Mission Driven: Glimpses of the Kingdom

Introduction

A few months ago, God started working in my heart to be open to leaving Zion. I have wrestled with God more over this decision than any other, mostly because of how much I and my family love all of you. When I finally surrendered to the call I felt God placing on me a few weeks ago, I started thinking about what I would want to say in my last few Sundays as your pastor. I was planning on preaching through much of Luke this summer, but felt instead to spend three weeks thinking about God’s mission for the church.

The first week, we talked about the Great Commandment to go and make disciples. This is not a coercive making of disciples, but the gentle appeal to come and follow Jesus with me disciple-making. And we acknowledge that you might be religious, but you are not a follower of Jesus unless you are living to make disciples. It is literally his last command to us.

But, if we are to make disciples, how should we go about making disciples. And so we turned to Matthew 22, where Jesus reminds us that the absolute core of his teaching is to love God and love others. We are to be a people who worship our God and seek the good of our neighbors, even our neighbors who define us as enemies. As followers of Jesus we no longer can define anyone as enemy for you cannot love an enemy.

And then this week, I want us to answer this question: what does it look like to love my neighbor? And for the answer, I can think of no better place to go than Jesus Great Mission as he lays it out in Luke chapter 4.

Before we read the word of God, let us pray for his blessing on the reading:

Lord God, help us turn our hearts to you and hear what you will speak, for you speak peace to your people through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Text

Luke 4:14–30 NIV

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’ ” “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

L: This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ!

P: Praise to you, O Christ!

Historical Background: Sepphoris - the wrong path

The city if Sepphoris lies almost due North of Nazareth about 4 miles. It sits right on top of a hill and at one point was the seat of the local government of the Jews before it was moved to Tiberias along the shores Galilee. Well, that is not completely accurate.

The capital wasn’t merely moved. Sepphoris was destroyed around 4 BC at about the same time Jesus was born. There was a rebellion based in the city. They believed the Messiah had come and the whole region followed him in battle against Rome. Herod was not gentle in putting down rebellions. The city was levelled and then rebuilt during Jesus childhood and early adulthood.

One of the lessons Jesus may have learned from this story is that when you use the weapons of the world, the ways of the world to fight the world, you get crushed. God’s people are called to a different way of engaging the world.

But there is more.

This new Sepphoris was different than the old. The old Sepphoris was filled with people who so loved God and longed for his reign to come on earth that they were willing to risk their lives and their family’s lives in order to bring it about. They followed the law and were careful to obey all God’s commands.

The new Sepphoris was Jewish, but more secular in its mindset, more willing to compromise with Rome, more willing to adapt the spirit of the age. As just one small example, conservative Jews would never have images of God in their homes because of the command to not make any graven images. In Sepphoris in Jesus day, they had images of Greek gods in their beautiful mosaic floors. The law of God was not so troubling to the residents of Sepphoris.

Jesus may well have spent much time in Sepphoris as a boy and young adult. Not because he was drawn t the more Roman ways of the city, but because his dad was a Tekton, a builder and the whole city was being rebuilt, including a large theater. There would have been much need for a stone mason as Joseph most likely was. So, Jesus walked the streets of Sepphoris and saw the blasphemous images casually laid in the wealthy homes and likely helped lay some of the stones in the theater where plays would be held Jesus would never watch because of their immorality.

While some people were willing to give their lives in seeking to bring about God’s kingdom, Jesus saw everyday in Sepphoris those who had so desired to get along they had become indistinguishable to the non-believers around them.

I want to suggest to you today that, though not identical, these are roughly the two mistakes Christians make in our culture today. First, there are the culture warriors. So focused on winning the next election or holding on to their cultural power that they have become more concerned with protecting their rights than protecting the weak. So concerned with holding on to power they have forgotten that in God’s kingdom the greatest are the least, the strongest are the weak, the leaders are the servants.

In my 17 years as your pastor, I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had with people who are done with church and with God because they have been hurt by or are simply sick of the angry scared Christians they meet in church who act a lot like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or very rarely in West Michigan like Rachel Maddow, but not much like Jesus. When you fight the world with the worlds weapons, the world always wins because we become like the world.

On the other side are those who simply compromise with the world. They want to get along. They don’t want to make waves. And they have so watered down the claims of Christianity that their faith has become an almost generic faith. When in Colorado, I was talking with a member of our church who captured this attitude so well when he said, “I just want my kids to have a faith in something.” The particular religion didn’t seem to matter as long as they believed something. But, if you really believe the claims of Jesus then you know it absolutely matters in whom you put your faith because every faith but Jesus leads to destruction.

As Christians, as a church, we need to be careful to avoid these two errors. The error of the warriors and the error of the compromisers.

The Gospel Offends

Now that does not mean we will not face resistance. Jesus faces resistance in our text today. People from his home town try to kill him for what he is saying.

We should not be a people afraid of resistance or conflict or even offending others. The gospel is offensive. It is offensive to modern sensibilities to be told Jesus owns us and we have no rights before God because we have been bought body and soul. Jesus is not our life coach, but our king.

It is offensive to modern ears to hear not only that we have sinned, but that just as God forgives our sin, he also forgives the sins of our enemies.

The gospel is often deeply offensive, but we should not be. Grace offends those who want to play victim and those who want to play judge. Grace calls us all to humility and mercy toward others.

We talked about this more in depth back on January 30, but the reason the people get so angry with Jesus is because he is proclaiming that God’s grace is going to be given not only to them, but also to the gentiles, the hated Romans, the culturally impure. The people are offended by the grace of God.

The gospel of grace will always offend a world that wants power and revenge.

Imagine a Grandville or West Michigan that Looks Like the Kingdom

But rather than focusing on the offense of the kingdom, I want to end our time together by focusing on God’s vision for our world. Our passage today is literally Jesus mission when he walked the earth. The temptation when we read a passage like this is to spiritualize what Jesus is saying. There are many reasons we may do this, I came up with three:

1. In a secular society, we have made faith a private matter and so communal implications of scripture get made personal.

2. Spiritualizing Jesus sayings often make them less offensive to the world and easier for us to follow.

3. It is hard to even a imagine a world that looks like Jesus message of the kingdom.

But we need to keep his words practical because that is how Isaiah meant them when he first wrote them down. Because clearly, Jesus meant them literally as well. When John the Baptist sends his disciples to double check that Jesus is the messiah, Jesus points to the very real miracles he has performed to heal the sick and preach good news to the poor, but leaves off the setting of prisoners free to communicate to John that he is not getting out of jail. Clearly Jesus and John thought these words were addressed not spiritually, but to the very real tangible problems of their lives.

So, let’s read the beginning of our passage again.

Luke 4:18–19 NIV

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

First, Jesus says that his kingdom, the way of life he is bringing about in the world, will be good news to the poor. So, what would our life together look like for people who are poor in Grandville or Grand Rapids to see our church as good news for their lives. Or more personally, as you examine your life, are there people who have less than you who see you as a blessing in their life?

Second, Jesus has come to proclaim freedom to prisoners. In the 1st century, especially among the Jews in Galilee, many of those in prison were political prisoners. They were in jail because Rome was actively oppressing them. I don’t think we have political prisoner sin the US, but we do put a lot of people in prison. These are the countries with the highest rates of incarceration in the world:

5. Cuba puts 510 people out of 100,000 in prison

4. El Salvador puts 564 people out of 100,000 in prison

3. Turkmenistan puts 576 people out of 100,000 in prison

2. Rwanda puts 580 people out of 100,000 in prison

The United States puts 629 people out of 100,000 in prison

There are all sorts of reasons for this that I do not fully understand. I imagine we would need to talk to Police, public defenders, social workers, parole officers and even more to figure this out. But I wonder if as believers who follow a God who said he wants to set prisoners free, maybe we could be a people who don’t default to solving crime by only building prisoners and putting more people in jail. Maybe some called to this would support those leaving the prison system to get a job or finding housing or simply enter a community of friends.

Third, Jesus comes to give sight to the blind. To allow those disability keeps them out of community, and in his day out of the presence of God. very practically, this is why we have an elevator so those struggling with mobility can avoid the challenge of our stairs and have a t-coil for those who are hard of hearing to be able to listen to the message and the whole service. It’s why so many of you have entered the healthcare field to be instruments of healing in this world.

Fourth, Jesus says in his kingdom the oppressed will be free. There is so much evil that has been done in the world that just about everyone can point to some way they or their ancestors have been wronged by someone. But, what if as Christians we sought to be sensitive to the ways we have benefited or participated in oppression, Just last week, I was sitting all week next to the pastor of Jicarilla Apache Reformed Church in Dulce, NM. At Synod, we read a statement acknowledging we were meeting on land originally inhabited by several different Native American tribes. It seemed like a very small thing to me, so I asked Brad what his congregation thought of those statements. He said there is lots of pain among Native Americans as they have lost their land, much of their culture, many are losing their language, there is so much that has been taken from them and there is much we could do to seek to make amends for those wrongs, but that simply acknowledging the reality of this history is healing for them as a people. Maybe it is simply acknowledging ther injustice of the past and how it affects people today.

And then fifth, Jesus proclaims the year of Jubilee, this is the once every fifty year event where all slaves are set free, everyone gets their land back, and entire families get a do-over. The Israelites were basically told to just divvy up all the wealth every fifty years and distribute it to everyone equally. We probably won’t do that, but what if Christians were known as the ones who worked t make sure everyone got paid a living wage, and access to decent healthcare and a good education and so on. What if we were known as the ones who sought to end generational poverty.

These are the values of Jesus kingdom. Notice, none of them define someone else as the enemy. None of them say who or what Jesus is against. They are all about who and what Jesus is for. What if we lived and were known as the ones who were for the things of this kingdom?

You are doing it here at Zion through the Personal Care Panty, Threads, Hand2Hand, Camp Zion, and all our deacons do for those in need in our community and the church. This is who you are and are becoming more and more. Stay the course, seek this kingdom, invite others to live into it, and may the Spirit bless you more and more with the power and guidance of our God.