The Rev. Margaret Watson
St. Margaret's Episcopal Church & School
Nehemiah 8:2-10 | Psalm 113 | Corinthians 12:12-27 | Luke 4:14-21
I think a sure sign that God is good is that we no longer call our children those names. [referring to the Old Testament lesson] Wouldn't you agree? But if I had nothing out of scripture, except this week's reading, it would be enough. And many of you know how passionate I am about the Gospel of John and this isn't John, it is Luke. But this is enough.
What is this scripture? We are the Body of Christ. Despite our differences or maybe because of them, we are one. A Royal Priesthood. Jesus said: The spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. This scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. What is this scripture? It's about the Kingdom. Luke's message about the Kingdom of God. What does that Kingdom look like?
I took some vacation time this week. That pretty much looks like the Kingdom to me. A little bit of Heaven there mid-week. I spent much of this week in story-telling situations. I love story telling. And my husband, Joel, you guessed it, hates fiction. Thinks it's a waste of time. But he indulges me. We went to the Tolkein, The Return of the King. And, yes, we have been to all three. And this one is three and one-half hours long. Add that up over the three years it is about twelve hours of movie. Right? And as we walk out he says, "I don't get it". And I respond, "What's there to get?" It's the truth. What's there to get! It's just the truth told in story. You know, the Gospel Truth: The littlest one is the strongest; the bravest one is the humblest; truth and valor always win; and it's always up to the women to get the bad guy! He still said, "I don't get it".
And I have been thinking about that a lot in pondering this Gospel Story, this Holy Scripture we heard today. Do we get it, or is it just a story we tell each other? I spend time with our kids. How would you tell one of them, we are one? How would you tell them the Kingdom of God is upon us? Come on! They would say, one body? I'm just getting used to this one! They would say, what do you mean? Why, that is only as believable as the Easter Bunny and the Santa Claus. We all know the truth about that!
Have we ever asked ourselves what it means to be the Body of Christ? Have we ever asked ourselves what the year of the Lord's favor is?
When I was a child I heard a Bishop proclaim a startling sermon that was based on this lesson from Paul. And I can still remember it. And he spoke of an image of the Church as that model of a circle, a perfect circle. A perfect circle is made up of straight intersecting lines. Perhaps you have seen that image in mathematical models. A perfect circle, and it is a bunch of straight lines. That is how the Church is, he said. And everybody is like one of those straight lines and together we make the circle. The Church is like a perfect circle. It was a brilliant image for me. Brilliant! I GOT IT!
So I ran up to him after Church bursting with a question, I asked "What defines the circle? What's inside the circle or outside the circle?" And he looked at me and said, "What circle?" What circle? But you just said….that's an unexpected answer. And it floored me at the time. But I am still grateful for that answer, because it gave me a chance to enter into the truth. I was not given a definition but an opening to an experience of who we are in new ways.
What body are we? We are the body of Christ. What shape are we? What is the shape of the body? Many would say we are in pretty poor shape. I have been personally saddened by recent arguments in the Church. People are talking about division and schism. It seems to fly the face of today's Scripture, doesn't it? Does being one body mean we have to agree? Do we really believe we are one body simply because we are like-minded?
Bear in mind Paul's imagery here. Imagine a whole ear trying to get down the street! Or imagine a nose! Hardly a whole body. I am an historian. I know about utopian societies. Utopian societies are made up of like-minded individuals. The history of those utopian societies, of those like-minded individuals, is that they all turn in on themselves. Utopian societies don't survive.
In the church we need our differences so that there is enough space between us for the Holy Spirit to move. We need to be open to the unexpected shape of our body. It's not what we think.
The Gospel today, we hear of the year of the Lord's favor. It was given by God that every seventh day be a Sabbath. A day of rest, of lust being in God's creation. And that every seventh year be a Sabbath Year. Your fields, they lay fallow. The animals, they did what animals do and you didn't get a part of it. And every forty-ninth year, it was to be the Jubilee of Jubilees. The year of the Lord's favor: if you had lost land it was restored to you, all debts cancelled, all the woe and everything that was wrong, corrected. No harvest was to be had because no work could be done. You lived off of what the Lord provided. The well being of the people _ all the people, was celebrated. All were restored to the goodness and glory God had intended.
But by the time of Jesus, the Jews had been so acculturated, so conquered, that this idea of the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the Jubilee, had degenerated into an ideal which was not practiced. The Story of the "Good Old Days" that nobody really believed, nobody lived. You can hear them saying, if we did that now, why, the whole economy would be ruined.
And here goes Jesus telling them the time is now. That Kingdom time, all is restored. The Kingdom of Heaven is yours, now. Not by what we do, not something we wait for, not something we earn, but now, by grace.
What an unexpected thing! What an unexpected thing for the son of a carpenter in a small podunk town to announce. The year of the Lord _ here - now?
We are one body. The year of the Lord's favor is upon us. It may not be how we expected it to look at all, but one thing I know, this is the truth. There is no place where we can go, where we would still not be part of the body. And there is no other time than this year of the Lord's favor.
Do we get it?