3rd Sunday after Epiphany, Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Nehemiah 8
Luke 4: 14–21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to thee, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.

I have something to admit to you all this morning.  All week long I was something like a donkey – standing nearly paralyzed between two bales of hay, unsure which one to sample first.  Because the texts from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah and the New Testament Gospel of Luke were equally intriguing, and I simply couldn’t decide which one to focus on.  Finally, though, I dove into the Nehemiah text.  And what I found, what I discovered in that story helped me understand what was happening in the story Luke told about Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth.  So let me begin with the story from Nehemiah.
You probably know this story.  It’s the fifth century, BC.  And among the Jewish exiles who have just been allowed to return to Jerusalem from Babylon, Nehemiah and Ezra emerge as leaders among the people.  Nehemiah, a layman, organizes the people to rebuild the city, while Ezra, a priest and scribe, begins to rebuild the peoples’ faith.  And he does this in an interesting way.
Realizing that the people lack any sense of personal or corporate identity, Ezra invites all the adult Jews who have just returned from captivity to meet with him early one morning on the first day of the seventh month in the year 444BC.  Standing on a wooden platform at the Water Gate in Jerusalem, he begins to read aloud to them the long–forgotten books of Moses.  But this was a very long read, so he doesn’t do the reading all by himself.  He has twenty Levite priests helping him to read – and not just reading aloud, but explaining what they are reading, applying what they are reading to the lives of all who listened.  That’s what it means when the text says that they ‘read with interpretation’ or they ‘gave the sense’.  They were helping the people make sense of what they were hearing in the light of their own experience.  In other words, those Levite priests were preaching the Word, not just reading it.  And we know that the people took their words in deeply, for as they listened, they began to weep.  Through the guidance of the Word of God, they were rediscovering their own identity.
In the Gospel of Luke, it is Jesus who reads a sacred scroll to the people.  He reads to them from the sixty–first chapter of the prophet Isaiah, verses one and two.  Now these verses were familiar to the people of Nazareth, listening to him in that synagogue; for those verses told them that one day Messiah would come.  And just as we find those poetic words of promise beautiful, they found them beautiful too.
But when Jesus had finished the reading, he sat down and offered them a new interpretation of what he had just read.  And his interpretation startled them, to say the least.  “This day,” he says to them, “This day, this scripture has been fulfilled in your presence.”  In other words, Jesus is announcing to them that he is the one who will bring these beautiful promises to pass, for he has come to bring good news to the oppressed, to the brokenhearted, to the captives and the prisoners.  He is telling them that these beautiful words describe his mission to a “T”.  They describe exactly what he has been sent to accomplish.  To say the hometown folk were stunned is to put it mildly.  They were flabbergasted.  For Jesus, in effect, had just told them that he is Messiah.
At the same time, they began to feel a bit threatened, a bit challenged, because the words Jesus had just read to them don’t simply describe some long–hoped–for coming of Messiah – like a fairy tale that will probably never happen.  They also describe what was supposed to happen – for real, for sure — every forty–nine years in Israel.  That, at least, is what the Law of Moses had mandated – a Year of Jubilee every forty–nine years when peoples’ debts were cancelled, prisoners were set free, the rich restored property to those whose lands had been taken from them, and everyone who had been left behind in the economy was brought back up to speed.  Only, there’s no proof – anywhere in the Old Testament — that people ever did what Moses had commanded.  You see, whenever anyone took these beautiful words seriously, wondering aloud if, ‘Now might be the right year for the Year of Jubilee’ – people got very nervous.  And that Sabbath morning, in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus was announcing that the Year of Jubilee had just begun.
In fact, people still get nervous about these ideas today, because this is probably the most radical mandate in the entire Old Testament.  Walter Brueggemann says he knows this is true because any time he reads it aloud, someone is sure to ask, “They never really did that, did they?” ¹  And now, here it is again in the New Testament.  It’s the cornerstone for Jesus’ entire mission on this earth.  “This,” Jesus is saying, “is what I have come to do.  This is the mandate I have been given by the Holy Spirit of God to carry out here on earth.”
What he has come to do, you see, is to put forgiveness ahead of who–did–what–to–whom.  It’s all about letting go.  What he has come to do is to put the dignity of human persons ahead of strict bookkeeping.  It’s all about mercy.  What he has come to do is to put the security of the neighbor ahead of the cleverness of the entrepreneur.  It’s all about grace.  And what he has come to do is to set free all who have been oppressed, all who are hurting, all whose lives are deeply helpless.  It’s all about showing the same compassion to others that the Lord God has shown to us.  Talk about radical!
And for us, it only gets better – or worse, depending on your point of view.  You see, Jesus did come to do all of this, all I’ve just described.  He came to bring the Kingdom of God to this earth.  But when he returned to the Father, he sent the Holy Spirit to help his followers continue the work he had begun.  And the Holy Spirit of God has been faithful to help us do this work.  You can see it all around us today.  It’s the Holy Spirit of God that keeps this church going, against all odds, and creates the bonds of love and friendship between us.  It’s the Holy Spirit of God that motivates us to feed hungry schoolchildren here in Putnam County, to give toys to children we’ve never met at Christmastime and to care for stray cats and dogs at the animal shelter.  It’s the Holy Spirit of God that motivates us to spruce this place up – even before the people we are expecting, the people we are hoping for walk through our doors.
So this morning, you and I have a choice to make.  We can choose to sign on to the work the Holy Spirit has begun in our midst – finding our very identity in those words of holy intention, those words of holy promise I’ve copied for you as an insert in your bulletins — Or we can turn away and say, “No.  That’s a whole lot farther than I’m prepared to go.”
The choice, you see, is ours.
Amen.
 
 
¹ Robert M. Brearly  Feasting on the Word; Preaching on the Revised Common Lectionary Year C, volume III
(Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 2020) p. 26.)
 
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