Sermon for January 26, 2025

 January 26, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Luke 4:  14-21

Earlier this week, as I sat down to think about the Sunday sermon, there was quite a lot of talk about the sermon that Bishop Budde gave at the Service of Prayer for the Nation.  I saw the clip of the last minute or two, and after a day of hearing a wide variety of people comment on it, I decided to watch the whole sermon.  It’s only 14 minutes, and it’s much more nuanced than the clip of the end would lead one to believe.  As I watched, I thought about the Gospel reading for Sunday, which has Jesus preaching a sermon, a much shorter sermon than the ones that we are used to.  

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all include a version of this story, but in the Gospel of Luke, the sermon appears early in the narrative of Jesus’ life, right after baptism and the temptation in the wilderness.  Jesus is filled with the spirit at his baptism, and in today’s Gospel reading, he’s still filled with the Spirit.  He preaches this sermon, which serves as the summary of what his mission and life will be—it’s like the overture of a symphony that tells you what to expect.  And then the symphony follows, and if we go back to the overture, we see that we’ve been given a foretaste.  Here in this reading, we see the same thing, and in fact, if you look at the early chapters of Luke, even the Christmas story, you’ll see that the Gospel writer of Luke uses beginnings to create anticipation for the middle and the end of the story.

One might protest that what we see is not a sermon—and in fact, the people hearing Jesus might also have been expecting more.  One Bible commentary writer notes that the detail about Jesus reading the scroll on the Sabbath is what lets us know that it’s more of a sermon situation than a teaching or reading the sacred text situation.  In the Gospel for next week, which continues the story, there’s language that can lead us to think that he talks a bit more on the topic than we see in the text for today.  

Our Old Testament passage, the reading from Nehemiah, gives us insight into how sermons might have been given traditionally:  read the scripture, help the people understand, and then help them navigate their reactions.  And we can see Jesus doing just that.  In fact, he uses the rest of his life doing that process.  His life is not spent in the Temple, giving sermon after sermon, listening to others give sermons.  No, his whole life is a sermon.  

Jesus chooses the passage from Isaiah that proclaims the good news that God will keep the promises made through the ages.  And then Jesus lives the text, his life a testament and a fulfillment of the promises that he declares in today’s Gospel of Jesus’ first sermon.

Our lives, too, are a sermon, and each day, it’s worth thinking about what sermon we preach by our actions.  If I spend more time feeling aggravated about my fellow humans than praying for them, my life is preaching one kind of sermon.  If I go on Facebook to celebrate a quilting group that made over 200 quilts in a year for Lutheran World Relief, my life is preaching a different sermon than if I go on Facebook to argue with people who don’t vote the way that I do.

Most seminary professors who train students in the ways of sermon giving would tell us that sermons need to be grounded in a Biblical text.  It’s what Jesus does.  It’s worth thinking about our lives as sermons and what Biblical texts our lives proclaim.  What do we reveal about God as we live our daily existence?  What Bible text grounds us?

Our lives can proclaim a powerful witness to the life changing power of a relationship with God.  We celebrate God the Creator, and as we see in Psalm 19, all of creation serves as God’s sermon, to tell us who God is and how God is working in the world.  Listen to those first words again:  

The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

19:2Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.

19:3There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;

19:4yet their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

Jesus, too, creates a sermon out of action; his whole life explains the ways of God to those who take time to listen.  As we look at all of Scripture, another way that we come to know God, we see God’s concern for the poor, the oppressed, those held captive.  We see God breaking through again and again to try to abolish oppressive structures and to proclaim that we can live more freely. Jesus’ choice of a much older prophetic text to read shows that God’s message remains consistent through the centuries.

God’s inbreaking also happens through the Holy Spirit, whose power is not limited to Jesus.  In the reading from 1 Corinthians, we see how the Holy Spirit transforms the first Christian communities, knitting them into one body, each with an important role to play.  Each part of the body has a different function, but each function is necessary.    

As we look at the passage from Isaiah that Jesus reads as his sermon text, we might use that as a tool to measure our activities.  Are we doing what God calls us to do?  Do our lives show how the spirit of the Lord is upon us?

There are many ways to bring good news to the poor.  The world is held captive by many powers, and we have many ways to break that power.  Oppression takes many forms, and there are many ways to heal the blind and to restore a vision.  Our triune God shows us again and again that we can proclaim the Good News of the Lord’s joy in so many ways.

Most people will not come through the doors of this church.  But that’s O.K. because we will go out into the world to do the proclaiming that is ours to do.  That old spiritual, “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” says, “If you cannot preach like Peter, If you cannot pray like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus, and say he died for all.”

There are many ways to tell that love of Jesus, to let our lives be a sermon that is complex and nuanced.  Most of us will never be invited to preach a sermon at the National Cathedral, a sermon for all the world to see and hear. But let’s not ignore the powerful witness of the way we live our lives as members of the body of God; our lives can do powerful speaking without us ever needing to say a word of speech.  Our lives can be a sermon, and for all who see our lives, we can be a powerful witness to God’s power to transform those structures that would break us, keep us blind, hold us bound and captive, and crush us into dust.

Let your life be a sermon.  Let your life be a testament to the ways that God keeps all the promises made through the ages.