Chris Taylor’s Sermon –12/14/08
Proclaiming Release
Isaiah 61:1-4
John 1:6-8
There is an old story about a man who had two sons: the older son was never happy with anything he was given. No matter what the gift, it was never quite good enough for him – there was always some shortcoming, always something wrong.
The second son, by contrast, was happy with everything he was given. He could always see the best in it, and always find some way in which it was just perfect for his needs.
One Christmas the father decided that no matter what it took he was going to find the perfect gift for his older son; a gift the boy couldn’t possibly find anything to complain about. He looked all over the city, visited every toy shop he could find, and finally, he found it. It was a perfect, four-foot replica of an Indy racer – right down to the rubber tires, leather seat and little button on the dashboard to start the gasoline engine. It cost him everything he had, but he just knew his son was going to love that car.
Well that left him nothing with which to purchase a gift for his younger son. He was puzzling over this when he happened to stumble over some manure that a horse had left on the street. Looking down he realized it would make great fertilizer for his son’s garden, so he scooped it into a box which he proceeded to wrap and address to his second boy.
Christmas day finally arrived. The older son was the first downstairs and tore into the wrappings of his present. When he saw the car he gave a great whoop of joy. He immediately took the car outside, jumped in and started it up and went cruising away down the sidewalk. The dad was thrilled, but just a few minutes later, the boy returned. He climbed out of the car, gave it a swift kick and then stomped into the house. It turned out the car wasn’t nearly fast enough and was absolutely the wrong color.
About this time the younger boy came walking down the stairs and he father gave him his gift. He read the card then carefully unwrapped the present. But when he pulled the top off the box he got a very puzzled look on his face. Then, sure enough, he suddenly got a huge smile on his face and his whole being seemed to light up. He father asked, “Son, why are you smiling like that?”
“Dad,” the son replied, “I just know there’s got to be horse around here someplace!”
I don’t need to tell you that life doesn’t always bring us what we are looking for. More troubling, though, is the vast discrepancy we see in the world – some people seem to get so much in life while others get so little. Just take a look around at everything we’ve got – the beauty of this sanctuary, the magnificent organ, the heat, the lighting, how well dressed we are. How do we reconcile this obvious abundance with the fact that there are nearly five hundred million people in the world who don’t even have enough to eat? It would be easy to conclude that God, like that dad, is playing favorites.
One answer is to simply ignore the discrepancy – to call it a mystery and push it away, out of our minds. Of course, that’s not so much an answer as it is a strategy to help us avoid discomfort. A second approach is to conclude that God must love us an awful lot (which he really does!) and then figure there must be something else going on between God and all those others. That’s the preferential dad approach, and of course, that doesn’t quite fit our understanding of God either.
There is a third approach, and it is the one that we find here, in our first lesson this morning. Our Old Testament text is particularly significant to us because it is the one Jesus chose when he was invited to read in the synagogue of Nazareth, his home. It is the one he chose as the embodiment of his ministry.
Luke describes the moment in the fourth chapter of his Gospel. Jesus has been baptized at this point. He has just come of out the wilderness with its three temptations, and has been teaching in Galilee. And now he has shown up back in the town where he grew up, back in Nazareth.
The people there are eager to hear him teach. When they gather in their synagogue they hand him a scroll. They clearly expect that he will not only read a passage from the scroll, but then go on to interpret it for them. He unrolls the scroll until he comes to this particular passage – he was looking for it – and then, after reading it, announces “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing…”
That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make. But it tells us a lot about Jesus’ understanding of his ministry, and it tells us a lot about what it means for us to follow him. There are two things we are going to find here and neither one should come as any great surprise. First, following Jesus has nothing to do with imposing our particular brand of morality on others. Second, it has everything to do with love – with meeting people at their point of need.
Look again at the functions this “anointed one” of Isaiah is going to fulfill: he is going to bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners, proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and comfort all who mourn. Do you see anything here about trying to force people to conform to a bunch of rules and obligations? Neither did Jesus!
One of the most important passages for understanding what the Gospel is not is found in the 23rd chapter of Matthew. It is often referred to as the “Seven Woes,” as in “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees…”
Jesus is talking about these religious leaders and where they’ve got it wrong when he says in the fourth verse, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of other; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” What were the heavy burdens that he was talking about? They were all the rules and obligations these leaders were telling people they had to follow if they were going to be right with God. They were placing one rule after another on top of them to the point where they were crushing them; squeezing the life and joy out of their faith. They were making them, as Jesus puts it in verse 15, “children of hell.”
That’s the impact of trying to impose morality from the outside. It isn’t that our choices don’t matter. Jesus never said that. It’s that morality is the product of a relationship with God, not the way to it. We don’t earn God’s love by proving how worthy or how righteous we are. Instead, after experiencing God’s love in Jesus, we choose to follow God’s guidance because we realize it enhances our lives. God’s guidance reveals life at its best.
If the Law could save us, we wouldn’t need Jesus. Yet we in the church keep acting as if the Law holds the key. We keep putting all our energy, all our emphasis on right behavior. The result is that what we communicate to the world isn’t the Gospel at all. Instead of focusing on Jesus and on what he means for us, we come across as rigid and judgmental. What we communicate is a kind of “anti-Gospel” of the Law.
Scholar William Barclay once shared the story of a woman in England who during the Second World War approached two men dressed in civilian clothes and sharing a meal in a well-known restaurant. She had no idea who they were. She simply assumed from their clothing and from their presence in that restaurant that they had somehow avoided service. She handed each a white feather; a symbol of cowardice.
When we try to impose our morality on others, when we presume to stand in judgment on people because of what they are or are not doing, we are really no different than that woman. We are judging on the basis of an outward standard. We are saying that what is most important is the capacity to conform to some pre-set criteria of right and wrong.
What that woman didn’t know was that both those men were, in fact, veterans. Even more, they had just that morning come from Buckingham Palace where one had been awarded a decoration for gallantry; and that far from avoiding service, the second had been badly injured in a flying accident.
You want morality? Jesus goes right to the heart of it; verse 23, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.”
Justice, mercy and faith. If the Gospel is not about imposing our morality on the one hand, what it is about is reaching out in love on the other. That’s what it means to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to release the prisoners and to comfort those who mourn. It means reaching out to them and ministering to them right where they are.
Years ago I met a remarkable woman out at Fuller Seminary. Her name was Lisbeth Piedrasanta, and she was from Guatemala. She was the first in her family to become a Christian and had actually put herself through school, often traveling great distances to get her education.
One day she began volunteering with the orphans in Guatemala. She simply started showing up. What she found, however – the abuse, the darkness, the absence of hope – took hold of her heart. So she began spending more and more time in the orphanages. She even began sleeping with the children there in the darkness so that they would know they were not alone. She became their advocate, and as she spoke and as she made the plight of these children known throughout the country, more and more officials in Guatemala began to listen to her – began to turn to her for insight and understanding.
Lisbeth Piedrasanta had never intended for the plight of orphans to become her life’s work. Her education would have opened up all kinds of other doors to her; doors that would have advanced her own needs and the needs of her family. But the needs of those orphans captured her heart, and following that heart she found God’s call.
Like Jesus, we are here for a very specific purpose in this world. We aren’t here for our own pleasure. We are here, rather, to make a difference. Joining Jesus in his ministry, becoming Jesus for others, doesn’t mean we have to change the world. What it does mean, however, is making known to others that same love that was manifest in Jesus Christ. It means making the choice each day to share that love any way we can.
Unlike that father with whom we started, God doesn’t play favorites. The great discrepancy of wealth in this world isn’t evidence of God’s will. It is evidence of a world gone awry – a world that has strayed from God’s intent. It is true that in one sense we are like that older son who has been given the race car. We’ve gotten the “good stuff.” But when we see the tears in our Father’s eyes, when we see his heart for those in need, we realize that part of our call is to share what we’ve been given. Part of our call is to reach out to others even as God has reached out to us.
Justice, mercy and faith. This isn’t about imposing on others our particular version of the moral life. What it is about is sharing God’s love. Have you received the good news of what God has done for you in Jesus? Are you willing to be that good news for someone else who is in need?