January 13, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

One of the Most Important Things He Said

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 146
Luke 4:14–21

Today I’m going to talk about things Jesus seemed to think were of utmost importance, and when I finish, I’m going to ask you to help me start thinking about how we as a church community might think together about these important things.

I read an article this week by Joel Lovell. He is a deputy editor of the New York Times Magazine. He confidently titled the article “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read All Year” (New York Times, 3 January 2013). The title of the article alone caught my attention, probably because I tend to have so much trouble making declarations like that—certainly when it comes to books. I love reading, but I sometimes struggle to tell you the best thing I read last week, let alone the best thing in a year, and I’m sure I don’t have as much to choose from as an editor at the Times Magazine.

I struggle in a similar way with a question that pastors probably get asked more often than most folks: What is your favorite passage in the Bible, Adam? What is your favorite story? I could name a number of them that I like, but the best one? I don’t know. I like a lot of them, all for different reasons. There would inevitably be a lot of qualifiers: “I find the language of this one poetic, the story of that one entertaining, the meaning behind that one is fundamental to what I believe . . .”

I’m not always comfortable with these kinds of questions, so I found it impressive that Joel Lovell is confident telling us about the best book of the year. Because I had that article in mind this week, it was infinitely more impressive to me when I found that in today’s scripture lesson, Jesus seems to pick out for us his “favorite” passage in the Bible.

Here’s how it would have unfolded: At the time when Jesus lived, the typical Sabbath service in a synagogue would’ve gone like this: (1) There was always the recitation of the Shema. (Edwin has preached about the Shema in recent months; it’s found in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord alone.”) (2) The congregation would have prayed, facing in the direction of Jerusalem, followed by a congregational “Amen.” (3) There would have been a reading from the books of the Law and the Prophets, (4) a sermon, and (5) a benediction. The whole routine is not terribly different than what we do (E. Yamaguchi, “Synagogue” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels).

In those days, any male in the congregation could volunteer or might be asked to read the scriptures. In addition, that same person might be asked to lead the prayers or preach the sermon.

On the day mentioned in today’s reading, Jesus has been traveling around, and he returns home to Nazareth. It is the Sabbath, so with his family and friends, he goes to the synagogue where this routine I’ve just been describing unfolds. Whether he volunteers or is asked to read is unclear, but one way or another, Jesus ends up being the reader, and back to my initial point, there’s no indication that he had any trouble choosing what to read. He opens the scroll containing the words of the prophet Isaiah and goes directly to these words:

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 let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Isaiah 60:1–2)

This is what he read. No hesitation. In fact, he simply rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, takes his seat, and in lieu of preaching some lengthy sermon, says to the gathered congregation, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

“This is what I am here to do,” says Jesus. He is sure about his choice of readings. “This is what it is all about: good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed . . . and this year before us, this is the year when the Lord says things will be good.”

It seems to me that this is what Jesus said was most important. I’m not even sure what my favorite book is right now, and I’m much less clear on what my favorite passage in the Bible is. But this is what Jesus picked. So why did Jesus pick what he picked? Well, speaking of that, let me step back for a moment to the content of that article by Joel Lovell, because the two stories have something in common.

The article started with Lovell talking about a talk he had with George Saunders. The two of them seem to be well acquainted. They were at a coffee shop or restaurant. Lovell had been having a tough time lately—a very good friend of his had died. He was trying to put into words what he’d been feeling, and as great authors tend to do, Saunders was asking helpful questions; Lovell was opening up. He’d been thinking a lot about death. Saunders listened to him, and then he told a story.

He’d been on a flight from Syracuse to Chicago. Everything was routine. He was reading a magazine when there was a loud thump, he said, like a minivan hit the side of the plane. He said he kept his head in his magazine, because if he didn’t look up, it hadn’t really happened—but then it happened again. It was no false alarm, and from there Saunders launched into the details of a story no one wants to be a part of: screaming, black smoke, awful noises of metal on metal. When the kid next to him asked, “Is everything going to be OK?” he lied. He recalled feeling like he was going to pee in his pants; he remembered the woman next to him whose hand he took and held until they landed, which, since he lived to tell the story, of course they eventually did. They all nearly died because the plane flew into an unexpected flock of geese.

Lovell had been struggling with his friend’s death. Saunders told him that story, and then he offered this reflection: “For three or four days after that . . . it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, If you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”

That statement pinpointed what Lovell had been struggling with. In the wake of his friend’s passing, with real mortality right in front of his face, he’d been wrestling with something that gives pause to many of us from time to time: the comparison between what is really important and the much more ordinary stuff that occupies our minds most of the time. The tension between the emotional energy and vitality we feel when we are most aware that we are alive, and the reality that we forget that urgency far too easily, and too often we find ourselves dragging through life only half-alive, forgetting how precious life is. Lovell described what he was feeling as a desire “to really have that awareness, to be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace.” What would it be like to feel that way all the time?

Isn’t that the kind of living Jesus is talking about? “I have come to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed . . . and I know that this is the year when the Lord says things will be good!” These are the kinds of things we think about when we really feel alive. When we are truly aware of the gift that life is and has been to us, when we are truly aware of how fragile we are, we don’t want to turn a dehumanizing, blind eye to the poor; we want to give the poor something real and tangible to hope for. When we are truly aware of life, we don’t want to conveniently forget that a totally unreasonable percentage of the American people spend every moment of their lives locked up in prisons. When we are truly aware of life, we want to open our eyes to the world around us; we want to seek out all kinds of means of oppression, whether it is violence in Syria, injustice in the workplace, or the depression or anxiety or heartbreak of a suffering friend, and we want to do anything in our power to make it better. Perhaps most importantly, when we are aware of the gift of life, we proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor: we do not look to the days ahead as a time for more of the same or acceptance of the status quo; we promise to ourselves and to those whom we love that this year things are going to change! Jesus was talking about this kind of urgency; he was reminding people that all of the time we should be remembering these things about life that are most important.

But it’s so difficult for us to keep our minds on those important things, isn’t it? In some ways, this is a very difficult time of year. The decorations and festivities of the holidays have gone away; resolutions have been made that you may already be finding to be difficult. For those of us who live here in Chicago, it is cold and dark outside right now, and it’s going to be that way for a few more months. For many of us, this is one of the easiest of times to slip away from the vitality of life, to forget the blessing and the fragility of this gift that we call humanity.

That’s why we hear Jesus’ reminder at this time to remember what is really important. A theologian whose work I trust, Carol Lakey Hess, says Jesus reads this text because it is the plumb line of his teaching. This passage he quotes from Isaiah has the potential to be “the central shaping force in our life of faith,” she says, but she also argues that “if we are going to follow the gospel, we should keep coming back to this text to measure our work” (Carol Lakey Hess, Feasting on the Word, C1). It’s difficult to stay focused on these important reminders Jesus gives, so we have to keep coming back to them again and again.

Now here’s the invitation: I want to invite you to do that with me this year. In the past months, I have felt this congregation growing into a community. Previously a group of disparate individuals who showed up for a convenient worship time, we are starting to know each others’ names and stories. We’re starting to figure out who we are and what God is calling us to do and be together as a family of faith. And so I want to invite you to think about and to talk about—with each other and with me—in the weeks and months to come how we might live out the call of Christ to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed, to be a community who says to each other and to the world around us that this is the year when the Lord says things will be good.

This is my hope: that we might figure out together how to be much more aware of how alive we are, how special and precious life can be. So I want us to ask together, How will we have ever before us that desire, Lovell described, a desire to be “as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility . . . and unexpected grace”? For this is the year when the Lord says things will be good. Amen.