St. John’s Lutheran Church, Toluca, IL – 3rd Sunday after Epiphany
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21
Gospel
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 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,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s 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.”
NRSV
The Gospel of the Unprosperous
You heard the term count your blessings as a measure of how much favor you may have found with God. Blessings can be myriad: health, talents, resources, houses, early retirement, new car, big screen TV, so on and so forth. Good health insurance is a blessing. So is good education.
Yes, God wants us to do well, and God bless us with good things. So much is God’s desire for all his peoples to do well that once every 50 years – many laws go with it. You can go to Leviticus 25 if you’re curious. It’s fascinating – there was the year of the Jubilee or the year of God’s favor.
See, God had brought God’s people out of Egypt. God had provided the land from which they could gather their sustenance. But guess what? And God wants all his kids to do well. Listen to my commandments and my ordinances so things can be well for you in the land that you’re about to inherit (Deuteronomy 6). That was biblical. Wellness is not a modern thing.
However, the truth is some people prospered more than others. Either they were more skilled, or they had higher energy. Whatever it was, some people prospered while others fell behind to the point of either having to give up their land or be indebted to the ones who were more prosperous. Sometimes, they would have to become enslaved – that was not forced labor. It was like, okay, I will work for you for food and housing until I get back on my feet. Then you would be in bondage. One’s sustenance became dependent on the person who prospered more until the debt could be paid.
God was okay with people’s prospering, but God has no pleasure in anybody dying. God was not for the law of the jungle and natural human selection, the survival of the strongest, no. So every 50 years, pretty much once in a generation, in the year of the Lord’s favor, everybody had a clean slate. If I owe you anything, the debt is released. I don’t owe you anything anymore. I have the chance to start anew, to go back to my own land. If I have given my land to you to survive, that land returns to my household. That is because God has always been interested in the community’s prosperity and not the individual.
God wants us to do well. God gave us his Word, the law, the prophets, and Jesus so we could be well. And we have been blessed abundantly. But here’s the
trick. Being blessed individually is not the end of it. It’s the beginning. God does not want me to prosper, so I would do well. God wants us to prosper so we can do well. Pronouns matter. They matter so much that when Jesus taught us to pray, he didn’t tell us to ask for my daily bread.” No, God is consistent. Give us today our daily bread; mine, yours, and theirs. Pronouns matter. It is a communal prayer. It is not an individual prayer. It’s a prayer that asks for a community of beloved people of God to be well. Every single one of them.
Again, God is consistent through scripture; he tries to explain that to us in multiple ways. Every single one of them, from the least to the most blessed, according to our way of thinking, matters to God, and so Paul gives us the image of the body. No one is more important than the other. All parts matter to God, for the body of his Son Jesus Christ cannot function properly and reach its full purpose without any of us. Everybody is needed for the body to be complete, including the least privileged.
God is consistent. It’s all over the scripture. That is what God wishes for us. Old, New Testament, through the teachings of Jesus, any blessing – financial, talents, time, energy, youth, faith, spiritual vitality and enthusiasm, freedom – all come from God. We know it. We learned it since Sunday School. All these, we say, are blessings from God. So when you have an abundance of those, what do we do? Considering that keeping it for ourselves and making sure that we have even more is not an option.
As disciples of Christ, since God has freed his people from the dominance of Egypt, our call as God’s children and as disciples for Christ is to sustain those who don’t have it until they are able to have some.
It’s absolutely okay to prosper. It’s absolutely okay to have joy in the prosperity that God has allowed for us. But God does not want us to prosper at the expense of the wellness, and more importantly, the dignity of others. That God doesn’t want to. It’s not a new invention of modern Christianity. It’s always been there, explained to us in multiple ways. So, we are sitting in our abundance of blessings. What do we do?
The Spirit of the Lord, it’s upon me; It’s upon you; It’s upon us. We have been blessed, and we have been anointed to bring good news to the poor. Jesus has
sent us to proclaim release to the captives and recovery to the sight of the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Everybody matters.
It’s always been God’s will for all his children to live well. It is okay to celebrate. But first, take it to those whom nothing has been prepared. Release the captives. Bring good news to the unprosperous. Amen.
Bridging Faith 