January 27, 2019
3 Epiphany, Year
C
Mark B. Pendleton
Christ Church,
Exeter
Jesus’ Purpose Driven Life
We make an
assumption about the people who come to our doors to worship with us on a
Sunday morning. We greet them and hand
them a printed bulletin. The assumption
is not they are cradle Episcopalians and will know when to kneel, bow, sit or
stand during the service. We can’t
always be sure of their economic status: are they struggling or well-healed or
somewhere in the middle – living like most people do – dare I day “paycheck to
paycheck.” The assumption that we are
making handing them a service bulletin is that they can read. In English.
We are printed word centric, which is why I wanted us to trying
something different and just listen to the words of the Gospel.
In the centuries
before Jesus, the people of Israel told and retold their sacred stories orally
– they spoke and listened to them from one generation to the next. What they heard grounded and formed their
lives. They were a people: loved by God and never forgotten. When the sacred stories and psalms and
prophesies were finally written down, they were hand copied by scribes on large
scrolls and read in public. There were
no leather-bound printed personal Bibles in those days.
We heard first
today a passage from Nehemiah – which I would venture to say is not among the
best known or loved books of the Bible.
What is compelling about the image is how the people, who had returned
from home from the long Exile to begin rebuilding their shattered lives and
remaking the customs they had nearly lost, they gathered into the square before
the Water Gate.
It is believed
that the priest/scribe Ezra was among the 3% or so of the people in his day who
could read and write. And Ezra did read
from the Law of Moses from morning to midday and all the people stood and were
attentive.
What makes you
and I stand up and pay attention with the same sense of urgency?
We know that
attentiveness is a challenge in today’s digital streaming world. We have distractions galore calling us to
watch, click, like, share and respond. There are apps to remind us how much we are
using our cellphones, which of course one needs to download – on one’s
cellphone. There is so much to wade
through it is hard to know what is worth taking the time to read, learn and retain.
Nehemiah gives us
a sense of what it means to be a gathered people looking for direction from the
God who has never left them.
Enter Jesus in
Luke’s gospel who effectively says: I’ll
give you direction.
Jesus returns to
Nazareth, his home town, and goes to the synagogue and like Ezra reads from
Scripture in public. Word was spreading
about Jesus: so far do good -- everyone was praising this hometown boy now
grown. (Luke 4:17) Jesus stood up to
read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the
scroll and found the place where it was written.
If there was ever
a mission statement for the life and work of Jesus – his echoing the prophet
Isiah pointed him and us to the central meaning and purpose of his life. In one
brief passage, we see what drove him and we discover a roadmap and a guide to
our own. Buyer beware: this is no easy
to-do list.
“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.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.
The message is as
simple as it is vast. To bring good
news. To proclaim release. Recovery of
what was lost. Let go and set free. To shout the Lord God’s favor. And
the object this call to action -- the base of Jesus’s support – are the poor, prisoners
and captives, the blind and otherwise cast offs. The oppressed.
Where do we find
ourselves in this list if we do not consider ourselves poor, captive, blind or
oppressed? Are these words of good news
for others less fortunate or do they reflect back on us somehow?
I read this same
passage from Luke during a communion service at the jail yesterday in Dover to
immigrant detainees. I asked those
gathered around the make shift altar if they saw themselves in the gospel. They blurted out: “we’re the captives.” “We are the poor.” The young man being deported back to El
Salvador this week and thinking about his return to home to a ravaged country
-- he knew he made the list of the oppressed.
Friends, if we
dig deeper and get honest and real about ourselves and our own lives, we know
that Jesus is making room for us to recognize our need and deep desire to be
set free from what hold us down.
How do we join in
this work? Are we expected to accomplish
all of these God and Jesus centered activities each and every day? Let me risk saying: no. Yet over the course of our lives we can use
this call to bring, release, heal, and set free as markers to know when we are
getting closer to what God wants us to do and be with this life we have
given.
This past month
many of her admirers mourned the death of poet Mary Oliver, who was 83 and
longtime resident of Provincetown. I
admit to have purchased books of only three poets. Wallace Stevens, because my family had the
fortune of living in his one-time home for nine years in Hartford. Billy Collins, whose poems often make me laugh
out loud, and Mary Oliver. She was a rock
star in the poetry world – and she sold lots of books – no small feat. Her poems have been quoted widely in sermons
and are taped up on the refrigerators, dashboards and computer screens of those
she touched.
In her poem “The
Summer Day,” she taps into the question that I am asking in response to the
focus of Isaiah and Jesus. She writes: “what
is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”
For as long as
there will be people with minds to think and hearts to love on this good earth,
we will wrestle with this simple question.
What is the purpose and meaning of my life? That is the spiritual and philosophical loop
that we all push up against sooner or later. It rattles around in the minds of
mystics and saints, and those of us toiling in the vineyard of everyday living:
teachers, gardeners, parents, women, men, caregivers, bureaucrats, and barbers.
Mary Oliver
thought and wrote a lot about getting older and what to make of it all. One of her most well-known works is “When
Death Comes.”
When
it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I
was a bride married to amazement.
I
was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When
it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if
I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I
don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or
full of argument.
I
don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary
Oliver paints a picture of the world that Jesus could call home.
Let
us not be mere visitors to this world.
Remember that
Ezra and Jesus read Scripture in community.
We are both blessed by -- and stuck with -- one other.
The life and the
work we have been given is meant to be shared widely and often. It is world filled with people aching for
good news – the kind of news that only God and God’s people can bring. To those oppressed by memories of the past,
violence that shapes their days, and fear of the future that no one can know or
control – what I hope we hear today is the message that we both hear and take
out into the world is one of freedom and release.
So: what sermon
might we preach in and through our lives?
What poems will
we write?
What are the songs
we might sing?
