Good News For Nassawadox Creek

Alex in Nassawadox Creek

Luke 4:14-21 (RSV)
Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and a report concerning him went out through all the surrounding country. And he taught in their synagogues, bring glorified by all.
He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the Sabbath day. He stood up to read and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. He began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

O.K., here’s something I learned about the gospel that I would not have learned if I had not moved to the Eastern Shore. The good news is not good news unless it is good news for Nassawadox Creek. Some of you may object. “That’s outrageous,” you might say. “That’s absurd! The good news is not good news unless it is good news for Nassawadox Creek? What’s so special about Nassawadox Creek? Why that creek instead of Occahannock Creek or Hungar’s Creek? Surely Church Creek must have some claim on the gospel?”

O.K., agreed. There’s nothing all that remarkable about Nassawadox Creek. I mean, it’s a fine little creek but I have no special fondness for it. It took my last pair of glasses in a kayak tip over. When I was trying to practice for the Crystal Beach Triathlon last fall I went to swim in it a few times and had to walk most of the way because it’s so shallow. (Don’t go swimming at low tide.) No, there’s not anything remarkable about it, but I still say: the good news is not good news unless it’s good news for Nassawadox Creek.

“But there’s a more basic problem,” you say. “The gospel is not a message of salvation for a creek. It’s a message of salvation for a people. Jesus did not come to preach God’s grace to a body of water. He came to preach good news to bodies – human bodies in need of liberation from sin and death.” I can’t disagree. Jesus did come to preach salvation to people, but there was a message for the earth as well.

It is when the deep waters of the earth (and even the shallow waters)…when the waters hear the word that even they are reflections of God’s glory then we will hear how radical God’s word is. God turns everything upside down. The waters in biblical days were representative of chaos and death and disorder. But where does Jesus begin his ministry? Under the waters of the river Jordan…passing through the waters in baptism and wading out to the banks of the river proclaiming a message that God’s kingdom was coming and was at hand. The waters could never again be claimed by beasts and monsters. Now the waters were claimed by the God who set the bounds of the sea. God was changing even the natural order. Good news for the people? You bet. But good news for the waters too.

But you didn’t come to church to hear about Nassawadox Creek today. Probably you came to hear the good news for you. “It’s been a rough week, Alex,” you’re probably saying. “My parents are being unreasonable. I’ve got exams to take. My boyfriend hasn’t IM’d me in three days and I think he may be starting to lose interest in me. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to look like or how I’m supposed to act. What’s the good news for me?”

Or maybe you’re a little older and you’re saying, “My kids are being unreasonable. I’ve got a ton of work to do. My wife is not real happy with me and hasn’t smiled at me in three days. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to do or what I’m supposed to teach my kids. What’s the good news for me?”

Or maybe you’re in another life stage worrying about how you’ll pay for college or what retirement is going to look like or how you’ll get out of an emotional rut or how you can trust others when you can’t trust yourself. The last thing on your mind when you came in here was Nassawadox Creek. What’s that got to do with the good news, Alex?

Well, listen to the words of the gospel today. They don’t mention Nassawadox Creek, but they do challenge us to hear something new. Jesus was walking through the area around Galilee following his baptism and a time of testing in the wilderness. He had quickly become a well-known teacher. The Spirit of the Lord was upon him. Luke tells us that right at the beginning. He spoke with authority and power and word spread throughout the synagogues.

Finally he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. It was the Sabbath and he went up to the synagogue because that was his custom. There must have been great anticipation in the congregation. Here was the carpenter’s son who had made good. Of course, it was a test. The people who remembered Jesus as a child were reluctant to let him grow up. “Don’t get above your raising,” was just as much of a saying in Jesus’ day as it is in our own.

But they were watching attentively and with great interest as Jesus stood up to read. They handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He opened it and looked for a passage. He put his finger to the scroll and began to read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” Isaiah had written these words centuries before him to describe his own appointment as God’s messenger, but we hear them differently now because Luke has already told us that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Jesus, too. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then he closed the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. That sounds to us like he was trying to take the attention off of him, but teachers in the synagogue would often sit. It was the teaching position and Luke tells us that the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he starts to talk. “Today,” he says, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now you can imagine the confusion in the room. As long as Isaiah’s words were about their ancestors back then, waiting to hear good news from the midst of their oppression, things were all right. As long as Jesus was using this poetic language to deliver a nostalgic message that did not challenge them, it was O.K. As long as he didn’t challenge the way things were, well fine.

But then he says this thing. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Fulfilled? In our hearing? In our hearing?! Did something change while Jesus was speaking? Did these words take on new meaning while they were sitting there admiring the fine way that Joseph’s son had grown up? Fulfilled? Was God really preaching good news to the poor? Was God really freeing the prisoners, letting blind people see and liberating the downtrodden? What had changed in the reading except that Jesus had said the words?

I have to tell you that things did not end well in Nazareth that day. The crowd finally realized that Jesus was talking about himself. He was saying that a new day had come and he was its embodiment. He had come and nothing was ever going to be the same. They saw a local boy done well, but they couldn’t see a savior.

So they almost kill him. If he hadn’t slipped away mysteriously at the last minute he might have been tossed from a high cliff at the edge of town and have to test out one of those things that the devil had tempted him with –jumping off a high place and proving his worth by having angels come to rescue him. But Jesus was not about the show, he was about the message, the Word, and the Word was that God was turning the world upside down.

So the message for Nazareth and for all was the same. The gospel was not a message meant to give more comfort to the comfortable; it was a call to see what God was doing beyond the bounds. Outside the walls of the synagogue, God was at work. And the people who would not be on anybody’s list of premier individuals, at the top of the social ladder, were the first to hear. It wasn’t Bill Gates or Paris Hilton who would hear God’s good news, it was the poor. It wasn’t the prince but the prisoner. It wasn’t the bishop but the blind. It wasn’t Donald Trump it was the refugee. These were the folks who would hear the good news and it was not good news unless they heard it. And who was bringing the news? Jesus.

So what does that mean? It means that the gospel will not be contained. It will not be packaged in such a way that we can easily digest it or assume that we know what it means. It will not be imprisoned by any walls, even the walls of the church. And when we come to hear the word of God spoken to me, just me…when I need the word after the week I’ve just had…when I am at a loss to explain what God is doing in this messed-up jumble that my life often becomes…God points somewhere else. You want good news? Go talk to the poor, go talk to the prisoner, go talk to the oppressed.

I have this feeling that sometimes the most important things that we do as human beings are often the most frustrating. Tonight when we gather in this sanctuary with the people of Shorter’s Chapel for a worship service, I know that it’s going to be a joyful time. I know that we are going to watch the youth dance and hear the choirs sing and hear the word proclaimed by my friend Earl Morris and it is going to be a wonderful time. We are going to say, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.” And we will eat together and wonder why on earth we don’t do this more often.

I sense God’s movement in all of this because it is something that could easily NOT happen. Last week at the Community Unity Day Breakfast at Northampton High School, Gordon Evans, who was the keynote speaker, reminded us of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s observation that the most segregated hour of the week is 11 AM on Sunday morning. We pay lip service to overcoming racial barriers in the church, but we so rarely live it out. And I have to admit that the journey we have been on as clergy working together in our clergy schools group has not been an easy one. It’s been one of the most frustrating things I’ve done since I’ve come here.
We are white and black. We have great ideas. But we have struggled to keep ourselves together and to work together. But God is there in the midst of the frustrations. God is there in the new friendships and partnerships being formed. And so last year we set up a series of cottage meetings, one of which we co-hosted with Bethel Baptist Church. Then Pastor Earl came and was minister-in-residence at Camp Occohannock with me for a whole week last summer. Then he invited me to preach and our choir to sing at a special service last September. Then our youth went and sang at a service in December. Now they are coming to be with us. This is very unusual. It’s not the ordinary thing. It’s not the easy thing to do. It takes a willingness to move beyond the bounds and to see the new things that God is doing. It takes a willingness to see that sometimes to hear the good news for us we have to hear the good news for others.

Here’s what I believe God is doing in Franktown Church. God has blessed us with one of the most remarkable places of ministry in the whole Virginia Conference. This is a church that has a long history of strong education, mission, and making disciples dating back to the 1700s. It’s also a church that has made a great statement of faith in the future by expanding the physical facility and starting new programs. But God is not blessing this church because it is building a monument to what we can do. God is blessing us to be a blessing, to the hard and difficult work of creating new partnerships with new people…to reaching out to welcome others with the good news of how salvation has come in Jesus Christ…to stretching across boundaries of race and class to model the kingdom God is building in this place…to listening not only to the voices that are here, but also to those who aren’t who need to hear that good news, too. Even Nassawadox Creek, because I know that when I have been in those waters that I have heard God speaking there as well. If the heavens are telling the glory of God, then surely the waters are, too.

God is calling us to go out from this place because the Spirit of the Lord is upon us. God is calling us to see that our salvation is tied up with the salvation of our entire community. And God will not be satisfied until all the earth proclaims the good news and the acceptable year of the Lord.

You don’t know how proud I am to be your pastor when I hear people say to me, “You’re the pastor at Franktown Church? You have a lot of loving, active people there.” People know us because we reach out with the arts and with the food bank and with missions and with leadership in the community. I love being the pastor of a church where people are seeing the good news enacted and feeling welcomed to join. I would hate for us to grow complacent and turn inward and forget that the good news calls us to follow Jesus out the doors and into the world.

So, yes, there is good news for you today. There is a word of hope and life. But there is also a word of challenge. Who do you know that needs to hear good news? What places and people in our community are crying out for a new word of hope and life? What is it that we are called to do to meet the needs of the world? Where are you going to start? Let’s be doers of the word and not hearers only. Thanks be to God.