Sunday, January 27, 2013

Sermon: What Sort of Good News?


Luke 4:14-21
What Sort of Good News?
James Sledge                                                                   January 27, 2013

How many of you watched the inauguration on Monday?  It was a great day for a lot of people, a celebration of the good news of Obama’s win and a second term.  Of course it’s not necessarily good news if you are a Republican or you disagree with Obama.
If you are from Seattle, the outcome of a football game a few weeks ago was very likely good news to you, but for a lot of people around here it was a bitter pill to swallow.
The term translated “good news” in the New Testament is the root of our word evangelism. But how many of you think of good things that need celebrating when you hear the terms evangelism or evangelical? For some Progressive Christians, the term evangelical is used almost as a slur. But why? Why would we react negatively to good news? Surely it is because of the particular content we have come to associate with evangelism.
What is the content of the good news, the gospel that followers of Jesus are called to share?  You would think that after all these centuries, this would be an easy question to answer, but there seem to be a lot of different answers. 
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Christian gospel sometimes becomes about escape.  “Good news! Even though the world’s a crummy place and you may experience suffering and difficulties, if you just believe the right things, you will get a ticket to heaven when you die.”  Some have labeled this a gospel of evacuation. Liberal Christianity usually rejects the harsher requirements of this gospel, deemphasizing or completely leaving out the need to believe the right things, but it often maintains the evacuation part.  “Good news! God loves you and you’ll go to heaven.”
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Imagine that you are a Syrian refugee in a tent camp in Turkey.  You have lost family members, you have left almost everything you own behind, and you are dealing with pouring rain and temperatures in the 30s.  At times it feels so hopeless that death seems preferable, and perhaps in that situation, the promise of evacuation to heaven might seem good news.
But as you languish in that refugee camp, as you wonder about the fate of friends and relatives still living in a war zone, as the death toll grows and grows and grows while the world sits back and watches, truly good news would be to hear of a change to this horrible situation.  Good news would be an end to the fighting, hope for stable government, the possibility of living in safety and peace.  That would be good news.
Or imagine that you are an eleven year old growing up in one of the roughest and poorest parts of the DC metro area.  Some of your friends are already involved in drugs and gangs.  Some have already been killed. Not many people in your neighborhood make it out.  They seem trapped in cycles of poverty and violence, and very few have any hope, any belief that there is a way out.  Perhaps in such a situation, where life feels hopeless and cheap and you’re intimately familiar with death at a young age, the promise of something better when you die, of evacuation, might sound like good news.
But as you live in a landscape bereft of hope, as you watch friends get swallowed up in those cycles of violence and poverty and drugs, truly good news would be to hear of a change in this awful situation. Good news would be individual and community and political will, commitment, and energy to transform things. That would be good news.
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In Luke’s gospel, the author takes the story of Jesus’ return to his hometown and moves it to the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  For the most part, Luke, along with Matthew, follows the timeline provided by Mark’s gospel, but Luke takes this story and relocates it.  And it’s not because he discovered Mark got the order wrong.  Rather, he is making a point about Jesus’ identity, an identity rooted in the content of the good news he proclaims.
In Luke, the first public words of Jesus are these words he chooses and reads from Isaiah.  "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 then Jesus adds, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
Luke insists on a very particular content to Jesus’ good news, and getting into heaven isn’t mentioned. It is peculiarly about the poor, the captive, and the downtrodden.  And it is about release from systems and patterns that have trapped people in poverty and oppression.
That’s what “the year of the Lord’s favor” is talking about.  It refers to something known as the year of Jubilee, a time when loans were forgiven and property was returned to the family that originally owned it.  The idea was that families whose ancestors had sold property to avert a financial crisis in the past would have it returned.  And the wealthy who had acquired and accumulated such property over the years would lose it, with no compensation.
Biblical scholars and historians doubt that this Jubilee mandated in the book of Leviticus was ever actually observed in ancient Israel. That’s hardly surprising. It would have benefited the poor and hurt the wealthy.  And we all know who has the political power to get things done their way, never mind what God’s law says.
But Jesus says that the opening of his ministry is about good news to the poor and restoration that the wealthy may not want.  He even goes so far as to say that this good news and restoration are fulfilled in him.  He embodies good news to the poor and God’s Jubilee.
Of course, when Jesus’ ministry is done, the poor are still poor, and no one has had their land or home returned to them. The powers-that-be get rid of Jesus, have him killed in much the same way the world still deals with those who get too carried away about good news for the poor, release to the captive and downtrodden, or God’s jubilee.  Just ask Oscar Romero or civil rights activists from the 1960s or Malala Yousafzai, that 15 year-old Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban because she insisted on going to school.
But the difference with Jesus is when they kill him, he doesn’t stay dead.  And his resurrection is about much more than a vague hope for life after death.  It is about God’s preferential care for the poor, the oppressed, the broken, and the downtrodden that will not die.  It is about God’s  new day breaking into the present despite all attempts to snuff it out.
Truth is, really believing that requires a lot more faith than believing a gospel of evacuation. To look around and see a world seemingly stuck in the same patterns that sent Jesus to a cross can make it difficult to trust that something new has arrived in Jesus that fundamentally alters reality.  But that is what the good news of the Jesus movement is all about. 
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NPR recently did a special series called “Losing Our Religion” which explored the rapidly changing religious landscape in America, including the dramatic growth of the “Nones,” those who check “none” when asked their religious affiliation. Although they may still have religious sensibilities, roughly one third of Americans under 30 identify themselves as “Nones.”  The reasons are many and complex, but a lot of them react to the word “church” the way some of us do to “evangelism.”  And not surprisingly, it’s about content.
For many young adults, “church” speaks of quaint rituals that provide meaning for older people, but feel empty to them. Or it is about fights over social issues such as gay marriage and abortion.  Many “Nones” believe in a God, pray occasionally, or dabble in spiritual practices, but the content of “church” contains little that sounds like good news to them.
I think that suggests that we in the church need to make sure our identity is rooted in the true content of the good news.  We need to find the core, the well that we go back to over and over again to discover and sustain our true identity as Jesus followers.  And that is what Luke is pointing us to in his gospel.  This particular good news with its particular content is what Jesus embodies and who he is. It is this particular good news that defines him, that pushes him forward in his ministry, and that sustains him even in the face of death for he knows that a new reality lives in him, one that cannot be extinguished.
And in Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts, he assures us that this new reality can live in us as well.  When the Spirit is given to Jesus followers, that new reality that cannot be extinguished in born in them, in us, and the church, the body of Christ lives and moves and ministers to a hurting and broken world. Now that is good news.

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