January 20, 21, 2007
Third Sunday after the Epiphany
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

Thirty years ago today (yesterday) I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.  It was an incredible occasion, attended by many, including some folks I didn’t even know.  It was clear that while I was the vehicle, the ordination was really not about me, but about what new thing God was doing in our time.  That having been said, I want to tell one funny story about that event.  What you need to remember before I tell it is that Jan. 20 is also inauguration day for the President of the United States.

The day after the ordination, the Herald Statesman, our local Westchester County paper, had a huge picture of me in my vestments with my presenters, with a big headline:  Village Woman Ordained Priest.  Down below with a smaller picture and smaller print, Jimmy Carter Inaugurated President.  After all, Westchester County had carried stories of men having been inaugurated president before, but this was the first time a woman in the county had ever been ordained an Episcopal priest.

What we have in our Gospel this morning is an Inaugural address, to continue using the language.  It is Jesus, returning to preach for the first time in his hometown.  The local boy who has been making good has returned to the synagogue that gave him his start.

His larger family and friends had heard stories of his success, and they were so happy that they were going to share in it. 

It started out well enough.  Jesus is handed a scroll.  It is the prophet Isaiah.  He chooses a passage to share (I almost wrote passion, which may be really closer to the truth.)  He reads those incredible words that you just heard, which are the words of Isaiah 61, with a verse thrown in from Isaiah 58.  And he leave out a few words that are there, which is to let us know that this is not just a random passage.  These are words that Jesus has carefully chosen and thought about.

Let’s reflect on what has happened so far in Jesus’ ministry.  He was baptized by John, which he considered his anointing.  He was immediately driven into the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan.  He learned in that time of trial what his ministry was not going to be about:  not about just responding to people’s physical needs in the form of bread lines; not about power in the sense of being King of the World; not about daring and dashing miracles to prove he was truly God’s beloved.  No, those were not the ways he was called.

So what was he called to do and to be?  He tells us in Isaiah’s words:  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me—to fulfill the following action items:

1—to bring good news to the poor
2—to proclaim release to the captives
3—and recovery of sight to the blind
4—to let the oppressed go free
5—to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

We can be sure he read as one who spoke with authority.  He rolled up the scroll and sat down to preach, as it was the custom to do.  The eyes of everyone were fixed on him, in great expectation.  What would this son of Mary and Joseph say about these words?  What good things was he going to do for them, what kind of miracles and bennies was he going to bestow upon family and friends?

His words were electric: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Wow!  Talk about claiming authority.  I am sure they sat up even straighter, leaning forward a little more, waiting in delicious anticipation. 

But this is where it falls apart.  And this part is not even included in the Gospel reading for this morning.  I’m going to have to fill you in.  He tells them that he will not be able to do any miracles there among them, for he has not come for them.  He has come for the outsider, for the Gentile as well as the Jew, and he knows that this will anger them sufficiently so that they will not be open to his authority and power. 

H was telling them in so many words—and go home and read them for yourselves—that he was not what they expected and he was more than what they hoped.  I believe that in telling the people what he was going to do, what his ministry was, he was also telling them that his model was not the successful miracle working king who would restore the Israel they all had heard about and loved, but the Suffering Servant that Isaiah spoke about. 

In the prophecy of Isaiah there is a figure that has been named the suffering servant.  No one can tell for sure whether this servant was an individual or a group or perhaps the whole nation of Israel.  But these songs of the suffering servant baffle those who have heard them through the generations.  I believe that Jesus identified his call, his anointing, with that of the Suffering Servant.  His mission was the five points above—but his role would ultimately mean that he would anger people to the point that he would be killed.  He was God’s servant and he would suffer for it.

If he was testing the waters in his hometown, he certainly saw that those waters were troubled, for after he said their lack of understanding would prohibit his ability to do any signs and wonders and that he was going to find understanding and faith in the Gentiles, the people in his hometown, “got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”  I quote exactly.  On that cliff now there is a religious house, a home of hospitality, where I stayed some time back, and on that cliff overlooking Nazareth, it was my privilege to celebrate the eucharist, in which we remember Jesus’ broken and bleeding body.

But it was not his time; his ministry was just starting, and they did not hurl him off the cliff.  We are told, “He passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”

So let’s back up from the drama of this story and take a look at what he actually said he was about.

The first place of proclamation is to the poor—to care for those who are in economic hardship—Jesus is against poverty and impoverishment.  The second is release for the captives, and the word here for release implies forgiveness, so it is release from our sins, from those things that imprison us by regret or guilt. The third is restoring sight to the blind, in the sense of recovering the prophetic vision of who Israel was meant to be as a people.  The fourth is to free the oppressed--  from what ever oppresses, and we all know oppression can be economic, political, physical or demonic. And finally, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, which would have been understood as the Jubilee year, that year after seven years times seven would be the 50^th year in which land was to be returned to the family who originally owned it.

I wish I could go on longer about each of these—they are like the Millennium Development Goals, only they are now in their fourth millennium since Isaiah said them .

Don’t think the Millennium Development Goals are entirely a new idea! 

But what excites me is that perhaps it is in our time that this prophecy is to be fulfilled.  Perhaps we are the ones that will hear and heed and fulfill the words of Isaiah and Jesus.  What would this mean for our world?  We would realize that poverty is the ultimate sin, as the Archbishop of Cape Town has recently said.  We would realize that the Good News of Jesus is about lifting of what holds us down and back, and that the healing of our physical bodies and the body of the world are somehow one healing, one reconciliation of the one great wound we all bear.  It would mean that we would regain a right relationship with the land which supports us all and which no one but God can truly be said to own.

It would mean that no one, absolutely no one, is outside the Good News of the Reign of God.

There is a lot of work here.  Can we hear the Good News in it?  Can we get excited?

Now I want to tell you one thing that I have learned in thirty years of priestly ministry.  Are you ready?  You know how in every eucharist in the midst of what we call the Great Thanksgiving we proclaim, Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again?  Well, what I have come to realize is that we are wrong to believe that that is some future event.  Christ has come again.  Christ is in the Body of Christ, the faithful people, the baptized community.  You are the Christ who has come again, and this work of changing the world to eliminate the scourge of poverty, to proclaim God’s healing and reconciling love for all, and to care for the earth in a God-centered way, is what we are about.

We are not a bunch of little Jesuses running around doing our own thing, but we, we together, are the Body of Christ, as St. Paul said so eloquently in the epistle for this morning.  And our response to this incredible news—to this miracle of being alive at this incredible time in history is, I think, to be the response of the people at the Water Gate in our first lesson: celebrate, share, and rejoice, for the joy of God is our strength.  Amen!  Truly!  Amen!