I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 13, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke. The text is Luke 4:14-30; you can read it here. That evening was also the launch of our "Season of Listening," a period of months in which our community will be listening to the stories of the city and our neighborhood by conducting one-on-one interviews with residents.
It’s a bit of a strange decision Jesus makes,
when you think about it.
Baptized,
forty days alone in the desert,
filled with the Holy Spirit,
he returns and begins teaching in the temples all around the country side,
and everyone is responding,
and then he goes...
home.
To Nazareth,
a two-stop-lights-and-a-tumbleweed kind of a place,
where everybody knows everybody at the corner store,
and everybody remembers Jesus,
Joseph’s son.
Perhaps he always seemed a little bit...different
to the residents of this tiny, no-count town.
While everybody grew up, and found a job and got married, had some kids,
Jesus just...didn’t.
Then he was out in the wilderness for more than a month,
doing God knows what.
You can almost hear the gossip among folks stopping to chat on the corner:
I always did have a strange feeling about that kid.
Remember when he was just 11 or 12,
the way he stayed behind his parents and sat in the temple
in Jerusalem?
They say he was just sitting there, listening.
It’s just not normal for a kid that age.
*
Scholars are confused by the quick turn in Jesus’ conversation
with the people of his hometown in the temple.
But I think that many of us, who've left a place to land in a big, anonymous city like this one
can probably speak of the unstable chemistry that’s in play
when returning to the place we left behind.
When I go home for Christmas or a summer visit,
I invariably run into someone I knew back in high school
at the grocery store or the Barnes and Noble.
They have three kids and a husband, and I...don’t.
I left and they...didn’t.
And no matter how genuinely glad I am to see that person,
or how glad they might be to see me,
no matter how warm our initial greeting might by,
the gulf that exists between us is palpable.
The very act of leaving seems, in and of itself,
to be a judgement of their staying.
Even though that’s not what I want at all.
There’s no reason to be surprised
when Jesus’ reception at the temple,
at first warm, then proud,
then a little stunned,
turns quickly to hostility.
What he’s saying to these people,
the people who raised him, is,
It’s bigger than all of this.
What God is doing is not just for you,
not just for this place -- it’s for the whole world.
*
Yesterday,
some of St. Lydia’s Leadership Table members and a few others and me
all went to look at a space that’s for rent a few blocks up on Douglass Street.
I thought it was be a place that we might consider for St. Lydia’s --
a place that we could think about moving to,
as we’re swiftly growing out of our space here at the Zen Center.
At our Community Meeting in November,
we decided that we would aim to move this coming Fall,
which means that now, amazingly enough, is the time for us to begin to poke around,
get a sense of what’s out there,
and see what might be realistic.
We also said that, if the right place came along before the Fall,
it would make sense to move on it.
I will let you know right now that we decided not to pursue this particular space on Douglass --
but we learned a LOT taking a look at it,
and I want to share some of that with all of you.
The space on Douglass is a big, unfinished mechanic’s garage.
Brick, one story,
with a roll down garage door.
The space is HUGE.
By New York standards, it seemed to go on for eternity.
And the prospect of fixing up such a space for our use,
putting in new flooring and bathrooms and lighting
and getting inspections done and figuring out how to pay for it all
was an overwhelming prospect, at least for me.
Afterward, we stood around outside
talking about the neighborhood and how rapidly it was changing,
the businesses and organizations that were popping up just south of the space,
Park Slope rising up to the East of us
and the Gowanus Houses poised to the West of us,
the block where we stood situated in the gulf between them.
Wondering who we were in relationship to both.
Jesus reads from the scroll in the temple.
He reads from the prophet Isaiah
and everyone in the room hears those words differently when he reads them,
hears them as if for the first time.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Jesus says,
because God 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.’
Listen to the powerful words he’s using:
Proclaim
Release
Recovery
Go free, or, Liberate
Standing on that block, in the gulf between neighborhoods,
neighborhoods changing more rapidly than we are probably prepared for,
a whole lot of questions emerged
about who we are,
and what we’re being asked to do.
This is Christ’s church,
and the Spirit has anointed us
to proclaim,
to release,
to recover,
to liberate.
And we don’t know just how we’re going to do it.
But we know that it’s bigger than this.
Bigger than these four walls and bigger than these seven tables.
What God is doing is not just for us.
It’s for the whole world.
That’s a little scary to hear sometimes,
because “just us” is awfully cosy.
But “just us” also means just that --
“Just us.”
On top of it all,
proclaiming
and releasing
and recovering
and liberating
brings up a lot of scary questions,
about who’s poor and who’s rich,
about who has power and who doesn’t,
about who can liberate and who can be liberated.
It brings up real, deep questions
about race and class and gentrification.
About the difference that exists
between the world of my block,
and the world of one block over.
And sometimes these questions feel a little bit like standing in the grocery store,
just feeling the distance, the gulf, between you and another human,
and wishing it wasn’t there.
The people in the synagogue were filled with rage
when they heard what Jesus had to say.
This stuff is real.
But there’s something else that’s real.
And that’s God’s deep and abiding presence in all of these questions.
Throughout the last several stories in the Gospel of Luke,
there’s been a leitmotif running through all the stories we hear.
It’s the Holy Spirit.
It’s the Holy Spirit that moves Simeon to go and see Jesus in the temple,
the Spirit that inspires his song.
It’s the Holy Spirit that descends at Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan,
the Holy Spirit that drives him into the wilderness,
and brings him back to begin this ministry that’s been set before him.
None of it happens without God.
None of it happens without the movement of God’s Spirit.
These questions,
the whole lot of them,
about where we’re going to move
and how we’re going to grow,
and what we’re being called to do --
how we’re being called
to proclaim
and release,
and recover,
and liberate,
and the very tricky, very scary, HOW
of actually doing that,
of actually reaching across the gulf,
are questions that we need to sit with
and wrestle with
and struggle with.
And in the very midst of our sitting and wrestling and struggling,
the Spirit will move.
Most likely in ways that are entirely unexpected.
There’s a rule in theatre improv that,
whatever your partner gives to you to work with,
the best thing to do is just to say yes.
What if we approached each day as a holy improvisation?
A playful, surprising partnership
in which our job is to simply be ready to say yes?
We plan and rehearse and prepare, and we should,
but all of that rehearsal is really just getting ready to be light on our feet.
To say yes when that surprising moment comes.
St. Lydia’s, for instance, never set out to have a garden;
but we got one by serendipity,
when it landed in our laps.
Or maybe it was grace.
I have a feeling that grace is not done with us quite yet.
*
Standing in front of this ginormous garage,
Contemplating what St. Lydia’s might do
if we were to take a space like this on,
a space that could house pretty much anything we wanted it to --
an after school program,
a theatre,
a day program for those without housing,
a yoga class (or three)
bible study, theology group,
a chapel,
Jake’s friend, an architect who had come along to advise us,
gave us some very good advice.
He said, You need to learn more about the neighborhood.
About what the needs are here,
and how you’re going to respond to them.
And someone said,
We need the Season of Listening.
This is a season of listening at St. Lydia’s,
and a season of discernment.
A time to listen to this city and this neighborhood.
To learn more about what we are being called to do,
and maybe even to begin to put some flesh on the bones,
and think a little bit about how we’re going to do it.
And by “we,” what I really mean is “God.”
Because she’s our parter in all of this.
We will rehearse and prepare,
and then we will listen,
all so that, when the moment comes,
we can be light on our feet.
All so that, when the moment comes,
we are something close to ready
to say yes.
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