Day 57 - The Scroll of Isaiah

A sermon delivered Jan. 23, 2013 at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN using Nehemiah 8:1-10, and Luke 4: 14-21.


The last three Sundays we have been on a search for answers to the question, “Why did Jesus come to earth?” I’m sure I’ll hear a sigh of relief that today finally we look at Jesus’ answer.

We have read that Jesus came to bring light into the whole world so that they might be a light themselves. We learned through his baptism that he came to cloth us in new clothes and to call us to grow by living spiritually according to his word and rub the chaff of sin away. We heard last week that a wedding in Cana was his first sign that he was coming to a great wedding with humanity where the groom showers his bride with superabundant blessings in spite of the fact that the spiritual poverty of the bride has made the Lord an unrequited lover.

Today we hear the first public announcement by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke that his is coming to bring Good News to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind and free the oppressed. These are powerful words from the history of dreams to a Jewish audience captive to Imperial Rome.

What does good news to the poor, releasing the captives, giving sight to the blind and freeing the oppressed have to do light and sin an weddings? I remarked in my first sermon that all of us ought to reacquire or polish the habit of reading the Bible regularly and widely because it is the story of our relationship with God. As we gain familiarity we gain greater appreciation of how these stories connect to our modern hearts and minds and the power of Jesus coming to earth.

I was going to do a little biblical history lesson about the most grievous sins. I read Isaiah 62 in my sermon of last week. In beautiful language the Lord said he loves humanity with the passion a groom has for his bride. (Please accept the culturally specific gender usage that pales in comparison to the point.) That love is so immense that he has showered us with a superabundant blessing of priceless grace. In other words, God loves us over everything and we ought to love God and everything God created in the same way he does.

Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart and mind and the second is like it, love your neighbor as you would love your self. (Mark 12:28-34) In other words the most grievous sins are (1) to deny God and his superabundant love; and (2) to abuse his precious creation, humankind that he loves as a groom does his bride.

I was going to talk about stories of how we abuse God’s creation that are as old as dirt. I was going to talk about Cain, the first human born in God’s creation who soaked the earth with the blood of his brother Abel, the second human born in God’s creation and when God confronted Cain, Cain replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:1-12) I was going to talk about Noah when God saw that society was filled with people directing violence against others and God blotted out almost all living things (Gen 6,7).


I was going to talk about the time God destroyed Sodom.  We have this idea that God destroyed Sodom because of the sexual perversion of its inhabitants but if you read the rest of the story in Ezekiel 16:48-51 you hear the Lord tell the people of Jerusalem  “ ⁴⁸ Your sister Sodom has not done as you and your daughters have done.  ⁴The guilt of Sodom is that it had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.  They were haughty, and did abominable things therefore I removed them when I saw it.


I was going to talk about the Hebrews in the desert of Sinai before they entered the promised land when the Lord commanded them, “Remember you were slaves in Egypt and I brought you out. Do not harvest your fields to the edge but leave a border of grain for the poor, needy and alien among you. Do not glean your fields but leave the remainder for those who have little.”
I was going to read this quote from Deuteronomy 6:10-15, “¹⁰the LORD your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob to give you - a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, ¹¹ - houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, - hewn cisterns that you did not hew, - vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill,  ¹² take care that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. “ to make the point that the sin of Israel was spiritual poverty and blindness, who used God’s blessing to convince themselves they were a nation of self-made people not as a chosen, privileged people indebted to God


Jesus reads this an ancient prophesy from the scroll of Isaiah in that Nazarene synagogue to proclaim he has come to remove the blot of the greatest sins against God, (1) refusing to love God over everything else like a bride of her groom, and (2) not treating everyone, the person living in the gutter, you and me – all his beloved humanity with the same compassion and love God has for us. I hope you would agree that Jesus still expects his Church to live that proclamation as the charter in Luke as it walks in the world.

I was going to fast forward 2,000 years to 2013 and talk about the hole in our Gospel. Today we find 75% of the PC(USA) and its predecessor churches that were present in Chattanooga in 1980 are gone. I was going to talk about how.the majority of us citizens of the church are crowned by material status and economic success compared to the world, yet we are impoverished spiritually by the absence among us of the economically and socially distressed people in our communities, the very people Jesus said he came to free.


I was going to point out not much has changed today from the Sinai desert. We have a wealthy church, our PC(USA) statistics show that our membership compared to the general population has 50% more people earning over $60,000/yr and 50% less people earning below $30,000/yr.  This is the hole in our Gospel and conscience.

As far back as 1935 we heard a preacher called Richard Niebuhr tell the story. He looked over Western culture and saw the wreckage of a first World War, the looming clouds of war in Germany and disintegration of the German Church and the failure of the Social Gospel to solve any social problems. He saw the marriage of the Church to the expansive growth of materialism encouraged by industrial capitalism, not to God.  He saw people out of work living in hobo camps, bankers jumping out of windows because they lost their fortune, newspapers full of stories about how far the state of the church and society had sunk.

He concluded that the poverty, oppression and spiritual blindness is a universal sickness. We are all impoverished spiritually by our wealth or our lack of it. He actually said the church faces a single question, “What must it do to be saved?”

We have to understand how much poverty we share with the family living in the homeless camp under the bridge.  I am constantly reminded of it every week as I work with the homeless shelter in downtown Chattanooga. The first mistake is we can solve our guilt by giving the poor money.

One man in our group thanked us at thanksgiving all he wanted was to see his kids. and bottom fell out. He worked hard and at Thanksgiving his wife relented and invited him home.  We got him a van to get to work. Unbeknownst to us or our man, his wife didn't want him to get custody or visitation right to see the children, so when he got there at thanksgiving it all fell apart. His wife greeted him with meth and after a night of partying, called his sponsor saying she suspected he was high on drugs. He failed the drug test and was kicked out of the program by the management. Our gift of money the van helped destroy him because we didn’t take the time to help his healing by counseling that to fully recover it is necessary to permanently or at least temporarily give up a relationship that is dragging him down. In this case, his wife. His old relationships sunk him back into the mire of despair.

Leroy, another of our group had a dream. He wants his kids to know he hung the moon, but does not know how to get there over his bad past there except he said, please help me. Who is going to help him as a friend to get there?

It is so much easier to be like the priest and pharisee and cross over to the other side of the road to avoid the problem. I had an eye-opening experience in Atlanta. I played a prominent role in Godspell. We cast the play in the context of the homeless population of downtown Atlanta. I became a non-person quite literally. 

My job was to sit out on the steps of the church made up as a beaten man, panhandling folks for spare change for a meal. The first night it was a novel experience playing with people who refused to even look directly at you. By the second night my role took on a more urgent perspective. I tried to get any ting, eye contact, a glance, even a nickel. I became a great observer of shoes, nice loafers, fancy high heels. By the third night, I was desperate. It took all my effort to even solicit a glance. The realization struck me with the force of a blow, I no longer existed, I was invisible to the patrons of the show. You have to walk with someone to understand their poverty and your own.

We all have to get to a turning point where we realize “there but for the grace of God go I.”  A simple turn of events could easily put me in Will or Leroy’s shoes. The loss of a child, loss of a job, an illness that hooks me on painkillers, alcohol that covers up my depression, greed or just simple blindness. 
We do not have to read the newspapers, watch TV, go to the movies or cruise the internet to know we have a hole in our gospel. To know how far we have fallen from the grace of God as a church and society, we only have to look around at the people crying for help and be the good Samaritan I told your children about, not the scribe or Pharisee who crossed to the other side of the road.

It is a reality that we are children of our culture, everything we learned that is important we learned before we were 5.  

This is probably the best way to think about sin, we are born into it. We all have a lot of unlearning to do.

Bringing Good News to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind and free the oppressed is quite the challenge to our daily living.


This reason that Jesus came to earth told In Luke is what I call a hard teaching that calls us to a committed spirituality and worship, something that makes us very uncomfortable because over the generations the values of our culture are steeped in our veins. As hard as that teaching is, all it takes to learn it is to walk with those who are heavy laden with fear and despair.

If Jesus said this is the reason he came to earth is to heal our fear and despair, and we realize as Christians we are his people and his church who is supposed to continue his work begun in Nazareth in that synagogue, them we have some work to do. There but for the grace of God I could be Leroy or Will.

My answer to why Jesus came to earth and to Richard Niebuhr’s question of  the salvation of  the Church is that the only way to save the Church is for us to act according to the words Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah and feed his sheep.    Amen