The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany Jeremiah 1: 4 – 10

Sunday, January 31, 2010 I Corinthians 13: 1 – 13

The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 4: 21 - 30

But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Luke 4: 30

We meet Jesus in the Jewish synagogue this morning in our reading from the gospel of Luke. Jesus has just finished reading a text from the prophet Isaiah, a text written when the Jews were living in exile in Babylon six centuries earlier. In the text, the prophet Isaiah proclaims to a wearied and downtrodden people: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” Your exile, Isaiah tells the Jews, is coming to an end and God is going to lead you back home, back to Israel. The prophet Isaiah, has been sent by God to announce good news, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And “Today,” Jesus says, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Today the people of God are being set free, led out of exile, returning home. What God had done in the Exodus when God freed a band of Egyptian slaves and what God had done when God set Israel free from her bondage in Babylon, God was doing once more, today. Jesus announces that today, God is showering God’s people with God’s goodness and blessing.

And the Jewish town of Nazareth is filled with gladness. The long awaited promise made by God to the Jews that God would indeed rescue them and lead them into a land flowing with milk honey is coming true, today, and Nazareth is the first to hear this good news. With amazement, they listen to one of their own, Joseph’s son, proclaim that God is, today, acting to set them free and bring them home.

So the people of Nazareth expect Jesus to do something like part the Red Sea right there in Nazareth, work a few miracles, heal the sick and bring sight to the blind of Nazareth. And when Jesus does none of those things in Nazareth but goes to Capernaum, a gentile city, a city filled with people who were not Jews, were not circumcised, did not follow the commandments, the people of Nazareth get angry, and try to throw Jesus off a cliff. Charity begins at home and Nazareth is Jesus’ home.

The story we hear this morning from Luke is the first public act of Jesus in Luke’s gospel and sets the scene for the rest of Luke’s “orderly account,” an account of the way through Jesus, God acts to welcome all people into God’s kingdom, not just the people of Israel. In Jesus, God speaks the ancient words of comfort and homecoming spoken by the prophet Isaiah to all people, all nations, all races, to all creatures under heaven. Through Jesus, we become children of Abraham and heirs of God’s promises. Through Jesus, God is not rejecting Israel but opening the way for us to become as Israel was and is, “the chosen people of God.” The mission of God through Israel was that the whole world might know God’s love and Jesus the Jew is sent by God to proclaim that good news.

Through Jesus, God was fulfilling the promise God made to Abraham way back in the book of Genesis. There we read: Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ God sent Abraham out, blessing Abraham so that through Abraham the whole earth might know God’s blessing and favor. And in the fullness of time, Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, is sent by God to complete what God promised long before to Abraham, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” not just to the children of Abraham but to the whole world.

The verb “to be sent” in Greek is άποστέλλω, the root of the noun apostle. Apostles are those who are sent out by God, to announce the love of God for us as God reveals God’s love for us in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Apostles, and that means all of us not just the first twelve, are not free agents, but are sent by God on God’s mission, by the power of the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit.

We, the “apostolic” Church, in other words, do not have a mission but are rather the instrument of God’s mission, sent by God to bear witness to the good news of God in Christ, that the whole world might come to the knowledge and love of God. We do not have plans and programs; God has plans and a program and our task is to discern what God would have us do. And our evangelist Luke narrates the beginnings of that often difficult discernment in the book of Acts, sometimes called “The Acts of the Holy Spirit,” when the Holy Spirit is sent to the disciples on the Day of Pentecost, drawing them together as one and sending them out into the world to do the work God had given them to do.

While no one of us can ever know the mind of God, God has created us to be God’s missionaries and given us the capacities to be able to discern the work of the Holy Spirit within us and among us, prodding us, pleading within us, wooing us into God’s mission. Saint Paul would come to write in his letter to the Galatians, that the fruit of the Spirit, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In the presence of love and joy and peace, of patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, we are in the presence of God, the God who sends us into the world to be a blessing to the world, to make known God’s desire for us all to live together in unity, constancy and peace.

God wants us to know the fruits of the Spirit in this life, a kind of foretaste of things to come. And when we taste for ourselves the fruit of the Holy Spirit, we cannot help but want to share that fruit with others. Such is the mission of God, that the whole world might feast on this fruit, and we, by grace, are invited to share in that mission.

You know and I know that today is my last day with you. I have resigned my position as Associate Rector. “Resignation” sounds pretty negative and to say that I am leaving because of budget woes does not make the picture much brighter. I am going now for the same reason I came to St. Bart’s four and a half years ago – in response to what I discerned to be God’s call to come then and discern to be God’s call to go now.

As I continue my discernment around what God would have me do next and you all continue your discernment around what God would have this parish do next, this time for both of us is filled with both peril and possibility – peril insofar as we begin to fear God has no will or plan or purpose for us; possibility, insofar as God may be wooing us to dare to do something new, something we never considered, something we’ve never done before. God is for sure sending us different places, but not to bring us to grief ultimately, but through us, to bear the blessing of God into this world God so dearly loves, leading us and all those whom God loves to joy.

The past few weeks with you have been filled with grace abounding. Both I and A.G have felt wrapped in your love. You welcomed us warmly and graciously and you are saying goodbye with the same gentle compassionate hospitality. Both of us are deeply grateful. Our ministry together these past years has been filled with joy for me. With you I learned about being a deacon; with you I was ordained a priest and celebrated my first Eucharist; with you I felt brave enough to chant the Sursum Corda; with you, I welcomed the newly baptized and buried those we love; with you I changed light bulbs and peeled potatoes and dug post holes and studied and prayed and worshipped. “With” is what God wants to be for us, and what God wants us to be for one another. Thank you for being that to me.