Sermon January 26 2025  Luke 4:14ff                                    Rev. Betsy Hogan

Do you enjoy a good synchronicity? Like, someone pops into your head for the first time in probably at least ten years, and then two days later you get a message from their daughter to let you know that they’ve died?  

That literally happened to me over the Christmas holiday. And I know that the rigidly empirically-minded among us might just call it a coincidence, but I’m afraid I just can’t agree. 

Things like that just seem to me to be TOO random, to just be random. I can’t help but jump instead to contemplating a whole array of somehow-intertwined connection and communication at an invisible but real level. That’s also somehow operating. Making occasional syncronicities. Keeping us on our toes.

Or even making us laugh. Because here’s a fun little synchronicity that I enjoyed… admittedly a bit later this past week than I probably should have…

Because it wasn’t until Friday of this past week – so apologies in advance for the sermon – that I opened up the Lectionary schedule of readings that tells all of us preachers in the mainline churches what our preaching text for each Sunday will be…

And discovered that this week’s was the passage that Janet just read for us from Luke’s gospel. About Jesus beginning the three years of the divine mission for which he was made… by getting into a pulpit, opening the holy scriptures, and preaching a thoroughly political sermon. 

I mean, thoroughly. Like, there really are times when I KNOW that God has a sense of humour. And sure, it wasn’t technically a synchronicity – the lectionary schedule was put in place literally decades ago – but the gospel reading assigned for this day could have been anything. Four gospels, an abundance of choices. But it wasn’t.  

Instead, it was Jesus rising in the pulpit in Nazareth, reading from the prophet Isaiah about the eventual arrival of God’s Messiah, rolling the scroll back up, handing it to the elder, turning back to the congregation with the flourish of a dramatic pause, and telling them: “It’s me. Hi. I’m the Messiah. It’s me.” 

Or as Luke would have it, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”. 

Jesus of Nazareth: HE is the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed. Those three words that all mean the same thing. Messiah in Hebrew, Christ in Greek, the Anointed One in English. 

Promised by the Prophets, sent by God and filled by God’s Spirit, and for what?

In the words of the prophet Isaiah that Jesus reads aloud that day: to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to set the oppressed free.

It’s like the job description of the Messiah, these words from Isaiah that Jesus begins his message with. Which to be fair, they could all just be distilled into “bring compassion and proclaim mercy” because that’s basically what they all amount to… but they’re not.

God wants the detail, and Isaiah – God’s prophet, inspired – he speaks the detail.

Because the job description of the Messiah, the embodiment of Godness that Jesus IS and he now proclaims has arrived -- promise fulfilled -- in the presence of those gathered that day who hear him – 

It ISN’T just ‘bring compassion and proclaim mercy’ as sort of feelings, as kind of a way. Modeled by Jesus. Go and do likewise. Generally caring. Be how God likes.

Not that they’re not what God likes because they certainly are what God likes, compassion and mercy as feelings and a way – 

But for the mission of the Messiah? Bring compassion and proclaim mercy: it’s just too abstract. It’s too airy and nebulous and intangible. 

And God has met us. God knows. Airy and nebulous and intangible – we’re not going to grasp it. We’re not going to get the fullness of what God wants us to understand is what it actually looks like on the ground. And what it actually looks like on the ground is what matters.

So no. Isaiah doesn’t distill the mission of the Messiah into just “to bring compassion and proclaim mercy” but instead -- in the words that are explicitly claimed by Jesus in this moment at the beginning of his ministry – it’s “to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to set the oppressed free.”

It's not just compassion and mercy, as loving feelings. It’s not even just what compassion and mercy as loving feelings look like on the ground, when they shape the behaviour of individuals.

It’s what compassion and mercy look like on the ground when they shape the behaviour -- the rules, the ways, the assumptions, the expectations, the policies – of the whole community. 

Because the only way there can be good news and freedom and wellness for the poor and captive and suffering and oppressed – is if the rules and ways and policies of the community that have caused them to be, and have kept them, poor and captive and suffering and oppressed in the first place, are changed. 

Are utterly reshaped and reoriented into rules and ways and policies that are compassion and mercy embodied. 

The mission of Messiah that Jesus explicitly claims that day in the pulpit in Nazareth, its markers aren’t individual holiness, but social holiness. 

Individual holiness will come – Jesus spends a tremendous amount of time in his earthly mission teaching and guiding his listeners, teaching and guiding US, into living generously, into living peacefully, into taking care of those in need, into seeing ALL as our relations, ALL as God’s beloved, and resisting against cruelty and hurt and harm.

So individual holiness will come. Jesus’ mission of preaching and teaching and healing, it’s absolutely soaked in it. In showing his followers, each of us for our own selves, the way of faithfulness and the way of discipleship. Individual holiness will come.

But here, in the pulpit in Nazareth as he begins, he explicitly begins by grounding the nurture of individual holiness to come -- in the deeper wider mission and purpose of social holiness. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, describing the promised Messiah he is.

It’s a thoroughly political message – from the Greek polis, which means a city, an organized community. 

Because a messianic mission that brings good news to the poor spells the end of community ways and laws and policies that make people poor and keep them poor. 

A messianic mission that proclaims release to the captives won’t countenance enslavement, indentured servitude, ways and laws and policies that entrap people in cruel or dangerous situations.

A messianic mission of recovery of sight to the blind, in the absence of antibiotics, when pervasive bacterial infections left rampant blindness when they didn’t kill -- it’s a furious calling-out of ways and laws and policies that ostracize the ‘undesirable’, the ‘unclean’, into the filthy over-crowded slums that breed those infections.

And a messianic mission that sets the oppressed free, it demands an overturning of ways and laws and policies that officially silence voices, and promote wealth accumulated on others’ hard labour, and secure compliance with threats and fear.

It’s an explicitly political mission, the Messianic mission. It’s not ONLY a political mission, and not by a long shot. And we know that from our gospel stories of Jesus teaching and embodying the way of personal goodness, compassion and mercy, that we try to lean into, God being our helper.

So it’s not even remotely ONLY a political mission. But it is a political mission. Its concern isn’t just individual holiness, but social holiness. Jesus makes that explicitly clear, literally as the first thing he does, in claiming those words from Isaiah from the pulpit in the synagogue.

And here’s what’s interesting. No one there questions that. No one wonders aloud about ‘politics in the pulpit’. Because they can’t even fathom a Messianic mission that ISN’T about social holiness as much as it is about individual holiness. Because they know that when compassion and mercy are real and deep, they don’t just make PEOPLE kind. They make the ways and laws and policies of those people kind. 

The two can’t be separated. And no one in the synagogue that day questions that. They simply take it as a given. 

I mean, they DO – when Jesus for reasons known unto him decides to goad them a bit with how they’ll almost certainly reject him – they DO wind up flying into a rage while Jesus just quietly exits. 

But it’s not because he’s “gotten political”. It’s because he’s suddenly weirdly sort of insulted them, when really until then they were all in. 

They don’t question for a moment that his mission will be as much social, political, as individual. Because that’s what the mission of the Messiah IS. It’s how it was proclaimed and foretold by Isaiah. 

It’s simply a given. The point of everything he does, everything he teaches, everything he shows in how he is with the people around him, is about pouring compassion and mercy not just into how we are individually, but into what we expect or yearn for or work for socially in the ways and laws and policies of the world around us.

In a synagogue in Nazareth, as Jesus begins his mission, that’s simply a given. For us, now, it occasions a week of furious debate. But in a nice bit of synchronicity at the end of that week, I didn’t choose this passage. The schedule of readings was literally set decades ago.There was no operative agenda at work. 

Jesus turned up in a pulpit to ground his Messianic mission in social holiness. In a thoroughly political, entirely Biblical sermon. And “Amen,” says God. “This is my son, my beloved. Listen to him.”  Amen.