Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Good News for More Than Me
A good sermon encourages, challenges, and maybe even aggravates the gathered community. Jesus shares a good sermon in Luke’s Gospel, bringing words of hopeful change for the poor, liberation from oppression, and recovery for those blinded by injustice (Luke 4:18–19). Jesus’ words surely resonate with a community living under the oppressive powers of the Roman Empire. He preaches a Good News sermon. Yet his community is soon enraged as he continues speaking.
Jesus tells a story from their (and our) holy texts about the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who are sent to help first those who are viewed as outside their community. In sharing these stories, Jesus lets his friends and relatives know that the Good News is not just about you. This movement is reaching beyond your community, to people different from you and even those you consider enemy. Those who hear this sermon move from awe to annoyance to outright rage.
Too often I resemble the people in Jesus’ hometown. I center the Good News in terms of how it impacts and changes my life, how the Good News brings people to my church community and serves my way of being church. I forget the movement of Christ’s Good News is to move through us into our larger communities. The church must be about our Savior’s concerns: working for justice with any who are worn down by oppression, forming spaces of welcome for those who are estranged from God and community, working for a just sharing of resources of health, housing, or voice in the political system, and caring for a creation burdened by human exploitation. Jesus’ summons us to this ministry of compassionate justice that reaches through our congregations and beyond.
Will we answer this call, or drive Jesus out?
Marian Boyle Roloff, pastor, West Side Moravian Church
Green Bay, Wisconsin