"Life Verse"
January 21, 2007: 3rd Sunday After Epiphany, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org
Scripture:
Luke 4:14-21
(Introduction:) Our reading this morning comes from the Gospel According to Luke, chapter 4, verses 14 through 21. Just as last week, we heard about John's vision of the inauguration of Jesus' ministry at the wedding feast at Cana, so this week we hear from Luke, who sets the first scene of Jesus' ministry in his hometown synagogue at Nazareth. Listen now for a word from God from Luke, chapter 4:
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 the Lord 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 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."
"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."
Sermon:
In Texas, where I grew up, everyone is Southern Baptist. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, it doesn't matter—everyone is Baptist, even the Catholics. In Texas, Seventh Day Adventists are Baptists, only on Saturday, and Church of Christers are, too, just without the musical instruments. If you're an agnostic in Texas, it's a Baptist God you're not sure about, and if you're an atheist, it's a Baptist God you don't believe in. It's been said that if all the Baptists just in Texas were to secede from the Southern Baptist Convention, they would form the nation's eighth largest denomination all on their own. So, you see, it's just not possible to escape the enormous influence they exert on the culture down there. It's like gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics: "The Baptist-ness of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum Baptist-ness at equilibrium."
So even though I grew up attending a Presbyterian church with my family and going to daily chapel services at my Episcopal school, I still managed to acquire a passing acquaintance with Southern Baptist belief and practice, through a process I've come to think of as Baptismosis. And I don't mind telling you that some of what I learned frightened me—well, if I'm honest, frightened and ascinated. To this kid from his staid, "frozen chosen" Presbyterian background, the rumors I heard made Baptist worship sound raucous, wild, and magical. All that clapping and shouting and singing along with a real live Gospel choir and a band, and everyone swimming around in a special pool they had built-in right there in the church! Who wouldn't give up dancing for all that?
It was like my Baptist friends were part of some cool club. My family went to church only once a week, maybe twice for a potluck, but they were at the clubhouse constantly: Sunday morning, afternoon, and evening... Wednesday nights... for scout meetings, basketball games, and Bible camp during the summer. They swapped scores on their latest sword drills like baseball batting averages. And they had their own lingo. They talked about "being saved" and having a relationship with Jesus as their "personal Lord and savior" and "winning souls for Christ," all utterly foreign concepts in what I increasingly came to think of as my impoverished Presbyterian experience.
I don't know how old I was when someone first told me about their "life verse." For those of you not familiar with the concept, as I wasn't, a life verse is a single verse from the Bible a person picks to be their personal motto, their "words to live by" throughout their life of faith. It's the first place they look for direction when life gets confusing, the one verse they come back to again and again for comfort when times get hard. Some perennial favorites include Philippians 4:13, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," or Romans 8:28, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God," or 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you."
Now, in the proud Presbyterian circles in which my family moved—the kind of folks who, like The Rev. Maclean in A River Runs Through It, might half-joking refer to Methodists as "Baptists who could read"—the idea of having a single life verse was poo-pooed as simplistic and reductionist, as bad as proof-texting. After all, scripture can't be taken apart piecemeal. You can't pick just one verse out of thousands. The Bible is a rich tapestry of spiritually inspired Word of God woven on tangled loom of complex historical, sociological, and literary context and all written down long ago, of course, in long-dead languages we'll never really understand by and for long-dead people we'll never know.
At least that's the sort of answer I used to get when I would ask my confirmation teachers and youth leaders about such things. Now, after some years in seminary and some more years in ministry, I can say that, as with so many other spiritual dilemmas, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, somewhere in between Bible as bumper sticker on the one hand, and Bible as doctoral dissertation on the other. And, as usual, it is useful for us to look to the image of Jesus for help in discerning our way forward. After all, we gather here still this morning as spiritual descendents of Jesus, whose exact nature remains a subject of healthy debate among faithful persons, but whom we all recognize as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), the one in whom "there is no longer Jew or Greek,... slave or free," Baptist or Presbyterian or United Church of Christ, for that matter, to paraphrase the author of the letter to the Galatians (3:28). That's right, folks, I'm going to ask The Question: What would Jesus do?
Or rather, what did Jesus do? Well, of course, Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar and the rest of the rationalists are right, on that point: we can never know completely, know for sure. Jesus lived two thousand years, and his memory has been edited and embroidered by all the generations between then and now, all with their own biases and blind spots, they're own contextual axes to grind. But that doesn't mean there's nothing we can know. It's clear that the first generations of Jesus' followers, those who compiled what we know as the New Testament, came to understand their experience of Jesus through the lens of Hebrew Scripture, through the images of the suffering servant in Isaiah (Isaiah 53) and the good shepherd in Jeremiah (ch.23) and the messianic Son of Man from Daniel (7:13-14), among others.
Jesus himself seems to have pursued his own ministry within a matrix of Jewish religious tradition articulated by the Scriptures; in other words, Jesus wasn't just making it up as he went along. He understood himself to be acting in consonance with the Word of God as he experienced it through favorite Bible passages that illuminated God's will for the world. Matthew has Jesus quoting the prophet Hosea (6:6), among other scriptural witnesses, when he tells the judgmental Pharisees to "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners" (Mt 9:13). In the same way, Mark's Jesus quotes Deuteronomy (6:4-5) and Leviticus (12:30-31) in answer to the question put to him by the scribes about the true heart of the Torah: "The first commandment is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these" (Mk 12:29-31).
And then there's this morning's passage from Luke with its quote from the prophet Isaiah, deployed here by Luke at the opening of Jesus' ministry as a kind of inaugural address, but echoed elsewhere in the Gospels (Mt 11:4-5, Lk 7:22): "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has appointed 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 the Lord's favor."
My point is: whether we reduce this Bible that has been the sourcebook of our faith for countless generations to a series of simplistic one-liners or whether we fence it off behind nearly impenetrable layers of scholastic mumbo-jumbo—we miss the point either way. For Jesus, scripture was neither a quick fix—a bowl of microwave chicken soup for the soul—nor was it an end in itself, a thing to be studied under a microscope in obsessive Pharisaical detail. Instead, for Jesus, scripture was a rich and living word that gave voice to a faith and an experience of God which, in turn, Jesus himself made flesh in his flesh, putting it to work in his work in the world. As Jesus told his hometown congregation in Nazareth in our passage for this morning, these are not just words on a page, but "this word is being fulfilled today in front of your very eyes."
Now, I'm not suggesting you each should run home and pick out a life verse and have it cross-stitched on a pillow. And I'm certainly not suggesting you all go become Baptists... not that there's anything wrong with that. But I am saying, well, wouldn't it be good to weave ourselves into this living witness of faith, to have a rich and intimate relationship with the scriptures that have informed and enriched the lives of diverse Christian communities down through the ages and around the world? We do believe that "God is still speaking" now as in ages past, so wouldn't it be good to learn to speak this common language so that the many, many voices represented in this book and among those who read it may become our partners in an on-going conversation about what is good, what is right, what is true? We do believe actions speak louder than words, so wouldn't it be good to have the benefit of three thousand years of faithful persons' trials and errors to help us discern the best ways to put our own faith to work in the world today?
As we begin another calendar year of walking through these scriptures with Jesus and his disciples, with Abraham and Sarah, with Paul and the other Apostles, with ordinary women and men just like us who found themselves caught up in an extraordinary experience of God's Spirit at work, I invite you to deepen your appreciation for and knowledge of the book we carry up here into the pulpit each and every week. This is not a bumper sticker to be slapped on your behind on the way out the door so folks know you've been to church. Nor is it a relic to be kept under glass in some museum. This may look like a book, but it's really a tool. It is intended to be used hard and well in the life of faith, in the way of Christ, so that the poor may hear good news, that all those who are held captive may be released, that the blind may regain their sight, the oppressed go free, and the whole world know this, even this is the year of God's favor.
So, c'mon: You don't have to have a life verse, but, if pressed, wouldn't it be good to be able to come up with a Top Ten List? You've already heard some of Jesus' favorites. Now, in all humility, here are some of mine, just to get you started thinking for yourself. Drum roll, please:
From the home office in New Haven, Connecticut, here's The Rev. John MacIver Gage's Top Ten Favorite Bible Verses for Sunday, January 21, 2007:
Beginning at the beginning, #10. From the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 31: "God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good."
#9. From Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter 12, verse 5: "So we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another."
#8. Joshua lays it all out for the Hebrew people in chapter 24, verse 14: "Choose this day whom you will serve... but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."
#7. From the Letter to the Philippians, chapter 3, verse 12: "Not that I have already obtained all this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own."
#6. From Isaiah, chapter 43, verse 19, where God says, "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert" (Isaiah 43:19)
#5. From the First Epistle of John, chapter 4, verse 7: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."
#4. An oldie but a goodie from the prophet Micah, chapter 6, verse 8: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
#3. From the Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 8, Jesus telling his disciples, and us: "I will not leave you orphaned, but I am coming to you."
#2. Again from Paul's bestselling Letter to the Romans, this time chapter 8, verses 38-39—sing along if you know the words—"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
And finally, just because putting it at the top of my list would rile my Baptist friends back home, #1, from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, verse 15, Peter's rebuttal to the cynical Pentecost crowd: "Indeed, these people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning." But this, this is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
As you go home today and go through the week ahead, I encourage you to think of your own top ten list, or at least those several special verses that have really meant something to you over the years. And if you can't think of any just yet, well then, I invite you to keep your ears open in church... or better yet, open the book for yourself. We dip into this well every Sunday morning, but it's available to you around the clock—Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday nights, whenever. It doesn't belong just to Baptists or Presbyterians or UCC'ers. It belongs to you. It belongs to all of us. Thanks be to God.