[A sermon preached at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Lindsay, Ontario on January 19, 2025. The text was Luke 4.16-30.]
Did anyone notice what piece of music Paul played for us as the prelude this morning?
It was Oscar Peterson’s “Hymn to Freedom,”
and I asked Paul to play that magnificent jazz hymn
in honour of Martin Luther King Jr.
You see, last Wednesday would have been Dr. King’s 86th birthday,
and tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day in the United States.
That’s why we opened our worship with “Amazing Grace”
and why we just sang “Precious Lord.”
Both were favourite hymns of Dr. King.
And that is why our hymn of response this morning
will be the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”
You see there is something almost tragically ironic
about January 20 this year.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president
of the United States on Martin Luther King Day,
we will see Dr. King’s dream become a nightmare.
And that got me to thinking about another inauguration,
another occasion where someone gave an inauguration speech,
another time when someone sketched out their vision
for a kingdom, a rule, a social, economic, and political transformation.
It happened in Nazareth, and the story goes like this:
_____________
When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“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 set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them,
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’”
And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”
When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.They 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.
But he passed through the midst of them
and went on his way.
____________
A rather auspicious beginning to a ministry.
Jesus preaches to the home town crowd,
gets fantastic approval ratings
and then picks a fight so that his old neighbours
move from amazed appreciation
to murderous rage.
Notice that Jesus read from the scroll
of the prophet Isaiah.
And notice that he looked for this particular text.
It was almost predictable that Jesus
would reach for Isaiah 61.
If you want to get to the heart of things quick,
then this is the text.
If you want to find a word that will speak radical hope
into a context of injustice,
then Jesus quoting Isaiah was the place to turn.
So what happens if we bring this story
forward to today, plus one.
What happens if we bring this story
forward to tomorrow,
to another inauguration?
I know this is crazy,
and I know that this won’t happen,
but what would happen if something
like this story from Nazareth|
was brought forward to Washington, D.C.
on Inauguration Day,
on Martin Luther King day?
Now first we need to note that
while there will be Bibles
involved in the ceremony tomorrow at noon,
– there might even be a couple
of Inauguration Day editions
of the “God Bless America” Bible on hand –
there is no prescribed reading of the Bible
at an Inauguration ceremony.
No, the Bible is used as something
of a talisman for taking an oath,
not as a text that might say something
about the responsibilities of the president,
or the character of the president,
or the foundational values of the nation.
But while there is no Bible reading at the ceremony,
it has been known to happen that a minister
who has been asked to pray at the event,
smuggles in an unscripted Bible quotation
while he has the podium.
Franklin Graham did this at Donald Trump’s
first inauguration in 2017.
Now, again, I know that this isn’t going to happen,
but what would it be like if one of the ministers tomorrow,
sneaks in Jesus’s reading of Isaiah 61??
Heck, I’ll even get specific.
I’m imagining Pastor Lorenzo Sewell
from 180 Church in Detroit doing something like this.
You see, Pastor Sewell hosted Donald Trump
in his church last June 15.
He also preached a heck of a sermon
endorsing Trump at the Republican convention.
And Pastor Sewell will be praying the benediction
at tomorrow’s ceremony.
Now, Pastor Sewell, as an African American preacher,
is fully aware that tomorrow is Martin Luther King day.
In fact, just the other day this Detroit pastor said,
“Jesus wants me to do something on Monday.”
“Those who are voiceless will get a voice,
… so that Dr. King’s dream will be fulfilled.”
Pastor Sewell will pray that freedom
will reign in the United States,
and that there will be love
for “those who are marginalized,
disenfranchised and pushed aside.”
Well, what would happen if he actually did that tomorrow?
What happens if we can imagine an eye-witness account
of Pastor Sewell making good on his word?
Might we be able to imagine someone
who is at the Inauguration
telling us this story on Monday afternoon?
That eye-witness account might go something like this:
____________
As Pastor Sewell made his way to the front
I noticed that he had a Bible in his hand.
And as he reached the podium,
he turned, smiling to the newly inaugurated President, and said,
“Mr President, I feel compelled by the Spirit to read
this scripture for you, and for the nation.
You see, this is the Scripture that Jesus read
on his inauguration day.”
“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 set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Pastor Sewell knew how to read Scripture
and there was a poignant quiet in the room.
Everyone in the room also knew
that Pastor Sewell could preach,
and some of us got to thinking that
an unscripted sermon was about to come.
But he just stood there, looking at the audience,
holding them in the tension of the moment,
and then he said in a clear and confident voice,
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
And you know, as he said those words,
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”,
he totally captured the room.
This text and the pastor’s pronouncement
wasn’t part of the program,
it was totally unscripted.
And yet, it wasn’t unwelcome.
Almost immediately were mumbling their approval,
turning to their neighbours and commenting
on how wonderful that was,
how full of grace.
A few people started saying, “amen,”
one of the Supreme Court justices
was heard to say, “that’s right,”
and even the president was smiling and nodding his head.
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
Today, our dreams of American greatness are fulfilled.
Today, America is once again a city set on a hill.
Today, the God who spared President Trump
from an assassin’s bullet,
has installed him as God’s servant ruling America.
Today, the cleansing of America begins.
Today, we take back our nation.
Today, is the day of the Lord’s favour.
Yes, folks were feeling pretty good for a second there
after Pastor Sewell’s proclamation.
I confess that I was a little uneasy.
You see I knew what happened in the rest of the story.
I knew how Jesus turned it all on its head.
And I knew that Jesus
had cut his quotation of Isaiah 61 short.
You see, after Isaiah proclaims
the year of the Lord’s favour,
the next line is,
“and the day of vengeance of our God.”
Jesus dropped that bit,
just as Dr. King would have rejected such vengeance.
And I was wondering what Pastor Sewell
might have made of that.
I mean, the President that he
so enthusiastically had endorsed,
the President that Pastor Sewell
believed was God’s own choice,
had talked a lot about vengeance
and retribution on the campaign trail.
But then something happened.
Pastor Sewell usually loved it when
folks said “amen” to his sermons.
Pastor Sewell’s smile always got wider
when folks responded enthusiastically to his preaching.
But he seemed a little uncomfortable with it all,
uneasy at the positive reception to his word.
So, as Pastor Sewell was making his way back to his seat,
he stopped, and, he looked at all the smiling,
self-congratulatory faces out in the crowd,
– some of whom were even weeping with joy –
and he walked right back to the microphone and said,
You know that this is Martin Luther King Day,
don’t you?
You know that Dr King proclaimed
good news to the poor,
not tax cuts for billionaires, don’t you?
You know that he proclaimed
release to captives,
not arrest and deportation
of the most vulnerable, don’t you?
You know that he opened the eyes of the blind,
including those blinded
by their own wealth and greed, don’t you?
You know that he called
for the liberation of the oppressed,
not the enrichment of their oppressors, don’t you?
You know that his kingdom was
for the brokenhearted meek,
not for the self-secure and arrogant, don’t you?
You know that he proclaimed
the year of the Lord’s favour,
the year of Jubilee,
the year in which freedom will reign,
not an oligarchy of vengeance and retribution, don’t you?
Things were getting tense.
But there was something about the power of this man’s words,
that kind of paralyzed everyone.
So he went on and said,
Let’s be clear about something, Mr. President.
In the Jubilee of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the powerful will be brought down from their thrones,
the tech bros will all go bankrupt,
the government will devolve into chaos,
the economy of greed will collapse,
and the heresy of white Christian nationalism
will overthrown …
while the lowly will be lifted up,
the hungry will be fed,
the immigrants and refugees will be welcomed,
the economy will be redirected to the least of these,
and the racist gates of hell
will not prevail against the church of Jesus Christ!
At this point things moved very quickly.
The Secret Service created
a protective ring around the President,
and converged on Pastor Sewell
with their weapons drawn.
But then something remarkable happened.
Pastor Sewell began to walk away from the podium.
And as he did so, all of the security officers got out of the way.
He walked to where his wife was sitting, took her hand,
and walked right out of the door.
_________
My friends something like that happened in Nazareth
two thousand years ago.
Jesus read from Isaiah 61 at his inauguration.
Jesus proclaimed that the vision of Isaiah 61
was fulfilled on that day.
Jesus dropped any reference to vengeance.
And it was all so well-received.
But it was too well received.
So Jesus picked a fight with the hometown crowd.
They had heard his reading and his wonderful
one-sentence sermon
as fulfilling all of their own
nationalistic visions of exceptionalism.
In their imaginations they thought …
“Surely, we are the poor, held captive
under the imperial rule of Rome.”
“Surely, we are the oppressed,
under the boots of an occupying regime.”
“Surely, this local Messiah will bring about
the year of Jubilee,
the year of our restoration, our liberation.”
“And … while Jesus might have cut the Isaiah reading short,
surely Israel will be made great again,
through God’s vengeance on our enemies,
and their expulsion from our land.”
So, recognizing that his hometown neighbours don’t get it,
and that they have found a way
to appropriate his radical words
to their own nationalistic ideology,
Jesus went on the offensive and picked a fight with the crowd.
You see, these two stories …
about Elijah saving the life of a Sidonite widow
while Israelite widows were dying in the famine;
and Elisha healing the leprosy of Namaan,
a Syrian military terrorist
who had taken Israelite children as slaves,
while all kinds of lepers in Israel
remained in their disease,
… were not exactly the favourite bedtime stories
of the folks in Nazareth.
Jesus was not going to allow
the radical good news of his kingdom,
to be co-opted
by the self-enclosed ideology of his neighbours
any more than we can allow that good news to be
taken captive by the violent idolatries of our own time.
Today, Jesus said, is the day of Jubilee.
Today is the day of good news for the poor.
Today is the day of release for captives.
Today is the day of sight to the blind.
Today is the day of liberation for the oppressed.
Writing from a prison in Birmingham
two thousand years later,
Martin Luther King Jr. called
the African American
community
“to reject the tranquilizing
drug of gradualism”
and in the name of
“divine dissatisfaction”
with injustice, demand change now.
Dr. King came by that kind spirituality from Jesus.
Jesus also rejects the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,
and out of a radical divine dissatisfaction with injustice
proclaimed that “Today” this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
Sisters and brothers,
we need to be animated by that kind of
dissatisfaction with injustice.
Siblings in Christ,
tomorrow is Inauguration Day,
but more importantly,
tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day.
The question before us today,
and the question that is always before us is,
whose inauguration is the one that matters, and
whose kingdom will we serve?
And if we decide that it is the inauguration of Jesus
that will animate our lives,
if we decide that it is his Kingdom
that will set our vision of life,
then we just might find ourselves
needing to sing an old song
in the years to come.
We just might need to dust off
that old civil rights anthem,
to give us a voice, to give us courage,
to give us hope, in the days to come.
We just might need to sing,
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome, someday
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome, someday
And we can be assured that we will overcome
because in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu,
Goodness is stronger than evil;
Love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness;
Life is stronger than death;
Victory is ours through Him who loves us.
Can I get an amen?
