Year C
 Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
 Psalm 19
 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
 Luke 4:14-21

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

It’s almost as if this set of lectionary readings were chosen for us…  it’s almost as though somehow…  Providence knew…  that today…  we’d be having our annual meeting…  and thought these readings would be great reminders for us…  ] and why is that…  because these lessons talk about God’s Law…  about being the body of Christ…  and about the launch of…  and Jesus’ ongoing ministry…  and isn’t that what we’re all about…  here…  today and every day…

Our passage from Nehemiah… is believed to have been written in about 445 BCE…  the first Temple has been destroyed…  and the Babylonian Exile is over… ] now Nehemiah was not a prophet…  though he served the king of Persia during the exile…  and later led a group of Jews to Jerusalem…  his heart set on rebuilding and fortifying the city’s foundation and its walls…  Ezra on the other hand was a priest…  and in today’s reading…  on the first day of the seventh month…  the day which later becomes Rosh Hashanah…  the Jewish New Year…  Ezra stands elevated on a wooden platform…  and reenacts the Sinai event…  and the people stood when they heard God’s Word…  and like their ancestors…  they make a public proclamation to accept the law…  and while Moses recorded at Sinai what God revealed…  Ezra now reads what Moses had written…  and Nehemiah’s hope…   revealed in v. 10…  is that this reenacted revelation will be characterized by joy…  and not with mourning… and in today’s final verse…  affirms…  for your rejoicing in the Lord is the source of your strength…

Melanie Howard…  Assistant Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Fresno Pacific University…  points out that in v. 21 of today’s reading from 1 Corinthians…  Paul imagines a scenario in which certain body parts claim no need of the others…  and while this imaginary scenario may at first seem absurd…  it illustrates a real tendency towards radical individualism…  and is not merely the result of an active imagination…  indeed…  the conflict between a spirit of radical individualism…  and the recognition of our interconnected interdependence…  continues to be evident in the world today…

For Paul’s purposes…  individual rights are secondary to the good of the whole…  for example…  in 1 Corinthians 8:   Paul counsels those who would eat food sacrificed to idols…  because while he agrees with them in theory…  that it shouldn’t matter…  since no idol in the world actually exists…  Paul recognizes that the issue is a sensitive one for many others in the congregation… and he advises those who would eat to put these others first…  and avoid eating it for their sakes…

In today’s Gospel…  after his river baptism…  and his long wilderness fast…  and the temptations set before him…  Jesus returns home…  and inaugurates his public ministry…  sets its tone by reading Isaiah’s prophetic words…  and he makes the seemingly audacious claim…  that the prophet’s words have been fulfilled…  even as the people heard him speaking them…  even though they still had these marginalized people among them…  though fulfilled doesn’t mean fully accomplished …  but it does mean that we’ve been put on notice…  that we are to participate in it…  to live into it…

In his book The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, pp. 210-211)…  Joel Green writes that while the word translated as “poor” from the Greek…  does have to do with economic status…  it also has to do with other factors which lowered one’s status in the first-century world…  factors such as gender…  genealogy…  education…  occupation…  sickness…  disability…  and one’s degree of religious purity…  and so Jesus’ mission is directed in a holistic sense…  to those who…  for various reasons…  are relegated to the margins of society…  he refuses to recognize these socially determined boundaries…  insisting that these very “outsiders” are the special recipients of God’s grace and mercy…  and Jesus may also have taken Isaiah’s words to refer to a deeper kind of poverty…  a deeper kind of captivity…  a deeper kind of blindness…  and a deeper kind of oppression… and so this fulfillment to which Jesus refers…  may be a precursor to the Beatitudes…  about those who are blessed in spite of being marginalized…

Some years ago…  a Buddhist monk was invited to speak at a senior high class on religion…  and as he entered the room…  he didn’t say a word…  he simply walked to the board and wrote…  everyone wants to help save the world…  but no one wants to help mom do the dishes…  but then he went on to tell the students…  statistically…  it’s highly unlikely that any of you will ever have the opportunity to run into a burning orphanage and rescue an infant…  but in the smallest gesture of kindness…  a warm smile…  holding the door open for the person behind you…  shoveling the driveway of the elderly person next door…  you have committed an act of immeasurable profundity…  because to each of us…  our life is our universe…  and my hope for you…  is that by your smallest act of kindness…  you will save another’s world…

And this Buddhist’s words make me wonder…  are there members of the body of Christ…  who are not Christians…  can a Buddhist practice Zen meditation… and still develop the Mind of Christ…  after all…  in Mark 9:38…  John complains to Jesus that the disciples saw someone casting out demons in his name…  and they tried to stop him…  because he wasn’t following them…  but Jesus said…  don’t stop him…  because no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me…  and if God is a verb more than God is a noun…  are we not Christians more by what we do…  than by what we are…  or by the adjective we use to describe ourselves…

As we prepare this morning to vote on a new Constitution and set of By Laws…  documents which will allow Ascension and Holy Cross to create one unified leadership body…  documents which will offer a more seamless access to membership…   documents which I believe are in concert with what Lutheran Pastor Walter Bouman would have had in mind when he wrote…  that we are called to increasingly make One what has previously been divided…  because our denominations are not simply brand names competing for a share of the Christian market…  and perhaps too…  there is some significance…  that we take this vote…  during this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity…

The Law…  the body of Christ…  and the ministry of Jesus…  one inseparable and unified whole…  by whatever name we call it…  and trying to claim that it applied only to Jesus’ contemporaries…  trying to claim…  to any degree…  that this Gospel applied 2,000 years ago but doesn’t to us now…  or that crazy love-your-neighbor-as-yourself idea…  applies only to Christians and not to absolutely everyone else…  is like trying to argue that the laws of physics work in Brooklyn, NY…  but can gain no traction in Boise, ID…

And while living as fully as we’re able…  into the Gospel’s principles…  may be challenging…  while it may be easier to just go with the flow…  while it may be difficult to be the salmon which swim upstream…  it is what we are called to do…  now watch out…  I’m going to make a sports analogy…  we cannot simply go to major league baseball games…   and root and cheer from the bleachers for those who hit home runs and grand slams…  to the degree that we are truly able…  we need to go to spring training…  and throw the ball…  and run the bases…  we need to be out on the fields practicing…  not so that we can win the World Series…  because Jesus has already done that for us a thousand and one times over…  but so that we can write more of God’s law on our hearts…  participate fully in the body of Christ…  and join Jesus in his ongoing ministry…  by welcoming and loving our neighbor as ourselves…