Those of you who have been paying attention to the news heard this week that
after an apocalyptic kind of earthquake in Haiti last Tuesday, another
earthquake hit about a week later, an after shock measuring 5.9 on the Richter
scale.
You’ve also probably heard that nations around the world are rushing help to
that poor country, trying to save as many lives as possible and restore order.
The US has sent thousands of soldiers and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid
to Haiti.
Another way of helping is the adoption of orphaned Haitian children. Both the US
and Canada are working to streamline the process of international adoptions for
these children so that they can have a chance to be raised by someone who will
care for them, even if it isn’t their own parents.
While that helps tremendously, some groups are proposing another kind of aid. A
group called the Paris Club, which is made up of the leadership of a number of
industrialized countries, called for wealthy nations to forgive the debts of the
Haitian government as a way of helping free up funds for earthquake relief.
In Sept. 2008 Haiti’s total external debt was $1.88 billion. Now that doesn’t
sound like much to us, but being that Haiti is the poorest country in this
hemisphere, that kind of debt is crushing on the country’s economy.
The members of the Paris Club were willing to put their money where their mouth
was. Long before the earthquake the member nations had made a decision to help
Haiti by cancelling the debt Haiti owed them, about $214 million last summer. By
the way, yes, the US is a permanent member of this organization.
Now you might be asking why I mention this when I’m speaking about a story where
Jesus goes to his home town and preaches for the first time. Here’s why: In this
story, Jesus talks about his own ministry in terms of a program set up in the
Laws of Moses which does basically the same thing for those who are in debt that
this Paris group are calling for.
Again you’re probably asking yourself what the zeroing out of debt has to do
with Jesus coming to earth and proclaiming the good news. Apparently a lot,
because in his first speech in Luke, he describes his purpose in terms of an
ancient legal custom called Jubilee.
Let me set the scene here. Jesus was baptized at the beginning of his ministry,
but then, probably as a way of preparation, spends some time in the desert being
tempted by the devil, much the way that Moses and the Israelites were tempted in
the desert on the way to the Promised Land.
Unlike the Israelites, Jesus did not fall to temptation, and in some ways proved
himself through this experience. After this Jesus begins to go around Galilee,
the district where he lived, and teach people how to follow the laws that God
had given to Moses.
Luke seems to know about some initial ministry Jesus did in Capernaum involving
some kinds of miraculous acts, but he doesn’t tell us what Jesus did. The first
thing he does tell us is that Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth and taught
in a synagogue there.
Jesus was probably invited there by the owner of the synagogue. He would have
come in on a Saturday, and there seems to be a lot of people from town in
attendance, folks who saw him grow up.
Among other things that would have happened in the synagogue, Jesus probably
would have read some portion of the Laws of Moses or from one of the prophetic
books. This Saturday he was given the book of Isaiah, a prophet who lived well
over 700 years earlier.
Out of respect for the scripture, Jesus stood and read the portion he chose to
speak on. He unrolled the scroll to the chapter he wanted to read and began
reading aloud. Who knows all of what he actually read, but Luke talks about him
reading from Isaiah chapter 58 and 61.
Those chapters were written hundreds of years after the actual prophet Isaiah
lived, probably by his disciples who still prophesied in his name. Specifically,
the prophet was speaking during a time when Jews who had been taken captive by
the Babylonians were allowed to return to their homeland and begin rebuilding
after 50 years of exile.
The prophet says that God has anointed him to bring good news to the poor, to
proclaim release to the captives, and to let the oppressed go free. In other
words, God has heard the cries of God’s oppressed people and has made a way for
them to be freed.
So what does that have to do with Jesus coming and telling people about the
kingdom of God? Jesus told people that he had come to do the same thing in his
own time. He had come to bring good news to the poor, to release captives, to
free the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of Jubilee.
Let me stop here and say something about Jubilee. Every seven years, according
to the Laws of Moses, all debts in society were to be forgiven. If you owed
someone money or someone owed you money, every seventh year that debt would be
cancelled. Now I’m not saying this always happened; I’m just saying that God
commanded the Israelites to do this.
In addition, Jubilee is a custom where the entire society kind of hits the
“reset” button every fifty years. Every fiftieth year, on the Day of Atonement,
which would be early October, the nation has a holiday in which anyone who is
enslaved must be freed. If someone else has a lien on your land, that lean is
cancelled.
No one is supposed to sow or harvest crops. They can only eat the food that
grows wild. All land becomes public, then reverts back to its hereditary owners.
It’s kind of a year of rest for the people and the land.
When Jesus says that his ministry marks the year of the Lord’s favor, that
phrase means the year of Jubilee. When the prophet spoke those words to the
exiles, it was an image used to describe a new era in their history, an era of
salvation from their enemies and restoration of their land and property.
But now Jesus is speaking of a new way of salvation. His ministry too is like a
year of Jubilee, but more in a spiritual sense. Everyone knew that since they
were ruled by Herod and ultimately by the Romans, Jesus wasn’t talking about the
cancellation of debts and the end of slavery.
Jesus was referring to the forgiveness of sin, which was often seen as a debt
owed to God. Remember the Lord’s Prayer that we prayed this morning, “Forgive us
our debts.” We aren’t asking God to zero out our credit cards or pay off our
mortgages. If that were to take place we wouldn’t have enough room in this place
to fit all the people who would show up for church.
We are talking about the forgiveness of our sins, the cancellation of the
punishment which people used to believe was a consequence for sin. Jesus is
proclaiming a new era in which God’s forgiveness has come to the world in a new
way.
That forgiveness is evidenced in the world by the reversal of bad situations
which were thought to be God’s punishment on the people. People who were blind
were widely regarded as losing their sight as punishment from God for something
they or someone in their family did wrong.
The fact that they were ruled by the Romans was seen as a punishment by God
because people weren’t following the Laws of Moses correctly or because the High
Priest was appointed by the Romans.
The fact that people were suffering in devastating poverty was widely
interpreted as God’s punishment for their sin. And the corollary was that God
blessed the rich because they were good people, even when they were really bad.
Jesus says, “Forget that noise. Everything is changed. God loves the poor. God
loves those possessed with demons. God loves foreigners. God loves those held in
captivity. God loves the sick and the blind and the lame. God loves people who
are downtrodden and hated by society.
“The people who really need to watch out are the rich, who used to think they
had God in their pockets. Those who really need to watch out are the folks who
think that just because they follow some of God’s laws that they’re free to
disregard a bunch of other laws.”
Jesus was challenging people to think about their faith, their sin, and their
society in a radically new way. People who were relegated to the status of
undesirable, sinful, useless dregs of society were being told that God’s view of
them had been mischaracterized by those in power.
No longer would those with money or power be able to define everyone else’s
status before God. Jesus was now defining everyone’s status before God. And his
message is that everyone is on an even playing field, even if they’ve been told
differently their whole lives.
Can you imagine what it would be like in our society if everyone believed they
were on an even playing field in God’s eyes? You see, despite all of our
attempts to honor the freedom of the individual in the church, we have still set
up a kind of pecking order in society, and many people feel that pecking order
is representative of God’s own perspective.
You have your good people and you have your bad people. And there’s a strong
sense among many in our society that the good people should overrule the bad
people. On the good side you have the wealthy (they have to be good to have come
into that kind of cash). You have religious people, specifically Christian
people.
You have home owners. Patriotic people. People with good jobs. Skinny people.
Attractive people. Veterans. Business owners. Taxpayers. People who are
industrious enough to merit a job that provides health insurance.
On the other side of the tracks you have the bad people: The homeless, those
with substance abuse problems, the unemployed, the under-employed, those who do
not to have access to affordable health insurance, Undocumented Immigrants (i.e.
illegal aliens), people in jail or on probation, poor people, fat people,
homosexual people, unmarried people who are cohabitating, unattractive people,
people from places like the middle east, people who practice a religion other
than Christianity.
Those folks are relegated to a lesser status in society, and they hear the
messages loud and clear on a daily basis in the media and from the people with
whom they come into contact:
“God is happy with me, but God is unhappy with you. If you can change your
personal defects, which are completely your own doing, then maybe you can get
back into God’s good favor again.”
“But for the time being, please don’t expect us good folks to share any power
with you. Don’t’ ask for the same rights as we have. And for God’s sake, don’t
burden us with your problems by asking us for any help. We’ll give you whatever
help we feel like giving, but don’t expect anything more.”
The good news of this passage is that Jesus is saying to us, just as he said to
the people of Nazareth 2000 years ago, “Don’t’ let someone else speak for God as
to who is valuable and who is not. God loves you and is reaching out to you no
matter what society tells you.
“It doesn’t matter if people like you. It doesn’t matter if you’re sick. It
doesn’t matter if people have condemned you as a sinner. They don’t make that
call. God does. And God loves you just as much as God loves those judgmental,
self-righteous sanctimonious folks who think they’re better than you.”
Everyone is on an even playing field. And those who have been disregarded and
devalued and denigrated hated and made to feel like they have no place in
society may even be at an advantage because they, more than other people, need
to know that God is reaching out to them.
This is a timely message, and one we should reflect on as we Americans take time
this week to remember Dr. King. The message he preached is rooted in what Jesus
is saying in Luke 4 about human dignity and God’s favor.
In reflecting on the meaning of Dr. King’s life, a pastor by the name of Nancy
Rockwell noted that Dr. King “transcended all these boundaries and became a
citizen of the world – not by becoming an elite world traveler or a connoisseur
of cultures, but by opening his Baptist heart and mind completely, so that no
one was alien to him and he was alien to no one – not Jews, nor whites, nor
communists, nor Hindus, not northerners, not even haters.
And in this MLK followed Jesus – who spoke to and embraced peasant fishermen and
revolutionary zealots, Roman soldiers and foreign women, tax collectors and
Jewish prostitutes and people who had once been possessed by demons.
I don’t know how MLK was able to do this. Most of us shy away from
confrontations, and from conversations we fear may be painful, and from making
difficult decisions. MLK confronted the entire nation, southern sheriffs with
fire hoses, KKK guys with bullhorns and hate speech in their mouths, Govs.
Orville Faubus and George Wallace, black radicals like Stokely Carmichael and H.
Rap Brown, a woman who stabbed him in the chest at a book signing, J Edgar
Hoover who harassed him every day, and a lot of anonymous phone callers, too.
Somehow MLK conquered his fear, his fear of being hurt and his fear of death.
And then he was free to be with anyone, anywhere.” Jesus announced the end of an
era dominated by those kinds of fears. He came to proclaim that the grace of God
is not limited by fear or prejudice or hatred or even by sin.
Jesus overcame those hurdles. He offered God’s grace to everyone, no matter
where they came from, no matter what had happened to them in life, no matter
what they thought of God. The same is true for us today.
As we go out into the world this week, try to tell someone that they have found
favor with God. God knows they’ve heard the opposite plenty of times. 2010 is
the year of God’s favor, and this scripture is being fulfilled as we speak
comfort to those who most need to hear it.