from places near and far. And re-connecting each person to their foundation, reminding them to put down roots in God’s love and be like trees firmly planted by streams of living water.

Name, bless, connect. May we continue to follow Jesus’s lead as we seek blessings in all we encounter.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3960

“By the grace of God, I am what I am…”

1 Corinthians 15: 1-22

February 10, 2019

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

It would be difficult to overstate the impact the Apostle Paul has had on the world. Though he never met Jesus in the flesh, some of his letters are the earliest writings about Jesus we have. So much of the Second Testament was written by Paul. And since most of his letters are full of theological interpretations about the life of Christ and what it means to follow Jesus, a lot of Christian doctrine over the centuries has been shaped by his particular understanding of Jesus.

I have a confession to make…..I struggle with the Apostle Paul. And as I read over today’s passage from 1st Corinthians, I smiled as I got to the last few lines because they remind me of all of my complicated feelings about the guy.

As a child, I probably read the letters in the Second Testament more than the rest of the Bible. You see, the Epistles are mostly short, which means I could read one from beginning to end during the sermon on Sunday morning.

Unfortunately, Paul (and those who pretended to be Paul, writing under his name) has a highly rhetorical style – definitely not on a 4th grade reading level. So I didn’t understand much of what I read and, consequently, thought he was pretty boring.

But by the time I was in high school, I could understand 80% of what Paul had written and I didn’t like all of it.

He always seemed so full of himself. So certain that everything he had to say was gospel truth. And, of course, I was angered by his rants about how women should stay silent in church and obey their husbands without question. (Some of which, by the way, Paul didn’t actually write….turns out there were a lot of people who wanted to be like Paul and pretended to be him in order to get their stuff read.)

It wasn’t until I was in seminary that I finally began to pay attention to Paul again. And it was because I finally took the time to get to know Paul as Paul that I finally learned to listen to this person who had always gotten under my skin just a bit.

That’s why the last few verses of today’s passage really grabbed me – they reminded me of the first time I actually sat down and thought about Paul as a human being. A human being filled with faults, sure, but also a human being who lived and breathed and walked on this earth and engaged daily in the struggle to follow God’s call.

In short – a person just like you and me.

So when Paul says, “By the grace of God, I am what I am…” there is a part of me that wants to listen.

Because there is a part of me that knows I am what I am….both the good and the bad, the profound and the obnoxious, the kind-hearted forgiver and the judgmental know-it-all….I am what I am because of the grace of God.

******************

Paul’s story, in a nutshell, is this: he was a faithful Jew. And we need to really emphasize the word FAITHFUL. He was madly in love with God. He was proud of his heritage. He followed all the rules. He was so faithful, in fact, that he was willing to persecute the Jews that had begun to follow Christ because he thought they were putting their mortal souls in danger.

But then, one day, while he was traveling to a city called Damascus, he encountered Christ.

Now Paul would have been about the last person in the world you would have expected to run into a vision of Jesus Christ. After all, in Paul’s mind, this Jesus guy was a false prophet who had been killed and was dead in the ground. Paul’s running into Jesus on the road is probably the equivalent of Pat Robertson encountering a vision of the Prophet Mohammed….and – get this – being radically changed by the experience.

Paul’s encounter of Christ was so intimate, so powerful, so real that it convinced him he needed to not only stop persecuting those who followed Christ…but actually join them.

And, not only did he join them, but he expanded their vision of what it meant to follow Christ. Without Paul, Christianity might never have expanded beyond a small Jewish sect. More than anyone else, Paul was the one who insisted that Gentiles – those who weren’t Jewish – could become followers of Christ, too.

How about that? The one who initially wanted to kill people for falling too far outside the bounds of what he understood as acceptable eventually became the one to push for drawing the circle wide and wider still to include “outsiders.”

Never forget that God has a sense of humor, right?

***************

When I start to remember Paul was a real person, things about him that once seemed obnoxious become more palatable. His zeal, for example.

I’d always found his stern admonitions and know-it-all attitude horribly off-putting….but when I started to think about just how radical of a shift he made in his life to follow Christ, and just how much he gave up and risked in order to do so, his holier-than-thou attitude became understandable.

Sure, it still annoys me when he says stuff like, “On the contrary, I worked harder than everyone else.” But now I just sort of chalk it up to him having bad social skills because, you know what? He probably DID work harder than most other folks. Apparently he just didn’t realize how obnoxious he sounded when he said that.

Does this mean that I want to be best friends with Paul? Not really. There are still things he says that I find incomprehensible. And I don’t agree with all of his theological claims. And there are days when I find his tendency to say things like “I am the least of the apostles” in the same breath as “I worked harder than any of them” just too wearisome to stomach.

But, on the whole, I’ve made peace with Paul because I see him as a real flesh-and-blood person. I respect his call from God and I respect his dedication to follow that call. I know that he is simply human – by the grace of God, he is what he is – just like you and me.

I don’t have to agree with everything Paul says to remember his humanity. I don’t have to think he’s right about everything in order to keep my heart open to the possibility that I might learn something from him.

You know, one of the reasons I am a part of the United Church of Christ is because we place such a high value on the covenant we share with one another. We realize that we don’t have to agree on everything in order to love one another. When people join our congregation they don’t have to say they believe a certain set of things to become a member….they simply have to be willing to enter into a covenant with God and the rest of us….

to seek the mind of Christ,
to be open to the new light and truth God has for us,
to bear each other’s burdens and share each other’s joys, to pray for each other, to serve in the name of Christ,
to give to this church and its mission,
and to take our stand for justice and peace,
confident God’s concern embraces the whole world.

Confident that God’s concern embraces even those who are very different than us. Confident that God’s concern extends to those who we think are so closed-minded they’ll never “see again” the way Paul did. Confident that God’s concern embraces those we don’t understand, those that frustrate us, those whose behaviors truly make no sense to us at all.

Whew. That is HARD, isn’t it? Maybe not for you, but for me that can be a real challenge some days.

Earlier this week I had a chance to be in dialogue with the new Director of RCPD, Dennis Butler. About twelve leaders from various faith communities and MAPJ sat with him for over two hours over at Mt. Zion Church of God in Christ talking about what it looks like to share life together in a diverse community. I’m sorry to report that we were unable to solve all of the problems that racism has created.

What we did do, though, was share stories. We listened hard to everyone present and honored that each person there is a unique and beloved creation, made in God’s image. We raised difficult questions. We admitted when we didn’t have all the answers. We spoke from our own lived experiences. It felt like a holy time of nurturing relationships.

And relationships are what make EVERYTHING happen.

What would it look like if we took the time to remember that each person we encounter can echo Paul’s words, “by the grace of God, I am who I am” – and then we took the time to ask the person sitting next to us, “Just who are you, anyway? And how did God’s grace make you that way?”

I believe that the Apostle Paul was radically changed by an encounter with God.

I believe that many of the people we interact with in our daily lives also have complex, gripping, astounding stories to share about their own lives. Taking the time to pause, slow down, and intentionally make space to hear those stories of how our neighbors’ identities have been formed is a powerful and holy experience.

It doesn’t mean we will become best friends with everyone we encounter. It doesn’t mean we will agree with everything another person says. But it does mean that we have the opportunity to see God’s grace still moving, living, breathing new life into our world.

May it be so. Amen.

“Jesus’s Mission Statement”

Luke 4:21-30

Sunday, February 3, 2019

First Congregational United Church of Christ of Manhattan, KS

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

When I was in seminary, my intro to theology professor, Theo Walker, made us memorize Luke 4:17-18. It’s the only text I was ever asked to memorize in seminary. Dr. Walker wanted us to memorize it because he felt it was one of the most important texts in the Bible. It’s Jesus telling us why he’s here. It’s Jesus telling us what he’s come to accomplish. It’s Jesus telling us what will be fulfilled by his life and ministry.

Jesus could have picked anything as his personal mission statement. Anything at all. What he chose was a text about Holy Spirit-led liberation for those who need it most. Dr. Karoline Lewis notes that these verses from Isaiah are essentially a re-language-ing of Mary’s song in Luke 1. Perhaps the Magnificat was not just a one-time song sung by a pregnant Mary, but was a lullaby that she sang again and again to the infant Jesus. [1]

“God’s has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.

God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.

….

The Spirit has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

And new ways of seeing for those who cannot see,

To let the oppressed go free,

To proclaim the year of Jubilee.”

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Those who were here last week for worship will remember that we spent time talking about the HOW of that short, short sermon that Jesus preached in the synagogue at Nazareth. In Luke 4 we find Jesus at the place where he was raised in the Jewish faith. Except now he’s all grown up and starting to get a reputation as a wise teacher. When he goes to his hometown, everyone is excited to hear him preach. So he reads aloud a version of Isaiah 61, and then preaches the words shortest sermon. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Last week we looked at the HOW of Jesus’s preaching in this particular moment. The way that he embodied God’s presence in this moment. The way that his ministry signified something new taking place. The way that the best sermons aren’t necessarily always about words being said.

This week we’re looking at the WHAT of Jesus’s debut sermon. Because not only did he choose those specific words from Isaiah as his mission statement….he doubled down on them in the part of Luke 4 that we heard today. It seems that the people present didn’t quite catch what he was saying at first. They smiled and nodded….but then Jesus came back and clarified, “Look. I know you like me because I’m a hometown boy. But I have to tell you, I’m not just a hometown boy, I’m a hometown prophet. And I know that prophets aren’t doing their job unless they’re making people mad. Let me spell this out for you a bit….remember all those great stories from the past about all the amazing things God has done? Well, I need you to notice that many, many of those miracles were for people you would consider to be outsiders. God has always been about the business of seeking the people that we despise and loving them fully….just as they are. So...what do you think about that?”

And after that second, longer explanation of what he was trying to say the people there in Nazareth got it. And they didn’t like it. In fact, they disliked it so much that they tried to kill Jesus right then and there.

Yikes.

What is is that is so very offensive about Jesus lifting up these words from Isaiah?

Jesus’s ministry is about all the things Mary sang about when he was just a little boy. Freedom, release, new life, justice, liberation for those who need it most.

When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he’s not talking about what happens in the sweet by and by. He is talking about that same radical realm that Dr. King later called the Beloved Community. A place where prisoners are set free, the lowly are lifted up, the marginalized sit at the head of the time. A place where the last are first, the lost are found, and the least are blessed beyond measure.

We’ve been hearing these refrains for so long that sometimes I fear they fail to shock us the way they should. What would it look like for this text from Isaiah to be fulfilled today? What would it look like for the Realm of God to finally break forth here and now?

Good news to the poor would mean a sense of security for federal workers who are wondering when the next shut down will happen. Good news to the poor would look like leaders who refuse to let SNAP payments and tax refunds and the federal free lunch program and section 8 housing vouchers be used as political pawns. Good news to the poor would be healthcare for all, living wages, affordable housing, access to quality education for everyone.

Jesus setting the captives free would probably begin with the 2.3 million people in the United States who are incarcerated. That number includes over a half-a-million people who are locked up awaiting trial, 60,000 people incarcerated for immigration offenses, 50,000 youth who are behind bars. [2] Speaking of youth, did you know that the state of Kansas places no limits on the amount of time youth can spend in solitary confinement? [3] Jesus might begin setting the captives free by visiting the tents along our southern border, releasing migrant children and their families.

Jesus brings recovery of sight to those who are blinded by greed and fear and white supremacy and misogyny and hate. Jesus offers new ways of seeing, knowing, understanding. Jesus proclaims the year of Jubilee.

Jubilee - what is that? Jubilee was an ancient social custom where debts were reduced or forgiven completely on a regular basis. A chance for people who were trapped by their debts to finally get a clean slate. Jubilee today would be a Jesus who cancels student loan debt, crushes predatory lending, shuts down payday loan storefronts and makes sure that everyone has what they need to flourish.

When he restores our sight and embraces Jubilee, Jesus turns us towards our neighbors so that we finally see the resources we able to share with one another. Jesus rids us of that deep fear that everything is a zero-sum game and that if I help you I might be putting myself at risk. Jesus ends the stigma of poverty and helps us see that everyone is made in the image of God.

Jesus brings an end to transphobia. Jesus welcomes people of all genders into every kind of service imaginable….including military service. Jesus honors the sacrifices made by people who are transgender and just trying to do what everyone is doing….find a job that pays the bills, find work that is meaningful.

Jesus smashes the patriarchy. Jesus makes sure that women who choose to wear short skirts and women who choose to wear hijab can all walk freely down streets without fear of harassment.

Jesus creates new pathways for those who suffer from the stigma of mental illness or addiction. Jesus ensures that people of every ability know they are beloved and created in the image of God.

Jesus ends all oppression.

God, may your Spirit be ever upon us and this scripture be fulfilled in our hearing. Today. Amen.

[1] Working Preacher podcast for 2/3/19

[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html

[3] http://jaapl.org/content/45/3/350