This is the final sermon in a four part series, Together, for the month of July. The previous entries in this series are linked within the opening of the sermon. This week, we’re looking at our call to pursue Justice Together. In his first recorded sermon, Jesus says he has come to proclaim the coming of God’s kingdom, release for the captives, freedom for the oppressed, and good news for the poor. God’s kingdom will be a reign of justice and peace. And as God’s people, we are called to join in Jesus’ mission!
In our work together as a congregation, as a wider church, and as individual followers of Jesus, we seek to enact God’s reign, pursuing justice so that everyone may live a just and free life, with equal access to the abundance of God’s creation, especially the least of these who are so often overlooked by our world’s systems of exploitation and injustice.
Today’s Scripture readings are Amos 5:21-24, Psalm 9:13-20, and Luke 4:14-30. We also celebrated a baptism this Sunday at Living Hope, so there are some references to that in the sermon. Here’s the livestream from Living Hope and the sermon audio.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about how Jesus calls us together as God’s people, offering a different path than our culture’s division and hatred. We’ve talked about how we are stronger together, able to do much more together as Christ’s body than we can on our own, lifting each other up, and encouraging each other as a community. Later in the service we’ll hear a little more from Dr. Joyce Caldwell about how we work together as church in the Greater Milwaukee Synod.
We talked about how we’re called to serve together, not seeking earthly power, but serving with humility, using our freedom and our resources to love our neighbors.
Last Sunday, we looked at the parable of the Good Samaritan and talked about there are no exceptions to the neighbors we’re called to love. No loopholes. Even when we disagree with people, even when they might seem very different than us, we are still created together. They still bear the image of God. Jesus died for them too.
I know we’ve had a lot of folks traveling this month, viruses going around, and newcomers here for Ashton’s baptism, so if you want to hear the rest of this series, our church website has each week’s livestream and sermon podcast.
This week, we wrap up this Together series by talking about our call to do justice together. As a community, our goal is to live out Jesus’ teachings. We’re here to be the Body of Christ; caring about what Jesus cares about, doing Jesus’ work.
The Gospel reading we just heard from Luke 4 is Jesus’ first recorded sermon—right after he comes back from being tempted in the wilderness after his baptism—and this sermon is basically Jesus’ mission statement.
He comes to his home synagogue, the place where he’d been brought up, and he reads from Isaiah, “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.”
Jesus says to the congregation, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This prophecy is what Jesus has come to do. He’s come to bring good news, free the oppressed, and proclaim the arrival of God’s kingdom. This is good news, both for the people listening and for us today! This is the hope we proclaim, the work we get to be part of!
And everyone loves it. All spoke well of him, Luke tells us. Everyone’s amazed at the gracious words coming from his mouth as he tells them God’s spirit is with them, God is redeeming their broken world; God is coming to the rescue.
I remember in seminary, one of the first times I got to preach was at my home church, Ascension Lutheran in Fond du Lac, and it was the most nervous I’ve ever been before giving a sermon. I was up late the night before asking Christin and my mom to read the sermon, and I was so concerned what people would think.
The sermon was fine, I think—not great necessarily, but not bad—but the people there who knew me loved it. I realized afterwards I probably could have just stood there without saying a word and people would have still said I did great, because they knew me and were proud of me. That’s the reaction Jesus gets…at first.
He says this great stuff about God setting people free, bringing good news to the poor, and everyone likes it. But then he says it applies to other people too. He talks about when there was a famine in Israel, but God sent the prophet Elijah to a widow in Sidon, which is not in Israel. Many had leprosy, but God chose to heal Naaman, a foreign general. Jesus is not just talking about God blessing them; he’s talking about God blessing their enemies, the people they can’t stand.
That message doesn’t go over so well. Luke 4:28-29 – “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”
We like the idea of God working for justice for us, right? Justice for others can be more controversial. We like the idea of receiving God’s grace, but sometimes we’re not quite so sure about giving it to those other people who don’t deserve it, especially…those…other people. You know the ones. The people who don’t vote right, who don’t work hard enough, the ones who aren’t very loving to us. Those people.
But if we are created together, if we all bear God’s image, if we are in fact sinners ourselves who can only receive from God grace which we did not deserve and do not earn, then we have to believe God’s grace is for them too. We have to believe they deserve justice as much as we do. They are welcome in God’s kingdom too. And that’s a controversial view.
We talk a lot about sharing the love of Jesus with our neighbors. Well, as Dr. Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Paul writes in 1st Corinthians, “If one member [of the body] suffers, all suffer together with it.” When we see brokenness in this world, when we see systems of racism or exclusion, cycles of poverty, places of inequity, when we see oppression of our neighbors who bear the same image of our Creator as we do, love requires us to get involved.
In the covenant of baptism, we are commissioned to “strive for justice and peace in all the earth.” That’s an individual calling, but it’s also part of our mission as a congregation, as church together. In baptism, the Holy Spirit joins us together into a community, a community with a purpose. Today, we’re welcoming Ashton into that mission.
Justice means fairness for all; opportunity even for the least of these. It means everyone gets water to drink and food to eat, everyone has access to shelter and healthcare. Justice means the chance to live in peace and safety.
In the world God creates, there is enough for everyone, and everyone has access to what they need. Good news for the poor, release for the captives, a world where no one is exploited or cheated or excluded.
So how do we get there? Working for justice might be big things like going out and protesting for people’s rights, or maybe getting a lawyer and suing—we call it the justice system, right?—but it’s also smaller scale things as well.
There’s a barrel out there right now for the next couple weeks from Family Promise for a school supply drive, collecting things like colored pencils, post-it notes, and rulers, because as a community, we want to allow our neighbors to start on an even playing field. We give to the food pantry because everyone deserves enough food. We can do a lot together. We send quilts and baby care kits around the world to support neighbors in need who we’ll never meet.
We’re good at collecting and donating, and that’s important. It’s doing God’s work with our hands. Sometimes we have a little more trouble with the next step though, the part of working for justice that goes beyond charity. Because it’s not God’s will that there are people in our community who don’t have enough food to eat.
Giving quilts to people living in refugee camps where they can use them as bedding, but also as rugs or even as walls is generous and caring and worth doing, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not right that people are forced to flee their homes and live in camps. So much in this world is not the way God intended it to be.
And as the church, we’re called to do something about it. What good is our faith and our worship if it doesn’t lead to action? Amos says God despises the noise of our songs, God rejects the offerings of the people, unless they’re accompanied by justice. Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Samuel Thomas writes, “According to Amos, religious devotion is meaningless if it is accompanied by unfair taxes on the poor, backdoor bribes, and working against those in need…a nation is exceptional by the measure of how it cares for the lowest members of society, and a nation of religious hypocrisy and economic injustice is one that will perish.” (Notes from page 1249 in the SBL Study Bible [Amazon Affiliate link]).
One of the daily themes from our mission trip two weeks ago—and it was a theme at the big ELCA youth gathering as well—was that we are “Created to be disruptive.” As we heard two weeks ago from Hebrews, we are called to provoke one another to love and good deeds. Sometimes we need that push, because justice is disruptive and disruption is uncomfortable.
When there is injustice, someone is benefiting, and they don’t generally want to give up their privilege easily. WE don’t want to give up OUR privilege. And especially on a global scale, we are often the ones benefiting.
What does it look like for us to refuse to benefit from exploitative wages paid to people on the other side of the world? What does it look like for us to refuse to profit from sales of weapons, or destruction of rainforests?
I say this hypocritically, of course, because I certainly benefit from lots of these systems. But what steps is God leading us to take together to work for justice? To better love the neighbors who make our stuff? We’re supposed to believe in this as a nation, right? Liberty and justice for all? And yet, advocating for justice is risky.
Try not to get thrown off any cliffs, because as we’ve been talking about all month, some of this starts to sound political. Just and unjust systems are set up through politics, because politics is about how we live together, how we treat one another.
The church is not here to tell you who to vote for. I’m not going to endorse a particular party or candidate. All political parties struggle with the humility part of serving each other, and the church’s mission of working for justice and loving our neighbor in Jesus’ name doesn’t change if one party or the other is in power.
But as you discern who to vote for, as you listen to the various political messages you’ll hear in the next 99 days and beyond, remember God’s call for justice. Remember the mission of Jesus, to bring good news to the poor and liberation to the oppressed, a mission that led to his death.
Remember the freedom won for you on the cross, and the abundance God has given you in Christ, and listen for the Holy Spirit’s nudge to stand up and speak when you see injustice.
And of course, pray for our leaders. Pray for our nation. Pray for those who suffer regardless of who’s in power, the people only God seems to be looking out for.
This is God’s work, God’s kingdom, and we get to be part of what God is doing. 1 John 4:11 “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” May you know and share God’s love with your neighbors. Amen