Fulfilled today in our hearing
Friends, before I say anything else I want to say how blessed I am to be with you this morning as preacher and celebrant. I’ve worshiped at St. John’s on and off since 1998, when my husband Jonas and I bought a house in Ashfield and began spending part of our summers here. When I finally left parish ministry and began serving the diocese as Missioner for Creation Care, this church gradually became the place on Sunday mornings where I most wanted to pray when I wasn’t on the road. And now I’ve retired, so here I am! It is good to be with you.
I especially treasure the opportunity to preach sometimes over the next few months because things are changing fast. It’s been quite a week. We’ve entered a new era in our life as a nation. In this uncertain time, filled with so much worry and woe, I am grateful to have an opportunity to reflect on how God is calling us to live out our faith. As we just sang, “I want to walk as a child of the light. I want to follow Jesus.”1 How do we follow Jesus in “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14)? Our readings this morning have a thing or two to say about that. Let’s begin with the psalm. As you know, I’ve devoted much of my ministry to speaking about God’s love for the whole Creation and about our Christian calling to protect the web of life. So, I rejoice that the opening lines of today’s psalm proclaim the sacredness of the natural world (Psalm 19:1-4): “The heavens declare the glory of God,* and the firmament shows [God’s] handiwork. One day tells its tale to another,* and one night imparts knowledge to another. Although they have no words or language,” and their voices are not heard, Their sound has gone out into all lands,* and their message to the ends of the world.” The psalmist knows that the living world declares God’s glory and conveys God’s presence. We’ve been trained by our culture to view the natural world as little more than objects or resources for us to use and exploit, whereas the Bible insists that the Earth belongs to God and is alive with God’s presence. When we gather to worship God inside this building, our worship is joining the worship already going on outside, in the wind and sunlight, in trees and streams. God comes to us through the natural world, so it’s not surprising that many of us, in times of anguish or stress, find solace in turning our attention away from the noise of human chatter and conflict and toward the silence of wild creatures and landscapes. The other night, when I couldn’t sleep, I got up and spent a long time watching the moon rise over the ridge beside our house. In her calm and silvery light, I felt God’s presence and I felt God’s peace, and I praised God with a grateful heart. Because our faith and experience link God to the natural world, it’s deeply disturbing to witness its destruction. It hurts. When a new Administration comes to power and immediately withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement; when it rolls back climate protections, ramps up domestic drilling, and spurns clean energy; when it turns a blind eye to the signs of Mother Earth’s distress, spoken in the language of massive wildfires and droughts, flooding and heat, my heart breaks with outrage and sorrow. Maybe yours does, too. The web of life upon which all our lives depend is fraying, and so, too, is the social fabric that knits our country together. So, let’s turn to the passage from Luke’s Gospel, which comes like medicine to our weary souls. Jesus, “filled with the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14), returns from forty days in the wilderness and begins to teach in the synagogues of Galilee. You’ll remember that he was baptized just weeks before in the Jordan River, where the Holy Spirit descended upon him and a voice from heaven told him, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). The same loving Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness to face his temptations and to renounce the self-centered patterns of thought or behavior that could pull him off course. By the time Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth, he has purified his intention to give himself wholeheartedly to serving God. The Gospel passage tells us that in Nazareth Jesus goes to the synagogue on the sabbath day, “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). It’s clear that Jesus was a faithful Jew who shared in the liturgical life of his community. Synagogues generally had no professional rabbis; instead, the person presiding at the service would ask some respected person in the congregation to speak. Jesus was invited to teach that day, and so our scene unfolds. The congregation watches as he stands up and receives the scroll. They watch him unroll it and find a passage from chapter 61 of the prophet Isaiah. The congregation listens as Jesus reads aloud. Maybe we can imagine the quiet authority in his voice as he reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring 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” (Luke 4:18). The congregation watches as he rolls the scroll back up, hands it back to the attendant, and sits down – as was the custom of the time – before he begins his sermon. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue are fixed on Jesus as they wait in silence for him to speak. What does he say? It’s probably the world’s shortest sermon: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). I suppose I could have spoken that sentence from the pulpit this morning and left it at that. I imagine something like a surge of energy being released around the room when Jesus said those words. Today the Scripture has been fulfilled, he says – not some other day, not some distant day, not some moment in the far-off future, but today, this very day, the Scripture has been fulfilled. To fulfill is to make actual, to bring to completion. Today this Scripture has been fulfilled, a fulfillment that his listeners have been ardently awaiting for years, for decades, for generation upon generation. The people of God – and the whole Creation – have long been waiting for the Messiah to come, waiting with expectation for the anointed one who will come at last to heal the broken-hearted and bring good news to the poor, to liberate the captives and give sight to the blind. Our weary, weary world has been longing forever for fulfillment – “groaning,” as St. Paul says in Romans (Romans 8:22-23) – as it waits to be made whole and to be set free, suffering like a woman in childbirth as it waits for an end to brutality and injustice, to war and natural disaster, and for the coming of peace, for the sounds of harmony and laughter. “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I take this as Jesus’ mission statement, as Jesus’ announcement of who he is and why he’s come, in essence the same declaration which he expresses in the Gospel of John as “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Jesus has been anointed by the Spirit to bring good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to proclaim release to the captives. He knows who he is – the Beloved of God – and he knows why he’s here and what he’s been sent here to do. Everything he does from this point on – preaching, teaching, healing, standing up to the unjust powers of this world, suffering, dying – everything he does will be for the sake of his mission, following that true north on his compass. His whole ministry will flow from this inaugural sermon and its vision of carrying out God’s mission of healing and reconciling and setting free. Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in our hearing. Today is our day to claim our identity in Christ as the beloved of God, our day to affirm that we, too, have been anointed in baptism and are filled with the same Spirit with which Jesus was anointed and filled. We listen to the same inner voice of love to which Jesus listened. And we are sent out, as Jesus was sent out, to embody and make real the healing and liberating presence of God. It’s in dark times like these that we pray, “Shine in our hearts, Lord Jesus,”2 and, with whatever light we’ve been given, we find a way to serve and to set free. I’ve never been prouder of, or more grateful for, the Episcopal Church than I’ve been this week. Shortly after the new President took office and began issuing executive orders related to deporting undocumented immigrants and restricting asylum, the top leaders of our Church sent a letter to the church affirming our Christian commitment to welcoming the stranger and protecting the most vulnerable among us. And I don’t think I will ever forget the moment when Bishop Mariann Budde paused on Tuesday during her sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, took a breath, looked directly at the President, and made a heartfelt appeal for him to have mercy on gay, lesbian, and transgender communities and on undocumented immigrants. If you haven’t yet watched her sermon online, I hope you will. It’s available on the National Cathedral’s YouTube channel This is what following Jesus looks like. This is what nonviolent resistance looks like. Living out our Christian calling can be risky and can be costly – indeed, just moments after Jesus finishes his sermon, the congregation runs him out of town and almost throws him over a cliff (Luke 4:28-30). But Jesus is undeterred. God willing, we will be, too. We can do difficult things when we feel led by the Holy Spirit. I’ll close with three brief suggestions. Here’s one: protect your inner stillness. Guard the peace within your heart. Do what you need to do – gaze at the moon, study the hills, feel the wind on your face. Listen to music. Breathe in the love of God. Taking time to pray is countercultural, even revolutionary work. As theologian Karl Barth once said, “The contemplative who can stand back from a situation and see it for what it is, is more threatening to an unjust social system than the frenzied activist who is so involved in the situation that he [she] cannot see clearly at all.” Next, make space for grief. Welcome God into what you’re feeling just now, whatever it may be – fear, sorrow, outrage, numbness, overwhelm. The God whom we know in Jesus loves us utterly and sits with us as we mourn or rage or rejoice, holding us in love and helping us see what we need to see, accept what we need to accept, and find courage to change what we need to change. Finally, take your own next right step. Maybe you’ll reach out to someone who is lonely or to someone who is fearful of attack by the new Administration. Maybe you’ll join me in an activist group like ThirdAct.org, which is for folks over 60 who want to protect democracy and the climate. Maybe you’ll sign up for action alerts from the Episcopal Public Policy Network. These are just a few of the many ways we can offer healing and justice in a perilous time. The main thing is this: we know who we are, and we know why we’re here. For today this Scripture has been fulfilled in our hearing. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Hymn #490 (words by Kathleen Thomerson) in The Hymnal 1982. 2. Ibid.