Sermon — January 26, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
What are we doing here?
That’s a rhetorical question, to be clear. But it’s one that’s worth asking from time to time. In a world that’s full of urgent needs and pressing demands, what are we doing when we pause for an hour and gather here on Sunday mornings for worship? Our Scripture readings this morning happen to tell two stories of worship. They happened hundreds of years apart from one another, and thousands of years ago, but they have something urgent to say to us about why we do what we do, and what it can mean for us in the coming months years.
And so I want to invite you to come with me on a little journey through time today: to read these two stories as the pattern for our story as we try to understand God’s vision for this world.
We begin with the Book of Nehemiah, which describes events that took place about 2500 years ago. It comes at the beginning of what’s called the Second Temple period. The First Temple, built by the great King Solomon, had been destroyed about seventy years before. The Babylonians had besieged the city of Jerusalem, and demolished the Temple, and kidnapped the leaders and many of the people and brought them into exile for many years. After the Babylonian Empire fell, the people were finally allowed to go home. They began to rebuild the city. They began to rebuild the Temple. And as they tried to rebuild their life together, they gathered to hear the scribe Ezra read from the scroll of the Law.
There are echoes of what we still do here today. Ezra opens a book in the sight of the people. They stand. He says a blessing, and they offer a response. He reads. And this is a lot like what we just did. (Although we’re all glad that the Gospel reading didn’t last “from early morning until midday.”)
The people read from the book of the Law “with interpretation,” the Bible says. And we do the same thing. We’re doing it right now. We listen to readings, and we hear them explained. And we do it within a context of community, and ritual, and prayer.
The “Law” here is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Christians often think of Biblical law as being mostly concerned with ritual and purity, food laws and obscure commandments. And it does have all of those. But throughout the Law that they heard read that day, you also find a clear concern for people at the margins of society: most especially for people who are poor, and for the gerim, “strangers,” people who are not citizens, not members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but residents in the land.
And there’s an unusual characteristic of this law. Over the next few thousand years, the Jewish people rarely had an independent state. But the Law that Ezra read wasn’t something that needed to be enforced from above. It was something that the people could follow for themselves, even as the political authorities changed. It didn’t matter whether the ruler was Persian or Macedonian, Seleucid or Ptolemaic or Roman. Because the Law didn’t lay out an immigration policy that those authorities needed to enforce: it said, “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 10:19) You or your ancestors have known what it is to be new to a place; so love the people who are new, as you would love your own family.
It didn’t matter who was king, because the social safety net the Law described didn’t rely on an official bureaucracy: it told the people, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 23:22) The edges of your property, God said, really belong to the poor and to the strangers in the land. And whatever decisions whoever’s in charge may make, there cannot be a law against generosity and mutual aid. That commandment’s from Leviticus, by the way, a book we sometimes dismiss, but you know what else comes from that book? Jesus’ second-favorite law of all: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19:18) When Ezra reads from the Law, it isn’t for the Persian emperor to hear, it’s for the people gathered there: This is who we are, and in this society we are trying to rebuild, this is how we’ll live, whoever sits on the throne.
Ezra’s reading of the Law happened once. But that same kind of holy reading would go on, in synagogues and study houses around the Holy Land and around the world.
Jesus did it all the time. He does it in our Gospel reading today. He goes to the synagogue to worship on the Sabbath day. And when he stands to read, they give him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he reads, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
And they wait. Is there a sermon? Is he going to explain?
And Jesus simply says: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.” (Luke 4:21)
He’s announced the agenda for the rest of his short life. God has sent me, Jesus says, to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, sent me to let the oppressed go free. He has announced the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of the jubilee, when debts are forgiven and injustices are made right. “He has anointed me,” Jesus says. He makes his claim to be the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, and he does it by recalling people’s attention to the Biblical values of equity, and justice, and liberation.
This is sometimes called Jesus’ “Nazareth Manifesto,” but he’s not making a speech. His comments on the text are brief. He doesn’t lay out policy ideas. He reads from a holy text, and he reminds the people of God’s vision for the world, a vision of good news for the poor, release for the captives; sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.
You might ask what the point is. Does Jesus really think that word will spread from his little synagogue in Galilee down to Pontius Pilate’s palace, that news will travel across the sea to Rome; that suddenly Herod Antipas will say, “Maybe we’d better do something to help the poor,” that the Emperor Tiberius will let his oppressed subjects go free?
News will spread all right, not of Jesus’ values but of his claim to be the Messiah. Will they accept his claim to rule? Will they accept his word as law? No. He’s gonna be crucified for that.
But Jesus’ words aren’t really for them.
Jesus’ words aren’t for the powerful people, the rulers of his day and age. They’re for us. For all of us who hear his words and are reminded that there is another way to look at the world: through the eyes of a Messiah who spent his life among the people at the margins of society, the Word of God made flesh, the Law of Love in human form.
These words are good news for us who hear them, rich and poor alike, in any day and age, because they remind us that God’s vision of generosity and love does not depend on human politics; that we can live according to that heavenly law whatever our earthly laws may be.
Laws change. Leaders come and go. The Episcopal Church as a whole Office of Government Relations that advocates for our values, whoever the government may be. But whether their words are heard or not, we can live our values now. We can treat our gay and lesbian and transgender neighbors with dignity and respect, love them and protect them as ourselves, as God has commanded us. We can welcome people who are strangers in our land, not because of our opinions on how they arrived, but because we’re all human beings, and it’s really freaking cold, and the only way that we can survive in this land is to welcome one another, and help each other out, as locals have been helping newcomers out for four hundred years and more. We can choose to leave the edges of our fields unreaped to share with people who don’t have enough—even if these days, that takes the less-romantic form of writing a check. We can glean things from our closets that we’d forgotten were ever them, and drop them off at the Clothes Closet to be harvested with joy. There’s a bonus perk for church members: you can even drop them off on a Sunday morning. I won’t tell you came outside the scheduled time.
We can live, in other words, as people of faith have always lived, with our feet in two worlds: governed, yes, by the laws of the land in which we live—but guided by God’s holy law of grace, and mercy, and love.