Sermon The Dover Church
January 24, 2010 – 3nd Epiphany Scripture: Psalm 19, Luke 4:16-21
1. Talk about starting of your preaching career with a bang. If Jesus had dropped a bomb it could not have stunned his hometown synagogue more.
2. Hard to imagine the effect with straight reading - begs dramatic presentation - Let me try to paint the picture
a. Small town synagogue Sabbath service – everyone knows everyone else
b. Jesus liked to read – always a religious kid
i. The old-timers could tell you the story of how he ran off on his parents when he was 12 while they were in the Jerusalem Temple
c. Everyone in Nazareth knew him, town of 50 houses – knew his parents: Joseph a carpenter, Mary a mother of at least 5 kids, his brothers and sisters
i. The old-timers could also tell you the story about the irregularity surrounding Mary and Joseph’s engagement and marriage – how the cart got in front of the horse as far as the baby Jesus went, if you understand my meaning
d. He’s a 30 year old man now, Joseph a father in his teens, so as mature as he’s going to get, been away down south with his cousin John for a while but comes to Sabbath service regularly – they hand him the Bible, opened to Isaiah and he picks the text
i. OH, what a text. One of their favorites. The one about the servant God is going to send to deliver Israel – the Messiah, which in Greek is Christ, Latin Savior – it warms their hearts to hear what this Messiah is going to do
1. Deliver the poor from their state of dependency
2. Set free the captives
3. Restore sight to the blind
4. Begin the year of the Lord’s favor
ii. They love this text – Isaiah preached it when their ancestors were in captivity in Babylon 500 years before, but with the Roman garrison just 5 km away over the hill in Sepphoris, they can relate
1. They were impoverished with rent to the land owners and taxes to the Herods and the Romans - dependent
2. They were captives in their own country of the legions and their landlords
3. They were going blind, only seeing oppression and hopelessness -starting to lose their sight of what was important, who they were, where God was
4. They never thought they would be free from their burdens – things going from bad to worse – can’t imagine the year of the Lord’s favor
iii. Ah, good old Jesus – he knows just what we need to hear to cheer us up and remind us of the dream we hope for
iv. but then what does he do?
1. He gives the Bible back, sits down to preach, because preachers sat back then
2. OK. Let’s hear what he has to say
3. Short sermon - Today, everything you just heard in the text is fulfilled – it is happening right here and right now and I am the one the text refers to
2. I can hear the benches being pushed back - You have got to be kidding me. Who does he think he is? Some carpenter’s kid from town who thinks he’s the Messiah? What a joke?
3. You see, folks back then were a lot like us today – they had their religious dreams of what the Bible said God supposedly did long ago and was going to do someday, but they really didn’t believe it – if believing means moving from thinking about it in your mind to living it in your body
4. No one told them how to get from the idea to the lived reality
5. comforting to think about, but really just impossible – helped pass the time and provided comfort when reality got too bad – but actually happening? Naw.
6. Let me just unpack for a moment exactly what Jesus claimed to be about as Israel’s Messiah and our Christ – allow for a little breadth of interpretation so it relates to where we are today
a. Bring good news to the poor
i. evangelion – victory proclamation by Caesar of deliverance – protection, peace, well-being in the person of Caesar, Caesar will deliver
ii. poor – dependent upon others for survival – sense of anxiety and fear and uncertainty
1. Many masters competing for our allegiance
iii. release to the captives – may not be enslaved like Jews in Nazareth, but all of us are in bondage to something – the past, the future, our stuff, our image of who we ought to be – you tell me what your chains look like…and don’t kid yourself, they’re there
iv. recovery of sight – to be able to see through all the confusion of life to what is good and beautiful and true and life-giving and worth-while – we know somehow it’s there, but everything gets so blurry and confused
1. have one vision to live into rather than multiple contradictory ones that preclude each other
v. year of the Lord’s favor – when all debts cancelled, land and property restored, slaves freed, everyone has a clean slate
1. every 7 years according to Jewish law
2. debts in Lord’s Prayer as opposed to trespasses
b. Some agenda, wouldn’t you say?
c. I would go so far as to call it the answer to our prayers – who wouldn’t want to be set free from whatever was holding you down or keeping you from living freely and fully? Who wouldn’t want to get out from under the shadow of the things that threaten us, cause us anxiety? Who wouldn’t want to have a lens to see life through that you could trust? Who wouldn’t want a clean slate? A clean slate for everyone so we could all begin again regularly? All pent up debt and anger and pain and everything else that leads people to start wars and commit murders and all the other wickednesses which plague our world – all gone. Who wouldn’t want that?
7. So that’s the deal – that what we follow when we say that we believe in Jesus the Messiah as our Lord and Savior
8. So why doesn’t anything ever happen? How come our lives don’t change? How come we don’t feel more in tune with God like Jesus did? How come the world doesn’t change? How come we don’t change the world?
9. Quite simple – because no one ever told us that Jesus was someone we lived like as opposed to just believed in, as in thought about – Jesus not an idea – a person to live like
10. No one ever told me a method or a series of practices to move from the attractive idea to the way of life
a. I became aware of baseball in, of all years, 1967 – I wanted to be like Carl Yazstremski - I wanted to play left field and bat like Yaz
b. Watched what Yaz did, how he swang, three, even how he ran and smiled and did what he did – read books about how he got good at what he did and did it – if Yaz’sd mom gave him mapo, hillshiore farms Kielbasa and Nissen bread, then I wanted my mother to get that for me
c. Emulated their way of life – do the exercises Yaz did just the way he did them
d. Not enough to walk up the plate, get in the batters box and want to hit like Yaz – sure to strike out – need to make it my way of life – practice, practice, practice
e. Couldn never be Yaz – didn’t have physical gifts
11. But anyone and everyone can be like Jesus – all you need is a heart that you want to have broken open and a desire to come face to face with God
12. God became a human being in Jesus for one simple reason – to show us how it could really be done by doing it
13. When you sign up for karate, you are shown a program to begin with your white belt and what you will learn at each stage until you have become a master with a black belt whom other beginners would then try to emulate
14. Same thing with piano, painting, yoga, you name it, most other religions too, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, lots of Catholics and Orthodox –just not modern American Protestantism – somehow God was going to do it for us if we just believed strong enough
15. As I said, for the longest time I had no idea how to become more like Jesus. No one told me about coming face to face with God either. Sometimes I thought I understood better. Sometimes I had moments of closeness or illumination. But mostly, I just sort of stayed in one place and tried not to get bored. But then I began to find old masters and some new ones who taught how to live the life Christ lived, various disciplines: things he did which I would emulate. Now I practice every day, the same way I once learned how to cast a flyrod, throw a baseball, play the piano.
16. And so, in the months and years ahead I am planning to lay it out for you and offer instruction - how to go from beginner Christian to proficient Christian so that you can really experience everything Jesus laid out in his first sermon. My prayer is I will be progressing right along with you.
17. Be like Jesus – not just in our hearts, but in the very specific details of our lives
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