Trickle Up Economics (Luke 4:14-21)

So, here we are: Luke’s version of Jesus’ initial voyage into the waters of ministry. Actually, this week is the first half of that story, next week we’ll read the second, but here at the outset it’s good to remember that beginnings are important in a piece of literature. What an author—in this case, Luke—chooses to open with tells us a lot about the concerns of that author. Take Mark, for instance: the first episode he describes—after the baptism, wilderness and calling of disciples—is an act of healing. On the other hand, the first instance of ministry Matthew describes—again after baptism, wilderness and disciple-calling— is the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

By contrast, Luke defers his telling of disciple-calling and chooses to begin with this episode of Jesus in his home-town synagogue. He’d been led into the wilderness and tested by that wily old Devil, and emerged unscathed, “filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.” And it’s important to remember the sequence: the Spirit had descended upon Jesus at his baptism, led him into the wilderness—Mark says drove him in, as if he’d had no choice—and now he’s filled with the power of that same Spirit. And what did that Spirit enable—compel him, maybe?—to do? Teach. He began to teach in synagogues all around Galilee, and was a huge success right off the bat. Word got out and, his fame preceded him all around, into the surrounding country-side. People were just waiting to hear from him, lining the tracks into dusty little sheep-smelling towns and packing out the synagogues where he preached. He was a rock star! Or as Luke more prosaically put it, he “was praised by everyone.”

And now he comes to Nazareth, where, Luke reminds us, he was brought up. And it’s just as crazy—on his way into town, at least. It was like one of those carefully-staged American Idol episodes . . . you know, where they bring the contestants back to their home towns? There’s this big ol’ parade into town, Jesus riding in an open limo like a homecoming queen, smiling and waving to the crowds . . . there’s Joseph with his little brother James on his shoulders and Mary, with her secret smile, and look! Over there’s Barnabas, his best friend, with his high school sweet-heart Hannah, who is displaying a prominent baby bump. Jesus is a home-town boy made good, and they’re all out to meet him, whooping and hollering, trailing him all the way to the synagogue, where they pack the place out, discomfiting the elderly rabbi, who twitters and fusses around, and finally—with great ceremony—hands Jesus the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

Now. Isaiah is a big book, and he could have read any part of it, like “Comfort, comfort O my people” which would have been a comfort in those dark days of Roman occupation, or “Truly, O people in Zion . . . you shall weep no more.” But instead, he opens the scroll to the part that begins “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and so, stressing that Spirit thing again, we’re going to hear what it’s all about. And what it’s about amounts to his mission statement, what he’s come to do. But it isn’t just any coming, he didn’t just decide to show up one day; he has been anointed—by God’s Spirit, no less—to do it. And anointed is a freighted verb, the Greek for it is chriso, which of course is the root word for “Christ.” And what is the Hebrew for Christ? Messach, from whence we get the word “Messiah.”

So Jesus has been Christ-ed or Messiah-ed by God’s Spirit to do some stuff, to perform some deeds, and what he doesn’t say is as interesting to me what he does. He doesn’t say he’s come to boot the Romans out and bring back the glorious reign of a Davidic king, which were the expectations swirling around about the word “anointed” at the time. But neither is it to save us from sin and prevent us from going to Hell, as many Christians assume. What this statement is about is what we today would call social justice: he’s been anointed, messiah-ed, even, to bring good news to the poor. To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

So. A lot of folks concentrate on the five things in that list— the good news for the poor . . . what could that news be but not-being poor? The release of the captives . . . probably spoils or prisoners of war, not having a particularly good time. Giving sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed, lot of both of those going around in the day; and in short, the Day of the Lord’s Favor. All are wonderful things, and we should view them not as a definitive list but a representative one. We should view them in the same light as those more famous Old Testament passages: a time when the lion shall lay down with the lamb, spears shall be turned into pruning hooks, and we shall practice war no more. More specifically, “the day of the Lord’s favor” is reminiscent of the Jubilee Year, that legendary commandment of God wherein every fifty years, all debts are forgiven, all property is returned to its original owners, and everyone is set free.

But here’s the thing: the Jubilee Year, as far as we know, was never actually implemented, and so is what Jesus is promises a final coming of that time? Is he saying “this thing is finally coming, this long-awaited promise of re-ordering, redistribution of the gains—even lawful ones—this day that has been prevented human greed?” What we have here is a first cut at what Jesus’ ministry is all about, and it’s clear that for Luke, at least, it’s all about proclaiming the dawn of the Great Jubilee, a new era of liberation, restoration, and return. Because of that, this good news comes first of all not to the rich but to the poor, to the disadvantaged and downtrodden. In this “inaugural address” of his ministry, Jesus is crystal clear that the Gospel is above all about God “lifting up the lowly”—words that should sound just a little familiar . . . they were sung by his mother when she visited her cousin Elizabeth. Remember? “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she sang, ‘and my sprit rejoices in God my Savior, who has . . . brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; who has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

And did he learn this almost radical concern for the lowly, the marginalized and outsiders at his mother’s knee? It’s possible . . . certainly he came by it honestly. His father Joseph was by no means rich—in those days, there was no middle class, just rich and poor, and carpenters were clearly among the latter. And though this theme is present in the other gospels, it’s given especial prominence in the writing of Luke, who describes the apostles continuing this work of proclamation of the Jubilee—in thought and deed—all the way through the second volume of his writing, which today we call the Acts of the Apostles.

But the Jubilee ideal isn’t only for the benefit of the marginalized—it contributes to the health and wellbeing of society as a whole. Everyone benefits when liberty and vision extend across the neighborhood—that’s what “Jubilee” was all about. We’ve heard a lot about supply-side economics, where supposedly if you take care of the upper class it’ll somehow “trickle down” to the poor and marginalized. Jesus is having none of that: what he is preaching is pure-D “trickle up” economics, and as we know, he follows it up by practicing what he preaches. He knows that a healthy society takes cares of its most vulnerable members first, and that’s what makes for a solid, moral foundation.

Well. He rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the rabbi, and sits down. Unlike these days, when teachers—and preachers—generally stand, his sitting was the signal that the teaching—or preaching—was about to begin. And as kind of an aside, this is the model for our own, Reformed preaching, minus the sitting of course. Like Jesus, first we read from the scripture, then we expound on it, drawing what lessons we can.

Anyway. All eyes are riveted upon Jesus, there is a drop-dead silence, which for a bunch of Israelites is amazing, even in synagogue. And he looks intently at each of them in turn, and all swear he is looking straight into their souls, and he begins his teaching with “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And this idea of scripture being “fulfilled” in and through contemporary events was a powerful, widespread notion in Jesus’ day. It wasn’t just that ancient scriptures were understood to foreshadow the future, but that the meaning of present events was illuminated by how they embodied key events in scripture. Thus, the present and the past elucidated each other—God typically works through signature, even poetic patterns. Those motifs will resonate in current events, and current events will “fulfill” or “fill out” ancient motifs. The prophets of old - such as Isaiah, who we hear from in this week’s passage - thought and spoke and acted in terms of these signature forms, and likewise, so did Jesus.

More importantly, in this situation, so do his home-town friends and relatives, his homies. They stare at him in awe, gob-smacked by what he was telling them. And if we read just a verse beyond our passage we see that at first, they were appreciative: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” Luke tells him. That this is doomed to change is the subject of next weeks lection, but for now, I just want to leave you with a thought about our own place in all this. If it’s Jesus’ mission to proclaim good news to the poor, release of the captives, and etc., then it is ours as well. Further, as Saint Francis supposedly said, and Jesus embodied, we’re to do it in words, if necessary.

And you know what? We do a pretty good job of that around here, I have to say, especially for a congregation our size. Our mission programs are varied and important to our community. Soul, Winton House, Centro de Vida. The music school, Greenhills Strings and the Jean Wiggins Choral Scholars. Our activities—our coffee houses and recitals, our high-quality music program—help bring culture and hope to the Greenhills community. This congregation was historically and continues to be vital to the health of Greenhills and its surrounds.

If Jesus was a fulfillment of the Jubilee spirit of the Lord, we—by way of being his body on earth—are part of that. And to that I can gratefully say “Thanks be to God.” Amen.

It Takes All Kinds (1 Corinthians 12:1-12)

In Paul’s time, they were just learning how to be Christians.  It’s true: nobody had ever been one of those before, nobody had ever lived as a follower of Christ, and they had no idea how to go about doing it.  Paul had established communities in his travels, most probably meeting in houses—thus the term “house church”—many in secret, and it was a new thing for them.  Compounding it all was the fact that this Jesus fellow wasn’t like anybody else: he wasn’t an aesthete like those guys over in Qumran nor was he a military leader—no matter how wishful their thinking he was called the Prince of Peace. He wasn’t a moral leader, he didn’t seem to be much interested in who was sleeping with whom . . . in fact, he didn’t preach about sex once, although he did talk about divorce, about protecting the woman in an unequal relationship.  Most of his preaching was about money, about its use and abuse, and not unrelated, how to treat your neighbor.

This last prompted some, at least, to live in communes, or so Luke says in Acts, and it seemed to have prompted a lotof them to re-think leadership of their communities.  That was important, because communities were where it’s at in first-century Christianity, you couldn’t be a Christian on your own, Christianity was practiced in community with others.  That’s as true today as it was back then, I think: as Christians we’re called to do the difficult work of living in community.  Every time somebody says to me “I can be Christian on a mountaintop, I don’t have to be in a church, I want to tell them—and sometimes I do—that they are full of it, because Christian spirituality isspirituality in community.  If you are not in community, you may be spiritual, but it’s not a Christianspirituality.” John Calvin put it even more strongly when he said “unless we are united with all the other members under Christ our head, no hope of the future inheritance awaits us” and “beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation can be hoped for.”

Of course, there’s one caveat here: Calvin’s not speaking of a building or even a denomination, but the greater church, what he called the invisible church, which includes and subsumes the Presbyterian church that he helped found.  And he based his ecclesiology, his theology of church, largely on these passages from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians . . .  it’s here that Paul talks about the church as a body and Christ as the head . . . Note that we close our passage with his famous “for just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”  And from this metaphor flows all of Calvin’s—and Paul’s—ecclesiology, his theology of church, if you will.  Note the “for:” it’s forjust as the body is one, as in becausethe body is one we can effectively govern the church, that is, we can govern the church in a Christ-like manner.

I’ve always said, whenever I’m asked—and sometimes when I’m not—that one reason I’m a Presbyterian is that we do representative government right.  For those of you who don’t know what I mean, we are governed by elected officials, elected to represent us just as our congress-persons are, and . . . and when I went with my pastor to Presbytery meetings, where representatives elected from each church Session get together with pastors to help govern, I saw a system that, by and large, worked.  Not that it didn’t have its little squabbles, its little ups and downs, but hey … look at the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives—you knowhow well they’ve been working, lately.  And one reason—perhaps the mainreason—it works is this little thing: all the members of the body, though many, are one, and they are one in Christ.

We are one in Christ, and in Christ, as Paul says over in Colossians, all things hold together.  He is the center which keeps us from flying apart; if we separate, if we split up, as this denomination has before, as individual congregations have been known to do, one thing I can say: Christ is not in it.  Christ holds all things together . . . and you can spin it around, too, you can come at it from the opposite direction: without Christ, true unity is impossible.  And more to today’spoint, true sharing of power and leadership is not possible. For if church splits have nothing of Christ in them, neither do jealousies or anger or the protection of power and turf.

There are varieties of gifts, Paul says, but the same Spirit.  It’s the same Spirit, whether you be pastor or janitor or choir director or plumber, and if it’s the same Spirit, how can anyone claim superiority or turf?  It’s through the same Spirit that we are all chosen, that we are all called, no matter what our gifts.  There are varieties of services, but the same Lord. How against the ways of the powers that be thisis, where we value some jobs—no matter how vital—over others, and justify paying some people much less than a living wage based on our—not God’s but our—notions of how much a job is worth.  If our societies were truly Christian societies, it would not matter the nature of the job, all would be paid enough, all would have enough.

This doesn’t mean everybody is identical: there arevarieties of services, says Paul, and to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, not for their own personal good, or even for their family’s good, but for the commongood . . . to one is given the utterance of wisdom, another the utterance of knowledge, to another the gifts of healing . . . to one the gifts of music, to another the gifts of teaching, to still another the gifts of preparing a mean casserole or repairing the locks on the sanctuary doors.  All are given specific gifts, all are given tasks to do by the same Spirit, and for the glory of the same God.

This notion is at the heart of the Protestant doctrine of call, of the priesthood of all believers: God calls each of us to specific tasks—note the plural—and we are gifted through the Holy Spirit to perform them.  In the Presbyterian Church, we follow Paul in this: our offices, our positions are supposed to be gifts-based, we are to hold church position based on the gifts the Spirit has given us.  By this theory, I have some gifts in the realms of preaching and pastoral care—no smart remarks from out there—but thank God there are others with financial heads on their shoulders to appoint as treasurers and heads of finance committees, because if I did it, we’d be in altogether worse shape than we are now.  And likewise, thank God there are people who can play the organ or piano or lead a choir, because if it were left up to me to do it, well . . . have you ever heard a bag of cats sing?

Notice where all this puts the emphasis: it puts it on the person, and their abilities, not the office and any intrinsic worth.  If a person is appointed or elected or hired for a job, they are done so by dint of their suitability for it.  If they are not suitable, then they should perhaps not be in it.  As Paul points out here—and our theology of call affirms—there is nothing special about a particular office, about a particular position or job.  There are all kinds of jobs . . . the only thing special is the person filling it.  That’s why—and this is controversial, I know—I find it hard to respect a position.  As Paul says, there are varietiesof position, all are of value to God.  It’s not that I have no respect, but I reserve thatfor people, and that after they have shown they should be respected.

Well.  Tomorrow’s Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration.  In a few minutes we’re going to sing an iconic civil rights hymn. And reading today’s passage, it’s striking how egalitarian Paul was, not just for the times, but human beings, period. In this passage—and the remainder of chapter 12—Paul lays out his criteria for church leadership—and thus, of course, membership—and not oncedoes he say anything about race or gender or sexual orientation, for that matter.  He doesn’t say “There are different gifts, but the same Spirit, unless you’re black.” He doesn’t say “All those gifts are activated by the same Spirit, unless you are a woman, and then it must be the devil . . .”  No. All gifts of the Spirit are givenby the Spirit.  End of story.

And of course, this is hardly the strongest case for inclusion Paul made . . . he is, after all, the one who wrote “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  It makes centuries of exclusion and bigotry in the church all the more unexplainable, because make no mistake—Paul is the founding theologian of the church. That’s why I thank God for prophets like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who through their lives and—yes, death—consistently call the church to live up to its promise of inclusion for all. Amen.

It's Not Easy Being King (Matthew 2:1 - 12)

     It wasn’t easy being Herod. Consider: Herod the Great—aka Herod the First, the Herod of our story—was appointed ruler of Judea by his father Antipater the Idumaean, who was from what the Hebrew Bible calls “Edom.” After Herod helped overthrow the last of the Jewish Kings, thus handing Palestine to the Romans, he was awarded the title “King of Judea” by the Roman Senate, and set about alternating between oppressing his Jewish subjects and trying—with little success—to be a good Jew himself. He had a pretty long rule, by the standards of the day, some thirty years or so, and perhaps it was because of his extreme paranoia, which led him to be rather, how shall we say it, brutal toward members of his own family, murdering for example, his second wife Miriamne and her relatives when he thought them a threat.

Be that as it may, as Herod approached his dotage, he began looking towards his sons as heirs. His first choices were two of his sons by Miriamne: fine, ruddy youths who’d been raised in Rome, at the Imperial Court no less, and who offended Herod with their Imperial manner upon their return home to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they were his choices for heirs until another of his sons—first-born Antipater II—turned the King against them, and Herod had them strangled for treason. Which put Antipater II in the cat-bird seat as Herod’s heir . . . for a year, anyway, until he got convicted of trying to poison the old man and executed, at which point Caesar Augustus was said to have remarked that “It is better to be Herod's pig than his son."

Well. Herod was on his last legs in 4 BCE, the year Jesus was born, when three Magi—aka wise men—showed up, looking for “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” And when they came before the King, they emanated . . . what? An aura, I guess, a touch of the divine, doubtless because they had been following a star, a spark of that Presence, and it had filled them with wonder and hope that shone out of every pore.

But Herod hadn’t gotten any less paranoid since he killed his last son, and he was completely absorbed by dynastic worries, and so missed the aura entirely. And he was in a panic when he heard what they had to say, and all Jerusalem with him, which seems strange, because Herod wasn’t a beloved figure by any means. Nevertheless, he called for the chief priests and rabbis, the Sanhedrin, and various assorted sooth-sayers, and asked them where this young king was supposed to have been born, and by way of answer, they quoted the prophets: “‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

“Holy Moly,” Herod thought “I’m the Shepherd of Judah!” And he called for the wise men—in secret, of course, wouldn’t do to have people know there’s a rival, might send shock waves through the market—and sent them to Bethlehem to look really hard for the child and let him know where he was so he could, ah, worship him, yes, that’s the ticket . . . worship him. But the magi weren’t called wise for nothing—they were court astrologers from the Far East, and where they came from it was no different than in the here in theMiddle East. The powerful didn’t give up that power lightly, especially when they’d had it for as long as Herod had. And it was in that moment that the magi—no slouches at divination—first felt that the King’s motives were not what you would call pure.

And it’s not so different these days, is it? It’s hard to pry the powerful away from their power. I saw it in the federal government, the Agricultural Research Service, where I once worked. We were organized into research units, with a Research Leader (or RL) over a group of scientists, kind of like in a university department. The RL was a scientist as well, promoted from within the ranks of us run-of-the-mill types, and the minute that happened, they often began to change. They had control of all the money, and because they still had to do research, the temptation was strong to use it to help maintain their position. And that went all the way up the hierarchy, from area leader to regional leader all the way up to the top.

Administrative hierarchies are like that . . . the one thing you can count on is that the individuals in them will try to hold on to what power they possess, and that gives the hierarchy a kind of unholy stability. You can see it everywhere, even in churches. Look at the Catholic abuse scandal: it wouldn’t have become entrenched if everybody—priest, bishop, archbishop—weren’t trying to hold onto power, or—and this is even more dangerous—making sure the hierarchy itself, which in this case was the Church, persists. Which, of course, preserves their own personal power, so it’s a nasty feed-back mechanism, it goes round and round and round.

Paul called these hierarchies “powers and principalities,” and recognized that they took on a life of their own. He often short-handed it with the word “flesh” and ended several of his letters with lists of bad things associated with it. Biblical scholar Walter Wink has fleshed this notion out, and showed that if anything can be called demonic it’s these entrenched, intertwined structures of administrative power—whether governmental or corporate—in which we are all embedded.

And perhaps that’s what Matthew means when he says Herod was afraid and “all Jerusalem with him.” After thirty-some-odd years of rule, there were so many toadies, so many functionaries in the multi-storied hierarchy—really a web—of which he was the head, that if you cut that head off, and relocate it somewhere else—Bethlehem? Really? —everyone would lose.

Whatever the case, the wise men departed in secret, and Herod’s own private guard watched their backs, making sure they weren’t followed, and lo! before them went the star, in defiance of all physics, and they were returned to that state of timeless wonder that had accompanied them to Jerusalem, before their encounter with Herod brought them . . . where? Certainly not reality, for this had more the feel of realism than all the petty squabbles at court . . . the star went before them, even in bright daylight, and settled over a Bethlehem house. It wasn’t the fanciest, nor was it the meanest, it was just a house, with a small adobe wall around a courtyard ringed by a kitchen and sleeping rooms, and there, in the center of the courtyard was Mary and the child, and their hearts were filled with an unaccountable joy, and once again they felt the heightened . . . something that surrounded the child, indeed that poured off him, wave after wave, like a warm tide. And they fell to their knees before the boy—they couldn’t help it, really—and they cried out their delight and homage.

Friends, at the touch of the star, at the sight of the child, the magi experienced another reality. Call it the Kingdom of God, as does our scripture, or the imaginal realm, as do Sufi mystics, or the ground of all being, but it is there. And though it is intertwined with all matter—and in a sense, underpins all matter—it is insensible, that is, invisible to our ordinary senses, most of the time, at any rate. But occasionally, the kingdom slips through the veil that normally hides it, and it did so that night. The wise men saw it, heard it, touched it, and even those veterans of the strange—they were magi, after all—were overwhelmed.

And that reality—which in the end we simply call God—that reality was incarnated that night, distilled and instilled by some means impossible to describe into that babe in that courtyard in that luminous night. The light of the world, pouring from that child . . . the light of the world who somehow was that child and—somehow again—is still with us, still underlying and supporting everything, and will be with us until, like the wise men, we go home by another road. Amen.