When the Spirit Gets A Hold of You

Rev. Charles Lewis

Luke 4: 14-30

January 21, 2007 Snohomish PC

Introduction

When we open Luke and look at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, we find something that should sound familiar. It is parallel to the beginning of the church's ministry in Acts (which Luke also wrote). Both are baptized, filled with Spirit, and are launched out to do their work. Luke is trying to tell us that the same Spirit that empowers Jesus, empowers the church. The same God who acted in Jesus, in continuity with Judaism and the prophetic movement,

continues to act in the life of the church. From Judaism to Jesus to the universal Church, the Spirit moves where and when it wills in the world. We're called by Luke to get in touch with where it is blowing, how it directed Jesus, and get swept up in that same direction.

(Read Luke 4:13-30)

Sermon

It happened at United Methodist Conference that a bishop, who was to preach, asked his liturgist, an ordained pastor, to preach a short meditation just before him. The pastor was not at all prepared for such a request. Caught off guard, he asked the bishop, "Well, I'm hardly ready to step up on the spur of the moment. I usually prepare for hours. What am I to do?" "Oh, no problem" the bishop said, "just get up there and let the Spirit move you," So the pastor approached the pulpit in front of large congregation when the time came and quickly trying to put something together in his head, spotted the manuscript of a sermon on the shelf inside the pulpit. "Ah," he sighed, "an answer to prayer." He proceeded to deliver the manuscript sermon he'd found to the satisfaction of the congregation. When he sat back down, the bishop leaned over to him and said, "What were you doing? That was my sermon! Now what am I to do?" "Oh, no problem, the pastor said, "just get up there and let the Spirit move you."

How is it that the Spirit moves us? When is it that the Spirit moves us?

How do we know when it's the Spirit of God moving us?

When I was in high school, there use to be a cheer they did nearly every game to get the student body and parents off their seat. They still do it today. One team's fans will shout to the opposing team's fans, "We've got spirit, yes we do. We've got spirit, how bout you?" The other side will answer more loudly, "We've got spirit, yes we do. We've got spirit, how bout you?" This bantering goes on back and forth as the decibel level increases each time to show who has

more spirit. Until the team in the lead brings it to an end by taunting their opponent with "Think you've got more, then check that score," as if to say, if the volume doesn't show we've got more spirit, then our higher score will."

Sometimes we're tempted to think that the sign of the Spirit's activity in the church is measured in the same way. The level of spirit is graded by how loudly the preacher can preach and the praise band can sing, or how high the level of attendance is, as if there were a spiritual point given for every person.

Jesus' way of measuring the Spirit's activity was a bit different.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," he read from the Isaiah text handed to him in the synagogue the day he began his ministry. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, give sight to the blind, and set the oppressed free."

There is nothing about Jesus' life or ministry that measures the Spirit with being able to offer a mega-church meal of something for everyone on its menu from Bible Study to business classes to Easter Bunny Eggstravaganzas to folks dressed in medieval costumes, as is the case in a church a few blocks from Ann's parents in Phoenix. There is nothing in Jesus' witness that demonstrates the activity of the Spirit has to do with numbers - he had, after all, a ministry with a large vision but only a relatively small number of disciples. From the time of his baptism when the Holy Spirit descends upon him and he is ordained as God's beloved, to the Spirit's leading him into the wilderness where he rejects the flashy ways of wooing, wowing, and winning people, Luke wants us to know that if you want to see someone fully captured by the power of God's Spirit, take a look at one whose passion is directed to the poor, the captive, the blind, and the

oppressed.

You want to measure Spirit -look at where their heart goes and to

whom their feet follow.

This is Jesus' first public appearance in Luke's Gospel. It's his inaugural address. I like to refer to it as his "I Have a Dream" Speech. It tells us what kind of Messiah he will be, and the character and shape and vision of his mission. As he reads from the scroll of Isaiah handed to him, he opens up to the 61st chapter and reads: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he ash anointed me to preach good news to the poor, give sight to the blind, release the captives and set the oppressed free." Well, you can imagine that when folks of Nazareth gathered in that synagogue to hear their hometown boy read as liturgist, they were beaming. Our hometown boy has spirit alright, they must have said to each other, knowing that his reputation had preceded him in the surrounding region as one, Luke says was "praised by everyone." And they were all abuzz as he sat down and declared, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." As Luke then puts it, "All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came out of his mouth." You can imagine

they were thinking about the new city limit sign they'd have to erect: Welcome to Nazareth. Hometown of Jesus.,,1

But things took a terrible turn after that. The One they thought was so full of the Spirit, their hometown pride, started sounding like he was full of everything but the Spirit when he started telling them who God was sending him to. It wasn't just to them, as if the hometown folks had some monopoly on God's blessing. The thing that got their goat was when he started talking about God's grace extending as well to their non-Jewish neighbors, the outsiders. Jesus proceeds to defend his concern for and ministry to those beyond their scope by telling them not one, but two stories of how God had passed over their kind to reach out to those beyond the home-front. First he tells of a widow from the wrong side of the tracks in Zaraphath and then Naaman the Syrian, who was an officer in the army of Israel's enemies. Then he has the gall to point out that there were lots of nice Jewish widows that Elijah might have helped, plenty of good Jewish lepers that Elisha might have healed, but instead God's grace went to the outsider.

That's when they went to grab the preacher and pitch him from his pulpit.

That's when they first started wondering what Spirit their hometown son had been possessed by. But Jesus wasn't telling them anything that wasn't right there in their own Scriptures, in the Good Book, only that was not how they used Scripture. Scripture was used to put God on their side, concerned more for them than anyone else, taking up their cause, caring primarily for them, the insider. Jesus challenges them to expand their horizons, enlarge their hearts, embrace a larger world. To the preacher who asserts that God is a big, living God who works the other side of the street - with outsiders - can incite serious questions, anger, even outright rejection.

When new ministers are being called to Presbyterian churches, the congregation usually comes on a Sunday and listens to a sermon. Then the preacher is escorted off to some lounge, given a cup of coffee and told to wait while the congregation votes on him or her: up or down, in or out. The friend of a Presbyterian pastor I learned of recently took a the pastor out for coffee and asked him what the vote for him had been at his current church, the response was: "Two hundred and something for, six against," he answered. "Six against!" the friend exclaimed, "How'd that make you feel?" His answer is remarkable:

"Well," the pastor said, "It was good to know that six people understood the sermon (on the wide reach of grace)."

Everybody in Nazareth understood Jesus' sermon. But the vote was zero "for" and two hundred and something "against," and not just a little against! The people who had been there when he was little boy, the same people who were there when he was confirmed, the very people who there at his grandmother's funeral, his home-town folks, now kick him right out of church, kick him right out of town, and almost kick him over a cliff to his death. "

1 Dr. Tom Long Pulpit Resmlrce, January-March 2004.

I can't judge the people of Nazareth too harshly. The most natural thing in the world to see God in terms of "me." It's the most natural thing in the world to understand God in terms of my need, my pain, my wants. It's so easy for us to only have eyes for ourselves-our family, our little community-for what we think is in our best interests. We come to church with the problems you face this week, the decision we have to make next Tuesday, the worry that kept us awake Friday night. We naturally want God focused on us. We want faith that addresses me. We want religion that's about my life and my needs and my hopes. The disconcerting good news is that God does care about you and me, but it's not all about you and me.2

In our passage, the people were upset because Jesus was going to minister to the Gentiles (those people). But Jesus says no, I'm not here just for you. I'm not going to take you away from the hard stuff. I'm here to expand your world, to broaden your concept of who will be citizens in my kingdom. To Luke, being possessed by the Spirit of God meant aligning oneself with the poor, the oppressed, the dispossessed, the one's left out and let down, the last and the least. It meant extending God's grace to the outsider, the one beyond our gate, outside the door of our church, beyond the scope of our country.

A wise old preacher once said that "the truth will make you free, but first it will make you very uncomfortable." Uncomfortable with those who often fall outside of our scope ... uncomfortable with the 40,000 people dying daily from hunger related causes ... uncomfortable with not only the loss of two thousand American soldiers to war but with the hundreds of thousands of losses of lives and livelihoods and homes of Iraqis ... uncomfortable with the genocide in Darfur and the two-three million refugees that have fled that ravaged

region ... uncomfortable with what the McDaniel's shared last week with the 55,000 who lose their fight daily to AIDS in Africa, the loss in one day equal to the fatalities of twenty 74 7's crashing ... uncomfortable that the richest 20% of the world consumes some 86% of the world's goods, while the poorest 20% use 3% of the world's goods ... uncomfortable with two billion people in the world lacking safe drinking and even more children today with no health care, permanent home or guarantee of a life of peace and safety.

The truth that shakes me loose of trying to domesticate Jesus or reduce him down to my size or my people or my hopes and dreams is that Jesus can't be limited. He belongs to the world. Yes, Jesus Christ came into this world for you and for me, but not just for you, not just for me. He came into this world for the love of the whole world, and the many "outsiders" that can fall beyond our scope. His own townspeople almost pushed Jesus over the cliff that day for loving too much, almost.

Three years later they-we-would push Jesus over another cliff, as it were, the cliff of a hill named Calvary. That day Jesus died for the love of you and he

2 Rev. Michael Lindvall, the Brick Presbyterian Church, New York, "Deadly Sermon" January 24,2004.

died for the love of me. But the bigger, awkward truth is that he died for the love of people - poor and helpless - those who often fall outside our purview, those we mighty hardly imagine worth the trouble. 3

The novelist and Presbyterian minister Fred Buechner once suggested a little spiritual exercise to alert ourselves to the discomforting breadth of God's scandalously inclusive love. Buechner said, "The next time you walk down the street (or read a story about a person in need or think about someone outside the scope of our normal thinking), take a good look at every face you pass (or if it's a story you read or hear, imagine in your mind what they look like), and in your mind say. Christ died for (you). That (child, that soldier, that AIDS patient), even that phony. That crook. That saint. That fooL .. " 1 Try it, really try it. "Christ died for you." Would you say it with me? "Christ died for you."

When we do that over and over again, we'll find our vision enlarging, our hearts expanding and our compassion increasing. We'll find ourselves taken a hold of by the Spirit. .. the same Spirit that took a hold of our Lord.

1. Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking, (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). p. 53.

Prayer: God of all people, give us more courage to hear your word than the good people of Nazareth found that day Jesus read and preached it. May we welcome your word when it comforts us; may we welcome your word when it confronts us that we may be filled with your Spirit and follow in the way of our Lord. Enlarge our vision, expand our hearts, increase our compassion, keep us growing more and more like our Master, Jesus Christ. Amen.

3 ibid