Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it so. The yoke is off your back. The impossible burden is forgiven.
And then Jesus sits down, because if you stand to give honor to the Scripture, then, in humility, you sit down to comment on it, because what you have to say about it is less important than the Scripture. That means I should be sitting. He sits down, and then he says something peculiar. He says that every word of Jubilee is fulfilled in this very moment in your hearing. As the sound waves hit their ears, Jubilee is fulfilled.
At this point, they are amazed, but not upset – yet. Imagine that in his announcement, Jubilee is upon us! What gracious and hopeful words. He comes near and so does Jubilee. The problem is what he says next.
He tells them, in effect, that in the same way that the prophets Elijah and Elisha went to everyone but the hometown crowd, so Jesus was going to move beyond them, too. Prophets aren’t honored – not really – in their own countries. You have to be from over 30-miles away and bring a PowerPoint presentation. It’s like the mayor brought out the key to the city and handed it to him, and he just gave it back and said, “I don’t need your key because I’ve got other work to do; give it to someone else.”
That just ticked them off. Imagine the gall of this young man! This is not the boy we remember. Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? That’s what happens when a good Ashland boy heads to Mizzou. He’s just corrupted. And then comes back thinking he’s somebody and insults his own people. His attitude is all screwed up. Who does he think that he is talking to us that way? We are his home people. He’s speaking to us like he is somebody!
Let’s suffice it to say that people didn’t come through the back door at the end of the service and say, “Good sermon, Reverend.” To the contrary, they tried to run him off the cliff. Try to use the WWJD maxim here: What would Jesus do? Well, it’s the sign of a really good sermon when they try to run you over the cliff at the end.
So that’s what Jesus got when he tried to go home. Everything had changed, especially him. And it was a portent of more to come.
You know, the Jubilee proclamation is a beautiful thing. No wonder they sounded the Shofar. There is healing, liberation, and release. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start over. But it’s not good news for everyone, not by a long shot. That’s because freedom for one means giving up control by another. Liberation for one group means loss of power for another. Healing for some means they are no longer easily exploitable. The empowerment of the disempowered spells trouble for those who need to keep people down. If the slaves are set free, then I, the slaveholder, lose my free labor and its resulting profit. If the debts are forgiven, then I, the mortgage holder, lose my interest. If the charge card interest rates are kept from obscene levels, then the holding company doesn’t make obscene profits. Jubilee isn’t always good news for everyone.
As opposed to human bailout schemes that are always self-interested and retrofitted to accommodate those who already have power, God’s Jubilee bailout plan is retrofitted to those least able to dig themselves out of the crushing load of debt. If the crushing Third-World debt is forgiven, and those debtor nations are then able to invest in their real economies, not their debt economies which benefit the First-World lender, what could they really do? What would come of Jubilee?
Jubilee is good news, and Jubilee is bad news all at the same time, depending on who you are. So it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that Jesus not only couldn’t go home, but his Jubilee mission statement was destined to get him in trouble from the very beginning. Some would try to kill him for it, because it threatened them and their way of life; it was just too radical. So when he broke bread with the wrong sort of people, questioned the powers and principalities of this world, including that of the religious establishment, told stories about prodigal sons who found their way home to forgiveness and people who built their homes on sinking sand, he placed himself on the edge of the cliff. And he stayed there until someone would push him over.
When the spirit-filled African-American woman Sojourner Truth preached, she caught even the attention of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. She advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. What a Jubilee announcement! Unless you were a slave owner or had a vested interest in keeping women in their place. Once when she spoke at a suffragist meeting in Ohio, she told the gathering that to deny women the privilege to vote or preach because Jesus was male was to ignore the fact that it was his humanity, not his gender, that made him the perfect revelation for the world. That’s good news, and that’s bad news, depending on who you are.
If we dare become Jubilee people, it often requires us to speak an unpopular word and stand in risky places. That’s why Jubilee work – in its many forms – requires great courage and compassion.
Have you ever heard about the Tojinbo Cliffs in Japan? They are located on the western coast of Japan, just north of Kyoto. In a country that has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, even higher than ours, those cliffs have become a destination of choice, a place to leap and end it. It is their Golden Gate Bridge.
There is a retired detective by the name of Yukio Shige who decided to do something about that. He decided that he would start patrolling the cliff area in search of those who are seeking their end. When he locates a person who shows some of the telltale signs, he approaches them, and smiles, and strikes up a casual conversation. He is a trained counselor, so in a short period of time, he gets to why they are really there and what they are up to. Often he will simply tell them, “You’ve had a terrible time until now, haven’t you.”
He’s patrolled these cliffs two or three times a day since 2004 and personally headed off more than 188 potential suicides (Time, June 22, 2009, p. 6). The problems that the people face are not all that uncommon – debt, unemployment, depression, mental illness, failing health – and most of all, the loss of hope.
He invites people to accompany him back to a little office nearby, and he offers them tea and, most interestingly, a special food that they eat together. The food is oroshi-mochi, a dish of sticky rice and grated radish that is the traditional food of a very symbolic day: The New Year. They eat the food of the New Year together, to remind them they are not alone, and that the old is gone. This is the food of starting over, of charting the new course, of reclaiming hope. This is Jubilee food.
When they asked him about his work of compassion he said, “I want these cliffs to become a place not where life ends, but where it begins.”
When Jesus said that the proclamation of Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing, he meant that there was no longer the need to wait every 50 years to proclaim release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and hope for the hopeless. Now Jubilee is every day. It appears at the edge of every cliff where your feet are standing.
I wonder what it would be like if we became a Jubilee Church? Wouldn’t we become a congregation that stands of the edge where life begins? We would be announcing liberation and inviting every soul to the Jubilee feast of bread and wine. Jubilee isn’t tomorrow. Jubilee is today. And it is fulfilled in our hearing.
Maybe we can go home after all.
Amen.
Benediction
Today is Jubilee. Now, go and be Jubilee people. Amen.
Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · January 24, 2010
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 19
The cosmos speaks of the glory of God.
Day to day the word is spoken,
and night to night more knowledge appears.
No speech is adequate, no voice able to tell the mystery of it all.
But the sacred song rings through the earth
and into the farthest reaches of space.
Let us pray:
Your presence fills our hearts with joy,
and your stillness sets peace on the land like a dove. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of life, God of beauty, God of creation; your light and glory are present throughout the earth. As we move through the new year, we ask you to journey with us. We praise you for your faithfulness.
In the midst of our planning, our wishing, our deciding, and our acting, we know that your Spirit moves among us. The traces of your grace abound. We know that when we hurt, when we hear news of war, news of disaster, and news of heartache, your heart breaks with ours. Your gentle touch surrounds us. When we rejoice, when we are strong, when we encounter the beauty of new life among us, you give us the faith and the courage to shout out in joy and to proclaim the good news of your story. For we know, O God, that you are the one whose pulse beats through us. You are the God of all of our becoming.
This morning, we pray especially for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We pray for the relief workers, the medical staff, the families devastated by loss, and the people of Haiti as they struggle to create a new normal.
We know, O God, you hear our prayers, and we pray that you will grant us the wisdom to know the ways in which we can reach out to others.
Here us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 4:14-30
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he 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 let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
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 not this 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 the prophet’s 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 lepers 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 they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Message
The Jubilee Boy
Tim Carson
As Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby red slippers, she chanted the mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …” As you and I know, her vast travels through dreamland led her to a new appreciation for what she had beneath her feet. But the other side of the story, the side that Frank Baum doesn’t talk about in the Wizard of Oz, is that you can never go home again.
In James Agee’s book, A Death in the Family, after the death of his father, he wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."
We all know that and know it on several levels. Don’t we?
Do you remember the first time you moved away from home in your young adulthood? Perhaps it was in making the trek to college and living away for the first time. Or going into the military service and traveling far away. Or serving with the Peace Corps. Or running off and getting married. Somehow, your new life took you away from family, roots, and the burying grounds of the familiar.
I remember one summer in college making the decision to move into an apartment with one of my college buddies. The independence was almost euphoric. But I also remember after that moving back home into my old room and the family ways. It actually felt very awkward to go back in under the roof again, under the authority of my family and the ways they did things. It wasn’t terrible. It was just awkward, because you just can’t go home. Once you have a taste of adulthood and that independence, once the lid is taken off that jar, once the Genie is out of the bottle, it’s exceedingly difficult to put it back in again. You just can’t go home again.
But it’s not only a matter of geography or the rules of the parental domain. What you can’t go back to is the way things were, and that’s one of the hardest things in life to negotiate, whatever your age. We can remember and reminisce, and it can be delightful or painful, but there are no repeat performances, no do-overs. Some of us get stuck in life trying to do just that, relive what was. That really never works.
The reason we can’t go home is that though things might look the same on the outside (the birdbath in the front yard, the mailbox by the road), they are not the same on the inside. We’ve changed. The people we love have changed. Our relationships have changed. And so we never return to a stagnant pond, but to a river that is ever moving. As they say, you never step into the same river twice. That’s as true for home as it is for church, or marriage, or education. Everything is moving, and so are we. One chapter closes and another opens.
Jim Coffman has a poem about that in his new collection of poems entitled, Gravel, Dust, and Dreams (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and I’ve asked him if I could share some of it. It is a wonderful poem about a trip he had back to his old home place of his childhood in Illinois. This is a portion of the poem as he drives up in a truck where the home place used to be.
Rounding the corner, now to the farm,
the stories are stilled
as they hold their collective breath.
no house, no corncrib,
no trees, no barn,
no stage for them on which to play.
Living yet are the stories,
only the stage is gone.
now, on that wet dirt
of my childhood,
standing soldier-like in row upon row,
the corn’s returned
to claim the land.
The stories, the memories survive, but the stage on which the drama is played out is gone, and we can never return.
In that primordial story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their dreaming innocence is shattered as they come of age through knowledge of and rebellion against the external rules of their paradise. The moment that they know who they are, become self-aware in their nakedness, they find themselves cast out of the innocence of childhood into the adult world of responsibility and struggle. And what is stationed at the entrance to this garden of their past? Two cherubim with flaming swords, blocking any kind of reentry. Once you leave the dance there is no going back in, even if your hand is stamped. There is no going back to what was, only forward to what will be.
And that’s the beginning of the problem with Jesus going back to his home town of Nazareth.
By the time he made it back home, the word was out about his remarkable teaching and healing. As a wandering, itinerant preacher and healer he made pit stops in small communities along the way, usually dropping into their synagogues. When he came back to his old hometown, Nazareth, it was on the Sabbath, and so he went to the synagogue to participate in worship, as that was his custom. That was one of his Eight Keys of Discipleship.
A word about Nazareth: You wouldn’t call it a town, certainly not a city. This was a little village with no public buildings. Maybe two-or-three-hundred people lived there, going out to work the fields during the day and sleeping there at night. There was no synagogue, as a building. They most likely met in a home or cluster of homes. And there were no Rabbis as we might think of them, just teachers or elders of the community. That’s the community to which he returned. That’s the Nazareth of his growing up.
So Jesus went to this gathering of the faithful called a synagogue that met in a home. And they offered the hometown boy the opportunity to both read and comment on the Scripture. Isn’t that nice? Back from school and he’s going to read Scripture in church. Aren’t we proud of him?
They hand him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he unrolls it to where he will read and then stands. You always stand to read the Scripture to give honor to it. And what he read was the portion of Isaiah that describes the celebration of Jubilee – that great forgiveness of debt and returning of the land that was mandated every seven weeks of years – on the 50th year. At that time debt was forgiven, land that was repossessed from families was returned, and indentured servants working off debt were released. What Jubilee accomplished was a collective reboot for the whole society. Everybody gets to start over again. And to mark the occasion, they blew the ram’s horn, the Shofar.
This reading from Isaiah, this Jubilee text, is chosen by Jesus as his very first public sermon. It’s his mission statement. This is what is whole ministry is going to be about.
The Spirit is upon him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the freedom to the oppressed, and the announcement that this is the year of God’s favor. It’s Jubilee. Everything is healed, and God is on the way to make it s
