The year of the Lord's favor
Commentary
If you had to pick one image from the scriptures to sum up the significance of Jesus' ministry, what would it be? Of all the prophecies and promises recorded in the Bible, which would you choose as placing the message of the Gospel in a nutshell?
Well, for Luke, the answer to that question was to be found in a story from Jesus' own experience as a Jewish teacher. In the village where he had grown up, Jesus was invited to read from the scroll of Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Everyone in that synagogue recognized the proclamation of that special year as the announcement of the Jubilee.
The Jubilee year was an important part of the Law of Moses, but one that is perhaps little known to many Christians (despite attempts to resuscitate the idea through calls for international debt relief a few years ago at the turn of the millennium). It was to be observed every fiftieth year in Israel -- a kind of festival year following each cycle of seven Sabbath years. In that Jubilee year, every debt was to be completely forgiven, every piece of foreclosed land was to revert to its original owner, every person forced into indentured service and slavery was to be freed. It was to be the society's supreme symbol of how God's grace frees us from the heavy burdens of our sinfulness. And so Israel's prophets used the Jubilee as the great image of what life would be like when God's justice and plan for the world was restored not just for a year, but forever.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
There were apparently two paths to becoming a prophet in ancient Israel. What was most likely the usual path was a period of training and apprenticeship as one of the "sons of the prophets" during which one studied in a kind of guild, probably under the tutelage of a recognized prophet. The other path was a response to a dramatic encounter with God that compelled the person to fulfill the task. Perhaps the best known example of the former is Elisha, who apprenticed under Elijah and then led the "company of prophets" once his master was taken into God's presence (1 Kings 19--2 Kings 9). The latter path corresponds to the more popular impression of prophets and includes such prominent figures as Moses (Exodus 3-4), Samuel (1 Samuel 3), Isaiah (Isaiah 6), and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1-3). Less widely known, but important for understanding these two paths, is Amos who directly contrasts his direct call from God with the more common process of prophetic training (Amos 7:10-17).
This lectionary reading places Jeremiah squarely in the second camp. As he recounts his call, he explains that he was destined to be a prophet since God had "consecrated" and "appointed" him to that task before he was even born. Thus, while like Moses and Isaiah before him he pleads a personal inability to fulfill the task (v. 6), God rejects the excuse as somewhat beside the point. The prophet does not provide his own counsel but instead speaks the words that God places within his mouth (v. 9).
This historical distinction between two paths to the prophetic office in ancient Israel is important to the preaching task because it directly confronts an all too common objection to more active engagement in ministry by laity. Many people will say something to the effect, "Well, God hasn't called me to take a prophetic stance." But the historical reality is that most of those considered prophets within Israelite society didn't have the sense they were predestined to the office or were compelled to it by a burning bush encounter with God. And even for those like Jeremiah and Moses who did have a dynamic sense of call, that very experience had underscored for them not some special ability they had in comparison to others. Rather, it convinced them more than ever that they were completely dependent upon God in their prophetic ministry.
With regard to the particularity of Jeremiah's call, no conclusion can be drawn regarding when in life he had this dramatic encounter with God from his objection, "for I am only a boy" (vv. 6b-7a). Certainly some people had such experiences in childhood or adolescence (for example, Samuel), but the expression "only a boy" covers periods of life through early adulthood and says more about perceived maturity in the estimation of others than about chronological age.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Anyone who has ever studied the complexity of systems involving simultaneous mutual influence in a physics class knows how difficult it can be to disentangle the individual forces. Something quite similar has happened over the centuries in the use of this famous chapter within different settings of Christian worship. The passage has been widely used in the context of wedding services to call the couple to a deeper commitment of love than mere romanticism. But the very association of the chapter with marriage ceremonies in the popular mind has, over time, sentimentalized the way that many hear this ode to love. And many attempts to remedy this situation have served only to introduce new problems.
As most people with even a passing familiarity with New Testament Greek know, the word translated "love" here is agape, the nominal form of one of three words from that language that can be glossed over into English as "to love." The verbal roots of these words have popularly been distinguished as: erao, sexual or erotic love; phileo, love within families and between friends; and agapao, moral or, better, divine love. While there is some basis for these distinctions in the usage patterns of Koine ("common") Greek in the Hellenistic period, there are ample instances where the actual usage cuts across these distinctions. Such is especially the case with agapao/agape that are often used to express simple affection or warm regard between persons.
Rather than relying on exaggerated distinctions, the best way to understand the nature of the "love" that Paul exalts in this chapter is to isolate the pattern within the things that Paul says such love does. After all, word meaning is properly determined by usage not some abstract norm, and the noun agape was only rarely used in Hellenistic Greek prior to its popularization in Christian literature.
Paul introduces the ode into the middle of a discussion about demonstrations of special abilities enabled by the Spirit (chs. 12-14). He begins by asserting that the use of these "spiritual gifts" (12:1) in isolation from love for others (i.e., for primarily or even solely personal benefit) is meaningless (13:1-3). Ecstatic utterances, prophetic declarations, faith, even generosity and ultimately martyrdom only find their meaning in the context of relational community.
Paul then turns to a classic means of definition, distinguishing between what he intends to include within the scope of "love" and what he considers beyond its bounds or even antithetical to it (13:4-7). Once again the pattern contrasts those things that focus on and foster community -- what love is: patient, kind, enduring, trustful -- with those things that focus on the individual -- what love is not: boastful, arrogant, demanding, sinful.
The excellence of love over even the greatest spiritual gifts (see 12:31) resides not in its divine origins per se but in its eternal quality. Spiritual gifts will not always be given by God (13:8b-11), but "love never ends" (13:8a). Indeed, the spiritual gifts are in some sense imperfect means toward achieving the perfection of community (13:9-10, 12) that is exemplified by faith, hope, and love. And as the bond that holds the community of human and divine together, "the greatest of these is love" (13:13).
Luke 4:21-30
By way of introducing his narrative of Jesus' ministry, Luke recounts an episode that transpired in a Nazareth synagogue. Having stood to read the passage as a sign of reverence, Jesus then sat down to assume the position of a teacher (v. 20) and began to speak about the meaning of those words and images from Isaiah. God's message, the prophet had said and Jesus reiterated, was good news for the poor, the promise of freedom for the captives and the oppressed, the miracle of healing for the blind, and the proclamation of the Jubilee, "the year of the Lord's favor."
You would think that those gathered there would have been elated by this news -- and at least initially they were. Luke observes that "all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth." But as Jesus continued, their attitude began to change. Jesus pointed out that there were others who would share in the blessings of the Jubilee, that indeed those gathered in the synagogue bore some of the responsibility for the need of an eternal Jubilee. They were guilty of complicity in the oppression of others. Their expectation that they alone would receive the blessings of divine favor and justice had blinded them to the truth of God's love for all humanity. And as Jesus continued, the amazement in that synagogue was transformed into rage.
No, they objected, their privileged status must be maintained. To teach that God's blessings belonged to other people as well -- people not specifically chosen as Abraham and they, his descendants, had been -- to teach such a thing was heresy. The only recourse could be that Jesus the heretical teacher must meet the heretic's punishment and be stoned to death by being cast from the cliff top. Somehow Jesus "passed through the midst of them and went on his way" to continue his ministry of proclaiming "the year of the Lord's favor."
Application
As the good news of God's Jubilee through the ministry of Christ spread and was received by those Gentiles whom Jesus' audience in the synagogue had rejected, they too over time adopted the same attitudes of chauvinism and particularism. It was the Christians, and really only the Christians descended from the Greek and Roman world in Europe, who were the recipients of God's blessing and deliverance. And in what was undoubtedly the most insidious development of all, they began to look upon their own power and wealth, far too often the product of oppressing and impoverishing others, as the proof of their divine favor. And so it became necessary through history for the Spirit to anoint still other prophets "to bring good news to the poor ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
One such "year of the Lord's favor" was 1843, for it was in that year that Isabella Baumfree heard God's call "to proclaim release to the captives." Then in her mid-forties, she began to preach that people best show love for God by love and concern for others. She soon began directing her speeches toward the abolition of slavery. Isabella had been born into slavery, and had only been freed 15 years earlier in 1828 when slavery had been abolished in her native New York. From 1843 until her death 40 years later in 1883, she traveled throughout New England and the upper Midwest calling this nation "to let the oppressed go free" and, once slavery ended with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment in 1865, challenging it "to bring good news to the poor" by dealing justly with the freed slaves. One of the most prominent of the American abolitionists, this woman of Christian faith, conviction, and courage would be remembered by history as "Sojourner Truth."
1905 was "the year of the Lord's favor," for it was in that year that the Niagara Movement began under the leadership of W. E. B. DuBois. Dissatisfied that the struggling economic progress and acquiescence to segregationist practices had not accomplished the moral "recovery of sight" to those "blinded" by racism as Booker T. Washington had hoped, DuBois and others banded together to oppose racial discrimination directly. The deepening crisis brought on by racial tension led people from many races to join with this effort, and in 1909 the NAACP arose from the Niagara Movement.
It was a young lawyer from the NAACP who played a crucial role in making 1954 "the year of the Lord's favor." That was the year that Thurgood Marshall successfully argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education that the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the Court almost 60 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson was not only a violation of morality but of the tenets of our nation's constitution as well. As that decision was published and applied in the coming years, it brought "good news" to those who had been kept in poverty by sub-standard education and by segregation and discrimination in so many aspects of life.
The following year was likewise "the year of the Lord's favor," for it was in 1955 that Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying a Montgomery, Alabama, city law that required blacks to give up their seats when white people wished to sit in their seats or in the same row. Montgomery's blacks protested her arrest by refusing to ride the buses. Their protest lasted 382 days, ending when the city abolished the bus law under order from the Supreme Court. The boycott became the first organized mass protest by blacks in Southern history. It also focused national attention on the young Baptist minister serving his first pastorate who was chosen to lead the boycott, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.
The ensuing years would make it clear that indeed "the Spirit of the Lord [was] upon" Dr. King "to proclaim release to the captives" and the victims of prejudice of every race and "to let the oppressed go free." That prophetic anointing of the Spirit perhaps was never more evident than on August 28, 1963, "the year of the Lord's favor," when Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and proclaimed to an inter-racial crowd of some 200,000:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."... And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Surely Martin Luther King, Jr., shared in the gospel ministry of Jesus, and could have confessed in the words from the book of Isaiah, "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 ... to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
But like Jeremiah and Jesus before them, each of these heralds of God's favor and grace upon all peoples learned that the rich and the powerful resist "good news [for] the poor ... release [for] the captives," and freedom for the oppressed. Even those in the synagogue who "were amazed at the gracious words that came from [Jesus'] mouth" sought to kill him when it became clear that deliverance for the oppressed meant judgment upon the oppressors. Yes, God's grace and favor extends to all, but for divine justice to become reality in our world, human injustice must cease. The same greed, animosity, and misguided sense of personal privilege that led the elites of Jerusalem to imprison Jeremiah, that led those in the synagogue at Nazareth to try to throw Jesus off the cliff top, also led an assassin's bullet into Dr. King's body.
And so the question before each of us is: How will we respond to the presence of the Spirit and God's call to each of us "to bring good news to the poor"? Will we "recover [our] sight" so that we are no longer blinded by the evils of racism, sexism, and classism? Will we join with God, empowered by the Spirit, to establish divine justice in the world? Or will we resist that "good news" because it may also expose our own complicity in the oppression of others, our own chauvinism at believing that we especially and to the exclusion of others are entitled to God's blessings? What will we do, both corporately and individually, to make 2004 "the year of the Lord's favor"?
An Alternative Application
1 Corinthians 13:1-13. Back when I was a university professor I would challenge my undergraduate students to define "love." After listening to a long list of definitions ranging from the sappiest sentimentality to the most demanding forms of moral commitment, I would tell them that they had all gotten the definition wrong. " 'Love,' " I would tell them, "is a score of zero in a tennis match." The point was to underscore that what words mean depends entirely upon the ways they are used within specific contexts of use. If we are going to understand what "love" means in the scriptures, we cannot begin with abstract notions about what God's love should be. Rather, we must engage the nitty-gritty ways in which the word is actually used.
The same is true for understanding what love is and means in life. If we are to understand what love is, then we must remove it from the abstract ruminations of our minds and get out and use it. What we will discover is that love is always about others and not ourselves. It is about building community and integrating ourselves within it, not about benefits for isolated individuals whether ourselves or others. Love is doing the things that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, not only for the present but for eternity.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 71:1-6
The power and importance of the psalms lies partly in their honesty. The elements of worship represented in the psalms include the kind of things we would expect: praise, joy, devotion, prayer, and so forth. However, within the context of worship, the psalms are also able to contain emotions and experiences that we do not often hear in our services. The psalmists of old felt the freedom to offer complaint, lament, protest, and even despair. Psalm 71 is an example of this sort of honest worship. It is the lament of an individual who cries out for God's help (vv. 1-4) but at the same time expresses affirmation and trust in God's goodness (vv. 3-5).
The cries for help dominate the first four verses: "deliver me ... rescue me ... save me ... rescue me...." This repetition may suggest the degree of suffering which the psalmist is experiencing.
If that is true, then the repetition of God's qualities also represent the degree of trust and faith the psalmist has in God. God is variously portrayed as a "rock of refuge ... strong fortress ... my rock ... my fortress."
Clearly the psalmist understood, perhaps firsthand, the destabilizing power of distress. Pastoral care specialists point out that when persons are in crises the entire body can change. Sleep patterns can become disrupted, appetite may increase or decrease, blood pressure sometimes goes up, and so on. Living through a traumatic event or crisis may create a sense that the whole world is shifting under our feet.
The psalmist addresses this sense of shift and instability by portraying God as a safe and solid refuge. The whole world may shake and fall apart, but the shelter of the Lord is immovable. We remain safe under his care.
This psalm with its promise of shelter is used three times in the lectionary cycle -- once during Holy Week and once during Epiphany. This makes perfect sense. As God reveals himself in Jesus, the promise of a shelter, safe and strong, is not rooted in some abstract image of God high above the heavens, distant and removed from our hurts and fears. God has made himself known in a most concrete fashion -- as the Word made flesh.
The Word made flesh becomes the stabilizing influence not only for our individual lives but for the whole world. The Word also becomes part of the focus of our praise and adoration. And, if we have the honest courage, the Word made flesh also becomes the one to hear our complaints and our laments. Or as the prophet noted, "He has borne all our sorrows."
Well, for Luke, the answer to that question was to be found in a story from Jesus' own experience as a Jewish teacher. In the village where he had grown up, Jesus was invited to read from the scroll of Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Everyone in that synagogue recognized the proclamation of that special year as the announcement of the Jubilee.
The Jubilee year was an important part of the Law of Moses, but one that is perhaps little known to many Christians (despite attempts to resuscitate the idea through calls for international debt relief a few years ago at the turn of the millennium). It was to be observed every fiftieth year in Israel -- a kind of festival year following each cycle of seven Sabbath years. In that Jubilee year, every debt was to be completely forgiven, every piece of foreclosed land was to revert to its original owner, every person forced into indentured service and slavery was to be freed. It was to be the society's supreme symbol of how God's grace frees us from the heavy burdens of our sinfulness. And so Israel's prophets used the Jubilee as the great image of what life would be like when God's justice and plan for the world was restored not just for a year, but forever.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
There were apparently two paths to becoming a prophet in ancient Israel. What was most likely the usual path was a period of training and apprenticeship as one of the "sons of the prophets" during which one studied in a kind of guild, probably under the tutelage of a recognized prophet. The other path was a response to a dramatic encounter with God that compelled the person to fulfill the task. Perhaps the best known example of the former is Elisha, who apprenticed under Elijah and then led the "company of prophets" once his master was taken into God's presence (1 Kings 19--2 Kings 9). The latter path corresponds to the more popular impression of prophets and includes such prominent figures as Moses (Exodus 3-4), Samuel (1 Samuel 3), Isaiah (Isaiah 6), and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1-3). Less widely known, but important for understanding these two paths, is Amos who directly contrasts his direct call from God with the more common process of prophetic training (Amos 7:10-17).
This lectionary reading places Jeremiah squarely in the second camp. As he recounts his call, he explains that he was destined to be a prophet since God had "consecrated" and "appointed" him to that task before he was even born. Thus, while like Moses and Isaiah before him he pleads a personal inability to fulfill the task (v. 6), God rejects the excuse as somewhat beside the point. The prophet does not provide his own counsel but instead speaks the words that God places within his mouth (v. 9).
This historical distinction between two paths to the prophetic office in ancient Israel is important to the preaching task because it directly confronts an all too common objection to more active engagement in ministry by laity. Many people will say something to the effect, "Well, God hasn't called me to take a prophetic stance." But the historical reality is that most of those considered prophets within Israelite society didn't have the sense they were predestined to the office or were compelled to it by a burning bush encounter with God. And even for those like Jeremiah and Moses who did have a dynamic sense of call, that very experience had underscored for them not some special ability they had in comparison to others. Rather, it convinced them more than ever that they were completely dependent upon God in their prophetic ministry.
With regard to the particularity of Jeremiah's call, no conclusion can be drawn regarding when in life he had this dramatic encounter with God from his objection, "for I am only a boy" (vv. 6b-7a). Certainly some people had such experiences in childhood or adolescence (for example, Samuel), but the expression "only a boy" covers periods of life through early adulthood and says more about perceived maturity in the estimation of others than about chronological age.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Anyone who has ever studied the complexity of systems involving simultaneous mutual influence in a physics class knows how difficult it can be to disentangle the individual forces. Something quite similar has happened over the centuries in the use of this famous chapter within different settings of Christian worship. The passage has been widely used in the context of wedding services to call the couple to a deeper commitment of love than mere romanticism. But the very association of the chapter with marriage ceremonies in the popular mind has, over time, sentimentalized the way that many hear this ode to love. And many attempts to remedy this situation have served only to introduce new problems.
As most people with even a passing familiarity with New Testament Greek know, the word translated "love" here is agape, the nominal form of one of three words from that language that can be glossed over into English as "to love." The verbal roots of these words have popularly been distinguished as: erao, sexual or erotic love; phileo, love within families and between friends; and agapao, moral or, better, divine love. While there is some basis for these distinctions in the usage patterns of Koine ("common") Greek in the Hellenistic period, there are ample instances where the actual usage cuts across these distinctions. Such is especially the case with agapao/agape that are often used to express simple affection or warm regard between persons.
Rather than relying on exaggerated distinctions, the best way to understand the nature of the "love" that Paul exalts in this chapter is to isolate the pattern within the things that Paul says such love does. After all, word meaning is properly determined by usage not some abstract norm, and the noun agape was only rarely used in Hellenistic Greek prior to its popularization in Christian literature.
Paul introduces the ode into the middle of a discussion about demonstrations of special abilities enabled by the Spirit (chs. 12-14). He begins by asserting that the use of these "spiritual gifts" (12:1) in isolation from love for others (i.e., for primarily or even solely personal benefit) is meaningless (13:1-3). Ecstatic utterances, prophetic declarations, faith, even generosity and ultimately martyrdom only find their meaning in the context of relational community.
Paul then turns to a classic means of definition, distinguishing between what he intends to include within the scope of "love" and what he considers beyond its bounds or even antithetical to it (13:4-7). Once again the pattern contrasts those things that focus on and foster community -- what love is: patient, kind, enduring, trustful -- with those things that focus on the individual -- what love is not: boastful, arrogant, demanding, sinful.
The excellence of love over even the greatest spiritual gifts (see 12:31) resides not in its divine origins per se but in its eternal quality. Spiritual gifts will not always be given by God (13:8b-11), but "love never ends" (13:8a). Indeed, the spiritual gifts are in some sense imperfect means toward achieving the perfection of community (13:9-10, 12) that is exemplified by faith, hope, and love. And as the bond that holds the community of human and divine together, "the greatest of these is love" (13:13).
Luke 4:21-30
By way of introducing his narrative of Jesus' ministry, Luke recounts an episode that transpired in a Nazareth synagogue. Having stood to read the passage as a sign of reverence, Jesus then sat down to assume the position of a teacher (v. 20) and began to speak about the meaning of those words and images from Isaiah. God's message, the prophet had said and Jesus reiterated, was good news for the poor, the promise of freedom for the captives and the oppressed, the miracle of healing for the blind, and the proclamation of the Jubilee, "the year of the Lord's favor."
You would think that those gathered there would have been elated by this news -- and at least initially they were. Luke observes that "all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth." But as Jesus continued, their attitude began to change. Jesus pointed out that there were others who would share in the blessings of the Jubilee, that indeed those gathered in the synagogue bore some of the responsibility for the need of an eternal Jubilee. They were guilty of complicity in the oppression of others. Their expectation that they alone would receive the blessings of divine favor and justice had blinded them to the truth of God's love for all humanity. And as Jesus continued, the amazement in that synagogue was transformed into rage.
No, they objected, their privileged status must be maintained. To teach that God's blessings belonged to other people as well -- people not specifically chosen as Abraham and they, his descendants, had been -- to teach such a thing was heresy. The only recourse could be that Jesus the heretical teacher must meet the heretic's punishment and be stoned to death by being cast from the cliff top. Somehow Jesus "passed through the midst of them and went on his way" to continue his ministry of proclaiming "the year of the Lord's favor."
Application
As the good news of God's Jubilee through the ministry of Christ spread and was received by those Gentiles whom Jesus' audience in the synagogue had rejected, they too over time adopted the same attitudes of chauvinism and particularism. It was the Christians, and really only the Christians descended from the Greek and Roman world in Europe, who were the recipients of God's blessing and deliverance. And in what was undoubtedly the most insidious development of all, they began to look upon their own power and wealth, far too often the product of oppressing and impoverishing others, as the proof of their divine favor. And so it became necessary through history for the Spirit to anoint still other prophets "to bring good news to the poor ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
One such "year of the Lord's favor" was 1843, for it was in that year that Isabella Baumfree heard God's call "to proclaim release to the captives." Then in her mid-forties, she began to preach that people best show love for God by love and concern for others. She soon began directing her speeches toward the abolition of slavery. Isabella had been born into slavery, and had only been freed 15 years earlier in 1828 when slavery had been abolished in her native New York. From 1843 until her death 40 years later in 1883, she traveled throughout New England and the upper Midwest calling this nation "to let the oppressed go free" and, once slavery ended with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment in 1865, challenging it "to bring good news to the poor" by dealing justly with the freed slaves. One of the most prominent of the American abolitionists, this woman of Christian faith, conviction, and courage would be remembered by history as "Sojourner Truth."
1905 was "the year of the Lord's favor," for it was in that year that the Niagara Movement began under the leadership of W. E. B. DuBois. Dissatisfied that the struggling economic progress and acquiescence to segregationist practices had not accomplished the moral "recovery of sight" to those "blinded" by racism as Booker T. Washington had hoped, DuBois and others banded together to oppose racial discrimination directly. The deepening crisis brought on by racial tension led people from many races to join with this effort, and in 1909 the NAACP arose from the Niagara Movement.
It was a young lawyer from the NAACP who played a crucial role in making 1954 "the year of the Lord's favor." That was the year that Thurgood Marshall successfully argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education that the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the Court almost 60 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson was not only a violation of morality but of the tenets of our nation's constitution as well. As that decision was published and applied in the coming years, it brought "good news" to those who had been kept in poverty by sub-standard education and by segregation and discrimination in so many aspects of life.
The following year was likewise "the year of the Lord's favor," for it was in 1955 that Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying a Montgomery, Alabama, city law that required blacks to give up their seats when white people wished to sit in their seats or in the same row. Montgomery's blacks protested her arrest by refusing to ride the buses. Their protest lasted 382 days, ending when the city abolished the bus law under order from the Supreme Court. The boycott became the first organized mass protest by blacks in Southern history. It also focused national attention on the young Baptist minister serving his first pastorate who was chosen to lead the boycott, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.
The ensuing years would make it clear that indeed "the Spirit of the Lord [was] upon" Dr. King "to proclaim release to the captives" and the victims of prejudice of every race and "to let the oppressed go free." That prophetic anointing of the Spirit perhaps was never more evident than on August 28, 1963, "the year of the Lord's favor," when Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and proclaimed to an inter-racial crowd of some 200,000:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."... And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Surely Martin Luther King, Jr., shared in the gospel ministry of Jesus, and could have confessed in the words from the book of Isaiah, "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 ... to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
But like Jeremiah and Jesus before them, each of these heralds of God's favor and grace upon all peoples learned that the rich and the powerful resist "good news [for] the poor ... release [for] the captives," and freedom for the oppressed. Even those in the synagogue who "were amazed at the gracious words that came from [Jesus'] mouth" sought to kill him when it became clear that deliverance for the oppressed meant judgment upon the oppressors. Yes, God's grace and favor extends to all, but for divine justice to become reality in our world, human injustice must cease. The same greed, animosity, and misguided sense of personal privilege that led the elites of Jerusalem to imprison Jeremiah, that led those in the synagogue at Nazareth to try to throw Jesus off the cliff top, also led an assassin's bullet into Dr. King's body.
And so the question before each of us is: How will we respond to the presence of the Spirit and God's call to each of us "to bring good news to the poor"? Will we "recover [our] sight" so that we are no longer blinded by the evils of racism, sexism, and classism? Will we join with God, empowered by the Spirit, to establish divine justice in the world? Or will we resist that "good news" because it may also expose our own complicity in the oppression of others, our own chauvinism at believing that we especially and to the exclusion of others are entitled to God's blessings? What will we do, both corporately and individually, to make 2004 "the year of the Lord's favor"?
An Alternative Application
1 Corinthians 13:1-13. Back when I was a university professor I would challenge my undergraduate students to define "love." After listening to a long list of definitions ranging from the sappiest sentimentality to the most demanding forms of moral commitment, I would tell them that they had all gotten the definition wrong. " 'Love,' " I would tell them, "is a score of zero in a tennis match." The point was to underscore that what words mean depends entirely upon the ways they are used within specific contexts of use. If we are going to understand what "love" means in the scriptures, we cannot begin with abstract notions about what God's love should be. Rather, we must engage the nitty-gritty ways in which the word is actually used.
The same is true for understanding what love is and means in life. If we are to understand what love is, then we must remove it from the abstract ruminations of our minds and get out and use it. What we will discover is that love is always about others and not ourselves. It is about building community and integrating ourselves within it, not about benefits for isolated individuals whether ourselves or others. Love is doing the things that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, not only for the present but for eternity.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 71:1-6
The power and importance of the psalms lies partly in their honesty. The elements of worship represented in the psalms include the kind of things we would expect: praise, joy, devotion, prayer, and so forth. However, within the context of worship, the psalms are also able to contain emotions and experiences that we do not often hear in our services. The psalmists of old felt the freedom to offer complaint, lament, protest, and even despair. Psalm 71 is an example of this sort of honest worship. It is the lament of an individual who cries out for God's help (vv. 1-4) but at the same time expresses affirmation and trust in God's goodness (vv. 3-5).
The cries for help dominate the first four verses: "deliver me ... rescue me ... save me ... rescue me...." This repetition may suggest the degree of suffering which the psalmist is experiencing.
If that is true, then the repetition of God's qualities also represent the degree of trust and faith the psalmist has in God. God is variously portrayed as a "rock of refuge ... strong fortress ... my rock ... my fortress."
Clearly the psalmist understood, perhaps firsthand, the destabilizing power of distress. Pastoral care specialists point out that when persons are in crises the entire body can change. Sleep patterns can become disrupted, appetite may increase or decrease, blood pressure sometimes goes up, and so on. Living through a traumatic event or crisis may create a sense that the whole world is shifting under our feet.
The psalmist addresses this sense of shift and instability by portraying God as a safe and solid refuge. The whole world may shake and fall apart, but the shelter of the Lord is immovable. We remain safe under his care.
This psalm with its promise of shelter is used three times in the lectionary cycle -- once during Holy Week and once during Epiphany. This makes perfect sense. As God reveals himself in Jesus, the promise of a shelter, safe and strong, is not rooted in some abstract image of God high above the heavens, distant and removed from our hurts and fears. God has made himself known in a most concrete fashion -- as the Word made flesh.
The Word made flesh becomes the stabilizing influence not only for our individual lives but for the whole world. The Word also becomes part of the focus of our praise and adoration. And, if we have the honest courage, the Word made flesh also becomes the one to hear our complaints and our laments. Or as the prophet noted, "He has borne all our sorrows."
