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The Good News Written
From the wisdom of Abraham Heschel:
The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder and amazement. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder and amazement.
Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us.
It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which humanity’s answer is elicited.
Luke 4.14 – 21 (NRSV)
14Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee , and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. 15He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. 16When 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, 17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of [God] is upon me, [who] has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. [God] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of [divine] favor.” 20And 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. 21Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
The Good News Proclaimed
Preached by the Reverend Doctor Mona West at the Sunshine Cathedral on Sunday, January 24, 2010.
In 2004 the United Church of Christ launched a marketing campaign called “God is Still Speaking”. The purpose of the campaign was to increase membership in churches and increase united Church of Christ name recognition by sending a clear message that God (and the UCC) is in the business of welcoming all people. A primary target of this campaign is the LGBT community.
The heart of the beginning of this campaign was a series of provocative television commercials that got this message of radical inclusivity across. Many of you may have seen the first one to air called “The Bouncer”. The ad showed bouncers — much like the ones you would find in nightclubs — outside a church building. They were allowing white, well-dressed different gender couples, and nuclear families in, but they were “bouncing” or rejecting a number of other people: an African American female, A Latino male, two men holding hands and a person using a wheelchair. The text displayed on the screen read, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”
The idea for the campaign came from a quote by Gracie Allen: “Never put a period where God has placed a comma.” One denominational leader said that the UCC wanted to build on the concept of earlier theologians that there is “more light and more truth yet to come from God’s Holy Word.”
Never put a period where God has placed a comma. I like that. But you know, it is not so much the period that I am worried about. What concerns me is the way certain religious groups want to determine what God ought to say! “God is still speaking and oh by the way we are going to tell you what God is saying.”
Jesus had a “God is still speaking” moment in our gospel lesson for today. He had already heard God speak to him at his baptism, “this is my beloved in whom I am well pleased.” Then he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days and for forty nights to explore more deeply what it meant to be God’s beloved. He was tempted in that wilderness to doubt that he was beloved. With each temptation Jesus heard, “if you are the beloved…”
In the story we heard from the gospel of Luke, Jesus is back in his hometown Nazareth, fresh from the wilderness. When the Sabbath came he attended the synagogue he grew up in. It was Jesus’ turn to read the assigned text for the day which was a passage from the scroll of Isaiah. “The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God 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 Divine favor.”
When Jesus read those words his heart was pricked. The Holy Spirit quickened his spirit. He had a response. He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. I can imagine he was sort of stunned. You know, like when you have just had an amazing aha moment and you just have to take a breath for it to sink in. So he is sitting there. Blinking. Maybe sort of shaking and nodding his head at the same time. Then he feels the eyes of everyone in the synagogue fixed on him. And he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
God was still speaking! And Jesus heard in those words from the prophet Isaiah, someone who had lived four or five hundred years before him, a clear articulation of how he would live and act as God’s beloved.
Brothers and Sisters, God is still speaking! God is still speaking, saying to each of us “you are my beloved in whom I am well pleased.” But often we are tempted to doubt when we hear other voices that say “you are not good enough, not thin enough, not rich enough, not young enough, buff enough, successful enough… to be beloved.”
There is an old Quaker saying, “let your life speak”. When writer and activist Parker Palmer encountered that saying he realized it meant listening to the truths and values at the heart of our own identity, not the standards by which society tells us to live. Let your life speak doesn’t even mean listening to the standards of other people’s lives we admire and trying to emulate them, it means listening deeply — sometimes through a wilderness journey — to our own divine nature, our true self, the beloved within.
God is still speaking. And that speaking and our listening manifests in what we say and what we do. When we live from the place of our belovedness, we bring good news to the poor and those displaced by earthquakes and hurricanes, we proclaim release to those who are held captive by addictions, we recover sight to those who have been blinded by greed and prejudice, we work to break the chains of oppression.
Where are those places and situations that you will be able to say to those whose eyes are fixed on you, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”? When we live from the place of our belovedness, God speaks in us and through us—we embody the Divine.
Once there was a rabbi named Zusya who loved God with all his heart and soul, and who treated all God’s creatures with respect and kindness. Rabbi Zusya studied Torah, kept Shabbat, visited the sick, and praised God for all the goodness in the world. Though he was not a rich man, Zusya gave generously to those in need. Students came from far and near, hoping to learn from this gentle and wise rabbi. Zusya often told his students, “Listen to the still, small voice inside you. Your neshamah will tell you how you must live and what you must do.”
Each day Rabbi Zusya”s students came to the House of Study, called the Bet Midrash, eager to learn what they could from him. One day, Zusya did not appear at the usual hour. His students waited all morning and through the afternoon. But Zusya did not come. By evening his students realized that something terrible must have happened. So they all rushed to Zusya’s house. The students knocked on the door. No one answered. They knocked more loudly and peered through the frost-covered windows. Finally, they heard a weak voice say, “Shalom aleichem, peace be with you. Come in.” The students entered Rabbi Zusya’s house. In the far corner of the room they saw the old rabbi lying huddled in bed, too ill to get up and greet them.
“Rabbi Zusya!” his students cried. “What has happened? How can we help you?”
“There is nothing you can do,” answered Zusya. “I’m dying and I am very frightened.”
“Why are you afraid?” the youngest student asked. “Didn’t you teach us that all living things die?”
“Of course, every living thing must die some day,” said the Rabbi. The young student tried to comfort Rabbi Zusya saying, “Then why are you afraid? You have led such a good life. You have believed in God with a faith as strong as Abraham’s. and you have followed the commandments as carefully as Moses.”
“Thank you. But this is not why I am afraid,” explained the rabbi. “For if God should ask me why I did not act like Abraham, I can say that I was not Abraham. And if God asks me why I did not act like Rebecca or Moses, I can also say that I was not Moses.” Then the rabbi said, “But if God should ask me to account for the times when I did not act like Zusya, what shall I say then?”
The students were silent, for they understood Zusya’s final lesson. To do your best is to be yourself, to hear and follow the still, small voice of your own neshamah.
Audio reading and sermon (http://sunshinecathedral.org/sermons/audio/20100124_1.mp3)
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March 2nd, 2010 - 5:27 pm
We are student to learn!
We are not afraid, hearing the Love of God!
Thank you for our Blessed today !
We believed in God, some strong as Abraham is a believer.
To do your best is to be our self.
We are Family!
Daddy Steve and his two Son Martin and Tom