"Today This Scripture Has Been Fulfilled in Your Hearing"

(Paul Visits the Church in Corinth, Part 2)

Luke 4:14-21

¹⁴ Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. ¹⁵ He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. ¹⁶ When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ¹⁸ “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, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” ²⁰ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

I Corinthians 12:12-31

¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

¹⁴ Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. ¹⁵ If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁶ And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁷ If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?

¹⁸ But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. ¹⁹ If all were a single member, where would the body be? ²⁰ As it is, there are many members, yet one body. ²¹ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” ²² On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³ 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; ²⁴ whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, ²⁵ that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. ²⁶ If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

²⁷ Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. ²⁸ And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. ²⁹ Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? ³⁰ Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? ³¹ But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

The Sermon

So they tell me that Jesus was back in his hometown, and he walked into the synagogue for worship, and they brought out the scroll as always and he started to read from Isaiah.

And it was, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

And he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

He has sent me to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

And I suppose all the people were supposed to say, “Amen!”

But there had to have been a few who said, “Are you kidding?”

You’ve got good news for the poor? Well come on then, let’s hear it, because the news for the poor isn’t very good, whether you’re in 1^st century Palestine or in any of a thousand 21^st century hovels, from Los Angeles to Bombay to Moscow to Hong Kong.

The news for the poor is, you were born with nothing to parents of no means and until you work for yourself a miracle to get out of this spiral, you are nothing but a sickening, frightening hindrance to urban cleanliness and rural progress.

So let’s hear some good news, if you’ve got it.

Release for the captives? Do you mean the captive children of Israel, who survive and exist on the whims of the military might of the Roman occupation; or do you mean all captives—captives of alcoholism and other addictions; captives of abusive marriages in places where women have no rights and no protection; captives of governments that bully and persecute those who disagree with them?

If you are here to proclaim that release, then this is a revolutionary moment in the history of the human race.

And recovery of sight to the blind? I’ve been stumbling around in darkness all my life. I can’t see overcoming the lure of drugs and gangs and meaninglessness for somebody who has no hope.

I can’t see a hole in the ozone, and if you convince me it’s there, I can’t see how we could ever undo the damage we’ve already done to it. There’s a lot I can’t see. It’s dark in here.

I have a hard time seeing God. I can see a lot of big, expensive cars, buildings, toys... Sometimes I can see my life spinning out of control.

And every once in a while, in a walk on the beach, or in the way the moon glows pale orange over a low horizon, or in a Beethoven symphony (specifically #3, part of #7, and #9), occasionally I will catch a glimpse of something greater than myself and deeper than all of us.

But most of the time, I can’t see God. Most of the time, I can barely see myself. I just go.

So if you’ve got the cure for all this blindness, then let’s have it.

And, now, release to the captives is a neat idea.

Leviticus 25 said, “You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.”

So everyone who had been forced to sell off their ancestral land, or who had had to sell themselves into servitude, would now be free to have what had been theirs restored to them, and go home, kind of like collecting 200 bucks just because 50 years had come around, and you passed Go again.

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

So, week after week, I go to my church in Corinth, the only church in town. We have as the centerpiece of our worship a celebratory meal, which is founded on the Lord’s Supper. And for many weeks I welcomed even the down-and-outs from the community. I didn’t know them, my friends didn’t know them, and they didn’t always strike me as the kind of people you want to be bringing into your home, especially if you’ve got some nice things around.

Of course the church had to meet in homes, because this was only about 20 years into the whole history of the church, and there was no such thing as a church building at this point.

That meant it had to be at one of the larger homes, so we could fit all those people in, so it was my friends and I who would have to provide the space, since we had the larger houses to live in.

And we’d let all the Christian believers from the community come in, and we’d have our sacred meal together.

Only, I began to realize after a few weeks that in that great community of believers, there were some who didn’t seem to do very much.

The people in my circle of friends had all found various ways of making something of ourselves.

And when it came to church life, we shared what we had. And that wasn’t just sharing the material things, like providing the house and the food for all this. I suspect we also provided the vast majority of the offerings, for our own local ministries, and for other churches in other places that were struggling.

And I began to think, we are never going to get anywhere as a church until we start to exclude some of these people who can’t do the things that we in the inner circle are capable of doing.

And then a man named Paul, a celebrated apostle, came to Corinth. And although at first it looked like he was just coming in to sort of pat us on the back and share a meal or two with us, after a few days it became apparent that he had something to say to those of us who sat at the center table and had to run everything in order to make it work.

One evening, we had gone through the sacred ritual again, and we had passed the plates all around the giant atrium—even feeding people who I never met, who were just kind of on the outskirts of the church.

And later, Paul was just kind of walking around, and I asked him how he was enjoying his visit to our church. I told him that I was sorry that not everyone was as involved as my friends and I were, because a lot of those people just didn’t have the leadership skills to do it. We would kind of tolerate their presence, but I said, I didn’t really see their value to the church, and I hope he didn’t mind that so many weak church members were hanging around.

I have to tell you that I am used to a certain amount of respect, which in my experience, because of my position, means that if I say something, I am used to being surrounded by people who will congratulate me on my intelligence and insight. Even if they don’t think that, I expect them to say it.

And this short, squat, irritated little man stood right up close to me and he said, “I n the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

And I started to say, “Listen, Paul, I didn’t mean any offense; I’m just tired of a few of us, who are accustomed to excellence, having to carry the burden of running this church, since there are so many people around who don’t have the skills we have.

And he said, “Each and every one of them can do things that you can’t do.”

I don’t think I had ever been told that before. I was raised to believe that I could do anything I put my mind to. But some people are better at some things than other people are. And those people have skills that others don’t have, and those others have skills that they don’t have; and they’ve all got skills that I don’t have.

But you know what? There are some things I can do that I don’t see anybody else doing. And now those are the things that I consecrate to the Lord. They were given to me for God’s use in the body of Christ.

I had been raised to believe that I could do everything. And somewhere along the line I had come to believe that I had to.

Imagine my relief when Paul taught me that all of us working together, using our various gifts, could do greater things than I ever could do on my own.

And so I wondered about all these prophecies of the scroll of Isaiah that Jesus had read, that said “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, 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.”

And I had thought—based on what I saw all around me—that that could not possibly be true, except maybe in some abstract, esoteric, philosophical way.

But when I looked again at the body of Christ, I saw

the thinker,

the doctor,

the cook,

the woodworker,

the accountant,

the missionary,

the attorney,

the contractor,

the mother,

the teacher,

the eye doctor,

the hardware store manager,

the organizer,

the musician,

the knitter,

the laborer;

the one who’s good at getting people together;

the one with the unflappable attitude;

the one who brings the energy of youth,

and the one whose words carry the wisdom of many years.

And I thought I heard someone say, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? No.

But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

January 21, 2007