Sermon for Year C, Epiphany 4: Rescue or Redemption

Preached on Sunday, January 31, 2020 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church in New York City. The lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found by clicking here.

Our gospel today takes up immediately after last week’s gospel. Jesus is, apparently, on the rota as a lector this week -- and he has read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, his hometown. The section of Isaiah that he reads is one in which the anointed messiah has come to give comfort to the poor and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Instead of ending his reading with, “The Word of the Lord” as you just heard Holly and Gwendolyn do, Jesus makes a bold declaration. Jesus says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus clearly proclaims here in his hometown, among those who’ve known him all his life, that he is God’s anointed messiah.

In addition to today’s selection from Luke, Matthew and Mark also recount this incident. And in the other two synoptic gospels, the Nazoreans seem to take umbrage with Jesus’ proclamation because of their familiarity with him. Their reaction is sort of, “Who does this guy think he is? He’s not messiah, he’s just a carpenter, not a scholar, and certainly not the messiah.” In Luke’s version, it seems that the Nazoreans’ umbrage is based more on the fact that they expect something from Jesus. If he’s going to make these miraculous claims, well, OK. But what’s in it for us. Jesus recognizes the Nazoreans self-centeredness right off and he calls them on it. “I’ll bet you’re thinking, ‘What’s in this for us?’ I’ll bet you’re thinking, “Let’s see if he can make a big splash here like we heard he has done in Capernaum.”

Jesus points out to the Nazoreans that God’s healing and life-saving works have not always been directed toward and visited upon the people of Israel. He cites two examples from Scripture that show how the prophets of old worked their wonders for foreigners, on a widow of Zarephath and a general of the Syrian army.

This particular gospel reading appears at this point in our lectionary for a particular reason. It is the season after Epiphany when our readings emphasize the revelation of Jesus’ identity as the messiah, and not just a messiah for the people of Israel, but a messiah for all the world. So, these readings that show that throughout salvation history, God’s mercy and grace has been extended beyond the Hebrew people fit well with the overarching theme of this time in our church calendar.

But the examples Jesus makes use of in his disputation with the Nazoreans bring to bear an issue that has been in the news recently. Jesus says that though there were many widows and lepers in the time of Elijah and Elisha, God chose to aid one widow and one leper, and not all the many others. Why? Why did the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian merit God’s favor and not all the others? Why did the people of Haiti suffer all that they suffered in recent days, and all that they continue to suffer, while others escaped such woes?

Last week, James Wood, a writer and author of a novel called The Book Against God, wrote an Op Ed article in the New York Times entitled, “Between a God and a Hard Place.” Wood discussed the now infamous statement made by evangelical leader Pat Robertson that Haiti had suffered the earthquake because of an alleged pact with the devil made by the leaders of Haiti’s slave revolt in the 18th century. He contrasted Robertson’s statement with one by President Obama whom he quoted as saying, “We stand in solidarity with our neighbors to the south, knowing that but for the grace of God, there we go.”

Wood finds behind both statements an assertion that God is micromanaging the processes of nature to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. He concludes his piece by writing, “For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.”

Well, when I read the Bible, I read it as a Christian. I have a bias and I’ll freely admit it. But when I read the Bible as the Christian that I am, right smack in the middle of it, more or less, I find something that casts a long shadow over all that comes before it and all that comes after. And that something that casts and recasts all else is the cross of Christ.

The cross of Christ means to me that suffering comes to all of us, suffering comes to even the Son of God. A noted German theologian Jurgen Moltmann titled one of his books The Crucified God. And that is what the cross of Christ represents, very God himself nailed to a cross and left to die in the noonday son. And though fully God, we believe that Jesus was fully human also, and so there was no escaping the pain and horror of that death, one of the most brutal forms of capital punishment ever devised by sinful humanity.

No escaping the pain and horror of it, and no escaping the despair that we encounter when faced with such horrific events. For Jesus too, like so many victims, cries out, “My God. Why have you abandoned me?”

The cross of Christ tells us that pain, suffering, death and despair are part of this life. More for some, less for others, but part of the large canvas on which human life is portrayed. It was thus for the Son of God, it was thus for very God himself on the cross, it is thus for us too. In different ways, at different times, in varying degrees.

Our God is not a god who rescues us from suffering. Our God is a god who redeems our suffering. For the cross of Christ might stand in the middle of the long story of salvation history, but it is not the end of that story. The end of that story is the resurrection of Christ. For in Christ’s resurrection we find the promise of our own redemption and resurrection. The cross of Christ did not end suffering, far from it. Christians went on to suffer thereafter, and still suffer even today in some places of the world. The cross of Christ didn’t end suffering, it ended suffering being the end of the story. For the story continues beyond our suffering and even our death, the story ends in redemption and resurrection.

But make no mistake, the suffering is real, and it can be at times almost insufferably long. In a few weeks on Good Friday, some of you will be in this very church, and if your schedules permit, you’ll be here for three long hours. There will be no reprieve, no shortcut. We’ll companion our God through his suffering for those three hours. And we’ll do it because that’s what our God does for us. The answer to the question, “Where is God?” when horrors such as Haiti occur is, “Here.” Here among the rubble, trapped under shoddily constructed collapsed concrete buildings crushing down upon us. Here in the heat waiting in vain for help to come. Here in Aushwitz, here at Nagasaki, here under the roaring waves of the tsunami, here on the cross in the blistering noonday sun.

It’s hard to sit through those three hours on Good Friday. Just as it’s hard to watch the reports from Haiti that aid is still struggling to get to those who need it most. But even at times such as these, we can do what our God does, and be present with those that suffer. Knowing that rescue may not come in time, but that redemption always does.

Some people say that if God is the kind of god that allows such suffering, then he is not worth worshipping, not worth praying to, not worth believing in. Well, OK, that’s their choice. For God’s grants us all that freedom. But such withdrawal of faith doesn’t change much, because deadly winds still blow, the horrors that we humans visit upon one another still come, the earth still shakes and the buildings still fall down.

We all know that is true we all know that such is life, I just rather go through what I must knowing that my God knows what my suffering is like and sure that my God lies just beyond the horizon ready to redeem my suffering my very soul. We cannot know what the future holds, we cannot know what suffering may befall us in this life and when we suffer, we cannot know how long the suffering will last, nor how hard the going may prove. And it will be true, in some cases, that rescue will not come in time, but redemption always does; God’s merciful redemption always does.

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins