Comfort, Affliction, Inclusion, and Joy

A sermon on Luke 4:14-21 and Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Stavrialena Gontzou on Unsplash.]
There is a well-worn saying you may have heard that you know it is really the gospel being preached if it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.
Now, whether or not you agree with that claim, it can definitely be argued that Jesus’s first reported sermon in the Gospel of the Luke is the archetypal standard for this assessment.
It is certainly a sermon that comforts the afflicted:
It promises good news to the poor,
and healing, which meant a life-changing freedom-from-disability, to the blind,
And for those who are suffering oppression (which can take many forms, from exploitive work environments, to human rights violations, to actual physical incarceration), Jesus proclaims freedom.
He links all these promises to the year of the Lord’s favor, which is a clear reference to the Torah’s Jubilee commandment:
God’s explicit instruction to God’s people that every 50 years all debts must be erased, all property returned to the ancestral owners, and all slaves freed.
It’s a vision of equality and wholeness that is, indeed, good news for the poor and, more broadly, is comforting to all who are on the bottom or the margins of a stratified society.
As for afflicting the comfortable, I would say that attempted murder is a fair indication that Jesus’ listeners felt pretty afflicted.
And that affliction does seem to be linked to their comfort, or at least to their perception that they were owed comfort by Jesus.
Because they don’t actually get angry with him and his Jubilee message until he comes after their special status.
At first, they are thrilled by the “local boy” done well.
It’s not until he rejects their efforts to claim him as their own, and reminds them that God has repeatedly chosen to bless the outsiders, and the unexpected that the crowds want to throw him off a cliff.
And this is, I think, a really important clarification about what it means for the gospel to inherently afflict the comfortable.
Because if we hear that claim too simplistically, if rapidly devolves into a non-sensical loop:
The gospel comforts the afflicted (great!), but then what happens once they are comforted? Presumably, they become comfortable… so they have to then be afflicted?
That seems… counter-productive.
Not to mention, we don’t actually believe that God wants to afflict everyone who is doing OK.
Of course we don’t. God’s will for all of creation is shalom… the wholeness and peace of every need being met and every person’s dignity being celebrated.
It’s not “comfort” that draws rebuke from the gospel, but rather the hubristic expectation that we should never be made uncomfortable… that even when the world is so far removed from God’s design of shalom we should never be made to confront that truth if we are actually doing OK.
That’s what the gospel afflicts: the desire to hold onto our comfort regardless of what it means for others.
And that, I think, is a really helpful reminder on RIC Sunday,
because it reminds us that the call to challenge inequities actually means rejecting the us-vs-them mentality of fighting for scarce resources.
It doesn’t look like every win for the marginalized – for the LGBTQ+, and racial and ethnic minorities, and the neurodiverse, and the mentally or physically disabled – it doesn’t look like those wins resulting in an equivalent loss, or at least not equivalent suffering, for those who are currently privilege by society.
Rather, RIC Sunday, the invitation to resilient community, the celebration of an inclusive and enthusiastic welcome is actually just a picture of shalom.
It’s a reminder that God’s call to Jubilee is described as the year of the Lord’s favor because it’s intended to benefit everyone by moving us together toward God’s vision of wholeness for of all creation.
The only thing that “the comfortable” need to let go of is an attachment to privilege.
In the framing of the Jesus’s sermon, we just have to let go of the expectation that God should bless us before blessing someone who looks different than us.
But the sad reality is that this message does, sometimes, make people, make us, feel uncomfortable, even afflicted… because it forces us to re-examine what God’s shalom requires of us.
It tells us that we must not be content with our own comfort if others are suffering.
It tells us that we have to care about the comfort of those who are currently afraid, or detained, or blinded by harmful ideologies… or any other condition that damages God’s Jubilee vision of shalom.
And that is uncomfortable.
Because…the world is broken, people.
And compassion-fatigue is a very real drain.
And some of the people we are supposed to care about are so different from us that it’s hard not to feel like they are the problem and deserve whatever they get…
So instead of lecturing you about how God’s law is love, and that includes loving our neighbor, and the stranger, and even our enemy (even though that’s all true)… I want to turn our attention to a different account of people feeling “afflicted” by God’s shalom-based expectations.
We heard it described in the reading from Nehemiah, which recounts God’s guidance, through the prophet, to a people newly returned from exile.
By any standard, this people would be classified as “the afflicted” who need some comfort.
They had been freed from captivity and returned to their homeland, but the land was devastated.
They were rebuilding, basically from scratch, which meant starting with the walls of Jerusalem before they could even start on their own homes
They finished that task and now, these people crave comfort.
But then, in today’s reading, we hear that after the city walls were built, they were all gathered together to hear the priest, Ezra, read and expound from God’s law, explaining God’s instructions for them about the community they were to re-build.
And apparently… they did not find this message comforting.
Instead, they cried out in mourning.
Because the law showed them just how far they still were from God’s intention.
And I’m sure it felt overwhelming.
And, I’m extrapolating here, but I can’t help but imagine they just wanted to set reasonable goals, and be allowed to focus on their own needs for a while, instead of being presented with God’s detailed plan for how to right every wrong in human society.
I have a lot of compassion for these people: overwhelmed, traumatized, and desperate for some good news.
But I also have incredible gratitude for Nehemiah, because in that moment he offered them a word from the Lord that was both comforting and afflicting. (Because it turns out that the gospel, like many other things, is not binary).
He comforted them with a call to see to their own needs (to eat the fat and drink sweet wine), while also calling them to send portions to any who would otherwise be left out.
He reminded them that God’s vision is for shalom, which means everyone’s needs getting met… and that means your needs as well as others’ needs.
And then he said something truly transformative: he said, “the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Not the law of the Lord, which can feel heavy, and overwhelming.
Not the special blessing of the Lord, which suggests it’s OK to put yourself first.
It’s the joy of the Lord that gives us strength.
Because JOY is not just the goal of God’s design for creation, it’s also the way that we get there.
By hearing in the call to fix what is broken not an overwhelming to-do list, but an invitation into the best God has for us.
By seeing in the one who is different from us not an enemy, but a part of our own wholeness.
By understanding in God’s words of correction not a rebuke, but an expression of hope that we really can do better.
It is the joy of the Lord that gives us the strength to actually be a resilient community, that loves our neighbor and our enemy and practices a welcome that really is gospel, good news, for everyone.
Thanks be to God.