Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran on January 31, 2016
Scripture text: 1 Corinthians 13, Luke 4:21-30

We’re only one month in and 2016 has already proven to be a tragic year for music lovers. So many have died. Lemmy from Motorhead. Natalie Cole. Glenn Frey of the Eagles. Jason Mackenroth from the punk rock Rollins band. And, of course, probably the most famous of all of them: David Bowie.

From the Telegraph

I can’t say I’m a big Bowie fan, but there’s no question of his impact on the music I do like. But there is one exception. One song of his that stands out, although it’s not entirely his song. It’s his collaboration with another musician who we lost far too soon, Freddie Mercury. The song is Under Pressure and it’s a duet between Mercury and Bowie about the pressures and struggles of modern life. Many of you have probably heard it.

But what does this song have to do with our purposes here today? Quite a bit actually. The answer the singers provide to this modern world is found in the last handful of lyrics of the song.

'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves

Love is the answer. Love. Something we don’t do very much of in this world anymore. You turn on the news and what do you see? Violence? Rage? Hatred? From the Middle East to the campaign trail to the Oregon stand-off to the streets of our own cities. Not a whole lot of love going on there.

And yet, St. Paul tells us in this well beloved chapter of 1 Corinthians, that love is all that really matters. It’s the end and the means of all that we are as Christians. It drives us, changes us, remakes us into who we are meant to be. It is God’s love that saves us. It is God’s love that we strive to share with others.

But sharing love is not easy. Because ultimately, with our sin and selfishness, we want only to love those we believe deserve it. People like us. People who think like us. Look like us. Believe like us. People who stand under the same flag or banner as us. We hoard love. We keep it to ourselves. We believe it belongs only to us and our own.

Which brings us to Jesus. Today’s Gospel lesson is Part 2 of the story that began last week. Jesus is in his hometown and, like any good boy, he’s going to church (or synagogue in this case) with his mother and family. He’s invited to read the Scriptures, so he gets up and reads from the 61st chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah...

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
   because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
   to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
   and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,

And then he sits down and says boldly. “Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” He’s the one who will do this. And that’s where we pick up with the text today.

Everyone is thrilled by this news. God’s jubilee, his declaration of freedom from the bondage of sin and evil, is coming to pass. But then Jesus continues. He brings up a couple of examples from the Old Testament: the widow of Zarephath, Namaan of the Syrians where God showed favor on “those people.” Times when God loved “them.”

How dare he! How dare he claim that God’s love is for other people. How dare he claim that God loves those sinners, those foreigners! God loves us and us alone. And they explode into rage. They even try to kill Jesus. They try to throw him off the cliff. They don’t succeed, of course, but they do try. All because he dared say that God’s love is bigger than they thought it was and that his jubilee, his liberation, was for everyone.

They shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Isaiah says elsewhere in his book that all the nations will come to God to learn his ways. They should remember the old covenant with Abraham, which says that God intends to bless all the families of the world. Jesus isn’t saying anything new.

But what is true and what we want to be true are not always the same thing. As St. Paul writes, love is not selfish, yet we wish it were. Love does not demand its own way, yet we want it to. It is not arrogant or rude or envious, yet we try to make it so. We do this to make it our own, our own little treasure that we can hoard and keep to ourselves, a treasure we can deny to others based on our own criteria of worthiness or deserving.

And the world has become what it is for that very reason. We are “under pressure,” because we do not love as God has asked us to. We turn our backs on others and the whole world is falling apart for it.

And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves

Sometimes, God shows up in the strangest of places. In the lyrics of a 35 year old song, for instance, reminding us that love is bigger than we’ve imagined it to be. That’s it’s supposed to be that way. That this is how the world will be set right. When we do start to care for those on the edge and when we do start to change our way of caring about ourselves, perhaps by seeing that “ourselves” is the whole human race.

After all, what is it that Christ does himself? He escapes death at the hands of his own hometown here, but he does not elude it forever. He goes to the cross and there he dies to put an end to sin and death. But he doesn’t just do that for just people like him or only those who agree with him or look like him. He does it for everyone. For the whole world.

Love. God loves all people, perhaps especially for those on the fringes, those most rejected by the world. Go and do likewise and we will see this world transform. Amen.