Annual Meeting: 2 building blocks

In today’s Gospel, Jesus goes back to the synagogue where he grew up, and they invite him to be the one who reads and expounds the Bible. There’s some dispute about whether Jesus chose what he read, or whether it was simply the lectionary for that week. (Not to be too technical, but while we know there were Jewish lectionaries, dating them is very tricky.) So maybe he chose this passage or maybe it was assigned. But at any rate, Jesus opens the scroll to Isaiah 61, and he reads as follows:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
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."
 
There must have been something about the way he read it, because Luke tells us that the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. It was one of those moments where you just know that something extraordinary is happening. And the very first line of Jesus’ sermon, as a colleague of mine commented this week, is the ultimate mic-drop: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 

He doesn’t say:  Now, Isaiah is probably referring here to a well-known traditional character whose identity is disputed. 
He doesn’t say: These ancient words are simply a metaphor meant to inspire us to do the best we can to help others.
He could easily have said that. But he says something different: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I’m it, Jesus says. I’m the person this is about. The exact thing that this centuries-old Bible reading promises is right in front of you because I, Jesus, am right in front of you. Luke writes later, "They were astounded at his teaching.” I’ll bet they were. Everyone in history who has said such things has been either a dangerous demagogue or certifiably insane. It’s up to you to choose whether you think Jesus is something else.
 
Now it’s interesting that while Jesus read the passage that was on the scroll, he also customized it a bit. He reads most of the first 2 verses of Isaiah 61, but he slips in a phrase from Isaiah 58, “to let the oppressed go free,” and another that echoes Isaiah 35, “recovering of sight to the blind.”  That’s how well he knew his Bible. So even if this were a lectionary reading, Jesus edits it so that it expresses exactly what he means to say, so that it summarizes the vision he has come to implement.
 
“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. It starts now.” This passage is Jesus’ mission statement. Now that’s worth paying attention to, isn’t it?  A summary by Jesus himself of what he came to do? You’d think most Christians would have it memorized. Certainly Jesus’ own mission statement for his ministry is up there with say the Nicene Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer. But I’ll wager very few of us, if any, could recite these verses by heart. Might be a nice thing to learn this coming week.
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
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."
 

 
As we gather in our annual parish meeting today, to think about what God has done at Emmanuel in the past year and where he may be calling us going forward, how is the Spirit addressing you and me through this passage? Where do we see Jesus’ mission happening in ours? Because of course they’re one and the same mission. A church has no other mission than, as the Body of Christ, to channel the mission of Jesus in its own context.
 
There’ll be plenty more time to talk amongst yourselves about this, but at this, our fifth annual meeting as rector and parish together, I want to just suggest a couple connections with our own path. Right around this time – year 4, 5, 6, in there – is where clergy and parishes tend to decide either to recommit and move forward in ministry, or to take it easy and coast. (If you’re going to have a longer tenure, that is.) You can see why – five years is about enough time to get things running smoothly, figure each other out, clean up whatever messes there are, and get on an even keel together. But then the question arises: now what? Do we re-engage and take a new step, or do we just coast along as we are? This Gospel assigned for today, I think, helps us think about the central building blocks of a community deciding, as I hope we will, not to just coast.
 
First, notice that Jesus roots his mission in the Scriptures. There’s not one original word in this. Now if anyone could be trusted to come up with original words that express God’s will, it’s Jesus! But he doesn’t; he makes the text God inspired his own. That is foundational for us who follow him.  I am happy that, over the past year, the number of people involved in Bible study here has risen a little. We have a new men’s group that met yesterday, and the women’s study and the Lectio Divina group continue. Some of you are absorbing Scripture in the daily office, or things like Forward Day by Day, too. So I’m glad we’ve made some progress. But I wonder all the time why there isn’t more, and why we don’t see a much greater hunger here to interact with God’s Word.
 
How many of us really know Scripture? In this age of, let’s just pick one thing, memes that distort Biblical information to manipulate people into thinking one position on something is obviously right – both progressive and conservative meme makers are equally guilty of this -- how many of us at Emmanuel know Scripture well enough that as soon as we see the meme our social media friend shared we think – wait, that’s not how the Bible works at all. That’s really misleading. To be equipped in that way, you simply have to read it. No, Scripture isn’t all equally easy to understand, but there’s lots of help available, not least reading with your fellow Emmanuelites. How many times a week do you open the book, or the app?
 
Again, I am glad we have grown a bit in this, but I long for the day when I hear the words of Scripture woven spontaneously through our chats at coffee hour, in our vestry meetings, when someone drops by the office, because enough of us have, in the words of the Prayer Book, read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested it. What a change that would make in our life as a church.
 
So there’s one thing: knowing Scripture well enough that it, not our own ideas or the assumptions of our culture, is our deep reference point. But here’s a second thing to notice -- what groups this mission is particularly directed to. The poor, Jesus says, the captive, the oppressed. Now we in the West have a bad habit of immediately spiritualizing passages like that, to make them purely metaphorical. I don’t think that’s wrong, exactly – there are many people with very meager spiritual resources, people who are bound in emotional captivity, people wounded by family dysfunction, and Jesus absolutely comes to minister to those, and because he works through us, so do we.
 
But the main reference of the passage is not any of those things. When Jesus showed up, he started healing people and casting out demons and challenging social norms that defined who was less important than others. He didn’t pat suffering people on the head and say something soothing, and he didn’t give charitable donations and walk away either; he directly confronted the power of evil on multiple fronts at the same time.
 
If you’ve ever spent any time in a situation where you have genuinely gotten to know fellow human beings who are beaten down by some aspect of the power of evil in this world, robbed of fullness of life because of their background or the continent on which they were born or their race or anything else, you know that they don’t struggle with taking what Jesus says here seriously, because words like these answer their day to day problems. I saw this when Mark and I did mission work in Africa in 2005, although you certainly don’t have to go nearly that far to witness what I’m talking about.  The poor? Yes, they’d say, we have poor. Captives? We’ve got that. Blind people or people with other chronic conditions who have no realistic access to health care? We’ve got it. Oppressed? We’ve got that. Thank God Jesus has come to deal with it. Thank God that’s his mission statement. The people who first heard Jesus’ words were not in a situation, and most of the people who hear them today are not in a situation, where they could afford to take them in only a spiritual sense – as true as that half of the meaning is -- and dismiss the literal sense.  
 
See at our best, the church doesn’t choose between the literal and the spiritual meanings of Jesus’ mission statement.  We do both, or more accurately we let him keep doing both through us. It’s holistic good news. Emmanuel has done better, since partnering with empty tomb, at offering our people more ways to get their feet wet in that calling – and empty tomb does a good job at making sure both the spiritual and the physical aspects of God’s work are honored. It’s helped us take a few steps in letting Jesus express his love and undo the work of evil through us – and I’m glad about that -- but the path stretches out a long way in front of us. It’s a path that could end in something really powerful for you and for me, if more of us will take the time to get our hands dirty in service.  
 
So those are two things where I think we’ve made progress, and which could serve in the year ahead as significant fulcrums for growth and development in this particular outpost of the Body of Christ. Bible study, and hands-on outreach, to boil it down. Bible study, and hands-on outreach. I mean, I could stand up here and talk about how we had 160 households in the directory five years ago and we have 196 now. I could use the pulpit to say “another year ending significantly in the black!” I could also stand up here and moan about the increasingly irregular attendance on Sundays and try to make you feel guilty for it.
 
But if I did, I’d be falling into the trap of treating what’s important here as if we were like any other organization, as if numbers and money were markers of spiritual success and failure. If we are disciples of Jesus, who was crucified as a criminal and deserted by all his followers, surely we know better than that. Success in a parish is obedience to God’s will. How we discern his will for our choices and our priorities as a church is complex and requires many voices at the table and much prayer and consultation. But, without having to tie ourselves into knots, we do know for absolute certain that two things are his will: Bible study and hands-on outreach.

If you’re not yet personally involved in one of those, I hope 2019 is the time.
 
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, 
because he has anointed us to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent us 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."