Loading...Sermon December 17, 2017
The Rev. Rebecca S. Myers, LSW
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen, Newport, PA
Advent III, Year B //lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Advent/BAdv3_RCL.html
For I the Lord love justice,
I hate robbery and wrongdoing; Isaiah 61:8
He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. John 1:8
Please be Seated.
Fifty-one years ago yesterday, the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was passed by the United Nations General Assembly. Part of the early efforts after World War II and the founding of the United Nations, the Covenant set forth basic rights for all people…things that are necessary for life. The Covenant includes rights regarding work, education, health, food, water, clothing and shelter. There are also rights to public participation.
While President Carter signed the Covenant, the United States Senate has never ratified it. Yet, the Covenant is one of the documents that guides the world’s thinking on what true liberty and freedom look like.
In today’s Gospel, we hear about John the Baptist. We all remember the descriptions of him in Matthew. He lived out in the wilderness eating locusts and honey and wearing clothes made of camel hair. He sounds like such an odd character. Yet many, many people came out from the cities to hear him preach and to be baptized by him with water. They came to hear his message of repentance and the importance of following God’s teachings.
We also hear that some, including the religious authorities of the time, questioned who John was and by whose authority he baptized. Our Gospel clearly tells us that John was not the Messiah, and he came to bear witness that the Messiah was coming.
The question for us today in this Third Sunday of Advent is how do we bear witness to Jesus Christ?
Our Epistle from Thessalonians gives us some guidance. Pray; be grateful; kindle the Holy Spirit; love the words of the prophets; hold firm to what is good and refrain from evil.
Isaiah also provides guidance in the form of a vision of a time when there will be no oppression. The captives will be free. The brokenhearted will be restored. The community which had been exiled and driven from their homes will be restored. Because, God loves justice.
Bearing witness to Jesus Christ means we, too, love justice. We, too, bring good news to the oppressed and proclaim liberty to the captives.
Remember how Jesus went to Nazareth to the Synagogue where he grew up? Luke reports Jesus read this passage from Isaiah to those there that day. Jesus said:
‘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.’ Luke 4:18-19
Bearing witness to Jesus Christ means we have the Spirit of God upon us. It means we can bring good news to the poor. We can proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. We can let the oppressed go free and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor or a Jubilee year. We bear witness to Jesus Christ when we work for this justice.
Recently I’ve been re-reading an interview with Paulo Freire. He was a noted educator from Brazil, who died in 1997. He did extensive work in educating for literacy and for freedom. In this interview, he was speaking to an international group of people convened by The Plowshares Institute, a religiously-based peacemaking organization. The group was focusing on how to address poverty by working with the non-poor.
When speaking about liberation and justice, especially in terms of the individual Christian, Mr. Freire said:
“Liberation is a social thing with an individual dimension. It’s not the individual dimension that explains what is liberation. Salvation is also a social question with an individual dimension. For this reason, I think that salvation comes after liberation and not before. In the same way, justice comes first and peace later, or simultaneously, and justice first and charity later.” Pedagogies For the Non-Poor, Evans, Evans and Kennedy, p. 220
Letting the oppressed go free is not only about our individual acts to work on ourselves. It is about our acts as a community. In the same way, justice must come first if we want peace. And when we engage in charity, we must also work for justice. Indeed, Paulo Freire says justice must come first, before there is true charity.
This is the hard part. We want to bear witness to Jesus Christ and aren’t always sure how to work for justice or what it looks like. Or we have lots of different ideas about what is just. We must struggle with this challenge. We need to ask the questions about why people don’t have what they need to live good lives and we must resist the temptation to say it is because individuals choose to live this way.
Paulo Freire explains it this way: "…how to die to be born again differently? This is Easter. For me one of the central questions for us as Christians is that we speak about Easter but we never do Easter. ... We write a lot about Easter. But it is so difficult to make it. Precisely because making Easter is to become committed, completely committed, ...committed not to the preservation of the status quo but to the creation of the world, and in favor of the poor people, not the rich people. " From Pedagogies for the Non-Poor, Evans, Evans and Kennedy p. 229.
We are not the light, but we bear witness to the light. Let us make Easter.
Amen
UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights //www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx
Paulo Freire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
Pedagogies for the Non-Poor: https://www.amazon.com/Pedagogies-Non-Poor-Alice-Frazer-Evans/dp/1579105009
