Seek Justice! – Isaiah 61:1-11 | 1
During our journey through Isaiah this Advent, we’ve contemplated what God might be calling us to do as we wait to encounter Christ anew. Advent in Action, we’re calling it. Today, as we explore God’s call to “Seek Justice,” we find ourselves with the Israelites, having just returned from exile from Babylon. They’re back in their homeland after being far away from their family, their friends, their house of worship. But things aren’t just hunky-dory. Strangers have moved into the neighborhood, there are squabbles between those who were exiled and those who got to stay home. The temple is in shambles. They’re back, but they are looking for hope – for signs that life won’t always be so broken. And Isaiah offers up these words of hope. This isn’t the only place we hear these words though, years later they bubble back up.
Jesus was just getting started. He’d been born and then presented in the temple. He’d had that remarkable moment of teaching the teachers, when he’d slipped away from his parents and back to church, when he was just twelve or so. And then, in Luke, there’s a time jump to adulthood – baptism, temptation in the wilderness and the start of his ministry. We get one little verse about him teaching in synagogues (Luke 4:15), and then Jesus rolls into Nazareth his childhood stomping grounds, strolls into the synagogue and preaches his very first sermon. In that moment the scroll of Isaiah was handed to him. Maybe he asked for it; maybe it was just plopped into his palm. And he twisted and he turned, and he looped and unrolled that scroll until he found the perfect spot. “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.”1 Jesus’ inaugural preaching text was the very same one from this morning, words from Isaiah, written 5 centuries before.
In the adult roundtable class, last Sunday, we wondered just what the odds were that Jesus would choose this scripture? How big was that scroll, anyway? The best I could come up with as a starting off point for a guess was the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Great Isaiah scroll is the largest and best preserved of the Dead Sea scrolls, which are dated at anywhere between 200 years before Christ’s birth and about a decade after his death, so it’s not such a far reach to imagine Jesus would have held a scroll just like this in his hands during that first preaching date. The whole book is there in one document of fragile parchment – 55 columns, with all 66 chapters. 66 chapters, hundreds and hundreds of verses . . . he could have picked anything. He could have chosen last week’s scripture begging God to tear open the heavens and come down into a broken and sinful world,2 or from the week before that “Comfort, o Comfort my people,”3 or next week’s scripture where a wolf down with a lamb, and a leopard with the kid and a little child shall lead them.4 But no, out of all the beauty and comfort, hope and challenge of the entire book of Isaiah, Jesus pauses where we pause, this morning. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor . . . to proclaim release to the captive, help the blind see, the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” It doesn’t seem insignificant - to those of us who call ourselves Christians, who light candles to countdown the day we get to celebrate Christ’s birthday - that the birthday boy, when he could have chosen anything, kicked his whole adult ministry off with these words.
1 Luke 4:18-19. 2 Isaiah 64:1-9. 3 Isaiah 64:1-9. 4 Isaiah 11:6. 5 http://www.e-2-d.org/ 6 Luke 1:26-37.
Seek Justice! – Isaiah 61:1-11 | 2
It’s the season of Good Tidings of Comfort and Joy. And the writer of Isaiah was anointed to bring good tidings. And Jesus was anointed to bring good tidings; “good news”, they both say. But it’s important for us to remember, as the world gets ready to throw on sequined blouses, to sprinkle our eggnog with nutmeg and peel back glittery wrapping paper, that this good news is for the brokenhearted and the beaten down. It’s for the thrown away, the incarcerated, the pretty-much hopeless. We worship a God . . . we celebrate a God . . . we wait for a God who sends messengers and God’s own self into the world bearing good news for a very specific constituency. And when we follow that God, we are led out into the world to proclaim good news for a very specific constituency.
But where do we even start? For Franny Millen, it started with a question – two questions actually. When Franny was twelve, she came home from school and asked her parents, “How can all kids in our school do their homework and projects successfully if some of their families are too poor to own digital technology?”5 Computers have become somewhat of a necessity when it comes to schoolwork these days. Long gone are the times of cracking open the Encyclopedia Britannica and copying a paragraph on college rule paper. Kids need to be able to type and print and search on the web. This twelve year old was insightful enough to notice that disparity existed and sensitive enough to care, so she followed up her first question with, “And what can we do to help?”
Franny didn’t know that about 95% of kids from “non-economically disadvantaged” families pass their end-of-grade exams, while just over half (59%) of “economically disadvantaged” students pass. She couldn’t have known that students with computers in their home are 8% more likely to graduate from high school, or that computers are pretty much a necessity for applying for jobs. She just knew that she needed the internet to do her homework and some of the kids in her class didn’t have it. This twelve year old was the catalyst for a whole town (and now a county) rallying together to eliminate the digital divide. The non-profit, E2D was born. It started with 50 laptops and low-cost internet service (paid for by the recipients at a price they could afford) to assure that every family at Davidson Elementary School had access to digital technology.
That was two years ago. Since then, they have eliminated the digital divide in the five public schools in Davidson and Cornelius, North Carolina. E2D provides computer training every other Tuesday, with students and adults volunteering to teach each other, and they are moving forward to match families in need with internet access in every public school in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. It started with a twelve-year-old’s question, “How can kids complete their homework if some are too poor to own technology?”
Jesus’ conception started with a question. The angel Gabriel appeared to Mary as the bearer of completely unfathomable news. “Greetings, favored one! You have found favor with God. And you’re going to have a baby – a son – and you will name him Jesus.” When the youth acted this out last week with a list of words required for their dramatic production, the angel arrived with the words, “Shazzam?”
5 http://www.e-2-d.org/
Seek Justice! – Isaiah 61:1-11 | 3
“Holy burrito!” Mary responded, knowing she hasn’t engaged in any baby making activities, so she asks, “How can this be?” (She really did say, “How can this be?”) The angel goes on to explains the whos, whats and hows of getting pregnant with God’s baby. And before Mary bursts into song about the overturning of the world as they knew it (as we know it) - the raising up of the poor, the defeat of the powerful, the same sort of stuff Isaiah proclaims and Jesus after them - before all that, the angel adds, “ Because nothing is impossible with God.”6 How can this be? Nothing is impossible with God.
About a year ago, the Valley Springs Manor assisted living home closed down in California. Many of the residents didn’t have anywhere to go. No family came by to pick them up. The staff stopped getting paid, so they left. Except for Maurice Rowland, the cook, and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor. The two men were talking in the kitchen. “What are we going to do?” It started with a question, one that probably seemed impossible.
They knew that if they left, those 16 residents would have nobody, so they stepped up providing round-the-clock care.
“I would only go home for one hour, take a shower, get dressed, then be there for 24-hour days,” Alvarez, the janitor explained, saying that many residents had dementia, and they couldn’t imagine leaving them unsupervised. What if they tried to cook breakfast, fired up the gas ranges and ka-blam? So Rowland, the cook, would make breakfast and then pass out medication. They fed and dressed, tucked into bed and escorted to the bathroom until the fire department and sheriff showed up several days later. This incident led to the legislation in California, known as the Residential Care for the Elderly Reform Act of 2014.7 “What are we going to do?” It started with a question.
Some questions of our faith are easy and answerable. Who are these good tidings for? “I have come to bring good news to the oppressed, the captives, those in mourning, the poor.” Why to them? “Because,” our Isaiah scripture says this morning in verse 8, “I the Lord love justice.”
What does any of this have to do with Christmas? Our God became human, and not just any human – a poor human, a homeless human, a Palestinian Jew, the child of an unwed, teen mom; an immigrant, a refugee, a death row inmate, but also a mighty fine preacher whose inaugural sermon promised good news to the outcasts and thrown away not so unlike him. When we follow this God, we are led into the world where hearts have been stepped on and bad decisions made. When we follow this God, we stroll right into in the West Bank, where Israeli checkpoints block the free movement of Palestinians, including ambulances, where hostility brews, where last week a Palestinian man threw acid on an Israeli family near Bethlehem and tried to stab the father with a screwdriver.8 When we follow the Prince of Peace, we can’t escape the people and the places that are crying out for justice. Some questions of faith are easy and
6 Luke 1:26-37. 7 http://www.npr.org/2014/11/21/365433685/if-we-left-they-wouldnt-have- nobody?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_co ntent=2046 8 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-12/palestinian-hitchhiker-threw-acid-at-israeli-family- army.html
Seek Justice! – Isaiah 61:1-11 | 4 answerable. Some lead us into unexpected places and call forth more from us than we could ever expect.
The other morning I heard a StoryCorps interview on NPR. “Ruth Coker Burks was a young mother in her 20s when the AIDS epidemic hit her home state of Arkansas in the early 1980s. She took it upon herself to care for AIDS patients who were abandoned by their families, and even by medical professionals, who feared the disease.”9 It was a calling she never expected or asked for.
“She became involved after visiting a friend at a Little Rock hospital where one of the state's early AIDS patients was dying.” She says that ‘"The nurses were drawing straws to see who would go in and check on him.”
"And so I snuck into his room,” she tells. “And he wanted his mama . . . And so I marched myself out to the nurses' station and . . . said, 'Can we call his mother?' And they [said], 'Honey, his mama's not coming. He's been here six weeks. Nobody's coming.'”
And so she went back in and stayed with him for 13 hours, while he took his last breath. Then she called his mom who told her, “I’m not burying him.” So she had him cremated and took him home.
"And you buried them," her friend who was interviewing her said, "when they died, when no one else would."
"I've buried over 40 people in my family's cemetery, because their families didn't want them," Coker Burks says. She’s 55 now and estimates that, despite having no medical training, she’s cared for 1000 AIDS patients.
"You were the only person that we could call," her friend says, remembering how she cared for his partner. "There wasn't a doctor. There wasn't a nurse. There wasn't anyone. It was just you. ... You loved them more than their families could. You loved them more than their church could.”10
“You loved them more than their church could.” I was walking my dog when I heard that and just stopped and let my heart break a little. Oh, I hope that isn’t true. Question: Is it true? For Ruth Coker Burks, it started as it often does, with a question, “Can we call his mother?”
You have questions too. I heard them as you held the current event photos in your hands for our (We’re All God’s) Children’s Message and wondered:
• [That elderly woman staring out the window . . . ] Is she lonely? Is someone coming for her? Is she waiting?
9 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-12/palestinian-hitchhiker-threw-acid-at-israeli-family- army.html 10 http://www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368530521/caring-for-aids-patients-when-no-one-else-would
Seek Justice! – Isaiah 61:1-11 | 5
• Is there life beyond prison? Is there hope behind bars? Is he coming or going? • Why do they have such big guns? How do you start over when you’ve lost so much? • What do we do? Why do we live in a world where we have to say out loud “Black Lives Matter”? Do we believe that #blacklivesmatter?
What question has God placed in your heart? What question is really God’s invitation to follow? We ask ourselves: God, what are you calling me to do? What are you calling us to do? How can we be church even when we’re afraid? How can this be? Who am I to bring justice? Can your kingdom really come when the world is so broken? Some questions are really hard to answer. But some not so hard.
Isaiah said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because [God] 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.”
Jesus said it too. Then he said, “Follow me.”
And the angel said, “Nothing will be impossible with God.” Amen.