The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, PH.D., Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Gazette.
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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D.
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals
Faculty of Divinity
(The following is a transcript from the service audio)
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight. Oh, Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. Amen.
Welcome back everyone to the sanctuary of Memorial Church. I'm glad to be here with you. I'm glad we can be here after another hiatus, another break in our worship here, and I'm going to confess that I'm kind of sick of it. I mean, we're taking these new precautions and they're necessary precautions, and I'm not impatient with the precautions because I know they're necessary and they are what make it possible for us to gather again here. And so I'm glad for them, but this is our third January with COVID-19 in our world. And I'm impatient.
I don't know what normal looks like after this. People who know more about this than me tell me that COVID will always be with us in some form, but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of shutting down the church, tired of roping off pews, tired of not being able to hug people or shake hands with folks. And I say that knowing that our experience, my family's experience of the pandemic has been blessedly mild compared to that of others. I know others have suffered much more, but I'm tired of it. And I'm impatient. And I think that impatience colors my reading of today's gospel lesson. I'm confessing that to you.
We are in the season of Epiphany. The word epiphany means to show forth, to make manifest. An epiphany is a manifestation. And the lessons we hear about Jesus in the season of Epiphany are lessons, stories about his manifestation, his self-manifestation, him showing himself to others, to the Magi who come to that manger, that's the feast of the Epiphany. He reveals who he is. He is revealed to them, at his baptism. He's revealed to John, to the voice from the clouds. When he is led into the wilderness, he reveals who he is by his responses to the tempter's temptations. And in every one of these instances, the scripture tells us, at least in Luke, the spirit is with him. The spirit descends upon Jesus at baptism. The spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness. And our lesson from Luke this morning says that Jesus full of the spirit went to teach.
And if the narrator didn't tell us that Jesus was full of the spirit, Jesus does. He takes these lines from Isaiah and says, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me." And he proclaims good news to the poor, release the captives, freedom to the oppressed, relief of all debt. And then here's the kicker, right? Then he turns to them, puts down the scroll, turns to them and says, "Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Our passage ends there this morning. The story continues. Emmanuel will preach on it next week. So I don't want to scoop him too much. But just to tell you the end of the story a little bit, this doesn't go well for Jesus in his hometown.
They actually say, "Isn't this Joseph, the carpenter's son? Who does he think he is?" They try to murder him. The Nazarenes, the people of his hometown are distracted by the claim, by who he has said he is. And they don't say much about what he has said, his reign will be like. And I like the what. That sounds like good news to me. Release the captives, freedom to the oppressed, relief of debt, comfort to the poor and the afflicted. And that's why I'm impatient because Jesus says, "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing," but that today was 2,000 years ago.
The poor still need good news. The oppressed still need freedom. The captives still need release. Jesus says all these things, these things that are the good news of the Christian message and he says, "Today, it is fulfilled." But what does that mean to us, today? This today, so many years later. This scripture has been read in Christian churches for 2,000 years and for many of those years, the Christian churches have been on the wrong side of the poor and the oppressed and the afflicted. When will the today that we've been waiting for all this time arrive? How much longer do we need to wait for that today to become this today? I don't know the answer to that question and I'm not going to tell you the answer to that question in this sermon, but I think I can, or I'm going to try to offer some alternative to impatience, leaning to the cynicism maybe that you hear in my voice this morning, as I am impatient. I'm going to try to offer an alternative to that impatience. The alternative to impatience and cynicism, I think is judgment and rejoicing.
We have this line from Psalm 19, that the choir chants so beautifully, this line that Abraham Lincoln used in the second inaugural, so important for us, "The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous all together." How can that judgment be our salve this morning? How can it be a salve to our impatience? For an answer, I want to turn to the lesson from Nehemiah. So let's revisit what happens in the lesson from Nehemiah. Ezra opens the book and reads the law to the people. This is a dramatic thing. Be grateful I did not try to reenact this as our worship this morning. He goes before the people and they start reading early morning, crack of dawn, 5 a.m., and the people bow their heads and put their heads on the ground and they read for hours. He just reads to them from the law and then interprets it and then he reads some more and interprets it. And the people have their heads bowed the whole time until midday.
It's not great worship planning by modern standards, but it works. The people are deeply, deeply moved. We hear at the end of the lesson, "They are deeply, deeply moved by what they have heard." And some of the historical circumstances around this event are important, right? So Nehemiah and Ezra have been sent by the Persian Kings, this is after the Babylonian exile, and Nehemiah is sent by the Persian Kings as a caretaker of Jerusalem to rebuild the walls and Ezra is sent to give back the Torah, to give back the law to the people. This is a law that they have lost. And this reading happens at the Watergate in a public place, the Eastern Gate of the city, where all the people could go, men and women and everyone who was able to understand, that was not the way scripture was always read. It was read for everyone. And it was read on the first day of the seventh month, which is Rosh Hashanah, the new year. And they read for hours and hours, the law, and the people bow to the ground and weep and are moved. Why is that? What's going on that this reading would so deeply move them, so deeply stir them?
Allow me a personal aside. So as you know, or some of you know, my mom is from Japan. My mom is from Osaka Japan and she moved to this country to marry my dad and raise our family. And we grew up, I grew up in West Michigan. And so my mom is a native Japanese speaker. She never taught me Japanese, I didn't learn Japanese growing up. I don't know Japanese. And there's some sadness in that for me because my mom's first language is not my own first language. And she did it because of the kind of a typical Midwestern immigrant thing, she didn't want me to have an accent or whatever, she wanted me to assimilate. But of course, because half my family's over in Japan, we go to Japan a lot. At least when there wasn't a pandemic, we would go to Japan.
And one of my fondest memories of these visits is just sitting in one of my aunt's houses and hearing my aunt and her sisters just speak to each other, just laugh and talk in a language I do not understand. In a way that's hard to describe for me, it feels like coming home to something I don't even understand or know. I could listen to them talk like that all day. I wish I could be in one of my aunt's kitchens right now, listening to my mom speak with her sisters. Speak this language that doesn't belong to me, but that somehow I belong to it.
The Judean people have been without the law for generations and Ezra comes back and he holds it up in front of them and he reads to them and they are home. He is telling them who they are, even though the generations of exile and oppression have forced them to forget. And what happens is they weep and mourn at the end of the lesson, they are grieving. They're weeping because of all that they've lost over these generations, because they've lost who they are, because they've forgotten who they are and they have not lived up to the demands of the law for these generations. And then Nehemiah, at the end of this lesson says, "Do not weep." He says, "Celebrate, feast." Don't weep over what you've lost, rejoice over what you have found. Rejoice that you have been reminded who you are. Kill the fatted calf. Let's have a party. These people have an epiphany, who they are is made manifest to them in this moment and that is why they bow. That is why they weep and that is why they rejoice.
The season of Epiphany is a season of manifestations, of realizations. And I think Jesus' words this morning are not just, not just about who he is, they're also about who we ought to be. He's not just saying, describing the sort of king that he is. He's also describing the sort of kingdom we, you and me, his followers, the sort of kingdom we are meant to become. I hear Him say, "Release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, good news to the poor," and I get impatient, but I'm just making the same mistake as the Nazarenes who want to throw him off a cliff in the story. I'm saying to him, "When are you going to do it? What are you waiting for?" Rather than reflecting upon what he has asked me to be, how we have failed to live this message that we have heard for 2,000 years, year after year. Because we do not look the kingdom he has described, we have been called year after year to release the captives, to free the oppressed, to relieve the debts, to bring good news to the poor. And we have failed, manifestly.
Like Nehemiahians, Judeans, we have ignored these teachings for generations upon generations. We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten who Jesus called us to be. I mean, Judeans had an excuse. They didn't have the scripture for years and years, as we hear it read every year. And God's judgment, true and righteous altogether, that judgment is upon us. But as I said earlier in the sermon, this is not just about judgment. Although that judgment is true and righteous altogether, it's also about rejoicing. Because remember what Nehemiah says to the people when they stand under God's judgment, for all they have lost Nehemiah says, "Do not mourn. Do not weep because the judgment of a merciful God is actually really good news." Because implied in that judgment of who we have failed to be, is also and always a vision of who we might yet become.
You can't judge someone for failing to have done something without also saying they could be what they have failed to be. I have a dog at home, right? I don't judge my dog for being bad at math. Suki can't do math. To judge someone to say, "You have failed to live up to this." To something, to some vision of the kingdom is to say that vision still is in you and you could make it so. You could make it real. To judge in this manner is to imply a potential, it's to announce a possible future. This vision Jesus proclaims this morning and so many mornings of the long history of the Christian churches, this vision of freed captives and welcomed exiles and redeemed debtors, this is a vision of us. Of who we can still be, of who we might become, of who each of us in our own lives is capable still of becoming.
And that is the consolation offered with this judgment. It is the rejoicing that should accompany our repentance. Do not mourn. Do not weep because you have forgotten who you are, rejoice because God remembers who you could become. As we hear Jesus speak today, this day, again, 2,000 years on, we listen to him tell us who we are. As we do I ask that you not grieve a prophecy God has left unfulfilled, I ask you to rejoice that God has invited you to become part of the fulfillment of that prophetic vision. At long last, and at the mercy of a loving God.