Risky Business

Discipleship is risky business.

After Bishop Mariann Budde gave her sermon during the prayer service of the Inauguration this past week to equal parts praise and harsh critique, it’s enough to make any preacher nervous.

It is not lost on me that the lectionary text for this Sunday and the next is when Jesus gets up and delivers an unexpected sermon followed by a bunch of people getting mad about it and wanting to throw him off a cliff.

Discipleship is risky.

This past Monday we witnessed the inauguration ceremony in which the 47th President of the United States was sworn in. During the inaugural address, the President gives a speech where they further set their intentions for their term. It gives us even more of an idea of how they will proceed now that they have been sworn in.

While Jesus never held a political office, I began to wonder that if Jesus had an inaugural address, a first sermon of sorts, would today’s text be it?

While last week we were on the scene in the gospel of John at a wedding in Cana, this week we are in a synagogue in Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth after his baptism and temptation in the wilderness. Notice the work of the Holy Spirit throughout here in the gospel of Luke. The Holy Spirit claimed and anointed Jesus at his baptism, sent him and sustained him in the wilderness, and then filled him and empowered him for his mission and ministry.

Jesus begins his ministry after the temptation in the wilderness filled with the power of the Spirit. This is important. Jesus has to say no to some stuff before he can say yes to what God is calling him to. Robert Brearley says “The Holy Spirit came and taught Jesus what was real: to say no to the false options and temptations in this world and yes to God’s good purposes for all people; to say no to self-glory in all its forms and yes to helping the poor and the captured of all kinds; to say no to trying to get your God to work for you and yes to working with God with urgency and compassion.”

Might there be some things that we need to say no to so that we can say a more full yes to God. To relinquish some other power so that we can more fully receive the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is in turning down the powers of the world that Jesus takes on the power of servanthood and suffering love. As he says in Matthew 20:28, “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve,  and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Jesus begins in Galilee and is praised by everyone it seems, until he gets to his hometown of Nazareth. Scholars today estimate that this was a small community, maybe consisting of 20-30 families or so. Jesus has spent a lot of time in this synagogue and perhaps knows some of the people there that day. Maybe some of them are even his relatives. In addition to this, the synagogue was the gathering space for all kinds of people: ordinary folks, leaders, Pharisees, Gentiles, men and women, the afflicted, the freed, the enslaved, the wealthy ,and the poor.

And it was to this assortment of folks that Jesus rose and began to read from Isaiah 61. Let’s listen again.

“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, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This is it. This is the heart of Jesus’s mission and ministry. If you want a snap chat, a tweet, a reel, or a summary, Luke’s gospel directs you here. Ruth Ann Reese calls this Jesus’s manifesto. She says “The good news that Jesus proclaims, and thus the good news that Christians proclaim, must be good news to the poor, to the economically disadvantaged, and to the marginalized of our society.” This is the plumb line or the measuring stick that runs through it all.

Robert Brearley says that when Jesus reads from Isaiah, he is “declaring that his ministry in the Spirit as Messiah of God calls him to be an agent of mercy to the downtrodden in this world: he will be good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and new beginnings for all who have failed.”

It can be so easy to get caught up in all the other noise that Jesus’s voice here is all but drowned out. We go on to try and fit the gospel into an agenda it was never built for. But remember what God said is required of us. Before we ever get to Micah 6:8 there is Isaiah 1 where the Lord says “what to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? I have had enough of these burnt offerings. I do not delight in the blood of bulls. Your incense is an abomination.” Incense. Offerings. Sacrifices. That was their whole worship. But what does God really want? Isaiah 1:16-17 says “Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

There is the plumb line again, and it is a plumb line of divine grace and mercy. Divine grace and mercy is what undergirds the life of our faith as United Methodists. John Wesley was so moved by this call to care for the orphan, the widow, the imprisoned, and the disenfranchised that he devoted his life to it, even begging for the poor on the snowy streets of London when he was 80, making himself ill in the process. This thread of divine grace and mercy underscore our social principles as well as our Book of Resolutions. If you want to know the spirit of United Methodists behind many of the issues addressed over this past week, I encourage you to read some of them.

Carol Lakey Hess says “the primary question is not so much, what does God demand for righteousness as it is ‘who needs my attention and compassion?’ Maybe right now our question as we listen to Jesus’s sermon is ‘who needs my attention and compassion?

But in order to really respond to this question, we have to care, and caring comes with a risk.

Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Ministries in Los Angeles which for 34 years now has grown into the largest gang intervention and rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. I have mentioned him before.

Father Boyle is a Jesuit priest who has dedicated and risked his life over and over for the sake of working with gang members. As a young pastor, Greg became overwhelmed with all the funerals of children and teenagers he was officiating. He formed a plan to help alleviate gang violence. What was his big plan? To bombard them with unconditional love. He was 36 years old at the time and would pedal his bike around his parish and visit all 8 gangs every night. For the first 10 years after Homeboy Ministries started, Father Boyle says “we received death threats, bomb threats, hate mail, never from gang members because we always represented hope to them, but, you know, kind of fueled a lot by law enforcement, many of the anonymous letters were, 'I'm a police officer,' 'I'm a sheriff,' 'we hate you,' you know, 'you're part of the problem,' 'you're not part of the solution,' which always seemed sort of confounding to me because it was abundantly clear to anybody close to the ground that if you, you know, invested in them, or you engage them in a positive way, they weren't participating in anything negative. And yet, they had so been demonized, they were the enemy.”

Rather than choosing to demonize or criminalize an entire group of people, Father Boyle chose to surround them with a community of cherished belonging.

Think about the power of surrounding someone with cherished belonging.

When we do this, it’s a risk. But thank God that God felt divine grace and mercy and unconditional love were worth the risk. And when we fully receive this divine grace and mercy ourselves, we are able to then fully receive others, and to share it with them.

Father Boyle said someone once pleaded with him after a talk. 'How do you reach them,' meaning gang members? And, and I said, 'well, for starters, stop trying to reach them.' You know, can you be reached by them? Now that's a whole other stance that's different. That's not, 'I'm going to go make peace.' 'I'm going to enter into relational wholeness with people.' That's hugely mutual. 'And I'm going to only begin. And only do one thing, which is I'm going to allow my heart to be altered. I'm going to be reached by this person. I'm going to receive.'

Henri Nouwen who taught a divinity course at Harvard once had a woman ask him, 'what is ministry anyway?'

And he was quite frustrated with the question. He said, 'Can you receive people?'”

Not -can you deceive, can you cast out, can you ignore, can you judge, can you blame, can you send away, but can you receive?

Discipleship is risky because when we fully receive the transformational grace of God for ourselves, it transforms how we receive others. It messes with our lens of how we see others. It changes our course of direction. And so we just might find ourselves doing something crazy, risking it all to share that same grace with others- walking in the cold begging for bread, pedaling around a neighborhood to befriend gang members, carrying meals to friends, visiting the widows, speaking out against injustice, or a million other means of bombarding people with the holy love of God.

It will be worth the risk.