Sermon: "Not Beyond Redemption," Season after Epiphany, January 19, 2025
Luke’s Gospel: Jesus and the Outsiders, Outcasts, and Outlaws
Scripture: Luke 4:14-30
Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka
Here was are again in Luke’s gospel. Jesus is fresh off his baptism, has just been tempted by the devil in the desert for forty days. “Filled with the Spirit,” we’re told. He returns to his home territory of Galilee, and begins a rather successful teaching career in the local synagogues. Where he joins them for worship as guest preacher.
Finally, he arrives at Nazareth, his hometown. Sabbath comes and you find him again in worship at the local synagogue. Filling in as guest preacher, yet again. So he stands up, takes his place, unrolls a giant scroll of the book of Isaiah, and begins to read. He reads out a mix of chapter 61:1-2 and 58:6:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he says. “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 and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Now, when Isaiah wrote these words he was addressing God’s people in the aftermath of the Babylonian invasion and exile. The country had been destroyed, traumatized, and countless citizens had been killed or dragged away to live in Babylon. Here Isaiah is proclaiming a glorious homecoming to the exiles, those who had lost hope. Those who have been impoverished will receive bread, those who have been locked away will finally get out, and the boot will lift from those crushed under foreign occupation. It’s like the jubilee year described in the book of Leviticus: those displaced will get their land back again. Isaiah has been given a message: God is coming and will set things right.
So Jesus reads all this out, puts back the scroll, and sits down. Everybody’s hanging on his every word. Finally, he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Which is to say ‘Like Isaiah, God has anointed me. I announce this same promise to you.’ Mic drop.
And it looks like the sermon lands. Wow… so articulate. This is Joseph’s boy? I remember when he was just a pimply lad, and now he’s a full grown rabbi. Can’t say my first sermon was so well liked. But everyone’s blown away by this reading of Isaiah by Jesus. Back pats, shaking hands all around.
Jesus, though, seems less pleased with the congregation than they are with him. “Soon you’ll be asking me to do miraculous healings,” he says. But remember Elijah when there was a famine? Where did God send him? Not to us, God’s people, but to a widow to feed at Zarapeth—in Sidon with those awful Phoenicians. And remember Elisha—same deal. Plenty of lepers, sick people with skin diseases in Israel. But who did he cleanse? That unclean pagan Naaman the Syrian.” “No prophet, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Same case here, my friends.
Now, as if Jesus lit a stink bomb and tossed it into the pews, this changes the mood of the place entirely. They are suddenly “filled with rage.” One contemporary paraphrase says that the congregation “blew a gasket.” They rush him, then try to toss him off a cliff. My first sermon went better than that, at least. Luckily, Jesus weaves through the crowd and escapes, going on his merry way.
Of course, their reaction to a sermon is rather extreme. But Jesus really pushed a button. Those two stories he mentioned have one thing in common: they are instances of God’s blessing coming to people who are foreigners.
You see, they figured Jesus’ sermon on Isaiah was about God rescuing them. God blessing them, God kicking out their Roman overlords, God healing them and giving them back their land and lives. But both the widow of Zarapeth, and Naaman the Syrian are examples of deliverance, and healing outside the boundaries of the people of God. Not just foreigners, but enemies. Those believed to be outside the realm of God’s favour. Jesus is saying that the Good News, God’s gracious liberation has come not only for them, but for all. Even those they detest. Which is crazy, so they try to kill him.
One scholar puts it like this, “In the end, because they were not open to the prospect of others sharing in God’s deliverance, they themselves were unable to receive it.”[i] Because the gathered congregation is not open to the prospect of others sharing in God’s deliverance, they are unable to receive it themselves. What makes the crowd upset is not Jesus’ message, but that the message is for their hated enemies as much as them.
What a bunch of jerks, eh? Like we would never think like that, would we?
Except we do all the time. All we have to do is consider the type of person we detest the most.
Like, we Christians can get caught up like the congregation in the synagogue, thinking that Jesus came for only people like us. That God’s mercy and God’s blessing are just reserved for those who love God and buy into the faith whole-cloth.
One time I was getting my car fixed, and the owner of the place told me he was a born-again Christian, that he left the United Church in 1988 when we discerned that sexual orientation was not an obstacle to ordination, to becoming a Minister. Finally he said “They (gays) should be able to be a part of the church, I just don’t think they should be able to preach.” And my response was that I had heard gay people preach the gospel as faithfully as anyone else with my own ears. That to deny that would be like the congregation in Nazareth, to blind ourselves to the fact that, in Jesus’ words, the Lord sends the rains on the just and the unjust alike. And the Spirit blows where it will.
That’s a danger for those of us on the conservative end. But those of us on the liberal end are culprits, too. Like most Canadians, we pride ourselves on our inclusiveness. Regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, we believe that all people are the recipients of human rights, deserving of dignity and respect, and help. And rightly so. When we hear sermons like this one, we nod our heads along like those here in the synagogue, because of course God’s blessing is for all. Good news for the poor, amen. Free prisoners, amen. End oppression, redistribute land. Amen, amen, amen, amen. Draw the circle wide, draw it wider still, as the popular hymn goes.
We love social justice Jesus and his inclusiveness. But what if he includes people we don’t want included?
I remember preaching a sermon a year ago or so and there was this throw off line about seeing God’s face in unexpected people or something. There was a guest there, a well-known advocate for progressive causes from homelessness to LGBTQ rights and reconciliation. After the service, he shook my hand. “Well, you got me,” he said. “Can’t say as I’m totally convinced God has anything to do with Pierre Poilievre. But now I’m at least willing consider it.”
Of course, it sounds a little silly. But if we’re honest with ourselves we know it’s true. We all have our someone. Could be the rich, could be the poor, could be the addicted, could be the successful, MAGA conservative or somebody sporting they/them pronouns. Just think of yourself. Who are you convinced God has nothing to do with?
Regardless of how open-hearted we may claim to be, we all have our own blind spot as to who we think God blesses and who God loves. And that’s a problem. Simply because at its heart, the Christian message is that Jesus Christ died on the cross for the salvation of all. Jesus says that if we are unable to be open to the prospect of others, especially those who we revile, sharing in God’s deliverance, we too, will be unable to receive it. We, too, fail to hear him. And he’s liable to slip past us. And right out the door. We are the ones who are shackled and imprisoned. Blind to our own self-righteousness, oppressed in our own thinking.
We need deliverance from this as much as anyone else. How do we get that?
Well, the answer is humility. A willingness to give this sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction up. This is the paradox at the heart of Christianity: To be great, we need to learn how to serve the least. To be saints, we’ve gotta admit that we’re sinners. To live, we need to learn how to die to ourselves. Same thing with this text, with Jesus’ sermon and proclamation.
Remember how Jesus preaches that sermon, and he says “these words are fulfilled in your hearing.” The great Reformer, John Calvin, in his commentary on this passage, says if we don’t want to be like the congregation at Nazareth, we need to hear this scripture properly directed at us. When we hear that is it “good news for the poor,” Jesus is referring not only to those lacking power or resources, but also to “the condition of all of us.” The condition of all of us “apart from Christ. Thus he calls them poor, and contrite, and captive, and blind, and broken, to whom God promises renewal.”[ii] We need to be willing to see ourselves in the police lineup along all the other wretches we revile. We need to see ourselves on the same level and the same plane. And therefore the recipients of the same love, the same grace that I myself need.
In the most recent issue of Perspectives, the magazine of the Vancouver School of Theology, Principal Richard Topping, shared a quote from a recent book by Benjamin Perrin, Professor of Law at the University of B.C. The quote was from Indictment: the Criminal Justice System on Trial, Perrin’s book on how his mind changed about the Canadian justice system.
Perrin had originally seen criminals purely as criminals. People who needed to punished, deterred, defeated, over and against anything else. Gradually, however, his thinking was transformed. He writes this:
In Jesus’ life and teachings, I see a major emphasis on mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation, compassion and humility… I see myself as no better and no worse before God than someone who is a convicted criminal, even someone guilty of heinous crimes. The Bible says we have all fallen short, yet we are all deeply loved by God and can receive God’s gift of free forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ. I’d challenge any professing Christian to search their hearts and test their minds to see if they really believe that, too, and if their actions align with their professed beliefs—or if their hearts are hard and unmerciful. No one,” he says. “No one is beyond redemption.”[iii]
Perrin’s thinking was transformed. Who was it transformed by? Jesus. How did this transformation come about? By humility. He’d come to hear Jesus and his good news and his transformative power not only for himself, or people like himself. Not only for the good, the law abiding and upright, but for all. That “no one is beyond redemption.” No one beyond God’s blessing, no one beyond God’s loving and grace. In seeing himself not above, but side-by-side with the criminals he would prosecute, he discovered the full meaning, and indeed the full power of Jesus and his good news.
To you today, dear friends, the Risen Lord himself offers you the same by His living Word. To you he brings this same good news:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he says, “and I today am giving it to you.”
“Today I am your good news. Today I have come to free you from your own God-limiting predispositions.
Today I have come to release you from your self-deceptions and your bigotries of all kind.
Today I have come to cure your blindness, so that you can see, that you can truly see, no just my love for you and all those like you, but also those unlike you. To see as I see, and not as the world sees.
Today I have come to set you free from yourself, by calling you out of yourself, and into blessed communion with your neighbour, your enemy, those you can’t bring yourself to consider, let alone love.
This year is the year of the Lord’s favour, and I have come to restore you to the land of love, together.
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing! May you be given ears to hear what I say! Eyes to see as I see, and a heart to love as I love. Then, and only then, will you be free.
I offer this to you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.
[i] R. Allen Culpepper, “Luke,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, vol. IX, gen. ed. Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 108.
[ii] John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, vol. 1, trans. A.W. Morrison, eds. David W. and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1972), 148.
[iii] Benjamin Perrin, Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial (Toronto: University Press, 2023), 326-7. Quoted by Richard Topping, “Called to Loving Service,” in Vancouver School of Theology, Perspectives: Contemporary Theological Education (Issue 82, Winter 2024), 4.