Nehemiah 8:1–3, 5–6, 8–10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12–31a
Luke 4:14–21
Year C
I.N.I.
I can’t remember too many sermons that have made people weep. Oh, I’m glad when you laugh at my humor, smile and nod when it seems that I am making sense to you. Part of me wishes I had an “Amen Corner” that would shout “Preach it!” or “Yes, Lord” when I’m on a roll, you know, in the zone, but then someone might also say “Watch out!” or “What’d you say?” when I afflict the comfortable or when my preaching heads in a direction that could get me thrown off a cliff.
I do think that preaching is important, potentially life-changing, and potentially hazardous. Walter Brueggeman suggests that engaging in this proclamation “is to open out the good news of the gospel with alternative modes of speech—speech that is dramatic, artistic, capable of inviting persons to join in another conversation, free of the reason of technique, unencumbered by….[the] abstract, unembarrassed about concreteness….The church on Sunday morning, [he says], or whenever it engages in its odd speech, may be the last place left in our society for imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith and to participate in joyous, obedient life.” Finally Comes the Poet by Walter Brueggeman. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, © 1998), p. 3.
Did you hear the Prayer of the Day when it gushed over the holy scriptures as nourishment? It references an old Anglican prayer that I have been hearing since I was knee high to a grasshopper when it suggests that we find promise and hold on to eternal life as we (and here goes the old phrase) “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
Can you imagine that kind of reverence for scripture? Do you know that in a vision, the prophet Ezekiel was offered the scroll of Torah and told to eat it? He opened his mouth, and said that in his mouth it was sweeter than honey.
I’m not sure that we should tear off a page and chomp on it. But I know that scripture was written for hearing. The multiplicity of literature in the Bible is by and large intended to be storytelling, poetry, oral exhortation, consumed as it were by a community assembled for public worship.
Think about it. For the past two weeks in listening to Isaiah we have been steeped in the experience of exile, of being aliens in a foreign land, yearning for the smells and sights of home.
Fast forward from the 6th century BCE to the 5th century when the small band actually made it back to Jerusalem, to the home country. Rebuilding the ruins went from pie in the sky to something possible, on the verge of coming to be. Here in the writing of the first reading from Nehemiah, the community opens its mouth (I mean ears) for the first time in centuries to hear the Torah read aloud. They are reminded of God creating the world out of chaos. They are remembering their past as slaves and the freedom trail paved by Moses and Miriam. They hear the story of the covenant as if they are there at Mt. Sinai. And from dawn until noon, standing the whole time, they hear whatever version they had of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy with a bit of commentary.
They didn’t nod off or write their grocery lists. They didn’t throw tomatoes at the Ezra the priest. They expressed themselves with “Amen,” “Amen,” “Yes, Lord,” “Yes, Lord” with their hands held high. And they wept, for what? For conviction of their shortcomings? For the encounter they had with the holy? That men and women together could be nourished with the Word? Yes. Yes. And Yes.
Martin Luther was a student and a teacher of the Bible. It is said that his most fervent ideas for reforming the church came when he was teaching the Psalms as a professor at
Wittenberg. Because in his study of the Bible he saw Christ everywhere! He found grace and mercy as God’s love song throughout Scripture. Luther suggested that the Bible is the manger for Christ, as if the most important way to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest is to look for that Word within the Word.
For Luther that way of reading was a release from a burden. It brought a freshness and delight where he only felt oppressed and inadequate. It moved him from the burden of a Bible that stifles to Good News in Jesus Christ that is revealed. This elevated also Luther’s and the reformers’ commitment to preaching.
Our own ELCA claps its hands about the proclamation of the Word each Sunday. In the worship document called The Use of the Means of Grace, it says as Lutherans we understand that
Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate. The proclamation of God's
message to us is both Law and Gospel . The canonical Scriptures of the Old
and New Testaments are the written Word of God . Through this Word in
these forms, as through the sacraments, God gives faith, forgiveness of sins ,
and new life.
http://www.elca.org/Growing-In-Faith/Worship/Learning-Center/The-Use-of-the-Means-of-Grace.aspx
It’s like we eat the Word up, taking in our hearing the same as our tasting, just like it says “faith, forgiveness, and new life.” Doesn’t it almost make you cry?
So as we strain to receive Christ in the Word, in this Time of Epiphany we center on Jesus’ mission to break out the Spirit of God in the world. Jesus begins his ministry in the gospel coming home. Jesus begins his ministry in a gathering of a religious community breaking open the Word. He, the son of the congregation, all grown up and presumably working in his father’s carpenter shop, steps up to the lectern and is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. The passage he reads bursts with a freedom song, offering God’s good news to the poor, release to the prisoners, a jublilee or fiftieth anniversary message that says renewal, sabbatical, this is the time for God to act!
And everyone is staring at Joseph’s boy, after he offers this “food” and returns to his seat. His one sentence sermon ups the ante, “from my mouth to your ears.” Today, now, at this time, history is being made.
The Word within the Word, Jesus, in the flesh, Jesus, in history, Jesus, really intends to change the world. From his mouth to his action, and presumably, ours. He talks the walk and walks the talk. He lights a fire that still burns today. He initiates social change that becomes the mission of Jesus’ followers everywhere.
In our hearing we eat up Christ’s freedom song and sing it ourselves. We become advocates for the poor and those locked up. We offer a new way to see, a new way to welcome, a new way to be church that extends itself by breaking boundaries and reaches those that wonder if they belong, if there is hope for them. In Jesus’ first sermon he lays out his mission plan that continues to give the church its marching orders.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself no slouch as a preacher, who did cause many to weep, who did take Jesus’ words to heart, himself broke open something new when he preached these words
If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. If the church does not participate in the struggle for peace and economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause [people] everywhere to say that it has atrophied its will. But if the church will free itself from the shackles of a deadening status quo, and, recovering its great historic mission, will speak and act fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice and peace, it will enkindle the imagination of [humanity] and fire the souls of [humanity], imbuing them with a glowing and ardent love for truth, justice, and peace.
--qutoed in Give Us This Day: A Lutheran Proposal for Ending World Hunger by Craig L. Nessan (Miineapolis: Augsburg Fortress, © 2003)p 49
Amen? Amen? Amen!
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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