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Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City
January 21, 2007
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Nehemiah 8: 2 - 10
Psalm 113
1 Corinthians 12: 12 - 27
Luke 4: 14 - 21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be
always acceptable in your sight, oh God, our Rock and our
Redeemer, Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading marks the beginning of Jesus’
public ministry (one person said it’s like his ‘coming out’), and
as such, it’s replete with those great Epiphany themes of the
ongoing manifestation of divine presence, the spread of the light,
the question of Jesus’ mission- and by extension, our mission as
well.
One can see this as a great drama of the Spirit. Jesus
had been claimed by the Spirit at his baptism, the story of which
we heard just a few weeks ago. He saw the heavens broken open and
the spirit of God descending on him, into him, in the form of a
dove. And immediately the spirit drove him out into the
wilderness – there to struggle, to be tempted by the adversary,
and to try to understand in the rawest and most immediate and
personal way just what this claim of God, just what this call as
God’s beloved is all about.
And now, fresh from that experience, that struggle,
that discernment, he emerges from the wilderness and Luke tells us
he is filled with the power of the spirit – and we can feel it in
the account of his preaching – it’s as if he’s on fire with
something. And those around know it too; he’s creating quite a
buzz, and he returns to Galilee. He goes home to the place where
he was brought up, and he goes to synagogue on the Sabbath as was
his custom.
In this question of embracing his mission, Jesus is
thus formed and informed by tradition, and there’s a kind of a
dance of the old and new. He is standing on the shoulders of
those who have come before. But he is also making something his
own, as he embraces the vocation of a prophet- and as he claims
the spirit’s anointing, using the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of
the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news
to the poor. He 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.”
He sits down to preach, and you can feel the palpable
expectation as Luke tells us that the eyes of all in the synagogue
were fixed on him. But what he says surprises even the most
elevated expectation. He says, “Today, the scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus’ sermon is not an explanation;
it’s more a proclamation. It grips those who hear it. It’s not
just interesting; it has the potential to be life-changing news,
and it’s offered now, today, for everyone who hears. It calls for
a response, and indeed the response may be rejection, but that
part of the story is for next week.
Always, when we are faced with this kind of
transforming word, it requires something of us. What strikes me,
though, in this Gospel account, is the quality of joyful urgency
that Jesus has in bringing his message to people in the
synagogue. The world then, as now, is surely so broken, full of
oppression – the power of the Roman occupiers- people sick,
grieving, desperate, suffering. But Jesus speaks with a passion
and a compassion and a clarity born of the Spirit, as if confident
that what he brings, what he says, is almost a done deal. It’s as
if he’s in touch with the deepest truth of how things are: this
justice, this healing, this wholeness, this freedom.
Our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts-Schori has
embraced this passage as a part of her mandate, and she summarizes
it with the wonderful Hebrew word “shalom,” which encompasses
somehow all of the wholeness and goodness and justice and
creativity that is God’s grace breaking forth and bubbling up and
bearing fruit. It’s the tradition of Jubilee, the tradition of
all things coming back to the way they ought to be, and yet being
even more than they have ever been. Jesus seems to speak out of
that experience as he preaches about what his mission is. He is
carrying it, and he sees it coming. It’s as if he’s dreamed it,
tasted it, seen it in glimmers, a little bit like Martin Luther
King, who we remembered last week, when he says, “I’ve been to the
mountaintop, and I’ve had a dream.” Because of that experience,
that Spirit-born experience, Jesus works and loves with all his
being towards this vision of the realm of God, and he embodies
it. He shows us what it is to be a human being fully alive, and
what the realm of God is.
He brings it. He preaches the good news, and he is the
good news. Isaiah says, Jesus says, Luke says that it is
specifically good news to the poor. That challenges us,
particularly here in this comfortable community, doesn’t it? The
bible is absolutely shot through, without question, with God’s
preference for the poor – and so, this challenge to those of us
who are at least economically not poor is a two-fold one. We are
challenged to find our own sense of need for God, our own poverty,
as well as challenged to share, to let go of privilege, let go of
safety based in violence. This is good news to the poor, but it
is also very good news for all of us, wherever we find ourselves
on this spectrum.
Because the deepest healing for us can only come if all
are healed. We can only be truly well if all are well, and so in
this passage, there is a kind of a ecological vision too. This
justice, this shalom, this sense of interdependence with one
another is woven into a kind of an interdependence with and
participation in the work of God.
The good news that Jesus preaches is not about
individual salvation only. The Spirit baptizes us into one body –
Paul’s great image for what it is to be a Christian. This is the
good news that we need to hear, and the good news that we are
called to carry forth, that we are to be, that we are
members, one of another.
The Epistle that we heard today is pointed, even funny,
as Paul tells the fractious Corinthians that they wouldn’t get
very far if they were all just one giant ear. Try to imagine it,
rolling down the aisle! He says, “if the foot would say ‘because
I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make
it any less a part of the body. If the ear would say ‘because I
am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make
it 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? If all were a single member, where
would the body be? 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.’
If one member suffers, all members 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.”
This is a remarkably timely message, isn’t it, telling
us that we can’t withdraw ourselves from the community of Christ,
and neither can we kick others out? All, says Paul, are made to
drink of one Spirit. We certainly don’t always know how to live
into this, but it is the deepest truth of things. Christ’s body,
each one of us and all of us together are given the Spirit for the
common good, and not just the common good of insiders, but rather
the common good of all creation. The Spirit is given for our
need, for our gift and for our participation – that we may be the
presence of Christ in the world.
Teresa of Avila rather famously said, “Christ has no
body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours
are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon
the world. Ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good;
ours are the hands with which he blesses his people, now.” So it
is, that we who bear the name of Christ, the Spirit of Christ, are
anointed to the same work that Jesus was: “The Spirit of the Lord
is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the
poor. He 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.”
What is the good news that we need, the good news that
we proclaim, the good news that we are? I have a story that gave
me a sense of this just in the last day or so. I think that most
of you have heard that our dear Arthur Williams died this past
week. Arthur had not been around church very much in the last few
years- he was living at Amsterdam House, the nursing home across
from the cathedral- but he was a former warden of this parish, a
man of deep faith and wry, sometimes rather Eeyore-like wit. We
used to call him Sage Arthur, and more times than one at the Bible
study on Tuesday nights, he was the one who pulled everything
together with one pithy comment. And the preacher would find that
she or he just had to quote Arthur on Sunday in the sermon. So
now I am going to do it one more time.
I happened to visit Arthur on the day before he died,
and I found Chris Bonet there, as she often was, for they were
dear old friends. And so, when we got the news of Arthur’s death,
I went to see Chris, and we spent some time reminiscing about
Arthur. And she told me a story which touched me deeply, and
which I share with her permission – thank you, Chris.
Chris, some years back, had cancer of the jaw and lost
the ability to form some sounds, and speech became very difficult
for her, and it was really hard to keep trying. There was the
danger that she might lose her speech altogether. At a certain
point, Arthur saw what was happening, and insisted that she talk
with him regularly. And so they did. Incidentally, Chris talked
of calling Arthur up when she was coming over, because his bell
didn’t ring inside his apartment, and always finding him standing
outside waiting for her, reading a book.
But it was a struggle, a struggle to keep working at
it, a struggle to know whether it was worth it, and at one point,
Chris said to Arthur, “I’m really afraid I’m boring the hell out
of you, Arthur.” “Oh no, Chris,” he said. “You’re giving me
courage.”
What a remarkable moment of good news! A gift was
shared in a surprising way. The good news of courage was named as
Chris’s gift to Arthur, a gift he needed, a naming she needed, and
in that mutual vulnerability, there was a kind of a healing that
has a ripple effect, even to this day. For later, when Arthur was
in the nursing home, Chris told me, that experience gave her
courage to make the trip up there regularly, even when she was a
bit afraid of taking the bus by herself. “Nothing was going to
stop me,” she said.
“You give me courage…”
In that brief exchange, there is a courage, a love, a
joy that ripples through all of us who hear it, I think – showing
us something of what it means to be human, what it means to be
Christ’s body.
Today, my friends, the Spirit of the Lord is upon you,
and you, and you and me, bringing the great good news that we are
loved, that we are gifted, that we are called by God, giving us
courage and sending us to bring and to be good news to all in
need, to the whole world.
Amen. |
