How do you understand the word “proclamation?” (You can leave your definition in the comments if you like. I asked the congregation and it created a fun discourse.)
St. Francis of Assisi is famous for saying: Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.
I am afraid that many of us…especially we liberals…have taken this quotation as permission to avoid hard conversations. We have used it to avoid speaking about our faith. We have used it to avoid talking about Jesus at all. We all have our reasons. Some of them may even be good.
Maybe we don’t want to be confused with Pat Robertson. Maybe we don’t want to upset anyone or make anyone uncomfortable…because that makes us uncomfortable. We are afraid. So, we don’t speak.
Certainly, we try to DO the things God would have us do. That’s laudable. Truly. But I also think we’re all off balance now. We’ve forgotten that St. Francis was a preacher. A preacher! He was famous for preaching…even to animals. He spoke of Jesus. He spoke of Jesus as the fruition of God’s promises and how God loves us.. He spoke of Jesus’ charity and how he lived with the outcast…he lived among the outcast. The words of St. Francis were sweet like Christ’s…and they were about Christ. Thus, his words were challenging.
What's ironic is that that many of us might not remember what St Francis did: He shared what he had…he stepped down from his place of privilege and shared everything he had. He stepped away from a sense of possessiveness and lived a posture of sharing all.
Everything he had also belonged to everyone in need.
He built a church. He helped the poor. He brought people together into community. When he had to, he also challenged his own Church when they would not follow the words of Christ that we heard in this morning’s Gospel passage. He saw the divisions, the dissension that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians, that divisiveness created by misused wealth and power and he called his own to task.
St. Francis and St. Paul caught the vision of Christ and they proclaimed it.
Paul is incredibly challenging this morning.
The Gospel, according to Paul, may be impossible to proclaim when there is division in the community. The efficacy of the proclamation of the Life, Ministry, and Resurrection of Jesus is hindered when there is division in the ranks.
This is not theological division. Not like we think about it today.
Paul is speaking to the Corinthians. They are letting their understanding of status quo get in the way. They are trying to rank the Gifts of the Spirit. They are trying to keep the low, the poor, in their place and make sure that the wealthy have their accustomed place of honor. Paul, however, understands what Jesus is after and says that diversity of gifts is to be honored. The gifts we bring are essential to being a healthy community. The differences are positives! The hand is not the foot is not the eye is not the ear is not…And this is a good thing.
But here they go again ranking people. Here they go again keeping the poor in their place. Even now in the church we do this. It’s something we have always struggled with. We forget that all have gifts to give. Out of fear we sometimes horde. We sometimes forget to share. We forget that we have enough to share. We forget the very words of Jesus.
‘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.’
Things are reversed now. God is here. The God of Love wants us to reverse the pecking order that would keep the poor, the injured, the broken, the hurt, the have-nots, the outcasts (whoever they may be) down. He wants those of us in places of worldly privilege and strength to step down, to lower ourselves. This is an act of love.
…the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
Think about Haiti – Is there a better time than now to Proclaim God’s Gospel? To stand with Christ, as Christ, and say and do these things? What can we live without so that the people of Haiti can rebuild in such a way that they can have homes that can withstand the storms and the earthquakes? What can we live without so that the poor in our own communities can thrive? Sometimes to share what we have means to live without. Does it not?
What do we need to say? What do we need to do? How can we proclaim the Year of the Lord’s Favor today? Let us proclaim the Jubilee, the Year of the Lord’s Favor and forgave all debts and release those wrongfully imprisoned. Perhaps we’ll come to a new understanding of national security, home ownership…or international debt…or even The American Dream.
We are to “strive for the greater gifts” and to live like and proclaim Christ. We need to strike that balance as a community of faith.
Next week we’re going to return to this same story from the Gospel and we’re going to talk together about what happens to Jesus after he stands in his “home church” and proclaims this radical truth (their own truth, by the way). For this week, I hope that you will find ways to talk about Faith…to talk about God in Jesus…to seek that balance speaking and doing in your own life.
Posted by tripp at January 30, 2010 08:24 AMAwesome!! I love the Haitian people in NYC.
They are the ones as well as the Jamaicans reading
their Bible on the subway. There was this one Haitian woman I sat next to with a Big, Flowery,
Bible. I looked over her shoulder to read it.
It was in French. About 6 months later, she had
a brand New, Big, Black Bible. Still reading.