In human history, religion has generally been about defining the holy, the sacred, and then designing ways to get access to it: obeying rules, performing rituals, sacrificing animals and enforcing taboos to guarantee that the individual is not unclean, unfit for the holy.
But our earliest tradition is that authentic religion is not so much about holiness and purity and piety as it is about goodness in the world. In ancient Israel, being holy and acceptable to God is, at first, a lot like other ancient religions: avoiding doing unholy, bad, taboo things, but then, with the emergence of prophets in Israel, religion slowly becomes about doing the good, holding to the good. Thus, in our passage this week, Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah:
"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, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Truth be told, the Hebrew prophetic religion gave the world the revolutionary idea that true religion has everything in the world to do with goodness: personal goodness, societal goodness, economic and political and social goodness.
It's an important word for us and for our nation as we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and the inauguration of our nation's next President in the same week. Christian faith has always held a spacious moral vision for the world. Early Christianity thrived because Christians were doing something new in the world, something no one had ever seen. They were loving their neighbors, not just their family, clan, or tribe. Not even just their fellow Christians, but others, strangers, outsiders, gentiles, pagans, Romans.
Today's expression includes loving immigrant and nationalist, Republican and Democrat, African-American and Caucasian, and anyone else bearing the image of God. We'll explore this in more depth this weekend. You can prepare by reading this passage.
Come, and bring a friend.
