So far this Epiphany season I’ve been reflecting with you all about the ways we care for our connection with God. Our worship committee wanted to make this the focus during this stretch of winter after Christmas which can be particularly hard for many of us emotionally, when we may be more likely to become disconnected from what is most vital and life-giving. 

Two Sunday’s ago, we did a ritual around tending to the flame of the Christ-light in our lives, and talked about the urgent importance of protecting and nurturing the means we have of being in relationship with God. 

Last Sunday was the retelling of the story of Jesus’ baptism, and we did a handwashing ritual to practice our receiving the cleansing gift of God’s grace. 

I shared the early Christian image of the soul as being like a bronze mirror that naturally reflects the light of God’s love. The trouble with bronze mirrors is that they are susceptible to becoming corroded and covered in dust. The practices of our faith, you could say, are ways of receiving the cleansing waters of God’s grace and allowing them to clear off the crud and the muck that can accumulate over our souls and block them from being filled with the light of God’s love. 

Now, this all so far seems to emphasize personal spiritual and religious practices. This is very important to the well-being of our souls and our openness to loving and receiving love from God: caring for our prayer life and making it a priority, worshipping with others, sharing in a collective devotional life, studying scripture and other inspired perspectives, alone and in conversation with others, and our ongoing commitment to the regular practices of humility, self-examination, forgiveness, mercy, generosity, courage, integrity, and so on (the fruits of the spirit). This all seems to emphasize more personal practices. But, as we know at our church, the journey of our relationship with God by following the way of Jesus is not just personal and private. It is also about being called together into life a community of faith. But it also means being called out together to public ministry on behalf of the prophetic vision of a more just and peaceable world. 

Some people have tried to make Jesus out to be only interested in purely spiritual, “heavenly” matters. On the other hand, others have tried to make Jesus out to be only interested in political, public, “earthly” affairs. The truth is that he deliberately blurred it all together – “on earth as it is in heaven.”

This means that our commitment to caring for our life-giving, soul-saving relationship with God through the way of Jesus means a commitment to that relationship not only in the innermost secret places of our hearts but also in our lives as part of the communities and societies and species and ecosystems in which we belong. 

The question is still the same: how do we deepen in our love for God and our love from God? How do we tend and care for this relationship? But the question draws us into a wholistic scope that does include the well-being of the collective as well as the individual. 

In other words, God calls us to tend not only to how our individual souls are reflecting God’s love, but also to how our societies are. Now, this is immediately troubling because we know how corrupting power can be, and how groups can become violent or exploitative, petty and nasty. We know how utopian dreams can turn into dystopian nightmares. We know how idealists can become embittered and depressed when they get disillusioned. We know how realists can become cynical and hypocritical. Maybe it’s better to be aloof from all that? 

Yet, one of the core commitments of our faith is to keep the vision alive, the vision of what Dr. King called “The Beloved Community,” the possibility, the sacred possibility, born from our relationship with the Creator of the Universe, that human societies can indeed live in a more just and peaceable way. This takes persistent practice – it is a spiritual and religious practice, that forces us to engage with the often-messy realities of life-with-others in ways that are hopeful and humble and courageous.

This is part of what it means to be a Jesus-follower. Jesus consistently confronts us with the reality of the realm of heaven on earth, in a way that challenges us to grow in our commitment to a more just and peaceable life for allGod’s children. 

According to the book of Luke, after Jesus’ baptism and temptation in the wilderness, he returned to Galilee and began to teach. When he came to his hometown in Nazareth we hear his public declaration of his purpose in this. In the synagogue he spoke the words of the Prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Most High is upon me, 

            Because God has anointed me

            To proclaim good news to those who are poor.

            God has sent me to preach liberation to those who are captives

            And recovery of sight to those who are blind, 

            To liberate those who are oppressed,

            To proclaim the year of the Most High’s favor.”

Then Jesus told everyone there, “This is what I’m doing. This is what I’m fulfilling. This is what God has sent me to do.” 

And the people of his hometown turned to each other and said, “Wow, this is great! Look at our Jesus all grown up! He’s going to do great things for us! He’s doing us proud.”

But when Jesus heard this, he said, “Don’t misunderstand me, now. God has sent me to do this for other people, foreigners.”

The people of Nazareth did not take well to hearing this. They immediately became angry and tried to kill Jesus. 

Now, what’s going on here? 

Good news to the poor. Freedom for the captives. Liberation for the oppressed. 

Jesus seems to be declaring the Jubilee. 
The Jubilee – the year of God’s favor – is the restoring of social relations to a more just and equitable state, in harmony with the will of God. This is from the laws of Moses, the Jubilee laws. According to the laws of Moses, there were supposed to be small jubilees every seven years, and big jubilees every seven-by-seven or forty-nine years. In a jubilee, people who have been enslaved are freed; people who can’t pay back their debts are forgiven; land ownership is returned to its original owners. 

In Jesus’ time, the Romans had ratcheted up taxes on the occupied territories. This forced peasants to go into debt to pay. The people wealthy enough to give these loans demanded the peasants’ land in collateral. When the peasants couldn’t pay their debt, the creditors took their land and often times the peasants also became indentured to them as slaves. The landholdings of the wealthy grew, and the peasants became dispossessed. It’s a familiar situation in history. 

Just think of what a Jubilee would mean to them. 

And just think of what a Jubilee would mean in our society, with so many so desperately in debt, with enslavement still permitted for prisoners, and trafficking a terrible problem, with the history of dispossession and chattel slavery still raw. 

Now, the Jubilee is one of those things in the Bible that religious authorities, from the temple priests and Pharisees of Jesus’ time, to the biblical literalists of today, have all found clever ways of sidestepping. I mean, just imagine people had been taking Jubilee literally. 

The argument in this case goes that Jesus wasn’t explicitly calling for a literal Jubilee, but was using it in a spiritualized way, talking about how God forgives us and liberates us from the spiritual condition of sin, our alienation from God. And, yes, of course that was Jesus’ focus. But it’s very clear in the gospels that Jesus consistently confronted people with the ways that sin manifests in how we exploit other people and neglect their needs for our selfish ends. And he challenged people with God’s vision that it does not have to be this way – a more just and equitable and peaceable way is possible. 

Jesus in quoting Isaiah here is showing how he is in the great tradition of the Hebrew prophets, who used the unfulfilled promises of Jubilee to see deeply into the injustice of their times, and to call forward the prophetic hope that, with God, we can do better.

Jesus was not a politician. He did not advance policies or side with political parties. He refused the temptation to rule over the nations as an emperor. His purpose was much broader and deeper and freer than that. Yet at the same time, the ways Jesus manifested the realm of heaven on earth confront us with the challenge and hope of a more just and equitable and peaceable way of life for all, and calls us to work on behalf of that challenge and hope.

Our story from Luke from today ends with Jesus challenging his people to accept that God offers liberating grace to those who are far from them, even their enemies, that God cares for the poverty and oppression and blindness of the people we fear and hate, as well as the people we trust and like. This vision of the universality of God’s liberating love drew his people’s sin to the surface, and many in Jesus’ hometown rejected his vision, with violence. 

What does it mean for us to not reject it, but embrace it, as we embrace the life-changing activity of God’s grace in our lives, and to allow it to inspire us to engage with faithful and courageous work for just and equitable and peaceable world as one of the core practices of our faith in the loving God of all Creation?

For that God, and for that vision and hope and courage, I give thanks. 

            Thanks be to God. 

(Delivered Sunday, January 22, 2023 by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)