Annual Meeting

Today as we gathered at St. Francis for our Annual Meeting, I marked twelve years as rector of the parish. Below is an excerpt of my "Annual Address" (it was rather lengthy!) that reflects something of my recent experience in Israel...

So today when we encounter Jesus in Luke’s Gospel; he has been busy teaching and healing in and around the Sea of Galilee and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, which no one really fully understands because it is such an elusive reality, something that at best people get glimpses of. One thing seems clear, however: it’s not merely a synonym for “heaven.” It’s not just the place you go when you die! It breaks in, here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.

And you can see it sometimes if you know where to look: it’s kind of like a mustard seed that isn’t yet come to fruition as a place where the birds of the air can rest, but nevertheless it’s growing in that direction. Or, it’s like when a young adult who has gone through a very hard stretch in her life. But then she comes home and is greeted with wide-open arms and there is veal piccata for everyone because she was lost and is now found. (In the modern telling of that story she has become a vegan so it’s tofu piccata but you get the point!) Jesus brings health to peoples’ lives in body, mind and spirit. So all of those healing stories, too, are signs of the Kingdom of God breaking in.

Word naturally begins to spread in and around the Lake where Jesus has been preaching and teaching and healing, in those small towns like Cana and Capernaum. Word spreads quickly in small towns of course, even without the assistance of the internet or a text-messaging plan. So it isn’t long before word gets back to his hometown of Nazareth. Jesus returns home amid great expectation and if you close your eyes I bet you can almost feel the electricity as he walks into that synagogue in Nazareth, as he stands among the people who knew him from the time he was a little kid. I imagine that his teachers and friends are all there, and the girl he took to the Nazareth High prom. The people there know his parents not as saints carved in marble, but simply as Miriam and Yusef. And don’t forget that the neighbors weren’t buying the whole Virgin birth thing; as far as they were concerned Jesus’ had been born amid rumors and whispers that people in a small-town don’t ever forget.

It can be very difficult to go back home; to be “famous” among people who know you so well. Anyone who has grown up in a small town knows there is a paradox: people like to claim as their own someone who “makes it,” but on the other hand don’t like it when one of their own seems to be getting too big for their britches.

Luke tells us that Jesus came back home to Nazareth and he stood in that synagogue and he unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. I had an opportunity while in Jerusalem to walk into the Israeli Museum and walk around a kiosk on which was displayed a replica of that same scroll of Isaiah, one recovered as part of the Dead Sea scrolls. It’s about 21 feet long and eighteen inches or so wide. Jesus unrolls that scroll, past the fortieth chapter that I already mentioned to a place near the very end—words from the sixty-first chapter that are addressed to the community some time after they have been home a while and rebuilt the Temple and are now trying to figure out who they are and what kind of people God is calling them to become. He finds where it is written:

"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 favor."

In choosing those words, Jesus sets his own life and ministry (and ultimately his death and resurrection) within the context of that work. The reason he gets people so riled up, I think, is that he adds one more word. Now. He says this isn’t something that can be postponed to some distant future: the time for bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives, the time for the blind to see and the oppressed to go free, the time for the Year of Jubilee, is Now.