January 26, 2025

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Luke 4:14-21

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 set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

I could stop right there this morning. I could simply repeat the words of Isaiah, these words being recounted by Jesus in the synagogue. That he and Isaiah had both come to speak good news to the poor. To release the captives. To make the blind see. To free those who are oppressed. I could end right there, and you would have the total of Jesus’ life and ministry. The purpose of his coming into the world.

How did we get so offtrack? Where did everything go wrong?

And you might be thinking, what does he mean? Things are not so bad, if you are looking in certain places, if you squint a little. The stock market is up 30 percent over the last year. The rich are getting richer. Wealth is growing all around us. Well, all around here specifically. Here and in a few other well-appointed places scattered about the world.

So, what then is the good news for the poor mentioned by Isaiah and Jesus? What is the good news for them?

But again, you might say that the captives are free, quite literally. Four Israeli hostages recently matched by 200 Palestinian prisoners. Free as of yesterday. And all it took to free those captives was the levelling the Gaza Strip. The deaths of 46,000 people in Gaza in many months of war after the deaths of 1,200 Israelis on October 7^th the year before last. Neither the people of Israel nor the people of Gaza deserved this deadly yearlong power struggle.

But you could say that captives are now free.

And what about making the blind able to see? Pardon me for being metaphorical on this one, but is anyone seeing the world any more clearly these days? Are we more certain of what is going on in our country? Or are we all stumbling about with half-truths and trumped-up anxieties?

And what about the oppressed? Who is being oppressed and who is doing the oppressing? If you were to ask that question to a hundred different Americans, you might get 100 different answers. The poor are being oppressed. Conversely, perhaps the wealthy are being oppressed with all those taxes. Maybe we all think we are in a state of oppression leaving no one left to do the oppressing. Can everyone be oppressed or are we turning feelings of discomfort with the world into a sense of personal oppression? That is not oppression, mind you, that is something quite different indeed.

This Sunday, I planned to talk about Jesus. Who Jesus was and what he means to those who try to follow him. To those who profess and call themselves Christians, as it says in our prayerbook. Who profess and call themselves by a name derived from the title of Jesus of Nazareth. That title is “Christ,” one who has been chosen and anointed as a messiah.

I say “a” messiah, because there has been more than one messiah in the Bible. A messiah was someone from the lineage of King David who would come to save the people. This had always been understood in a literal sense as someone who would serve as a political leader, one who would arrive and lead the people out of their state of oppression–that word again, oppression.

There was at least one non-Jewish messiah, Cyrus the Great of Persia, who released the exiled Judeans from captivity in Babylon. That was arguably oppression, but notice that in multiple books of the Bible, from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Nehemiah, that period of oppression was said to be warranted. It was punishment. The people of Israel and Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms of what had been a united Israel, they had broken their promises to God.

What had they promised? That depends on which books of the Bible you are reading. Some of the prophets say it was because some people had fallen away from the one true way of worshipping God. And others say it was because the rich had been oppressing the poor, becoming more and more wealthy while the rest struggled to survive. In both cases, mind you, it was the same people who broke those promises. It was the leaders, the wealthy, the aristocrats of that era, who did not do what they were supposed to do. And it is possible to break two different promises at the same time, honestly with the same bad behavior.

There were other messiahs in the Bible, such as the Maccabee brothers. They were rebels who in time overthrew their Greek overlords, the rulers of the Seleucid Empire that controlled the lands of Ancient Israel. This dates to the time of Alexander the Great who conquered the Biblical world. Now to be accurate, the Maccabees overthrowing their oppressors was for a short period of time. It amounted to a brief era of religious autonomy before everyone was absorbed into the Roman Empire. But you take the wins when you can.

Who was Jesus then? Was he a messiah? Specifically, was he a political leader descended from the lineage of King David come to save the people from their oppression? No, he was not. His disciples thought he was. They hoped that he was. But he was not.

Was Jesus at least able to free the people of Judea religiously so that they could worship and live without too much interference from the Romans? No, he was not. The Romans were generally indifferent to local religion, but when the people of Judea rebelled after the death of Jesus, the empire crushed the opposition. They eventually displaced most of the Jewish people from Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. The Temple was destroyed, as Jesus predicted. And the oppression of the people went on for centuries.

So then, how can we call Jesus the messiah or, in its Latin version, Jesus the Christ? Because, these are not the same things. The messiahs of the Bible are different than the messiah that was Jesus. Jesus did not overturn the oppression of the Romans. He overturned the oppression of the Temple. The Second Temple and its leaders who had once again broken promises made to God to allow for certain people, like the priests, to flourish while most others struggled.

Jesus brought good news to the poor. He did so by teaching that the poor and the hungry, the alien and the stranger, should be cared for by those who seek to follow Jesus. The poor who were not being cared for by the Temple or the leaders of Judea. The poor who were not being cared for by the wealthy under the selective oppression of the Roman Empire. For you see, there is a lot of money to be made from maintaining oppression. It’s just good business, as the saying goes.

Jesus proclaimed the release of captives and recovery of the sight of the blind. But this was not the political expression of power sought after by some of his followers. This was a state of mind, a matter of perspective. They were no longer captive to the Temple and its rules. And their eyes were opened to a different way of seeing the world and their place in it.

And please do not think that I am criticizing Judaism. This was a fundamental problem with the Second Temple, the religious institution rebuilt after the Persians set the people of Judea free. If you cannot control your government, you try to control other aspects of life around you. If you cannot beat the Romans, you can enforce ever more specific and burdensome religious rules on your followers. Jesus spoke out repeatedly against these–it is half of what he talked about.

But many Jewish figures, earlier and contemporary with Jesus, did the same. We see this in the Book of Micah when the prophet called for the people to turn away from the burnt offerings of the Temple and instead engage in acts of loving kindness. We see this in the writing of Rabbi Hillel, the great 1^st century teacher who focused on the commandment to love one another, the same commandment that would later be picked up and elaborated on by Jesus. That very commandment is from the Torah. But it repeatedly got (and gets) drowned out by a proliferation of rules and regulations. Behavioral micromanagement that required the scrutiny of people from the Temple, its priest and scribes, and their modern day equivalents.

If you read through the Bible with an eye toward its chronology, you will pick up that this is a recurring pattern. The people fall away from their promises to God and then there is trouble. The Garden of Eden. The Flood and Noah. The Tower of Babel. The many famines, plagues, and locust hordes. The conquests of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans.

Forgetting the Book of Genesis for a second, there were typically warnings from the prophets predicting something would happen. Repent for the end is nigh, but “nigh” comes faster than any repentance. And what is typically the reason for this punishment? What is the basis for God’s displeasure with his people?

They oppress the poor. They allow a few people to get massively rich. Their society gets split into the haves and the have nots. And, perhaps most importantly, that inequality becomes blessed by the kings and religious leaders as if it were God’s will. People begin to worship inequality because God provides blessings to those that are loved and punishes those who are not. So, you better be rich.

Now, someone out there might be thinking at this point that I am slipping into hippy dippy rhetoric. Oh look, another liberal bleeding heart trotting out arguments about societal levelling and religiously tinged socialism. Blah, blah, blah.

All the trite labels aside, that person is correct. I am arguing that Jesus wants us to care for the poor and that was and is central to everything he asked us to do. And, by the way, I have the Bible on my side. Luke chapter 6:

Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh…
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.

Does that sound like Jesus cared about the poor? I think so. And, conversely, does that passage in any way suggest that Jesus thought the rich were blessed by God, that theirs was a special place in the world or in the next? No, it does not. The word “woe” is a hint. It is an interjection of grief as in “Oh woe is me!” Woe is a word often paired with those who sin against God and, yes, those sinners are often the ones oppressing the poor.

I could parade dozens of passages along these lines about the poor needing our care and the rich awaiting punishment of some form. I could point to the problems of the powerful in the eyes of God and in the teachings of Jesus. It would be tiresome, for you and for me.

And sadly, the reason there are so many examples available for me to quote is that people ignore what the prophets and Jesus have to say. Over the centuries, people forget or overlook or do not care about the suffering that is caused by oppressing the poor. Because they flip a few pages back in the Bible and see some reference to God’s blessings and they think, well that must mean its good to be rich. And either I am rich, so that’s great, or I desire to be rich, so that is the right way to think about the world.

And this is not limited to a Biblical view of the world. Research suggests that income inequality is one of the most constant and destructive destabilizing influences in human history. Eventually, the social system breaks down because it relies upon the poor working classes to support the rich owning classes.

And when society is not working together for common purposes and mutual betterment, people stop caring about what they used to care about, particularly protecting someone’s shiny pile of stuff. The rich just want to get rich. But the poor no longer see any benefit in playing along.

We saw this during the pandemic. People did not want to risk their lives for low pay even when they were deemed essential workers. I remember signs posted in restaurants with owners declaring that people don’t want to work anymore, so please be patient while we make your pizza.

So, they had to raise wages and then people decided it made sense to brave the virus to make a few more dollars per hour. This was exactly what happened in Europe after the Black Plague–workers got paid more because they were needed. Because the rich were not quite so blessed anymore when no one was around to make the pizzas for them to sell.

I’m guessing there were no pizzas.

Now that the pandemic is over—sorta kinda maybish—it’s back to office. No more DEI, thank you very much. No more working toward any sense of fairness or mutuality. You workers have had it good for long enough, meaning a couple of years, so back to the grindstone or the pizza stone. And yes, that overbalance toward employers might work for a while. I am guessing for a short while.

You see, I go to a lot of boring meetings. Meetings about investments and the stock market. I am on a lot of boards for charities. And I spend a lot of time farming money to pay for scholarships, to take care of retired ministers, and to help the elderly. You know, hippy dippy stuff. In those investment meetings lately, people have been offering modern-day prophecies about what is going to happen over the next year or so. This is not a terribly Biblical phase of the sermon, but please bear with me.

If there are fewer people available to work, the price of labor will go up as will the price of goods and services. So, if there are fewer workers to, say, build houses or to pick crops or to work in meat packing plants, the prices of housing and produce and meat will rise. Why would there be fewer people available? Because many of the people doing those jobs are in this country without the benefit of the appropriate paperwork. And if they are sent out of the country, there will be fewer people to do the work. This means higher inflation under basic economics.

But doesn’t that mean that there are more jobs available to those who have the right paperwork or who were born here in the US? National unemployment is currently 4.1 percent. That represents about 7 million people. If you remove a million or so people from the mix through deportation, or the lack of work permits, you might theoretically lower that unemployment number. But that idea assumes that the remaining people wish to install drywall or to pick oranges or to disassemble chickens for minimum wage.

Even if the pay were higher, I am guessing some people might hesitate to undertake those rather backbreaking jobs. Ask one of your children or grandchildren if they would like to do that. I poured asphalt for a summer in college, and I assure you I would not get in line to do so again. Which means, the price of houses and oranges, chickens and asphalt will go up because fewer people will be available to do those jobs. Simple economics.

And we, as people who profess and call ourselves Christians, should be worried about what that means. What it means for the poor. What it means for the oppressed. What it means for society. And what it means to follow Jesus.

There was recently an incident. It happened at the National Cathedral in Washington. An Episcopal bishop, the Right Rev. Marianne Budde, said the following during a religious service for the presidential inauguration: “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.”

The president was not happy being confronted in this way, at that time. I cannot imagine why he would be. But where else are those words supposed to be spoken? Where else can you say:

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 set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Those words were a challenge. They were a challenge issued first by Isaiah and then by Jesus. A challenge to bring good news to the poor and to be good to the poor. A challenge to release those who are captive and to make it so they were never captive in the first place. A challenge to help the blind see, literally and figuratively, so that those suffering might become well and those wallowing in darkness might come to understand what Jesus asked his followers to do.

We are to care for others. We are to eliminate oppression when we can. And we are to speak out when we see it.

And if that is uncomfortable to hear, that is not surprising. It is not surprising because it was intended to make people uncomfortable. That was the goal of Jesus when he threw down the gauntlet in the synagogue, when he challenged the leaders of the Temple who were failing to uphold the expectations of God.

When he caused so much trouble that it lead to his death on the cross.

If that message is uncomfortable among those who profess and call themselves Christians, that is unavoidable. And, if it is so discomforting, it might be time either to become familiar with what Jesus expected of his followers or to decide whether following Jesus is what those who “profess and call” themselves Christians are really trying to do these days.

Because Christians are supposed to bring good news to the poor. To release the captives. To help the blind see. To fight oppression wherever they might find it. And woe unto those who do not.

But do not take my word for it. Please, do not just listen to me. Read Isaiah. Read Micah. Read Matthew and Luke. Read the lessons of the prophets and read the teachings of Jesus.

And then, once you are done reading, it will be time to follow.

Amen.