I have been thinking a lot lately about the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. It takes place in front of a cafe in a town in 1930’s France. At the beginning of the play, you can hear the sound of a rhinoceros in the background, and the people begin to talk about the arrival of some rhinoceros. At first, most of the people want nothing to do with them, but they mostly find them to be an annoyance. They are loud and brash and they are breaking things. Over the course of the play, some people begin to find them charming, some decide they need to be nice to them because they don’t want to get in trouble, while others start to think they have a point. The more each character begins to be okay with the rhinoceri, the more they begin to turn into one. By the end of the play, the town is overrun by rhinoceri, who destroy everything in sight, demolishing the pretty little town.
An obvious allegory for the Nazi invasion of France, I have been thinking about this because we often forget that what happened in Germany, and in Europe in the 1940’s didn’t start as a holocaust. It started with everyday people deciding, for various reasons from fear to self preservation to getting hoodwinked, to simply be okay with the Nazis. This lack of pushback, this slow acceptance of what they were doing is what led to the Holocaust. It didn’t happen overnight. It is imperative we understand this right now, as this country begins its descent into fascism. It is imperative we take stands loudly and early against what this government is trying to do, to see it for what it is and not sugarcoat it.
As a Lutheran, I hear Luther’s call to call a thing a thing, and this thing is fascism. This thing also stands directly against what Christ called us to do and who Christ calls us to be in this world.
These words of Jesus stand in glaring contrast to the actions of the government at this time. They would have been a tremendous comfort to the people hearing it in Galilee. He is telling his people he is the one they have been promised. They have heard the stories of what he has been doing in other places, stories of healing, stories of love. They have been waiting for generations for the messiah to come and reverse their fortunes, to take them out from under the thumb of Rome, to lead them to freedom and prosperity.
One might think that proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor means that the Lord’s face is shining on people, people are receiving the Lord's blessing, or something with a similar feeling to it. In fact, the year of the Lord’s favor is a specific reference to jubilee, an year long observation given to the people in Leviticus that happens every 50 years. In the year of Jubilee, the earth is allowed to rest, the people may not plant, till or plow, but may only eat what grows naturally. All debts are to be forgiven, and those who have been enslaved or become indentured servants are to be allowed to return to their home. Any lands or properties that have been sold because of poverty must be returned. It was a radical redistribution of wealth and power. Jesus here is saying, this is what needs to happen now. I am here, and I am the beginning and the fulfillment of this process.
These words are still a great comfort to many. To the poor, to the outcast, to prisoners, to the disabled, to those struggling under oppression. However, to those who have more than enough, to those who rejoice that some are in prison, who believe the poor deserve to be poor, who believe that they are better than others – indeed blessed by God – by virtue of their power, their wealth, their race, gender, sexual orientation, and all of the other ways we divide ourselves – these words are a challenge. Jesus begins his ministry telling us what he is there to do, and it is not to keep the powerful and wealthy where they are. He has come for the poor, for those in prison, for all living on the margins of society. And that is hard news for many to swallow.
For far too long now, American Christianity has believed its job is to make people comfortable, it has sided with the wealthy and powerful over and against the poor. It has worked hard to make it seem like Jesus is not really saying what he is saying – to turn the beatitudes into Jesus saying people should be content with their station in life because they are blessed, to tell stories of a place that is called the eye of the needle that *is* actually big enough for Jesus to walk through, or convincing people that “God helps those who helps themselves” is scripture (it’s not). Instead of being a faith that is on the side of the poor and marginalized, much of American Christianity has become a faith obsessed with what people do in their bedrooms, how people live into their prescribed gender roles, and the idea that those who are healthy, wealthy and powerful are blessed and received those things because of their faith, while those who are sick or poor or struggling just don’t pray hard enough.
American Christianity has so deeply perverted the gospel we have people who, after hearing a sermon on Christ’s command to mercy and compassion, tweet about “the sin of empathy,” and empathy being satan’s work.
I’m sorry, what?! That’s not the Jesus I know. That’s not the Jesus of the gospels. And that’s certainly not the Jesus Luke presents us with in this reading, or throughout his telling of the good news of Jesus Christ. This reading, at least as far as the gospel of Luke is concerned, is Jesus’ statement of intent. It is his thesis statement, his organizing principle. We see this again and again throughout Jesus words and deeds. Release the prisoner, heal people, set free the oppressed – whether its the story of the Good Samaritan, the beatitudes, his words about children and widows, again and again Jesus comes back to these points. He is here, as he is quotes in the gospel according to John, that we might have life, and have it abundantly.
One of the central themes of the gospel of Luke is a great reversal – a geopolitical reversal, as we begin our story with power born in Galilee, as central to power in both Jewish and Roman contexts as Swannanoa or Fairview would be to state or national power here.
We then get Mary’s words that her son is going to bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly, an economic reversal as we see here with Jesus first mention of need to care for the poor, which is related more in Luke’s gospel than in any other gospel, and reached it’s culmination in Acts where the disciples live together, sharing everything, so that none has any need. This desire on the part of pastors and the wider church to keep people in the pews comfortable, to tell them they are all good people, to focus on very specific personal sins and scapegoat the poor and struggling, has created space for a much worse form of Christianity. It has made room for the intentional warping of Jesus from a Palestinian Jew who routinely spoke of the need to care for the poor, the widow, the child, who preached of a call for himself and his followers to free the oppressed, to give up what we have and follow him, to let go of our desires for material things, into a hyper-masculine, white, gun toting God who tells people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. It is long past time we take Jesus back. It is long past time we not only tell, but show people of this God of grace who loves and forgives us unconditionally but who also calls us to respond to that grace with acts of justice and mercy.
Martin Luther wrote that *if* one has the holy spirit, good works will pour out of them, they - we - will not be able to help but do justice and love mercy, to love God and our neighbor as ourselves if the holy spirit is truly alight inside of us.
These times are scary, they are overwhelming, they are apocalyptic in the sense that an apocalypse is an unveiling. And it is also opportunity to show God how much value we put on the grace given us. Within this opportunity is the opportunity to witness to the world a Jesus that calls us to care about one another, calls us to live in service to one another, particularly the poor and marginalized. We have the opportunity to be a beacon of light in a time of growing shadows.
Yesterday I gathered in a warehouse with probably 100 people or more to learn about how we can protect our neighbors from harassment, imprisonment, and deportation. While the reason we had gathered there was ugly – stories of DHS and ICE staking out schools, neighborhoods, and walking into businesses that has so many of our neighbors terrified – the amount of people there was a beautiful moment of hope. In that room, I saw people - Christian and not - working to fulfil the commands that Jesus gave us. In that room, I saw people loving their neighbors as themselves. In that room, I saw the body of Christ. In that room I saw people that understood that if our hand is threatened with deportation, or imprisonment, we cannot say we have no need of that hand. We do what we can to ensure that hand is safe. Across the country, people are gathering around clinics and non-profits that care for women and transgender people seeking lifesaving medical care, knowing that if our foot cannot receive medical care we cannot say we have no need of that foot, just let it die, we must care for that foot.
Paul’s words here about the body of Christ are a call to solidarity, a call to remember that if one is suffering, all suffer, that our lives are all dependent on one another. If my arm is in prison, I am in prison. If my leg is poor, I am poor. We are inextricably linked to one another through Jesus Christ, our savior and Lord. We must pay attention to the least of those among us, for they are a part of our body, and suffer, the body suffers. We are one. These efforts to remove, to harm, to restrict, to oppress parts of the body are, according to the architects of this plan, efforts to purify it, to perfect it. What is a body when so much of it has been removed, harmed, restricted? What will we even have left when this is all over? To be the body of Christ is risky. To be Christian is risky. Jesus calls us into discomfort. But it is in that discomfort that we find Jesus comfort. It is in being the body that we find connection, and in connection, we find safety.
We are the body of Christ, blessed to be a part of him and one another, called out into the world to act in ways that benefit the entire body of Christ. We are called to do whatever necessary to keep the body safe.
As one suffers, we all suffer. As one rejoices, we all rejoice.
Let us create a world where the body can rejoice.
Amen.
