"The Holy Spirit II"
The Spirit in Power and Prophecy
Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 14, 2002
Text: Luke 4:14-21
Not in the great cathedral on Church Street, not in the magnificence of Wesley Methodist Church a few miles down the road, not in the gatherings where there are hundreds of people praising God on a Sunday morning, not in the prettiest church with ivy-covered walls and white roof will you find the most beautiful church on the island of Bermuda.
You will find it, rather, in an obscure place on the top of a hill where no one can find it. It is a church that I grew up in, and spent a considerable part of my life worshipping in. Its walls are uneven, its floors are stone and you can easily trip over them. The pulpit is rickety and if you lean upon it, you will fall on your face. The piano never seems to stay in tune because it is always so humid. It is one of those strange churches that, unless you understand how and why it was built, you could never comprehend. It was a church that was built 150 years ago and it was built by slaves in the moonlight.
You see, in those days, slaves were not allowed to go to church with their masters. On the contrary, if they were to pray, they had to huddle quietly in the fields or on a beach by the sea. Yet the slaves decided that they wanted to have a church - a place where they could worship God - so at night, after a hard day's work, they would go down to the coast and there, because Bermuda had had so many shipwrecks, they would take the beams of wrecked ships and they would carry them up this obscure hill in Warwickshire where no master would ever see them. Over a matter of years they erected a church. It is, without doubt, the most beautiful church in the world.
In 1833, the British Empire agreed to emancipate the slaves. Some five years later, in Jamaica on August 1, 1838, a group of slaves came together to celebrate their emancipation. They did so by taking a coffin and placing in it the shackles that had been around their hands and feet. They took the certificates that said that they belonged to another human being. They took the names that they had been given, adopted names by their owners, and they put them all in the coffin. They buried it in the ground and they said "Farewell." As they did so, they all began to sing, hundreds of them, and they sang:
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise God all creatures here below.
Praise God, above, ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost!"
You see, those slaves knew what those Bermudians knew - that the real liberator, the real source of human freedom, is still our Lord and our God. Wherever you go in the Bible, you find that very same theme working its way through - that the spirit of God is the spirit of liberty. Whether it is Moses appearing to Pharoah and saying, "Let my people go," whether it is the great prophet, Elijah, saying to the pagans who are worshipping Baal that their god was not a real God but that Yahweh was the real God, whether it was Amos taking on the corruption of his society and condemning it, whether it was Ezra or Nehemiah wanting to rebuild the Temple because the religious life of the community had become so poor and so barren - wherever you turn, the Prophets, led by the power of the Spirit, proclaim the liberty of our God.
You have to keep that in mind to understand our text this morning - where Jesus, as was his custom, went into the synagogue and began to read. Now the service in which Jesus took part was fascinating. At the beginning they would say the Shmah of Israel, "Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." They would then say a prayer. There would then be a set reading from the Law. After that, someone would come forward and read a passage from the Prophets. Sometimes these were set, other times it was up to an individual to choose them.
There was no minister, there was no clergy, there were just people who came up, in the spirit of God, and led in worship. Someone would however, give an interpretation of the passage. I didn't know this until recently, but you'll notice that after Jesus read the scriptures, he sat down. In other words, everyone stood for the reading of scripture but the preacher would always sit down to give the sermon - I'm assuming that it was because it was so long.
Well, in the synagogue in Jerusalem everyone usually sat down and heard a very long explanation of the word. But Jesus, when he got up to speak, didn't need to have an interpretation. There's no record of a message being given at all. He opens the Bible and He reads from Isaiah 61- a passage that was originally written in a time of the people's exile and was about the promise of the return of the people of God to their homeland. It was a message of hope and of liberty. When Jesus got up and read this, all eyes were upon Him. He didn't need to say a thing because, in their very presence, this text of the great prophet Isaiah was being fulfilled.
The Spirit of God had come upon Jesus, and, after his baptism, this very first act of his ministry suggested that the glory of God's liberty and God's freedom was breaking forth now and it was breaking forth in a Messiah and His name was Jesus of Nazareth. The people were in awe!
And so, I want to look this morning at the content of that message. It need not be explained, for the whole of Jesus' life was an explanation of what it was about. First of all, Jesus rises and says, "The Spirit of the Lord has come upon me to preach good news to the poor." The poor, in this passage, is a word from the Greek, patokwoi, and the patokwoi were the people of the land. The people of the land were the people who owned nothing, had no stature, no status. They drifted from place to place.
If you look at the ministry of Jesus, you find Him talking to people beside the roadway or talking to people who are planting seeds or taking care of sheep or working in vineyards. Jesus, you see, was identifying with all these people - the people of the land, the poor. But He was saying something profound here because, in many ways, He was affirming them as people. Now that might seem very strange in view of our modern concept of the individual and our enlightened understanding that all human beings are, in fact, people. But in many societies throughout the world, and particularly in Israel at that time, the poor were not considered people in the true sense of the word, as those who were to be counted, as those with status in society.
The poor were non-persons. Just like in modern Bogota, Colombia, where children are often enslaved, or in a country like Sierra Leone, where they are forced to fight, or in India, where people are treated as outcasts, as if they are not really people. Even today, there are still the vestiges that see people who have arisen from the dirt, as it were, from the mire of society, as not really people. Jesus is affirming their presence, He is affirming their personhood. He is saying, like the prophet Isaiah, "I am going to bring good news to these people."
And what was the good news that He brought? What He brought was the very power of forgiveness. You see, many of the poor people could not fulfill the laws of the land. They worked on the land with filthy animals - they couldn't be clean. Often they had diseases - they weren't allowed into the Temple. Often they could not have illnesses treated or wounds bandaged, and so they were ritually unclean. Often they had to work on the Sabbath to keep the fields alive and therefore couldn't worship God as they ought. And often, they were pushed out as outcasts because they couldn't fulfill all the demands of the law.
And Jesus came and proclaimed the message of forgiveness, the acceptable year of the Lord. The slate is wiped clean - it's okay because "I, God, am in your midst. I am the Good News." He is forgiving them their debts. Many of the poor were indebted to their masters and almost acted as slaves. Jesus comes along, just as Isaiah had promised, with a word of jubilee, to wipe those debts clean in order that they might be free from the oppression that hangs around their shoulders and in their pockets.
The poor are being forgiven by the power of the Messiah. Even more than that, the Messiah is identifying with them. He's not just talking about them in an abstract sense, He is coming and dwelling amongst them and showing them the power of God's love to lift them up. Jesus wasn't proclaiming a political ideology or a political philosophy, He was demonstrating God's identification with people who, in the eyes of society, were non-persons. Such is the power and the awesome grace of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, it was being fulfilled that the poor would hear good news because Christ was with them.
But He also came to heal the broken-hearted, and the broken-hearted were those who were ministered to by Jesus. It's not in every text that you will find in Greek this phrase, the broken-hearted, but it is in our Bible and I'm sure it was part of the original message. I'm convinced it was there because when I look at the ministry of Jesus, it was to the broken-hearted. It was to those who were constrained by guilt, who were in bondage to their fears, that Jesus of Nazareth came. And they just didn't realize the power of the liberating presence of God in His presence.
There's a wonderful story about Houdini, who used to brag that if you put him in any jail anywhere, he could get out in a matter of minutes. And so on one occasion they put him in a jail and he tried to get himself out using all his means. But he said he'd never seen a lock like it in his life. He filed and he filed and he pushed and he twisted and he did everything until, after many hours, he lay exhausted and he collapsed in sweat and tears against the door - and it just flung open, because it was never locked in the first place.
Many broken-hearted people are like that. They push and they strive and they agonize and they are bloody and sweaty and in tears and they wonder how their hearts are to be mended. But Jesus has already opened the door. He has already done that. All he says is for us to knock on it and it will just be opened wide. The people who gathered in that synagogue on that day when Jesus read from Isaiah 61 knew and saw the liberating power of Jesus, even to free them from their guilt and their fear and their despair.
But they were also (and here's a great irony) in despair and in bondage and broken-hearted about the state of their land. Everywhere they went they saw Roman soldiers and centurions and tax collectors. Even their religious leaders had kowtowed to the power of Rome. Their land was once again in oppression, just as it had been under the Babylonians in the Book of Isaiah.
Isn't it ironic that the same land is suffering the same fate even as we speak? Isn't it amazing that people are broken-hearted today because of the state of Israel? Is not your heart broken to see young Palestinians blown up in their homes, to see young Israelis murdered in their streets, to see the land of the Messiah of Bethlehem in flames?
I could not help but think as I saw what happened on Friday that if Jesus wept over Jerusalem, then the tears in Heaven, this day, must be causing a flood.
Why are hearts broken? They are broken because there's a chasm. There's a chasm between people. And why does that chasm exist? It exists because people have turned away from the very love and the power and the grace of God. They have forgotten that Jesus said that he came to bind and to mend and to heal and to restore and to give sight to the blind, and that the acceptable year of the Lord is a year of peace.
To that effect, here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, two weeks from Monday I am hosting a breakfast with Sheikh Professor Hadi Abdul Palazzi, head of the Islamic community in Italy, meeting with rabbis from synagogues here in Toronto and clergy from the Christian church to just do something simple, and that is pray. The Lord knows that the only true source of liberty, as those slaves knew in 1838, is when people praise God and put God first and humble themselves. Only then are the broken hearts restored.
And then he came to free the captives and the oppressed. What oppresses people is evil. What was destroyed at Easter was evil. What kills people is evil. What raises them to new life is Jesus of Nazareth. What divides people is evil. What restores them is the love of Yahweh, our God. Jesus came to overcome evil with the good.
Easter then is the fulfillment of Isaiah 61. The acceptable day of the Lord is in the power of the risen Christ and the power of the risen Christ (I want to say this again) is still alive in our world. For that spirit to be alive in this world, Jesus said to his disciples when he was about to depart from them: "I want you to wait in Jerusalem and I want you to receive that which my father will give you."
You cannot heal the broken-hearted. You cannot bring justice and liberty to the oppressed. You cannot bring good news to the poor all on your own. It is the spirit of the living God that does this. You are to wait on that spirit.
Just recently I have been reading a series of papers in a volume from my university days on the life of Abraham Lincoln. I must admit, I never realized just what a profound thinker and reader of the Bible Abraham Lincoln was, but there are two stories that have hit me and I think the modern world needs to hear them again.
The first is that at the Battle of Gettysburg there were some young soldiers and particularly one who fell asleep due to exhaustion. He was supposed to be guarding. The only problem was that that anyone who fell asleep on duty was to be shot. When he fell asleep one of the generals ordered that the young man be executed.
When Abraham Lincoln heard this he was so torn apart that, between the Battle of Gettysburg and the end of the war, he lost some 60 pounds in weight. He tossed and he turned in his sleep because he realized that if his own army could not forgive, if it was taking the life of its own, what was the victory worth?
He was a man, then, of great forgiveness and he sent a word out to his generals that this practice must stop. And many of them questioned whether Lincoln was a man really up to the job.
The second was when he was a young boy and he sailed one day down the Mississippi to New Orleans. On the banks in New Orleans he saw slaves being traded, and he saw children separated from their parents, and he saw husbands separated from wives and families dissolved and disintegrated because of the slave trade. To one of his young friends on the boat, even though he was a young man, he said: "I want to tell you now, I someday will hit this and I will hit it hard."
Here was a man, then, of courage - forgiveness and courage, just like Jesus standing there and reading Isaiah 61. He knew the cost that would have to be paid to stand for the liberty of God, but he was willing to pay it and an empty tomb simply confirmed it to be the day of the Lord.
May that same spirit please be in the world this day in the hearts of leaders in Christ's land and in our hearts, as we live the power of the spirit, the acceptable day of the Lord. Amen.