Our focus on being together can get in the way of making it happen–and doing the very thing we’re called to do.
And Proclaiming the Year of the Lord’s Favor
Epiphany 3C | Luke 4:14-21
Ninety-Six Weeks
Ninety-six weeks ago, we gathered for our first hybrid service. There were all of twenty people in the building and we ran a livestream on Facebook Live. It was crazy and messy and then we began a period of social distancing. And yes, I did the math. It was ninety-six weeks ago.
Most of us can remember that time: it was full of confusion and ignorance. There was so much we didn’t know.
And because we didn’t know precisely what we were looking at, we went with what we knew about related viruses and pandemics.
The funny thing about the “gift” of hindsight is that we manage to be hard on ourselves for wise hypotheses that weren’t true of this particular virus; and yet are likely to be true of a future one.
But as we reflect on the fifty-two weeks of 2021, there was an idea that dominated our thinking as much as the coronavirus.
How can we be together?
As much as we had learned how to be the church without being in the same room, let alone the same particular building, our attention was so often dominated by this desire to share the same space.
So here we are, learning how to be together in a variety of ways, creative ways, and ancient ways and yet something within us pulls us to not only take the notion of being together literally, but to reject the other ways of being.
We’re creating a cognitive dissonance. We believe something in our minds and believe something different in our hearts. And that is deeply uncomfortable.
So just as much as we’ve tried to figure out how to live through the pandemic, we’re trying to figure out faith through the pandemic.
But we are doing this by defining togetherness as inherently physical. We are treating this desire to be with others in such literal terms, we are treating our theology the way fundamentalists treat scripture. We’re taking it too literally!
So to get some more perspective let’s look back further than 2020. Nearly five hundred years earlier.
The Book of Common Prayer
As the Church of England was establishing itself, providing a renewed tradition to the people, Thomas Cranmer offered a radical transformation through technological revolution.
A people, who saw faith as housed in a building they went to regularly, were used to hearing the liturgy in a language they didn’t know with actions hidden behind ruud screens. Their faith was quite literally embodied by and within the priest. His physical form embodied their faith.
Cranmer took this locus of energy from the priest and the building alone and freed it for all of us to make anywhere with anyone.
And he placed in our hands the greatest piece of technology at the time: The Book of Common Prayer. He offered to the world at the moment that the people were becoming literate. The printing press began producing the Bible and Prayer Books. Suddenly the people had access to liturgy. And Cranmer offered them liturgies they could do at home. No priest. No church building. Just family.
This not only decentralized the faith, it destroyed the isolation of individuals who were separated from their faith because it was embodied in someone else!
Now, Cranmer wasn’t going full Protestant here. He wasn’t offering personal faith in a personal Jesus. But he gave us the tools to be the church anywhere.
Anyone who can read can lead.
And now, thanks to our own technological revolution, you don’t even need the book. A computer can give you access to liturgy at any time in any place. None of us needs to feel alone.
The beauty of our own history is that it shows us that it doesn’t have to be one or the other: all or nothing. Before the Prayer Book, people couldn’t do “real” church at home. Then they could. It opened up more possibilities at a time when the church thought the world was ending.
Did the Prayer Book suddenly make the church or priests obsolete? Obviously not. But you know they thought it would! You know thousands of people in England were saying, if it’s not chanted in Latin, back where I can’t see it and barely hear it, it doesn’t count! Ridiculous, right?
How much of what we worry about today will seem ridiculous in the future? My guess is a lot.
So what are we called to do now?
Isn’t that always the question of the moment? What are we called to do, now?
What we see in the gospel this week is the first half of a two-parter in which Jesus goes to his home synagogue and has an experience. But the part for us, as we reflect on the past year and engage with this year, may best be found in taking in what Jesus reads from Isaiah and then proclaims.
He reads the prophet’s words: about the spirit upon him, anointed to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Then he sits and says that this has been fulfilled in their hearing.
It is hard to avoid the idea that Jesus is embodying the words of Isaiah. That he is also full of the spirit and anointed to bring good news and proclaim release, sight, freedom, and God’s generosity. That these words are not ancient history—they are present and embodied. That he incarnates them.
We are called to incarnate them, too.
We are full of the spirit and anointed in baptism to bring the good news, right?
And we have thousands of years of history to draw on that shows that getting together with our neighbors is the best way to embody the Kin-dom. But within those thousands of years are hundreds of years in which that was impossible.
And the Spirit found a way anyway.
As much as people liked to call 2020 a “dumpster fire” and 2021 was “just as bad”, these were also the years of the Lord’s favor. Like this is the year of the Lord’s favor. Because we are blessed. Not with more money, power, or permanence. But with God’s love and trust.
We are entrusted to serve this community by making the kin-dom present here.
To share the blessing we’ve received. So we bless this community.
This is the year of the Lord’s favor. And we are called to be the way this community knows it. By sharing our love.
to…
bring good news to the poor.
proclaim release to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind,
let the oppressed go free,
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
And to believe Jesus when he says to us: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”