Luke 4:14-21
Saving Addicts
James Sledge January
24, 2016
Had
it not snowed, we would have welcomed members of the Institute of Islamic and
Turkish Studies, or IITS, and the imam of its mosque to our church this Sunday.
During the Sunday School hour, they were going to teach about the central
tenets of Islam. That got me to wondering what we would say if we visited IITS
and taught them about the central tenets of our faith.
What
would you say constitutes the core of Christian faith? That’s a crucial question,
yet there are many competing answers, quite a few of them incompatible. One
benign and inoffensive answer makes faith a simple matter of believing in Jesus
and being good little boys and girls. A less benign version adds that if you
don’t believe you are going to hell.
In
individualistic America, many answers speak of personal fulfillment. Sometimes
this is understood as a ticket to heaven, other times as a sense of spiritual
fulfillment or well-being, and others as success or financial gain.
Some
answers suggest that being Christian is mostly about being kind and loving. At
the very same time, some prominent Christian voices engage in hate-filled
speech rooted in their understanding of faith. All these answers cannot be
true. So what are we to do?
Unfortunately,
the typical answer is to imagine a Christian faith and life that is perfectly
compatible with my particular political, social, economic, and cultural norms.
Seems like a more helpful approach might be to ask Jesus, and fortunately for
us, Luke’s gospel provides an answer of sorts.
Luke
does something very interesting. He takes the story that Matthew and Mark
report much later in their gospels and places it as the very first event in
Jesus’ public ministry. Luke isn’t correcting a chronological error in those
other gospels. Rather, he uses this event to help us understand and interpret
everything that follows. Luke lets Jesus tells us, before he ever begins, what his
ministry is all about.
Jesus
says that he has been anointed – that’s
what it means to be a Messiah – “to bring good news to the poor… 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."
Jesus chooses these words from the prophet Isaiah, reads them, and then says,
“This is here, now, in me.”
At
this point in the story, all seems to be going well. The home folks are
impressed. But it doesn’t last. Just a few verse later they are ready to kill Jesus.
The crowd gets worked up because Jesus points out that God’s favor doesn’t
necessarily start with them, or even with Jews. But while Jesus does upset them
with talk of God’s favor to Gentiles, surely the year of the Lord’s favor
is enough of a problem all by itself.
This
refers to the Old Testament Jubilee year, a requirement that every 50 years all
financial debts be forgiven, slaves be freed, and land be returned to its
original owners. There’s little evidence that these Jubilee years actually
happened. Like other biblical commands – Love your neighbor as yourself; Follow
Jesus even at the risk of your own well-being; Love your enemy; Show
hospitality to the stranger or alien – Jubilee is one of those commands that’s
fine to say but a real problem to do. Forgive all debts? That would cripple the
economy, not to mention my investment portfolio. Return the land to its
original owners? Same problem. At least we don’t have any slaves we need to
free, unless you count all those sweatshop workers making our clothes and
electronics.
The
fact is that almost all of us want to turn Christian faith into something it
isn’t because what Jesus says it is scares us. I’m all for helping the poor,
but only once I’ve gotten everything well situated for myself. I would love
people’s debts to be forgiven, but not if it costs me very much. It would be
great if the oppressed were set free, but what happens then? Are they going to
come to America or claim their fair share of the world’s resources?
It’s great that God wants to do good
things for people, but let’s not get too radical. I don’t know why Jesus has to
be such a pain about this. No wonder the folks in Nazareth tried to throw him
off a cliff. He went on and on about how God’s wonderful promises were for
Gentiles and foreigners. He said it right there in his hometown. Sometimes I
wonder how Jesus managed to stay alive long enough to get to Jerusalem and the
cross.
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When
Jesus publicly states what his being the Messiah is all about, a lot of the
good news seems to be mostly for people not
like me: the poor, the oppressed, the blind and others who are vulnerable,
those under crushing debt, those who’ve lost the family farm. But Jesus may
also have some good news for me and you. He says that God has anointed him “to proclaim
release to the captives.” Now maybe he’s just talking about setting actual
prisoners free, but there are other sorts of captivity.
What
holds you captive? Certainly our country, and most of us to some degree, are
still captive to racism. Even the most progressive among us still deal with our
society’s inherent inequalities and privilege as well as our participation in
them.
But
I suspect it is consumerism that has the tightest grip on most of us. We have
totally bought into the lie that our lives are better the more we have. Some of
us are more captive and some of us less, but most all of us are participants in
our culture of acquisition. And that participation inevitably leads to a
competition with winners and losers, haves and have-nots, rich and poor, first
world and third world.
America has less than five percent of
the world’s population, yet we consume roughly a quarter of the world’s oil,
coal, natural gas, and aluminum. At least we use only nineteen percent of the
copper. The average US home built in 2002 was more than a third larger than
that built in 1975, a trend that casual observation suggests is continuing. According
to one expert, “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as
much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born
in Brazil.”[1]
And our insatiable consumer appetite contributes to growing income disparity.
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When
Jesus announces the focus of his ministry that day in Nazareth, most of his
good news seems addressed to those who are hurt by our consumer appetites, the
poor and oppressed like those sweatshop workers, those with crippling debt and those
who’ve lost their land to the greed of others, those who are weak and
vulnerable. But Jesus does also promise release to the captives, and oh how we
are captive. We’re like alcoholics or drug addicts when it comes to our stuff
and the need for more and more.
If
you’ve ever known or worked with addicts, you’re likely aware that they do not
always think it good news that there are treatments to help them stop drinking
or using. Some addicts enjoy their addiction too much to want to be helped or
healed. And I think a lot of us Christians in America feel this way about our
consumerist addiction to more. We’re fine with Jesus getting us into heaven,
telling us God loves us, or making us feel better spiritually. But we don’t
want him telling us that we have a problem and we need to change.
Jesus
insists that the call to follow him is good news, but he also insists that it
is good news that begins with repentance, with change. Jesus wants to show us
what it looks like truly to live, to be fully human. Most of us would prefer
that Jesus say we are fine just like we are, but Jesus loves us too much for
that. Jesus loves us just as we are, but he also longs for us to be what we
could be, what we should be. He wants to “save” us, in the biblical sense where
“save” and “salvation” are less about getting into heaven and more about
healing and fixing what’s wrong with us.
Jesus
longs to save us, and for addicts, including the consumer variety, getting
saved starts with realizing that some of the things we want the most are the
very things that are killing us, as well as injuring our neighbors.
Save
us, Lord Jesus. Save us.
[1]
Dave Tilford, quoted in “Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S.
Consumption on the Environment” Scientific
American, September 14, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits/
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