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Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany – January 24, 2010
Usually very meticulous about maintaining a standard length for his sermons – ten minutes, tops – a priest one Sunday became particularly inspired – he assumed it was by the Holy Spirit but you can never be sure about these things – so he went on a bit longer. After the service, he was approached by a parishioner who gushed, “Father, that sermon was simply wonderful – so invigorating and refreshing!” Pleased with himself, the priest beamed broadly, and made a mental note to lengthen his remarks in the future, until he heard the parishioner say, “Why I felt like a new man when I woke up!”
Sleeping during sermons is a time honored custom, less commonly practiced today – I hope – than in, say, colonial times when Sunday church attendance at both morning and afternoon services in New England was not only customary, it was mandatory. There were no brief homilies to sit through, either. Back then, sermons were between one and two hours long and anyone who dozed off was faced with public ridicule. One story goes that a preacher of this era, spotting someone nodding off during his remarks, shouted, “Fire! Fire!” The man’s head popped up and he cried, “Where, where?”
“In hell,” thundered the preacher for those who dare to sleep during the proclamation of the word!”
The fires of hell were a favorite topic of these lengthy remarks too. Puritan preachers did not open with jokes. Perhaps the most famous sermon of this era – “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” – was delivered by one of the most famous preachers of the era, Jonathan Edwards in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741.
Taking as his text seven words from Deuteronomy – “Their foot shall slide in due time” – Parson Edwards begins his remarks: “In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites.” It gets no cheerier. Parson Edwards goes on and on, assuring his congregation that, “There is no fortress that is any defense from the power of God. Though hand join in hand, and vast multitudes of God’s enemies combine and associate themselves, they are easily broken into pieces. They are as great heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind; or large quantities of dry stubble before the devouring flames…thus easy it is for God, when he pleases, to cast his enemies into hell.” Are you getting the idea? Just in case you miss it, he adds later, “God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire.”
Sitting on a hard pew in a dim church on a hot Sunday morning, forced to listen to this kind of diatribe, sleeping seems like a sensible escape.
An escape practiced by more than a few, at least in Old England, when afternoon services typically followed the large Sunday meal. “Opium,” said one 19th century cathedral dean “is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon.” And it was not just the people in the pews who were affected; the same dean reported hearing complaints that in one church, while the curate preached in the afternoon, the vicar dozed off sitting fully vested at his prayer desk. As one who was there put it, perhaps as an excuse, everyone “had indulged in a plentiful dinner and the process of digestion does not tend to wakefulness.”
Perhaps that was what happened to Eutychus, a man whose name means “fortunate” and that’s how he ended up; but, for a while, things did not look good for him. Mentioned only once in the Bible, Eutychus is the first person reported falling asleep during a sermon; a dubious distinction, true, but, while he did indeed fall, no mention is made of him landing in the burning hands of an angry God. Indeed, God showed him particular mercy.
As recorded in the Book of Acts, the Apostle Paul was meeting on a Sunday with a fledgling congregation in the town of Troas in what is now Turkey. Paul really had the spirit then and could have put the Puritans to shame. “On the first day of the week, when we met to break bread,” the narrator says, “Paul was holding a discussion; since he intended to leave the next day, he continued speaking until midnight.” The Puritans, who were big on early to bed and early to rise would never approve.
Here’s what happened next, says Acts: “A young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer. Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead. But Paul went down, and bending over him took him in his arms and said, ‘Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.’ Then Paul went upstairs, and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse with them until dawn; then he left. Meanwhile they had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted.”
I’ll bet they were; likely some of them because the boy was OK and others because they finally had a chance to go home. Luke does not say. Nor does he indicate how many people, awake or asleep, alive or dead, remained in that third floor room when Paul finally finished his sermon. Nothing was going to stop him – not people falling asleep, not people falling out of windows to their death – nothing. When Eutychus hits the ground, Paul calmly goes downstairs, brings him back to life, goes back upstairs, eats some more and continues preaching.
No one thought to write down what he said in what was a lengthy but not the longest sermon ever given. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, that distinction belongs to one Donald “Spiderman” Thomas, who preached for 93 hours on the subject of “Divine Nutrition” in a Brooklyn church in 1978. Mr. Thomas is also the holder of two other Guinness records, each involving public speaking, so one suspects that he is motivated by a somewhat more self-seeking spirit to see his name in print than the one that descended on and anointed Jesus who today takes up the scroll in the synagogue just prior to preaching.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he reads, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…to let the oppressed go free.” Jesus may be quoting a passage from Isaiah but he is talking about himself. At his baptism, the Spirit descends on Jesus like a dove; before he is tempted in the wilderness, he is “full of the Holy Spirit,” and before entering his hometown, he is filled with the power of that same Spirit.
That Jesus is filled with the Spirit of God is evident. The reason why is about to be made so in what must be one of the shortest sermons ever preached. Finishing the reading, Jesus sits down – the customary position for teaching – and with all eyes riveted on him, announces: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s it; nine words, two more than Jonathan Edward’s lesson from which he preached for two hours. No time to fall asleep; plenty of time to go home and catch the pre-playoff shows.
But, and this is important for our understanding of what this sermon means, it does not wrap up God’s word; it sets that Word in motion for us all. Jesus does not interpret the prophecy of emancipation; he fulfills the prophecy of emancipation. God’s long promised deliverance is sitting before the astonished crowd in the synagogue; God’s long dreamed of kingdom is fully present in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The messiah’s mission – the reason God sent him and filled him with his Spirit – is revealed: He came to be a herald of joy to the poor; to proclaim release to the captives and the oppressed; to bring sight to the blind and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
That phrase, “the year of the Lord’s favor,” would immediately bring to his listeners’ minds the Jubilee Year when the land is to lie fallow, all debts are to be forgiven; all people are to return to their property and to their family. “And,” God says, “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.”
Now, because liberty was proclaimed did that mean that liberty was fully present to all the people, everywhere? No, but it had to begin somewhere; and, in this case, it begins with a word, a word breathed that is still coming to life. Never underestimate the power of a proclamation.
When Abraham Lincoln announced on January 1, 1863, that “All persons held as slaves within any state or part of a state still in rebellion would be “then, thenceforward and forever free,” the words themselves, while they did not immediately free a single slave, still, historians say, they “fundamentally transformed the character of the war.”
After that date, every Union victory furthered not just the cause of the Union, but the cause of freedom. In time, Lincoln would come to think of the Emancipation Proclamation as the crowning achievement of his administration but that crown took some time to be fashioned. Harvard historian David Herbert Donald said that “During the hundred days after he issued the proclamation, Lincoln’s leadership was more seriously threatened than at any other time.” While the words of the Northern press were ecstatic, the Chicago Tribune calling it “The grandest proclamation ever issued by man,” Lincoln, Donald writes, “Was too much of a realist to overestimate their importance.” In fact, he told his vice president, “The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath,” but goes on to note that “breath alone” will not win the war.
No, but that’s where freedom begins, with a spirit – in Latin, “Spiritus,” meaning breath. The war was won but the struggle for freedom goes on around us and inside us. Words can start us on our way, but words alone are not always enough. The words Lincoln issued were noble and true; the emancipation they proclaimed was the right thing to do, and yet, while the horrors of slavery are a thing of the past, the remnants of its evil legacy remain part of our present. Hatred, of whatever kind, still holds us captive. Much, indeed, holds us captive, whether we can walk freely or not.
Freedom is not fully realized – in us or in the world - but, bit by bit, the weight of oppression has been lifted. Bit by bit we are, all of us, being set free. The good news is there; the new life long promised us has come to us, the Word made flesh, given spirit by the breath of God; the Word proclaimed, however briefly, by the Son of God; today, it is ours to live into, for as ever long as it takes.
And that’s where we start today. All through Luke, Jesus speaks of “today;” not yesterday, and certainly not “someday.” “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Today.
The fulfillment of the scripture began that day, and it continues today and it will continue until the weak are lifted out of the dust, the poor are lifted out of the ashes; the captives are lifted from their bondage. The Messiah’s mission is our mission, and as the Church of Jesus Christ we have promised to answer his call, to remain awake and proclaim to all people his good news – sometimes in words, sometimes not – until the Lord’s favor shines on us all. Let’s begin today.