Your Mission...

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
3rd Sunday after Epiphany - January 21, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a /Luke 4:14-21/]

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

            Forty years ago I used to wait with great expectation for “Mission Impossible” to come on. I liked all of the characters; especially Martin Landau’s master of disguise and voices, but my favorite part of the show was the opening segment. That marvelous music by Lalo Schifrin and then image of the match and the flame was great; although the thing that really got me was the set-up. The little recorder and the voice, “Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Jim your mission should you choose to accept it . . .” And then – poof! – the tape would self-destruct. For years people used that line – “this tape will self-destruct in five seconds” – in all kinds of conversations. Ah, this was real pop-culture stuff, though now we’d look at its rather simple special effects and Cold War related stories with something of a jaundiced eye. Still, that show used to make my weekend.

            What we have today is Luke’s set-up, if you will. Today we’re getting the essence of the mission Jesus is undertaking and that Luke will describe. We also catch a bit of what it means for us to “choose to accept” and take part in this mission in what Paul writes to the Church at Corinth. So, imagine the music playing in the background. We’re going to learn about the mission – your mission, my mission, our mission, should we choose to accept it.

            Jesus goes home, to Nazareth, and does what he normally does, he goes to shul, to the synagogue, on the Sabbath. It is clear that Luke wants to demonstrate that Jesus is an observant Jew, one faithful to the covenant. So he goes to the place where he grew up and where he first worshipped. I think that’s mission impossible in and of itself. I remember going home just for visits and leading worship at the church in my old neighborhood – it was eerie. All of those people sitting out there who really knew me and knew what I had done over the years. Still, they listened to my preaching and received the sacrament from my hands and all marveled, I don’t doubt, that Bill Peay’s boy had gone, as we used to say, “into the church.” Dad would have said, “A clear case of do as I say, not as I do.”

            As Jesus begins his public ministry we’re really brought full circle by Luke who, up to now, has only told us about Jesus. Now, on home turf, Jesus initiates his great work and his inaugural address gives us a summary of what that ministry will be. Jesus finds and reads a passage from Isaiah, slightly amended, and this text sets the theme for his ministry as Luke presents it. The reading is a conflation of two passages from Isaiah and what is notable is what Jesus leaves out – what he doesn’t talk about -- because he leaves out all of the mentions of vengeance. Rather, his emphasis is upon release, restoration and healing.

Fred Niedner, in an article in the Christian Century ("Living by the Word" Jan. 3, 2001), does a wonderful job of bringing out this point:

What is your program, Jesus? We sit in your congregation today. Tell us! Jesus stands to read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor ... 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." He ends in the middle of a verse without reading, "and the day of vengeance of our God." Nor does Jesus read more of Isaiah's oracle concerning comfort for mourners and cloaking the faint of spirit with praise, perhaps because further on Isaiah would repeat the claim that Israel shall have for itself the wealth of the nations, while all those others end up with nothing but God's vengeance heaped upon them.

Such was -- and is - -the conventional messianic dream of oppressed people. When we take over, we will be on top. The creeps who have oppressed us will be on the first track out.

Jesus wants no part of that. How, then, would he bring good news to the poor or freedom to the oppressed? He would do it, Luke shows, through persistent befriending of the poor, the outcasts, the little people of his day, including those who seemed his enemies. He listened to them and ate with them. Some he healed of maladies that diminished their lives. He simply kept on like that until he fell victim to the rich and the powerful.

Even then he responded not with vengeance, threats or self-interest. Rather, he went calmly toward death, stopping along the way to heal a slave's ear, to comfort the women who wept for him, to ask forgiveness for his murderers and to encourage his fellow condemned. There we see Jesus' messianic mission, the epiphany of God's glory in action.

What Niedner points out is that Jesus’ mission reaches to people where they are and seeks to transform and bring the holy into the ordinary. This was the mission Jesus set out to do and it’s still the mission of those who call themselves “followers” of his.

            Luke tells us that Jesus was “anointed” by the Spirit of God. Anointing was a sign of being set-apart for service and is still used in the baptismal and ordination rites of a number of Christian traditions. Being anointed is a sign of a divine call, a vocation, to which one responds. Sometimes we get the notion that the only anointed call is to some sort of full-time Christian service. Michael Novak demonstrates that being involved in business is a noble calling and, indeed, has a spiritual side. He writes about it in his book Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life. What he discovers is that few people really understand their daily work as a divine call. He writes:

I know from talking to and corresponding with business people that many have never been asked whether they regard what they do as a calling. They don’t think about themselves in that way. That has not been the language of the business schools, the economics textbooks, or the secularized public speech of our time. . . . But most of them, they say, do start mulling the idea of calling once it is raised. Some confess that they could think of what they do as a calling, even if they have not. That would not be much of a reach from what they have already been doing. It’s just one of those things that, so far, few people say. [p. 36]

Our Puritan ancestors did say it, however. They saw every vocation as a divine one and understood that the holy was to be found in the ordinary. God wasn’t simply sought or found in the meeting house on Sunday mornings. God was sought and found in every aspect of everyday life, including the work that we do.

            Leland Ryken has done a great service in writing the book Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were. One of the chapters of the text is given over to an examination of the Puritans on work. Ryken points out, “The Puritan conviction about the dignity of all work has the important effect of sanctifying the common.” He quotes several of the great Puritan authors on work and daily life, “William Perkins declared that people can serve God ‘in any kind of calling, though it be but to sweep the house or keep sheep.’ Nathaniel Mather said that God’s grace will ‘spiritualize every action’; even the simplest actions, such as ‘a man’s loving his wife or child,’ become ‘gracious acts,’ and ‘his eating and drinking [are] acts of obedience and hence are of great account in the eyes of God.’ For the Puritans, all of life was God’s. Their goal was to integrate their daily work with their religious devotion to God. Richard Steele asserted that it was in the shop ‘where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.’” [p. 25] This is our heritage – a heritage that accepts the mission Jesus sets out to bring a perpetual year of the Lord’s favor and transform life at its most basic, most ordinary level.

            Now the question is the same as Mr. Phelps heard each week. Here’s the mission, if you choose to accept it. The church, the followers of Jesus, has been struggling with this part of the program from the beginning. It’s a good thing to talk about Jesus, to think about what he has to say – noble stuff – and it’s very good to be identified with such a person. But this following part, this thing of my life resembling his, of my having to different in my attitudes or actions; well, that’s another issue entirely. It was that issue Paul addressed in his letters to the Corinthian church. In one of his most powerful passages, in my thought, Paul sets out the essence of what it means to be the church. He says, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Prior to this passage he shows that the body is made up of many members and that every member, no matter how small, is significant to the health of the body. In fact, when even a small part of the body goes off on its own, then the whole body suffers. Remember, it only takes an alteration in one cell to begin a cancer that can kill the body. I stand before you as a cancer survivor and can tell you that it is scary – but you learn, and you learn to watch; that’s why every member of the body is important.

            Our divine call to bring the holy into the ordinary, to transform life where we, that calls for us to have the support of the whole body. That’s why the church exists. WE continue to incarnate the Christ, we continue the mission Jesus outlined and accepted on that long-ago day in Nazareth. Whatever role we play, it’s an important one, because all together each of those roles, those functions make a difference in the lives we touch, in the bringing of good news to the poor – whether materially, emotionally, or spiritually.

            In last Sunday’s paper there was a headline: “66% of Candidates Run for Office Unopposed.” The article talked about the situation where people are simply not getting involved in community life. One line hit me, “people don’t have time to go to church, so they certainly don’t have time to run for office.” Well, that’s quite a statement and it hits home. There are, as of this year’s count, 898 active members of this church. Yet, we only see about 350 of them on any given Sunday. We have about 375 households who contribute to the work of this church and one hundred who choose not to do so. Not to do so with time, or talent, or treasure, at all. Needless to say, like Paul’s body analogy, we suffer when we lack even the smallest part. We have people who have owned the covenant, said before God and God’s people that they would worship, grow in the knowledge and practice of their faith and return to God a portion of the gifts God has given them. Many simply don’t do this and, as a result, the work we could be doing isn’t getting done.

            It takes not quite one hundred people to fill all of the offices – the boards and committees and the like – of this church. I know that we need to be looking at our governance structures and we will in the year ahead. I hope that we’ll turn out for the Lenten program in record numbers (hint, hint) so that we can have the ‘holy conversations’ that might just bring renewal to First Church. (I will just assume that we’ll all be at the annual meeting today.) We need good folks to fill these positions, people who will take their contribution seriously and will make an effort to be present at meetings. Nomination time is soon upon us. Please give thought to service and remember that the body doesn’t move or grow without you.

            Two articles in Saturday’s paper tell me that the world still needs the church and that we can make a difference. The first one, front page, “Lessons explore what really counts.” This article is on the development of character building curriculum, all because civility is dying in our society. When people were faithful to the church and its mission this wasn’t the case. We learned here, with each other, what it means to treat each other with love and understanding. Second, here’s a story about a church that decided to open itself to its neighborhood – making a decision to become an oasis for the community as opposed to a fortress against it. We’ve been doing that here for over a hundred and fifty years. We need to realize and to celebrate the good that we do, the care that we give to our community, and make sure that we work together to make it continue.

            I know that I’m preaching to the choir here – you’re the ones who are here and probably most faithfully. But what I’m doing is asking you to choose the mission and reach first to our own church members. If we know people who are church members and aren’t attending – ask them why, invite them back, let them know that they’re missed and that they are important to the life of this church. If we begin to make those kinds of efforts the scripture can be fulfilled again in all of our hearing because we live, everyday, in the year of the Lord’s favor.

            We have a mission, you and I; a calling and a role that only we can fill. Today, like everyday, we have a choice to make. Do we choose to accept the mission to which God calls us? Do we make the holy real in the ordinary, touch lives, be the instruments of healing God made us to be or do we keep on going our own way and doing our own thing? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to continue to make the Lord’s love and favor evident. Your mission…my mission….our mission….should we choose to accept it…..