Sermon for Epiphany 3C, January 24, 2016

Text: Luke 4:16-30

            Beloved in Christ, the Old Testament makes up over three-fourths of the Bible and is God’s holy Word, but it can be a bit puzzling to understand at times. It’s easy enough to read various events that occurred in the Bible and reflect on them from a Christian perspective. We read, for example, of how the Israelites rebelled against Moses and murmured against God in the wilderness, and we are warned by that example not to do the same or to repent when we see a spirit of bitterness settling upon us. Or we look at the heroes of faith and are moved to imitate their life of repentance and faith. With David, who repented after his adulterous affair with Bathsheba, we too humble ourselves before God and deplore our sins. With Abraham, who set out to a new land solely on the basis of God’s promise, we trust in and rely upon the promises of God in Christ Jesus.

            Somewhat harder but still easy enough are the direct prophecies of Christ in the Old Testament. Often that is because we Christians have not been trained to look for them and to contemplate their meaning, although they are there for people to see if they will pay attention. In every book of the Bible there is something that points forward to the coming of Christ. You see that, with each new generation from Abraham through Jacob’s children, there was a repetition of the promise that the world would be blessed by one of Abraham’s descendants. When the Israelites left Egypt and were about to enter the Promised Land, when David was established as king, when they were about to go into exile, there were direct prophecies given about how the Christ would come. Meanwhile, every book of the prophets not only chastised God’s people for their slowness to believe and their eagerness to do evil, but also pointed out how the coming Messiah would be the exact antidote to Israel’s waywardness. The more scathing the prophecy against the Israelites, the sweeter and brighter the messianic promises tended to be.

            But what is really difficult for us to make sense of are all the rules and regulations God gave in the Old Testament. Some Christians assume that all the rules and holidays are still in force. But this overlooks the repeated testimony of the New Testament that the moral law is still in force, but the rules about holidays, kosher foods, clean and unclean states, and the like are not. They applied to the Israelites in the Old Testament, but they do not apply to Christians in the New Testament.

James Tissot,
Jesus Unrolls the Scroll in the Synagogue

            Now this seems a bit bizarre to us. Why should God have given those rules if He was going to abolish them anyway? And what benefit can we Christians get from reading about these rules, when the ceremonies seem a bit strange to us and we know that they no longer apply to us. We naturally are inclined to skip over the entire book of Leviticus and huge chunks of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, because they all talk about these sort of things that we find hard to apply to us.

            But as always, it is Jesus who comes to our rescue. In today’s Gospel He preached His first recorded sermon in his hometown. And He preached it on a topic that we might find puzzling: the Jubilee Year that occurred once every 49 years. But it might help us to understand that our Lord did not just talk about the Jubilee Year as Moses had described it in Leviticus, but rather as the prophet Isaiah had further explained and shown how the Messiah would bring about what the Jubilee Year was pointing to. All Christ had to do was then point out that He was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.

            In other words, already in the days of the Old Testament the prophets had reminded God’s people that the rituals and ceremonies and holidays pointed to something greater. So when we Christians say that our Lord fulfilled all the rituals and holidays of the Old Testament, we are not inventing that interpretation. It is an idea that goes back to the Old Testament days and was approved by the prophets of old.

            And so with that in mind we consider what the Year of Jubilee might mean for us Christians today. It would help to begin by looking at what that festival actually consisted of. The Hebrew calendar not only observed the Sabbath every Saturday and several other festivals such as Passover and the Day of Atonement each year, but they also observed two other holidays that occurred only in some years. Every seventh year was a Sabbath year. The people took a year off from planting and harvesting their crops, although one could eat what grew naturally.

            Then following every seventh Sabbath year—that is, every 49 years, there would be the Year of Jubilee. It was like getting an extra year off. No crops were planted, but one enjoyed the food stored up from previous years. All Israelite slaves were freed. Now no Israelite could be enslaved for more than six years and they were to be treated as indentured servants rather than slaves, but if someone had only served a couple of years when the Year of Jubilee rolled around, they were still to be set free. At the same time, land was returned to the original owners. In this way nobody would amass all the land in an area and nobody would be permanently bereft of land, which was the only way to gain income in that kind of society. So this holiday helped the poor, but it brought joy to all.

            Well, when Isaiah wrote his book, he reflected on what the Year of Jubilee might be pointing toward. Yes, it was good that the poor, the afflicted, and the enslaved were being set free. But was that all that God had in mind for people? Did He just want everybody to enjoy a little time off? No, there was something deeper. It pointed to the fact that the Messiah would come and set the whole world aright, not just a corner of it. Not only would the poor receive good news and the captives be set free, but the blind would be given sight. Now that had never happened during a Jubilee Year in Old Testament days, but of course Christ would heal several blind people during His earthly ministry.

            But Isaiah had more than mere earthly poverty and blindness in mind. Throughout his book Isaiah had complained that God’s people had become blind by their constant idolatry. They had eyes, but they could not see. And so when Isaiah talked about the blind seeing, he was also including the idea that people would finally come to see the truth about God and would worship Him alone rather than the idols. And that is why Isaiah said that the coming of the Messiah and thus the true Jubilee would be when God’s favor would finally rest upon His people.

            And then our Lord Jesus entered that synagogue in Nazareth and spoke those words that still amaze us: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Yes, already the Jubilee Year—the year of the Lord’s favor—had begun and it would continue to last for all time. Of course, Christ wasn’t referring to the year on the Jewish calendar, since He was speaking these words around 30 AD and the next Jubilee Year wouldn’t come for another 30 years. But Christ was beginning the New Testament age that very moment, the age in which those promises of Isaiah came true.

            Christ had good news for the poor. The word Isaiah had used to describe the poor literally means “the bent-over ones.” They are the people so weighed down by life that they stoop underneath the burden. Poverty remains a horrible burden. How wonderful it is to hear that Christ cares for the poor in their misery. But it isn’t just the penniless who are bent underneath a terrible burden. So is every last human being, for we have squandered our eternal inheritance and chosen instead the squalor of sin. We have been cheated out of our birthright and face nothing but the grinding poverty of death and damnation. To us Christ proclaims good news: He has come to free us from captivity to sin. He gives us that freedom by our forgiving our sins—something He could do only because He went to the cross and died for us and then rose again by God’s power. No wonder Christ calls this era “the year of the Lord’s favor.”

            And so, beloved in Christ, consider all the treasures that Christ has given to you that our Old Testament counterparts knew only in small measure. They knew only about a rest that came from taking off a day every week. You have the permanent rest that comes from knowing God and enjoying fellowship with Him. They knew about the Passover that had set them free from slavery in Egypt. But you have the true Passover that sets you free from slavery to sin, death, and hell. They kept the Passover by scouring their homes and removing any yeast in them. But you should keep the true Passover by letting God scour your hearts and remove the taint of sin within them. They knew about a Day of Atonement where year after year the blood of goats was sprinkled that the sin of Israel might be removed. But you know of the true Day of Atonement, Good Friday, when once and for all the blood of the Son of God was shed that we might have our guilt removed.

            And so, beloved in Christ, let us consider the joy and hope that the ancient holidays of Israel brought to them. But then let us consider the greater joy and hope that are ours through Christ Jesus. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost 17 (Proper 20B), September 20, 2015

Texts: Jeremiah 11:18-20 and Mark 9:30-37

            Beloved in Christ, can you believe what Jeremiah is saying? “Let me see Your vengeance upon them.” That’s just wrong. That’s wrong and unchristian. Someone needs to sit down and have a little talk with Jeremiah and warn him that that is not how Christians talk. We are not to ask God’s vengeance to fall upon anyone. We are never to complain about injustices that we see or experience. Instead, we are to be happy and cheerful, no matter what happens. We are to smile and be tolerant of everything. But maybe we should give Jeremiah a pass. After all, he is from the Old Testament—you know, that benighted age when they didn’t know anything about grace or forgiveness or Christ.

            I dare say that’s what many Christians would say. But that is because of our prejudices about the Old Testament and the New Testament. We think that God was angry in the Old Testament, but mellowed out by the time of the New Testament. But that is just not true. Our Lord Jesus Christ had far more to say about hell than you will find in the entire Old Testament. And in the Revelation, one of the newest of the New Testament books, you see the martyrs crying out to God to do something about those being slaughtered for Christ’s sake. Meanwhile, the prophet Jeremiah himself would go on to write eloquently about the forgiveness God would impart to His wayward people and the new heart He would implant in them. So maybe our prejudices about both testaments is getting in the way of us hearing God’s law in the New Testament and His gospel in the Old Testament—and thus of understanding what God is about.

Jeremiah Lamenting over the Destruction of Jerusalem
by Rembrandt van Rijn
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Home : Info. Licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Commons - SK-A-3276.jpeg

            We in our post-modern society struggle to pray the words, “Let me see Your vengeance upon them.” But there are two reasons why we might decline to pray this kind of prayer. One is that we are cold-hearted robots without a shred of human empathy in our teeny, tiny hearts. We have no time to consider anybody else’s sorrows and problems. If they are the victims of injustice, well, they should just suck it up and soldier on instead of asking us or God to get involved in their troubles. The second reason is that maybe we do not want to be called out for our injustices. If we complain too much about the injustices that we ourselves experience or that we see going on around us, we might become the target of God’s avenging wrath. And so we pretend that God has no reason whatsoever to be concerned with the injustices in this world.

            But God does not shrug off injustice the way we do. You must understand that in both Greek and Hebrew there is only one word that means “righteousness” and “justice.” They are not two separate concepts, as they are in English. Thus, God is opposed to injustice even as He is opposed to unrighteousness. At most, He may delay His punishment until people have shown themselves to be fully guilty. He warns Cain about the anger and hatred lurking in his heart, but He doesn’t intervene until Cain has shown himself to be the murderer that he was. And so we shouldn’t assume that God is indifferent to the injustices of the world. Instead, He is giving enough rope to people to see if they will hang themselves with it.

            Nowhere do we see God saying that injustice is okay. And so we do well to consider the injustices of our day, that is to say, the injustices that are praised by our society and that we have a hard time avoiding. You see, every era, every culture, and every ideology is marked by some kind of injustice and we are no exception. We are unjust to the elderly, whom we are willing just to stick in some corner and neglect. We are unjust to the unborn, whom we are willing to kill because they are inconvenient. We are unjust to children, because we prefer to hop from one bed to another rather than create a stable household with a lifelong mother and father for our children. We are unjust to the poor, whom we despise for not having made it in our land of plenty. We are unjust to the gullible, whom we try to exploit for our advantage and then excuse it with “Buyer, beware!” We are unjust to people who do not look like us or talk like us or think like us. Injustice is not to be found just on the Left or on the Right or in the Middle. It taints our whole society.

            Now you might say, “But I do my best to respect and help the poor, the unborn, the elderly, the weak, and the vulnerable. I try not to be part of the problem, but part of the solution.” Good! That is a fine and Christian thing to do. But it is not always easy to extricate ourselves from the injustices of the world in which we live. Think, for example, how in our country the people in early 1800s New England were quick to denounce the evils of slavery in the South and bristled at all of its horrors, but they didn’t think much about using the cotton in their mills, even though the cotton had been planted and harvested by slaves. And they didn’t think much about forcing children to work long hours in their mills and putting them at risk of losing life and limb on the dangerous machinery. Often we find it difficult to extricate ourselves from the evil and injustices around us, and we find it easy to see other people’s injustices, but not our own.

            Moreover, we tend to rely on force (whether real or threatened) to end injustice, and this often leads to further injustices. The Communists in Russia claimed to be avenging the wrongs the tsar had done, but they ended up creating a bigger gulag than had ever existed in human history. The Nazis claimed to be helping Germany when it was being picked on unfairly by its neighbors, but they ended up killing millions of innocents. To be sure, there is such a thing as righteous indignation—and Jeremiah and the saints in the Revelation are examples of that—but it is a rather rare phenomenon. Usually our righteous indignation is soon channeled into unrighteous directions.

            But the good news is that God has come to put an end to the injustices of the world and to do so in a most unusual manner. Christ didn’t overcome evil by the ballot or the bullet. Instead, He Himself became a victim of the world’s injustices. He was falsely accused. He was framed. He was given a show trial. He was executed, though He was innocent. But it isn’t just that He was a victim. No, He took on both our injustices and the vengeance God wreaks upon those injustices. We cannot reconcile victim and victimizer, but Christ did so through His body on the cross. For there He was the victim but He also endured the just vengeance God poured out. Jeremiah’s prayer was heard. Injustice was ended. Righteousness was established. Peace began to reign.

            And that affects the way that we live now. Christ gives a new future to both victim and victimizer. Justice is rendered to the victim as evil is dealt with once and for all, and forgiveness and new life are offered to the victimizer—and both at great cost to our Lord. But this opens up to us all sorts of new possibilities. We are not bound to continue in the same old pattern of perpetuating injustice or excusing it or overlooking it. Instead, we show what God’s true justice looks like in the way we treat other people.

            The people who are victims of injustice are almost always the weaker people. Most people don’t pick fights with someone who can overpower them, since they don’t want to be hurt. That’s why it is the weak and the vulnerable and the lonely and the outcast who are most vulnerable to injustice. And that is also why we strive after power and try to be the greatest, because we know that we will be picked on mercilessly if we are a nobody. But if we understand that Christ has come to defend the weak and to turn the hearts of the mighty away from their pride, then we can look at ourselves and other people differently.

            That is what our Lord was doing after the disciples argued about who was the greatest. He held a child in His arms and said that the greatest person was someone who would receive such a little child. On another occasion, He would hold up a child as an example of the greatest person in the kingdom of God. Here He is saying that the greatest person is someone who would receive such a child and in so doing receive and honor Christ. These two ideas complement each other. The humble and lowly are great, and so are those who receive the humble and lowly and care for them.

            The child was apparently small enough to be held in Christ’s arms. We’re not talking a twelve year old or so. This is a small child. What can such a child do in God’s kingdom? Not much—just receive the gifts that Christ gives. But what use are even the best of us to God? Not much. All we can do is receive His gifts. But what makes the child and us valuable to God is that He loves us. And, therefore, we are the greatest in the world to Him. But so too are our fellow believers in Christ. The best thing we can do then is to love and to help our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially the weaker ones.

            If we counted others as our betters and received in humility whatever gifts God gives—in other words, if we acted with the humility of a small child who knows how dependent he or she is upon others—we would stop many of the injustices in the world. It would hold us back from participating in those injustices ourselves. And if all Christians would live their lives consistently this way, it would change the world.

            Yes, I know that we have not yet attained a perfect world nor will do so ever as long as the world lasts. We will remain part of the problem until the day we die. But Christ has come to listen to the pleas of Jeremiah and to take up his cause—and that of all who suffer unjustly at other people’s hands. Therefore, let us pursue humility and let the love of Christ flow through us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.