Last night's sermon at Lutheran Campus Ministry at the University of Colorado-Boulder featuring Luke 4.14-20.
Last week classrooms sat empty, powerpoint presentations went unpointed, and due dates postponed as the university celebrated a civic holiday. A big part of that holiday this year was the presidential inauguration. I imagine you heard some of the controversy emerging from the inaugural ritual. The media from the Times to the Post all the way down to the TMZ have been up in arms because it appears that much of the inaugural event may have been fake.
The biggest offender of our notions of authenticity and originality was Beyonce. The pop music heavyweight may or may not have lip synched her powerful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, depending on which sources you trust. But the whole day, with thousands of people spread out along the parade route and the mall was, in a sense, fake. The Constitution requires that the president be sworn into office on January 20th, this past Sunday. The inaugural celebration traditionally takes place on a weekday. So, President Obama took the oath of office in the blue room on Sunday in a small private service and opted to move the public celebration to the traditional Monday. While many presidents have made this same choice, you could see the entire inaugural affair on Monday as one collective lip synch, reciting the same words, songs, and rituals from the day before, but without the constitutional punch.
From my perspective on a university campus it was a bit unsettling. The university is a place that idealizes discovery and innovation, that strives to develop ideas and designs that have never been thought or created. And as the husband of an academic librarian I can assure you that there is still no greater academic sin than plagiarism, than the attempt to pass off borrowed ideas as one’s own unique work.
Tonight’s gospel reading is the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry. In Luke, Jesus is baptized, the spirit descends upon him before he’s quickly driven into the wilderness. Now Jesus has returned and what happens tonight is his first public act. And what Jesus does...is...well...he kind of lip synchs.
Jesus doesn’t start by proclaiming some unique and original verses he’d been workshopping out in the wilderness. No, the first thing Jesus wants to say are the exact words that the prophet Isaiah proclaimed a few hundred years earlier. He proclaims that he has come to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed. Jesus begins his ministry by reciting, by repeating the words of the prophet. And if we’re going to be harsh on Beyonce, we’d need to be even tougher on Jesus. Don’t tell anyone, but the words he quotes from Isaiah are actually a couple of different verses taken from this chapter and that and smushed together.
While I’m not sure what the penalties for plagiarism were in antiquity, I do think this first act of Jesus is an act of incredibly good news. First, it’s good news for any who ever found themselves standing at a lectern with sweating palms hoping to somehow correctly pronounce all the Melchizedek’s and Nebuchadnezzar’s. If Jesus doesn’t recite Isaiah with one hundred percent accuracy, things will probably turn out okay if we don’t.
But it’s also good news for those who gather each week on Sunday nights and even on Sunday mornings. It’s good news for those who repeat the same words and move through the same motions, week after week. If the standard for ourselves and for our God is complete uniqueness, then our expectations for the presence of the life-giving holy one are confined to moments of Bernoullian Eurekas, exceedingly rare moments of insight or brilliance.
There is a most powerful line, original to Jesus, in the gospel tonight. Jesus rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and said, “This scripture is now fulfilled in your hearing.” The good news tonight is that the work of our God is not unique. The life-giving work of God is not confined to one moment or place. The Word of God is not stuck over in Babylon, it’s not stuck at the moment when we were baptized, in a moment of epiphany, or even on a cross or an empty tomb. Rather the promises of God that emanate from that place come to us, wherever we are, but most especially here and now. In this place, in this moment, those promises are fulfilled anew.
It means that it matters that a group of college students gathers in the dark each Sunday on a hill in Boulder to read the same stories that our grandparents and ancestors in faith proclaimed, that Jesus read, that Isaiah read. It matters because tonight God is coming to us anew and again, and is pulling us into the fulfillment of a promise of life and release.
It matters because while the work of God is not unique to one place or time, what that work looks like and calls us to always is. Tonight God is calling us into a unique future, a future that can only be imagined in this spirit-filled place. To the old Israelites the words Jesus proclaimed meant freedom from the Babylonians. The ones gathered around Jesus in the synagogue thought God would do that exact work again. They heard that Jesus would be the one to fulfill the promise by restoring the nation. But true to God’s usual way of taking all the bits and pieces of our past and creating something new, Jesus’s words of freedom were directed to the Gentiles, to the ones outside of the synagogue walls. Only tonight can we begin to see the future into which God is pulling us.
To have the old promises of the faith fulfilled in a radically different way can be a bit uncomfortable. Once the people in the temple understand that Jesus is talking about creating something new, they run him out of town. The promise fulfilled is the promise that God will take the same old things and create something new, filled with life, beyond the limits of our imaginations.
Karen Leibowitz has an insight into the heart of God’s promises. She was the chef at a restaurant called Mission Street Food known for its use of a diversity of ethnic cuisines. In describing the philosophy of the restaurant she said that, ‘We feel authorized to make dishes outside our families ethnic traditions, and we freely mix different cultures’ ingredients and techniques, because we like to eat good food, wherever it comes from.” The fulfillment of the promises Isaiah proclaims comes as God uses us and all of our particularities and pasts to proclaim release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, and sight to the blind, because God likes proclaiming Good News regardless of whether the ingredients are Swedish or Mexican or Babylonian, wherever that Good News might take us. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment