Preaching Text: Luke 4:1-8
It isn’t any wonder why we killed him.
It sounds good though. What Jesus preaches in his visit to his home synagogue. Quoting Isaiah 61, Jesus proclaims this prophecy fulfilled in himself. And what a wondrous prophecy it is. Good news to the poor. Release to the captives. Vision to the blind. Freedom to the oppressed. All sounds great...until you see what it looks like in practice.
The poor? Who cares about them? And I mean really. Our society condemns the poor, blames for their plight. The American myth is that poverty is a moral failing, the result of laziness, substance abuse, or some other vice. Social media is filled with memes about how we cannot help the poor at our borders because we have so many poor here, and yet very little is ever done for them either. The poor remain poor and we like it that way.
Captives? Our nation has the highest prison population per capita of the civilized world. The face that many within those walls are being punished far beyond what their crimes would otherwise dictate is irrelevant. Some are even outright innocent. We don’t care. The thought of letting them go, setting them free, is terrifying. What if we’re wrong? What if they’re really bad people after all? Better to keep them behind bars where we’re safe from them. Keep in the jail, we like it that way.
Vision to the blind? Or perhaps more broadly, health to the sick and disabled. Well, only if it doesn’t cost too much. But as we all know, it always does. Cure them, but don’t you dare inconvenience me with the costs of their care. If that’s what it takes, let them rot.
And that’s just physical blindness. We’re no hurry to see spiritual blindness or intellectual blindness cured either. To see our fellow humans as brothers and sisters? Nope, let me cling to my prejudices and bigotry. To understand how we can solve the complexities of our problems? No, let me listen to the lies of charlatans who tell me the problems are simple, if only we condemn those people or that group and damn them for causing all this.
The oppressed deserve it. That’s why they’re treated the way they are. That’s the lie we tell ourselves, a means and a mechanism our society uses to excuse our racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and every other form of bigotry we exercise.
It’s not a pretty picture, but it is the truth of who we are. And it’s nothing new. When Jesus first spoke these words, the crowd had similar reactions. Their society too had settled into a comfortable norm, villainizing the poor, sick, and outcast of their time just as we do ours today. And no rabble-rousing rabbi was going to change all that. They nailed him to a cross when he proved too much trouble.
But Jesus isn’t interested in preserving a comfortable status quo. If so, why show up at all? No, the Son of God has come to change things, to flip the world upside down. That’s the kingdom of God. A place where all these frightening realities come to pass.
Because it’s the right thing to do. The just thing. The merciful thing. The godly thing. But it is not the comfortable thing. Nor is it the safe thing.
It is perhaps the saddest irony of the past 2000 years of history is that the religion of Jesus, a religion which set out to transform this world, has instead become the stalwart defender of all he sought to change. We sit and we fuss and fret about whether the doors will stay open, never mind those outside who have no roof over their head. We worry about empty pews instead of empty hearts or empty bellies. And we question how the church has come to be this way after so much success in the 20th century, but never ever ask why the poor get poorer, the prisons get fuller, the oppression grows worse, and the people become more and more blind to it all.
The answer is before us all.
Jesus came to this world to do precisely what Isaiah proclaimed. Because what Isaiah proclaimed was what God promised to Abraham and the patriarchs. It’s the Old Covenant and Jesus is the one promised therein. And he came to bring good news, and to set free the captive, and to give sight to the blind, and proclaim freedom to the oppressed. To bring the kingdom of God. Good news, because no one will ever lack in the kingdom. Sight, because God’s love will be our vision. Freedom, because all the guilty have been declared innocent.
And if that’s not the reality we, as the Church, proclaim and live towards, no wonder we’re failing and floundering. The pews stay empty because so often, we do not practice what Jesus preached.
I’m not up here to entertain you. I’m up here to motivate you. We have been given a priceless gift in the salvation of Christ. He died on a cross for you and for me. He rose again to give us life eternal. But he’s not satisfied with just us. He does, as I’ve said numerous times, love all people. He loves the blind, the poor, the prisoner, and the oppressed, but he does not love how we make them so.
So what are we going to do about that? The answer to that question is, and always should have been, our mission. Christianity is not a religion for safety. It is and is meant to be a faith that will change the world. And there will always be pushback from those who benefit most from keeping the poor poor, the sick sick, and the captives imprisoned. The rolls of history are filled with the names of people killed to shut us up, not the least of which was the man we honored just this past week, Martin Luther King Jr. But if you’re as tired as I am of the world being as ugly as it is, then Jesus is calling us to do as he did.
As I was driving to the office on Friday morning, I heard the old hair-metal band Poison on the radio. Their song: Give Me Something to Believe In. It sounds like a prayer to me. The world praying for the Church to be the Church again. The song’s third verse goes like this.
I drive by the homeless sleeping on
A cold dark street
Like bodies in an open grave
Underneath the broken old neon sign
That used to read
Jesus Saves
A mile away live the rich folks
And I see how they're living it up
While the poor they eat from hand to mouth
The rich is drinkin' from a golden cup
And it just makes me wonder
Why so many lose, so few win
Jesus is asking you. What are you going to do about that? Amen.
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