THIRD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, YEAR C
Nehemiah 8:2-10; Psalm 113; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27; Luke 4:14-21

“Now you are the body of Christ and individual members of it.”
I Corinthians 12:27

Well, it’s January. We've observed Epiphany. The Wise Men have followed their star to where the Christ child lay. We've listened to stories of God made manifest in Jesus. Jesus has stepped out into the Jordan to receive baptism from John, formally beginning his ministry. Jesus has performed his first miracle during the Wedding Feast in Cana. Here in Kentucky, we've settled in for whatever contingencies winter might yet visit upon us. The last needles have fallen off the Christmas trees, costumes from the Christmas pageant are stored away for next year, miniature outdoor lights have been unplugged, and the whole Yuletide season is receding into memory. Outdoors, the tentative, grayish light of winter afternoon yields to the unwelcoming dark of winter nights.

For most of us churchgoers, other than the continuing saga of searching for a rector and in spite of colds, flu and other wintertime ailments, nothing much has really happened, and now it's the bleak midwinter. We have hauled ourselves to church again for the umpteenth time, treading along the familiar, customary rut; it is our duty, it is the way we always spend Sunday morning. At some point, usually during prayers or the homily, we slip into a sleepy trance, daydreaming about the many things we need to do when the service finally sputters to a close. As the Bishop pointed out last week, we sometimes ask ourselves: How can the ancient stories be relevant to us in our daily lives? What can we possibly learn from the lessons appointed? On this winter morning let us interrupt our woolgathering and ponder the Words of God spoken to us in the lessons today.

What could be more relevant than a lesson referring to Ezra standing “before the Water Gate” in an era when we are repeatedly reminded of that Washington D.C. complex that has given a variation on its name to every successive national crisis! Nehemiah tells of the re-establishment of the rule of the Law of God after the Babylonian Exile when the Jews had finally been allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild it under the leadership of Nehemiah as their governor. One of the first things that Ezra, their priest and scribe, had to do was to re-establish and restore the pattern of common worship that had been destroyed. The particular reading today tells about the process Ezra followed to teach the people who had returned from exile what it meant to be Jews; what it meant for them to be God's people. Following the exile, they had their faith, but they did not have their identity as the people of God. Does this not sound just a little bit familiar as the Episcopal Church tries to find common ground after recent events?

Or, what about Paul writing to the Corinthians about the church as so many body parts, reminding them that certain body parts must be treated with modesty and remain unpresentable, and reminding us all that whenever one member of the body suffers, the whole body suffers. Paul is writing to a congregation he founded. But it is now a congregation in conflict and the conflict is not simple. Some of it is involved with people who are interpreting their forgiveness as an excuse for immorality. Some of it is involved with people who are claiming to have special knowledge of God. Some of it is involved with a conflict between those who are more “charismatic” and those who are less dependent on "speaking in tongues." Does this not have a ring of relevance to it even here in the Diocese of Kentucky? Paul called on them to live in love and charity with one another. Do we not still have a way to go in this regard today?

Even today's Gospel, known as the story of Jesus' “first sermon”, offers us some profound insight if we remember where Jesus has been just before delivering this first sermon. He had just spent forty days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. Jesus, like us, goes to church on the Sabbath. As is his custom, he goes to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, and he stands up to read from the scroll he is handed, just as our lay readers do each Sunday. The particular passage Jesus chooses to read is yet one more echo from the poetic book of Isaiah. Handel's Messiah abounds with such verses: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people (Isaiah 40:1)”, and “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (53:4).” All of these, along with Psalm 113 read today, foretell of a Suffering Servant, a Messiah who is one of us, in our very midst. And so, up on his feet, among his own in the Nazareth congregation, Jesus reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind.”(Luke 4:21) Is there anyone among us who does not long for “good tidings” to break us loose from winter doldrums and the stresses and heartbreaks of life?

It really should not take much effort to see how these passages have relevance today. But, alas, it is not an easy task. Because of our long history of American individualism, we look at ourselves and at others as individuals standing alone, uncommitted, uninvolved, uncluttered by other relationships; each of us personally responsible for our acts, our faith, our relationship to God. The lesson in Nehemiah, however, is that promises of God are made to the whole people together and not to any single individual. The individual takes his or her relationship to God from his or her place among the people of God. The Law of God is for all of us together, and individually only as part of God's people. The lesson for us from the Epistle is that each of us has been given a gift and each of us is responsible for the way we use that gift. We didn't make these gifts and we most likely don't "deserve" them. They were freely given by God and we are stewards of those gifts.

When Jesus read the lesson from Isaiah in the synagogue and then began to teach his neighbors about who he was, their immediate problem was that they saw him only in the context of the relationships in which they knew him. They could not get past the fact that he was “Joseph's son.” He had grown up among them. They knew his family. He was part of the familiar world. How could he possibly be other than that? In a way, the same thing is true for us. We have all grown up with familiar and more or less comfortable interpretations of who we are. And moving out of the familiar way of seeing a person or understanding a person, whether ourselves or someone else, is not easy. But, God always looks at individual people, even an Abraham or a Sarah, or a Moses, as part of the people of God, as being himself or herself not alone, not as an individual, but in the context of the body of the people of God. To God, we are all but a part of the larger picture, the whole body of the people of God; and we are each held responsible for how we take care of each and every part of that body. Like our bodies, the community of the faithful is a mixed bag of the necessary, the nice, the occasionally good-looking. Like our bodies, not all of the parts in the Body of Christ are very nice, or very polite, or generally spoken of in public. And also like our bodies, as St. Paul so clearly tells us, we, in the Body of Christ, all need all of our parts, and are dependent upon one another for the fullness of our life. The God who made us, made all of us, knows all of us, loves all of us, forgives all of us, and binds all of us into His Body.

The lessons in scripture are relevant today, I believe, and from today’s lessons these things I hope sink deep into our braced-for-winter, post-Christmas hearts:

God calls us, we do not call ourselves. We don't make the Body of Christ. God does. We don't provide the gifts which keep the Body of Christ alive and functioning and doing His work in His world. God Does. We don't define who or what belongs in the Body of Christ. God does. Each of us is necessary for the good of the Body of Christ. None of us has all the gifts of the Spirit.

2. As he went to Nazareth “to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19), so Jesus calls us to the same tasks in our time and place. We are to seek justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God, in His Body, doing our part whatever that may be. Not as isolated individuals, not on our own strength, not with our own wisdom, but among those whom He has bound into His Body to manifest His Love for all in our time and place.

3. Despite rejection by Nazareth, Jesus did begin his ministry. Christ himself is our welcome news. Christ is our anointed one. Christ is our promise that God might enter in and liberate us to our fullest humanity. Christ appeared in the synagogue proclaiming that he will be enough to sustain us, to fulfill our longing, to cheer us, to heal us. Jesus does this for us. We, the body of the church, are the community to which Christ’s ministry was devoted and for which Jesus gave his life. Jesus stands in our very midst and welcomes us, invites us to join with him as members of one body.

“Give us grace, O Lord,” beseeches today’s Collect, “to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works.”

And so, “Give praise, you servants of the Lord. Let the Name of the Lord be blessed, from this time forth for evermore. From the rising of the sun to its going down let the Name of the Lord be praised.” (Psalm 113: 2-3)

AMEN.

J. M. Barnes