Base text of a Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany 3. Year C. Luke 4.14-21.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Today.

In the Gospel according to Luke, this is the first recorded word of Jesus’s teaching and ministry. Today. Not yesterday, not tomorrow - today. Today the gracious promises of our ever-loving God have been fulfilled.

Today Jesus brings Good News to the poor, proclaims release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. Today he lets the oppressed go free.

And yet, as people who engage deeply with sacred scripture, as people who engage at any level with the news, the very mixed news of the world around us, where innocent people are still captive and oppression still abounds, we naturally react against the idea of “today”.

Our gospel text though helps us understand this seemingly pie-in the-sky optimism of Jesus, proclaimed in a backwater village in an occupied nation. Before the bold and world changing declaration of “today”, Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah. He consciously brings a venerable, and well-known prophecy from the past, from ancient tradition into his day. He takes the words and the proclamation of Isaiah and makes them his own, transcending the barriers of time, collapsing time past with time present.

And as he does so, he makes the prophecy even more beautiful, even more poignant - he tweaks the words. The bulk of the quotation comes from the beginning of Isaiah 61, but Jesus – or Luke – adds the all-important words “to let the oppressed go free” – which comes from Isaiah 58, a chapter where God proclaims Her radical program of social justice for all people.

So, there is not a passive acceptance, not a simple replication of ancient tradition; Jesus negotiates with the past and with sacred scripture and brings it into his present, alive and vital, ready for his day, ready for us, today.

How he does so, how he bridges past and present is crucial.

Jesus uses his body: he stands, he receives the scroll and uses his hands to unroll; he reads with his eyes, proclaims with his breath and his lips; uses his hands again to roll and hand back the scroll, and finally sits once more. His body - breath, limbs, lips - is the vehicle for the renewal and revitalizing of the ancient tradition.

And of course, we are the Body of Christ!

As St Teresa of Avila reminds us:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which He looks
Compassion on this world.

So, it is we, we who are his Body, who are called to continue his embodied work of proclaiming release and good news. It is we who through our bodies, as the Body, once more collapse time and space and bring the past from Isaiah, through Jesus to the world, right now - from the Temple in ancient Jerusalem to a simple synagogue in rural Nazareth to our community here today in Darlington-Bellevue, we make this scripture our own.

We are able to do this, because, like Jesus, through our baptism and our love, the Spirit is upon us and we too are anointed to bring Good News.

So, we who are made in the image and likeness of a Loving God, we who in the words of C.S. Lewis are being formed into “little Christs”, it is we who are to bring release to the captives, with our bodies, walking our Gospel, making physical changes in this physical world.

We do this, in the words of Paul from our Corinthians reading today, as members of the same body, having care for one another, the whole body suffering if a single member suffers. And in the full vision of Christ, the Body includes the whole world; all people, all beings, everyone and everything is caught up in his love.

And it is here we need caution. Because membership of the Body of Christ has in the past, and sadly, even today, been bounded by human concerns in contrast to Christ’s universal love. We have and still today exclude certain bodies from the corporate body and from the Body of Christ.

Today, Australia Day, the recognition of these many Lands we now call Australia, is a cruel and sad example. Aboriginal bodies were excluded from the corporate body, not counted as citizens, until 1967. And even today, in the corporate body of Australia, aboriginal bodies will die earlier, live harsher and suffer more chronic health problems than any other bodies.

And though these examples are stark and awful enough for us to easily repudiate them, we have to remember that the church, our church, this very church once supported government policies that gave rise to them. To some people sitting in the same pews we sit in today these policies seemed right and just and proper and in accordance with the will of God.

Because of this our church has, and still does, exclude certain bodies from the Body of Christ or from full participation in the Body.

Left-handed bodies, divorced bodies, Roman Catholic bodies, black bodies, Irish Bodies. All excluded at some point.

And still today, not many kilometres away, there are Anglican churches that exclude women bodies from the altar. And we still, as the Anglican Body of Christ, exclude our LGBTIQA+ sisters, brothers and companions from the fullness of the sacramental life; marriage and holy orders.

At the other end of the Anglican inclusion spectrum though are people like Bishop Mariann Budde in Washington. You may have seen and heard a sermon by Bishop Budde this week on the occasion of the Inauguration of President Trump. In that compelling and quietly powerful sermon Bishop Budde lived the Gospel and appealed to President Trump, pleading with him to be compassionate and include all people within the corporate body of the United States; people of black and coloured bodies; migrant bodies and transgender bodies.

She did this because the spiritual powers and principalities, the ideas and ideologies, the defensive thought patterns to exclude and define and guard the boundaries of our corporate bodies and the Body of Christ are alive and are still potent. They still harm, they still bind, they still oppress, and they still kill. Ask any member of the transgender community.

But we, by living the prophecy of Isaiah and of Christ in our world today, we by our anointing and empowerment by the spirit, we can free the oppressed, we can bring new sight and we can release the captives.

We do this, like Bishop Budde by looking the powerful and the lowly in the eye and quietly proclaiming the ancient, the revitalised and ever-new Good News that Christ includes and loves all people, all bodies in his One Body. No one is excluded, no one is left behind, because if one body suffers, we all suffer.

We may not be called to do this with a president or a world leader; but the harm and violence of exclusion only has power when it is held and reproduced, often unthinkingly, by the regular ordinary people in our lives.

And we can look our family and our friends – we can look at them at work, in our social settings, at church – we can look at them in the eye and quietly, but insistently proclaim the radical, inclusive love of Christ, for all people, for all bodies.

If we do this, if we do this wherever there is exclusion and limitation, speaking truth, then like Christ, we also can rest and sit and say:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled”.

In his name, Amen.