January 24, 2010 Des Moines

Luke 4:14-21

A ‘Zero’ Year

I've never been quite sure what the significance is suppose to be of “zero” years, but whatever it is we like to make a big deal out of them. Let it be known that somebody is celebrating one of these milestone birthdays and we strike up the band and ice the cake in black. Greeting card racks have whole sections devoted to zero-year birthdays. When I was growing up we weren't supposed to trust anyone over 30, though no one ever told me what exactly transpired in adults when they crossed that ominous threshold.

Our general sense of the passage of time seems to echo that significance. 2010, after all, seems so much more interesting – and surely more important – than 2009. Perhaps it has to do with our fevered giddiness over the upcoming census that always occurs on these special “zero” years. Whatever, it is our prayer that 2010 is a “zero year” only with regards to the digit at the end rather than the sum of what we accomplish in the course of its 365 days.

It isn't likely that the setting for this morning's story was literally a “zero” year, but Jesus nonetheless set it apart as having at least that much significance – the “year of the Lord's favor,” he called it; and that ought to count for something.

I've taken a particular interest in this story of late since my home church in Abilene, TX is celebrating its 125^th anniversary this year – not literally a “zero year” but one that makes a similar impact -- and I have been invited to preach there one Sunday in April. I am mostly looking forward to the occasion. After all, those are the people – that is the congregation – that raised me from a pup. In every way but blood, they are family.

But there is another part of me that feels some apprehension – for all the same reasons as I just mentioned. These are people in front of whom I really don't want to flub it. That, and I keep thinking about what happened to Jesus during his guest preacher appearance in front of the home-town crowd.

It happened, according to Luke, not too long after his graduation from the seminary of the desert. Sometime before, Jesus had found his way into the hands of John the Baptist who, after some initial hesitation, lowered him into the water and baptized him. Whatever else we might manage to say about that dunking, it was apparently a powerful enough experience that it drove Jesus into a prayerful solitude in the hills to grapple with the same question that we are always trying to answer: “what is God’s will for me?”

Weeks or months later, then, when Jesus returned to his home town and was invited to speak in his home synagogue, they were words from the prophet Isaiah that he chose to read – words upon which he may well have ruminated during that wilderness retreat.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

“This,” he said to those familiar faces gathered curiously in front of him, “this is who I am. This is what I’m all about.” And even though “they laughed him out of town for his presumption,” – indeed, darn near tried to kill him – “we know he spoke the truth because the rest of his life testified to this claim” (Mead, Transforming Congregations p. 26).

Throughout his ministry, he went about announcing good news, acting out good news, demonstrating good news – making it a present reality. And that, I would argue, is the business that you and I are in: the business of healing the woundedness that mars us and literally bleeds us to death. It isn't enough, in other words, for the church to simply be. Congregational survival is not the same thing as missional success.

It is my basic pastoral contention that no church has an inherent right to exist. We have a reason, to be sure, but not a right. As much as we might like to believe otherwise – as much as the good people of Abilene love their congregation; as fond as we are of this one – neither they nor we nor any other is indispensable to the work of Christ. Through the years it has been popular and even motivating for congregations to identify themselves as God’s singular instruments of change -- that “God has no hands but our hands; no feet but our feet; no voice but our voice.” But such a claim, I would humbly assert, is arrogantly absurd.

When the Jews presumed too much from their lineage, John the Baptist reminded them that God could raise up children to Abraham from the stones littered around the river bank. When the Pharisees assumed that they could shut up the gospel by shutting up the crowds who were voicing it, Jesus informed them that if the people were silent, the stones would shout out. God can do whatever God chooses to do, and can accomplish it through whatever means God sees fit -- individuals, the church, the rocks, or anything else.

We will not and should not survive as a church simply because we call ourselves one. Vitality requires manifesting – in each succeeding generation -- a clear sense of who God is and what God is seeking; and then it requires grasping who we are in light of that first comprehension -- who we are, whose we are, and what we are called to do, coupled with a lifestyle that is faithful to that identity.

So what are we called to be and do? Jesus announced that he had come as a healer in the midst of brokenness. And he certainly found fields of opportunity. He found people who had become barely people because of too little food or too little care or too little opportunity. To those poor he said “Something here is broken. This is not the way life is supposed to be.”

He found prisoners -- some held captive because they were poor; others because they had said the wrong thing to the wrong people and were bundled away for political reasons; still others because they had violated the law and ruptured the bonds of civilized community. To these prisoners he said “Something here is broken. This is not the way God intended life to be.”

And he found illness -- people whose bodies permanently or temporarily, through disease or genetics or some accident along the way -- were not full partners in the promise and possibilities of life. To these challenged and impaired he said “Something here is broken. This is not the way God intended life to be. I have come to bring you good news.”

And in dying and rising with him -- by becoming his disciples -- indeed his very body, so have we. To a world whose most notable element is its brokenness, we have come to bring the good news of a healing touch. We have, said the Apostle Paul, this ministry of reconciliation. To a world of broken pieces, we have this ministry of bringing back together.

We have our work cut out for us. Jesus said that the poor we would always have with us, and as a culture we seem determined to make that true. The gap between rich and poor has only widened as we have become more developed, and the financial basement is getting more and more crowded. The current pressures at the local and state and federal levels to reduce spending and eliminate government programs raise still more concerns, since the neediest among us seem perennially the hardest hit in such “reorganizations.” I don’t know what the wisest choices may prove to be, and aren't we all being forced to recognize that money doesn't grow on trees? I only know we have a moral investment to insure that the object of whatever strategies employed protect and lift up those who are beaten down and not simply to spend less money.

We have our work cut out for us just trying to help and teach people how to live together. We aren't just far flung, isolated peoples any more – colors kept neatly pure and separate like paint on an artist's palette. We are increasingly tossed and stirred, mixed and blurred, living side by side and sharing classrooms and work places and homes. But the...

· ...sideways suspicious glances in airport lines and grocery store aisles,

· ...and the picketing signs at the state capital...

...offer stark evidence that we still don’t know yet what to do with each other. And the

· clash of differing religious views,

· different moral perspectives,

· different visions of life together...

...inevitably result in shouting and name calling at best, total alienation and even bloodshed at worst. There is healing work to be done among us, along with the introduction of more constructive, better working tools.

Whatever emerges as the particular arenas of our individual and congregational work, we will nonetheless find ourselves in a position to heal, and we are called to jump in – working to build God’s wholeness within people and among them, remembering that we cannot bring good news if we refuse to look bad news in the face.

“Into a world of brokenness,” Jesus said, “I have come to bring healing. God’s Spirit is upon me to make the broken, whole.” The Spirit of God is here among us, pushing and pulling and leading in this year of God's favor. We are not the only instruments at God’s disposal, but we can, by God’s grace, be one powerful tool -- to make the broken, whole. It’s just the business we are in.