Luke 4.14-21 — Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-13 and Luke 4:14-21
preached on July 3, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As we celebrate Independence Day tomorrow, there are many official proclamations floating around. Elected officials at every level use holidays like this one to affirm their support for the American experiment, claim that they are following in the line of our forebears, often more faithfully than their opponents, and remember the contributions of the military in getting us through the last 240 years as a nation.

“The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind,” from the banners of Bloomfield Presbyterian Church on the Green.

But today we turn to a different kind of proclamation in the church: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.” These are the words of the first Great End of the Church, one of a series of six statements of the mission and purpose of the church first adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in North America in 1910 and lifted up with greater understanding and purpose over the last thirty years or so as we have lived into our identity as a reunited denomination after the reunion of the northern and southern branches of Presbyterians in 1983 following over 120 years of separation. We will spend the next few weeks looking at these Great Ends of the Church, celebrating the gifts that these words bring us as we live together in this congregation and beyond and looking afresh at the mission of God that these words call us to do as we live these words out in our life together.

Proclamation is an integral part of what we do as God’s people. In our Presbyterian tradition, we have lifted this proclamation up with particular importance. Each Sunday, our worship is centered around the proclamation of the word, usually (but not always) in a sermon like what you are hearing now. This time of proclamation is so important that we place it right in the middle, recognizing that everything that we do in worship leads up to or follows from this point. Even so, the sermon is only the beginning of our proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind—we proclaim the gospel in our everyday words and deeds, showing God’s love, mercy, and peace as we live in God’s world and act with kindness and grace toward all creation.

But what is this gospel that we proclaim? What exactly is the gospel, the “good news” that we can offer the world? What is the salvation that we lift up for the world to embrace? Our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke gives us some helpful insights into a biblical and faithful understanding of these questions. In this reading, we hear about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, about the first chance he had to proclaim his ministry in his hometown. After making his way through the other nearby towns, he arrived back home in Nazareth and “went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom.” When Jesus stood up to read, he found this passage in the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and used it to proclaim what he understood as the core of his message. Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson paraphrases those words from Isaiah that Jesus quoted this way:

God’s Spirit is on me;
[God has] chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
sent me to announce pardon to prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”

This was a radical proclamation. The world was not all that favorable to such a message, after all. Such a day of peace, justice, and blessing stood in stark contrast to the carefully constructed way of Rome that insisted on putting the poor in their place and increasing the oppression of the oppressed. You’d have to be crazy to live in such a way. Everyone knew that Rome would quickly suppress any attempts to claim real power and control for anyone other than the emperor.

But even after this radical threat to the superiority of the emperor through a recognition that there was something greater than the way of Rome, Jesus kept on going. After reading these words, he began his interpretation of them with an even more radical claim:

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Not only would God send God’s Spirit upon someone, sometime, that person was Jesus himself, and that time was then and there. This made Jesus’ proclamation all the more astounding. Luke continues the story after our reading today, indicating that Jesus’ words so bothered the people of his hometown that they chased him to the edge of a cliff!

But the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind is equally challenging for us today. Our world is not particularly interested in hearing good news for the poor, release for the captives, or freedom for the oppressed. More often than not, the systems and structures of our world are set up to shut down such news, to suppress this good news by claiming that it is a bad thing to name the powers that are destroying us, to insist that we should keep our focus on the spiritual life and not worry about its implications on everything else. We lift up the voices of hate and hurt, the continual rush of violence all around the world, and the little acts of oppression that make their way insidiously into our lives. Anyone who speaks up to offer “good news” today that goes beyond hope for something in a world still yet to come is so very unlikely to be heard above the din of the world.

Even so, as God’s church, we are still called to offer “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind,” not because our words themselves will bring the salvation that we so desperately need, not because we expect or even demand a positive response to what we share, but because the world may need nothing more than simply to hear the good news of this gospel, this hope that there is something more beyond the uncertainty of our weary world, this promise that God has not forgotten us and is not done with us yet.

The church has traditionally called this work of proclamation “evangelism.” Evangelism can be a difficult word for many of us. For some, it conjures up images of forced conversations with strangers, bad street preaching, and even threats of eternal damnation. I know plenty of people who have ended up in the Presbyterian church because they don’t want to be a part of such things!

But the evangelism that comes in this proclamation for today is not so much about these things as it is about living out our faith in our everyday lives, about making it clear to all those we meet along the way that we carry good news and live it as best we know how. We let our words and actions bear witness to the saving love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We recognize that the wonder of this gift is so great that we cannot hold it in or keep it just for ourselves. And we are so filled with the gratitude and joy that emerge from the depth of grace that we have received that we must invite others to join us on this journey of thanksgiving and hope.

In the midst of our broken and fearful world, we offer good news as we proclaim with boldness the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.

In our world filled with so much need, we can join our words and actions with Jesus to “bring good news to the poor… 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 in a world so filled with the glory of God, we can join with heaven’s song of alleluia so that we are united in love and witness to God each and every day.

May God so strengthen us as we offer this proclamation of this gospel for today, that our world might know the wonder and joy that we share together here so that it can join in this song of grace and hope. Thanks be to God! Amen.

a sermon on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a and Luke 4:14-21
preached on January 31, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Since we didn’t have worship together here, what did you do last Sunday? Did you sleep in and enjoy the beautiful snowscape from the warmth of your bed or couch? Did you get up and start clearing your sidewalk or digging out your car, trying to get at least a few of those 26 inches of snow cleared away before having to venture out on Monday morning? Did you find an online devotional or streaming service where you could set aside even a little of the day for worship?

I myself actually did all three of these things, but beforehand I took advantage of our snow Sunday by watching soccer. Watching soccer is something of a surprising hobby for me—I only played one season of it as a child, and I spent about half of that season sidelined at home with chicken pox!—and I only picked up interest in it as an adult three or four years ago. But now I am a season ticket holder for the New York Red Bulls and I spend far too many hours sitting on my couch watching soccer, mostly from the United States and England. Before these last few years, I’ve not been much of a sports fan in general, only watching the major championships here and there and not really taking up support of any particular team along the way. But now I watch three or four games a week on average, and I’ve started to learn more about the different strategies that get played out along the way.

I’m particularly interested in how teams get put together, especially in the American Major League Soccer. Some of these teams are built around highly-paid star players, with supporting casts made up of those who can fill in the gaps without breaking the salary cap. Other teams bring in stars who have made a name for themselves in other parts of the world but are now a little—or a lot—past their prime, hoping that the wise presence of these veterans will rub off on the young guys who fill in the other nine or ten positions on the field. And other teams put together a roster of young unknowns who may not play quite so wisely or quite so perfectly but who come together as a team to build on one another’s strengths and fill in one another’s weaknesses.

The body of Christ, the church, operates in similar ways. While we are not quite a team in the traditional competitive sense, we are certainly a group of people with different gifts who come together for a common purpose, and each little corner of the body approaches its form in a different way. The apostle Paul makes this abundantly clear in our reading from 1 Corinthians this morning. Paul insists that we are one body—one body with many members who come together to be something more than we would be on our own; one body that belongs together, even when we think that we could do things better on our own; one body that benefits from the gifts that each one of us offers; one body that treats one another with honor and respect; and one body that goes wherever we may go together.

Paul’s image of the body of Christ is incredibly helpful for most people to understand how different people come together to be the church, as it invites us all to think about how we fit into the body of Christ. We are part of something larger than ourselves, and we can see this so clearly when this approach is before us. And we all have a part to play in the life of the church, whether it be as an arm, a toe, an eye, a stomach, or even a hangnail! Today is a great day to remember these things, for as we gather after worship today to do the work of our congregation in our annual meeting, as we elect officers and hear reports looking back and looking forward, we are reminded very, very well of the ways in which we all contribute to the life and work of this part of the body of Christ.

But when we our focus is on how the body of Christ comes together, as it is here, it is easy to miss the deeper call of what we do together. When we spend most of our time wondering how we fit into the body of Christ, we are thinking about the parts, not the whole. When we are focused on the very helpful and generous gifts of the individual arms and legs and hands that make up the body, we can easily miss the need for all these parts to work together for a common purpose. And when we miss the ways in which the different parts of the body are united into one, we forget that the gifts of the Spirit come upon us all—the hands, the feet, the arms, the eyes, and even the hangnails—to guide us as we join in God’s work in the world.

The words of Jesus himself in our reading from Luke this morning point us toward our common purpose as the body of Christ. As his continuing body on earth, we the church are called to fulfill the scripture once again, just as he did:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon [us],
because [God] has anointed [us]
to bring good news to the poor.
[God] has sent [us] 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.

This week at our presbytery meeting, I think I got a better understanding of all these things than I have had in quite a while. On Tuesday, the presbytery approved the service of a ruling elder from the Church of Gethsemane in Brooklyn to broaden his ministry and perform the sacraments in this congregation and in their ministry in prison. This congregation does incredible ministry and mission among the incarcerated, and this elder who we commissioned on Tuesday began his connection with this church when he himself was in prison. Now there is a strong gospel command to share good news with those in prison, to visit those who are in jail, to care for those who are held captive in whatever way, but for a variety of reasons, this has not been a part of my own personal ministry. Yet on Tuesday, the body of Christ honored and supported one of its parts who is very much called to do this work. We laid hands on Chibueze and affirmed his call to be a part of our body, to witness to God’s presence in a place where it is all too often invisible. We recognized that not all of us have the gifts we need to do the kind of work that he does, and so we commissioned him to proclaim release to the captives, trusting that God would use our gifts in the body to support his gifts in the body, too. And we charged him to be the body of Christ in his work in ways that others of us are not gifted and called to do.

As we go into our annual meeting today, I invite you not just to think about the gifts that you bring to this little corner of the body of Christ on the corner of 149th Street and 15th Drive but also to wonder together about how the Spirit is upon us. How are we being anointed, together, to do the work that Jesus began and called us to continue? How is the Spirit leading us to proclaim release to the captives of our own time, to help people see in new ways where they have been blinded for so long and open the pathway of life to the oppressed? How is God working in our midst to help us to show that this is a season of the Lord’s favor, not of God’s condemnation? Thankfully we don’t have to do all these things ourselves—as the commissioning service at presbytery reminded me, not all of us are called to every important work of the church, and we as a congregation may not be called to do all of these things that are before us from Jesus’ proclamation—but we are most certainly called to use our individual gifts for the good of the whole body.

As we enter the second month of 2016, I feel that we are probably closer to this work than we have been in a long time, for in 2015 I saw a new sense of mission and outreach in our life together, with our focus on the Orange Campaign and Presbyterian mission in Madagascar taking center stage, and I am hopeful that this new year will see this work continue to grow. But as we do these things, how will each of us get involved? What will be your role in the body of Christ in this time? Will you be the legs that do the walking, the arms and hands that do the writing or typing, the eyes that keep looking for other ways to get involved, the ears that listen to the voices of those who need help, the hangnail that keeps on reminding us that there is more to be done, or some other part of the body? It is much like the decision we each faced last Sunday: how will we spend the time that is before us? How will we worship and praise and serve God, each in our own way, yet joining together as best we can to do God’s work in this time and place?

So may God give us wisdom for our worship and work, so that together we may truly be the body of Christ, individually members of it, proclaiming the good news of God in word and in deed until all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

A Proclamation for Today

A Body with a Purpose