Sermon 28th February 2010
Today one of our Lay Readers, Adjoa Andoh-Cunnell, preaches based on the reading from Luke 4:14-21
`I was in Manchester on Shrove Tuesday. It had been raining pretty much continuously all the time I’d been there. I’d spent all day at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, while
hopeful young auditionees came to perform their modern and classical pieces in an extremely hot dark room in front of a panel of us from RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).
While we tried to be as far from Simon Cowell and his gang on the X factor as possible in the way auditionees were treated, after 8 hours of being bludgeoned by daring sweary modern
pieces, wailing Juliet’s and shouty Macbeths bemoaning their fates, we were losing the will to live.
So I squelched back to the hotel in a daze, tried and failed to get online for 2 hours, and resigned myself to grumpily eating a whole bar of Green and Blacks Milk chocolate, because tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and chocs are off the menu till
Easter Sunday, and it’s the closest I’ll get to pancakes in this hotel!
Hmm? What a strange way to prepare for Lent, for this time of reflection and meditation. Joylessly munching my way through
a bar of chocolate in order to prepare for Lenten denial. Have many of you here like me, given up something for Lent? What does it really mean?
What is this denial about? To reflect Christ’s fasting for 40 days in the desert?
Is it to help us register how many of our brothers and sisters are doing without things we take for granted? Is it to give us a sense of discipline, a way of showing our willingness to do without? If God asks it of us? Or is it, that rather than simply being a time of denial, Lent could be seen as a time of preparation for action where ‘doing without’, translates into getting ready to ‘do’?
Perhaps it is all of these things. So why am I talking about Lent in the context of today’s passage where Luke writes about Jesus announcing who he really is in His home Synagogue in Nazareth?
Well although this episode in Jesus’ life is told us in Mark’s gospel and in Matthew’s, only in Luke is it the first detailed action that we get to know about after Jesus emerges having rejected the devil’s temptations during his 40 days in the wilderness. I wonder what that time in the desert did for Christ and how we see its effect in the Synagogue this Shabat and what we can learn from that.
It can be awkward being public about who we are in our faith in our work context. Or in our social context. In this morning’s reading Luke writes of Jesus being public about who he is in his home context. It’s risky; it can be risky unto death as we see from the reaction later in the chapter of
Jesus’ local community, when their scoffing at him leads eventually to a reaction so hostile that they attempt to throw him off a cliff. It’s interesting to reflect that at the beginning of this chapter when the devil in the desert tries to get Jesus to prove who he is, in an act of tastelessness in the extreme, he takes him to the
highest point of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, a huge high building and says at verse 9 “If you are God’s son throw yourself down from here”
And yet here when Jesus declares himself the Messiah in another temple his listeners are the ones who want to throw him from a great height!
Jesus knows who he is, he does not need to test his heavenly father and now he is here ready to proclaim his identity in the temple at Nazareth.
Sometimes, to be true to our faith, to proclaim and to live by the values of our faith, can be costly. Doing God’s work, can be a provocation to those who would not have God’s kingdom around them, who would rather their own power than God’s power. We can see it in the reaction of totalitarian regimes to the preaching of the Gospel today. We can see it in the response of the Pharisees to those followers of Christ who challenged the traditions of Judaism, like Paul, declaring that Christ had replaced living under Jewish law with living under the Grace of God. It was no longer about an outward show of following the rules, but about what was in your heart and how that radically changed the way you lived your life in the love of God.
What a challenge to the authority of the Jewish Religious Leaders!
And so it was in the Temple in Nazareth that day.
How bemusing and then enraging it must have been for many in that temple to hear the local boy, the carpenter’s son, proclaiming himself to be the longed for almighty Messiah.
How incomprehensible. How dare Jesus, brought up in Nazareth arrive in the Synagogue on the Holy Sabbath, read from the venerated words of the prophet Isaiah;
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty
To the captives and recovery of sight to the blind;
To set free the oppressed and to announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his
people.”
Jesus rolls up the scroll. Sits down and with everyone looking at him says to them
“This passage of scripture has come true today, as you heard it being read.”
What would they have understood from that comment?
The spirit of the Lord is upon me He has chosen me to bring good news to the poor Sent me to proclaim liberty me to set free the oppressed and announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people.
It’s all about me, all about this Jesus!
If we read to the end of the passage at verse 30 we find that Jesus talks of prophets not being welcome in their home town, he talks of the Jewish prophets Elisha and Elijah and God’s
healing through them not coming to God’s chosen people, the Israelites as expected, but to Gentiles. His fellow Nazarenes, Jews, God’s Chosen People, are insulted, incensed! Was Jesus saying Gentiles were more worthy than them, was he setting himself above them?
Imagine it’s me looking each one of you in the eye and saying to you it’s me
Not you, God’s spirit is on me…it’s uncomfortable listening isn’t it?
In order to be who he truly was, to be authentic, to live in the light of God’s spirit upon him, Jesus suffered, in that instance the hostility of his town, and later death on the cross. If being the Messiah didn’t keep Jesus immune from suffering in his own life on earth, then it may prove a comfort to us when we find ourselves in hard places.
Philip Yancey in his book ‘Reaching For the Invisible God’ quotes the theologian, Augustine who wrote;
‘Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast;
that the Bread (of life) might hunger,
the Fountain thirst,
the Light sleep,
the Way be tired on its journey;
that the truth might be accused of false witness,
the Teacher be beaten with whips,
the Foundation be suspended on wood;
that Strength might grow weak;
that the Healer might be wounded;
that Life might die.”
In living such a life Jesus has a profound understanding of every human emotion from the greatest joy to the darkest sorrow. As Yancey puts it ‘I cannot learn from Jesus why bad things occur – why an avalanche or flood decimates one town and not its neighbour’ ‘but I can surely learn how God feels about such tragedies. I simply look at how Jesus responds to the sisters of his Good friend Lazarus, to a widow who has just lost her son, or a leprosy victim banned outside the town gates. ‘Jesus’ concludes Yancey, ‘gives God a face, and that face is streaked with tears.’
This same Jesus who suffered, who gave God a face, announced the reality of who he was in that Nazarene Synagogue, and through all his subsequent teaching and healing.
Can the time of Lent help prepare us to announce who we are as Christians in a new way this year? Can we in Christ move towards a more sensitive understanding of the needs of the world around us? It may cost us, as it cost Christ, and perhaps more than doing without our favorite treats for Lent. But our faith is not just about who we say we are, it’s also about how we live who we say we are. This year Christian Aid is encouraging us in their Lent ‘Count
Your Blessing campaign’, to count our blessings (the opposite of denial you might think) where we acknowledge all the good things we have been blessed with in our lives. Yes material things certainly, but also a health service, friendships, safety from war, freedom to worship and so many others things. This morning we remember the blessing of marriage for Eric and Betty Baxter who were married at St Saviour’s fifty years ago this week. We remember the blessing of the 45 years that Sister Enid Johnson, buried on Friday, was a member of this congregation and we reflect on the 10 year blessing of the Cameron as our vicar and the Barker family in the Parish of Herne Hill and we wish that their trip to South Africa will be a further blessing for them.
And so in counting our blessings perhaps we will be prompted into action. That is Christian Aid’s hope.
Perhaps our action will be to share the blessings we have with others.
Maybe through donating to the work of organisations like Christian Aid.
Perhaps by buying Fairtrade goods instead of our usual brands.
Or giving gifts through the Good Gifts network, like a goat for a
family or contributing towards a bike for a midwife, Perhaps we’ll support the work of the Kabanda trust in Uganda, Or the continuing aid work in Haiti. Or perhaps we’ll get involved in writing letters of encouragement to Christians locked up for their faith, or perhaps we’ll sponsor a child with limited life chances because of poverty.
We could count our blessings in Lent in preparation to do God’s work, just as Jesus was in the desert for those 40 days we mirror in Lent, and then began his work. Lent preparation, be it through denial, reflection, or meditation on our blessings, can be a preparation for action.
What could our action be as Christians this year?
How will we announce by what we say and do that we are Christ’s followers? God’s children?
Perhaps we’ll ‘give up’ some free time to visit someone we know who lives alone or who is ill or housebound?
Perhaps we’ll give up time to God in prayer, or in service to the church here, Organising the Christian Aid Parish collection this
year? Coffee rota, chair rota, flower arranging, playground duty, joining the prayer team to name but a few. And perhaps we’ll reflect on Jesus’ preparation in the desert for the action of the rest of his life, his teaching, his proclaiming of the Gospel, his revelation of who he truly was, in his life, his death and his resurrection, the Messiah.
So the gift for us in this Lent time, of stepping out of our regular day to day lives, may perhaps be for us all to take the opportunity to own who we really are, if we have given our hearts and our lives to God. Maybe our giving up this Lent may be to give up the façade of being anything less than Christ’s followers. Maybe we’ll come to own ourselves as Christians to the extent that we can look into each others eyes, into our own eyes in the mirror, into the eyes of our colleagues, or our loved ones, friends and neighbors and announce:
Yes, the spirit of the Lord is upon me.
I am here to do his service, I am here to bring His Kingdom to the world around me in whatever way he sees fit to make it happen. I am here even to suffer for my Father’s sake and yet continue to
serve and praise him. He has indeed chosen me to bring good news, to proclaim liberty, to set free the oppressed, to announce his saving Grace for all peoples. Perhaps we’ll glory in saying:
I belong to the Maker of Heaven and Earth, whose face is streaked with tears at the suffering of his people. Perhaps this Lent we will claim that belonging, count our blessings place ourselves alongside those suffering, understand Christ is alongside us in our suffering and prepare to be about our father’s business, proclaiming the good news of his gracious love.
Maybe the end of Lent this year will be more than a return to the Fairtrade chocolate Egg, perhaps we’ll surprise ourselves by the way in which we announce our faith, in a new found sharing of God’s blessings. That’s my prayer for us.
Amen.
`I was in Manchester on Shrove Tuesday. It had been raining pretty much continuously all the time I’d been there. I’d spent all day at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, while
hopeful young auditionees came to perform their modern and classical pieces in an extremely hot dark room in front of a panel of us from RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).
While we tried to be as far from Simon Cowell and his gang on the X factor as possible in the way auditionees were treated, after 8 hours of being bludgeoned by daring sweary modern
pieces, wailing Juliet’s and shouty Macbeths bemoaning their fates, we were losing the will to live.
So I squelched back to the hotel in a daze, tried and failed to get online for 2 hours, and resigned myself to grumpily eating a whole bar of Green and Blacks Milk chocolate, because tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and chocs are off the menu till
Easter Sunday, and it’s the closest I’ll get to pancakes in this hotel!
Hmm? What a strange way to prepare for Lent, for this time of reflection and meditation. Joylessly munching my way through
a bar of chocolate in order to prepare for Lenten denial. Have many of you here like me, given up something for Lent? What does it really mean?
What is this denial about? To reflect Christ’s fasting for 40 days in the desert?
Is it to help us register how many of our brothers and sisters are doing without things we take for granted? Is it to give us a sense of discipline, a way of showing our willingness to do without? If God asks it of us? Or is it, that rather than simply being a time of denial, Lent could be seen as a time of preparation for action where ‘doing without’, translates into getting ready to ‘do’?
Perhaps it is all of these things. So why am I talking about Lent in the context of today’s passage where Luke writes about Jesus announcing who he really is in His home Synagogue in Nazareth?
Well although this episode in Jesus’ life is told us in Mark’s gospel and in Matthew’s, only in Luke is it the first detailed action that we get to know about after Jesus emerges having rejected the devil’s temptations during his 40 days in the wilderness. I wonder what that time in the desert did for Christ and how we see its effect in the Synagogue this Shabat and what we can learn from that.
It can be awkward being public about who we are in our faith in our work context. Or in our social context. In this morning’s reading Luke writes of Jesus being public about who he is in his home context. It’s risky; it can be risky unto death as we see from the reaction later in the chapter of
Jesus’ local community, when their scoffing at him leads eventually to a reaction so hostile that they attempt to throw him off a cliff. It’s interesting to reflect that at the beginning of this chapter when the devil in the desert tries to get Jesus to prove who he is, in an act of tastelessness in the extreme, he takes him to the
highest point of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, a huge high building and says at verse 9 “If you are God’s son throw yourself down from here”
And yet here when Jesus declares himself the Messiah in another temple his listeners are the ones who want to throw him from a great height!
Jesus knows who he is, he does not need to test his heavenly father and now he is here ready to proclaim his identity in the temple at Nazareth.
Sometimes, to be true to our faith, to proclaim and to live by the values of our faith, can be costly. Doing God’s work, can be a provocation to those who would not have God’s kingdom around them, who would rather their own power than God’s power. We can see it in the reaction of totalitarian regimes to the preaching of the Gospel today. We can see it in the response of the Pharisees to those followers of Christ who challenged the traditions of Judaism, like Paul, declaring that Christ had replaced living under Jewish law with living under the Grace of God. It was no longer about an outward show of following the rules, but about what was in your heart and how that radically changed the way you lived your life in the love of God.
What a challenge to the authority of the Jewish Religious Leaders!
And so it was in the Temple in Nazareth that day.
How bemusing and then enraging it must have been for many in that temple to hear the local boy, the carpenter’s son, proclaiming himself to be the longed for almighty Messiah.
How incomprehensible. How dare Jesus, brought up in Nazareth arrive in the Synagogue on the Holy Sabbath, read from the venerated words of the prophet Isaiah;
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty
To the captives and recovery of sight to the blind;
To set free the oppressed and to announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his
people.”
Jesus rolls up the scroll. Sits down and with everyone looking at him says to them
“This passage of scripture has come true today, as you heard it being read.”
What would they have understood from that comment?
The spirit of the Lord is upon me He has chosen me to bring good news to the poor Sent me to proclaim liberty me to set free the oppressed and announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people.
It’s all about me, all about this Jesus!
If we read to the end of the passage at verse 30 we find that Jesus talks of prophets not being welcome in their home town, he talks of the Jewish prophets Elisha and Elijah and God’s
healing through them not coming to God’s chosen people, the Israelites as expected, but to Gentiles. His fellow Nazarenes, Jews, God’s Chosen People, are insulted, incensed! Was Jesus saying Gentiles were more worthy than them, was he setting himself above them?
Imagine it’s me looking each one of you in the eye and saying to you it’s me
Not you, God’s spirit is on me…it’s uncomfortable listening isn’t it?
In order to be who he truly was, to be authentic, to live in the light of God’s spirit upon him, Jesus suffered, in that instance the hostility of his town, and later death on the cross. If being the Messiah didn’t keep Jesus immune from suffering in his own life on earth, then it may prove a comfort to us when we find ourselves in hard places.
Philip Yancey in his book ‘Reaching For the Invisible God’ quotes the theologian, Augustine who wrote;
‘Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast;
that the Bread (of life) might hunger,
the Fountain thirst,
the Light sleep,
the Way be tired on its journey;
that the truth might be accused of false witness,
the Teacher be beaten with whips,
the Foundation be suspended on wood;
that Strength might grow weak;
that the Healer might be wounded;
that Life might die.”
In living such a life Jesus has a profound understanding of every human emotion from the greatest joy to the darkest sorrow. As Yancey puts it ‘I cannot learn from Jesus why bad things occur – why an avalanche or flood decimates one town and not its neighbour’ ‘but I can surely learn how God feels about such tragedies. I simply look at how Jesus responds to the sisters of his Good friend Lazarus, to a widow who has just lost her son, or a leprosy victim banned outside the town gates. ‘Jesus’ concludes Yancey, ‘gives God a face, and that face is streaked with tears.’
This same Jesus who suffered, who gave God a face, announced the reality of who he was in that Nazarene Synagogue, and through all his subsequent teaching and healing.
Can the time of Lent help prepare us to announce who we are as Christians in a new way this year? Can we in Christ move towards a more sensitive understanding of the needs of the world around us? It may cost us, as it cost Christ, and perhaps more than doing without our favorite treats for Lent. But our faith is not just about who we say we are, it’s also about how we live who we say we are. This year Christian Aid is encouraging us in their Lent ‘Count
Your Blessing campaign’, to count our blessings (the opposite of denial you might think) where we acknowledge all the good things we have been blessed with in our lives. Yes material things certainly, but also a health service, friendships, safety from war, freedom to worship and so many others things. This morning we remember the blessing of marriage for Eric and Betty Baxter who were married at St Saviour’s fifty years ago this week. We remember the blessing of the 45 years that Sister Enid Johnson, buried on Friday, was a member of this congregation and we reflect on the 10 year blessing of the Cameron as our vicar and the Barker family in the Parish of Herne Hill and we wish that their trip to South Africa will be a further blessing for them.
And so in counting our blessings perhaps we will be prompted into action. That is Christian Aid’s hope.
Perhaps our action will be to share the blessings we have with others.
Maybe through donating to the work of organisations like Christian Aid.
Perhaps by buying Fairtrade goods instead of our usual brands.
Or giving gifts through the Good Gifts network, like a goat for a
family or contributing towards a bike for a midwife, Perhaps we’ll support the work of the Kabanda trust in Uganda, Or the continuing aid work in Haiti. Or perhaps we’ll get involved in writing letters of encouragement to Christians locked up for their faith, or perhaps we’ll sponsor a child with limited life chances because of poverty.
We could count our blessings in Lent in preparation to do God’s work, just as Jesus was in the desert for those 40 days we mirror in Lent, and then began his work. Lent preparation, be it through denial, reflection, or meditation on our blessings, can be a preparation for action.
What could our action be as Christians this year?
How will we announce by what we say and do that we are Christ’s followers? God’s children?
Perhaps we’ll ‘give up’ some free time to visit someone we know who lives alone or who is ill or housebound?
Perhaps we’ll give up time to God in prayer, or in service to the church here, Organising the Christian Aid Parish collection this
year? Coffee rota, chair rota, flower arranging, playground duty, joining the prayer team to name but a few. And perhaps we’ll reflect on Jesus’ preparation in the desert for the action of the rest of his life, his teaching, his proclaiming of the Gospel, his revelation of who he truly was, in his life, his death and his resurrection, the Messiah.
So the gift for us in this Lent time, of stepping out of our regular day to day lives, may perhaps be for us all to take the opportunity to own who we really are, if we have given our hearts and our lives to God. Maybe our giving up this Lent may be to give up the façade of being anything less than Christ’s followers. Maybe we’ll come to own ourselves as Christians to the extent that we can look into each others eyes, into our own eyes in the mirror, into the eyes of our colleagues, or our loved ones, friends and neighbors and announce:
Yes, the spirit of the Lord is upon me.
I am here to do his service, I am here to bring His Kingdom to the world around me in whatever way he sees fit to make it happen. I am here even to suffer for my Father’s sake and yet continue to
serve and praise him. He has indeed chosen me to bring good news, to proclaim liberty, to set free the oppressed, to announce his saving Grace for all peoples. Perhaps we’ll glory in saying:
I belong to the Maker of Heaven and Earth, whose face is streaked with tears at the suffering of his people. Perhaps this Lent we will claim that belonging, count our blessings place ourselves alongside those suffering, understand Christ is alongside us in our suffering and prepare to be about our father’s business, proclaiming the good news of his gracious love.
Maybe the end of Lent this year will be more than a return to the Fairtrade chocolate Egg, perhaps we’ll surprise ourselves by the way in which we announce our faith, in a new found sharing of God’s blessings. That’s my prayer for us.
Amen.
posted by Parish Administrator at 2:21 pm
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