When I lived in LA, without fail, any sermon that was about kindness or justice included “letting someone cut in front of you in traffic,” as an example of radical justice and mercy. Which it is, for people in LA. So I’m preaching a sermon about justice this morning, and I guess I lived there long enough that I’m going to start with a story about traffic and freeways.
I grew up only a few hours from here, and so for my first several years of driving a car, all of my driving experience was in the Midwest. Mostly, my experience with freeways was that you merged, possibly avoiding a semi or two, drove past a bunch of trees and maybe a cow, maybe even a couple cows, and then you exited the freeway to complete your journey. I might have driven in a city a handful of times, with careful preparation and studying of maps.
And then I got married and Myles was finishing college in Los Angeles, so I moved to LA – which is a place with very different kinds of freeways. To drive to my job involved a freeway with 10 lanes, and you had to cut over across most of them if you wanted to get there in a reasonable amount of time. I was scared of the drive, which I dealt with by plotting it out very carefully in my head. Okay, at this exit I move over one lane to the right. By this exit I need to be one lane further over. If I leave 5 minutes earlier, there’s less traffic at this merge.
The other way I coped with this challenge was by noticing all the hard stuff that I could confidently state I would NEVER have to do while driving in LA. I thought to myself, “Okay, this drive is terrifying and difficult, but I don’t have to get on the freeway on one of those super short stop-sign entrances in Highland Park.” This always cheered me up- at least I wouldn’t have to do ALL the scary things, just some of them.
And then the next year the only place we could afford to rent was in Highland Park, and I had to learn to get on the freeway at these terrifying short entrances, where you basically just turned right onto a curvy freeway. Did I mention we didn’t have any money and I was driving a 1991 Plymouth Sundance with a check engine light that never turned off? And that the other drivers in LA were all driving 90 miles an hour on a freeway designed in 1940 for cars that could barely reach 60? But there wasn’t another way in or out of our neighborhood, so I learned how to do it, and eventually I got pretty good at getting that old car up to speed before some guy in a Maserati hit me. But, I reminded myself, even if I had learned to do that, I could still keep avoiding that scary 101 to 110 interchange where you have to immediately cut across something like 5 lanes to not be forced onto an exit, because I didn’t have to learn ALL the scary things.
Until we started going to a church that was right after that scary interchange, and pretty much the only way to get there was through it. So I learned. But I could still plan out all my lane changes in advance, because I didn’t have to do ALL the scary things.
Until I started working more and more as a tutor, and started teaching students all around the city. And so it was just me and my old school printed Thomas Guide map on the passenger seat, jetting around the LA Metro area, trying to get to my students’ homes . I couldn’t plan things out- most of the time I had to just figure out detours and new routes on the fly, as I hit traffic. Eventually I got really good at finding shortcuts, weaving through the lanes, navigating the whole challenging mess with some degree of confidence that, whatever happened, I would be able to get through it.
I thought of this long-ago experience this week as I read this Gospel. It gets obscured by the poetry, a little bit, but Jesus, in returning to his home congregation, chooses a scripture passage from Isaiah to tell people who he is and what he’s about. And he chooses one that basically says that he’s going to turn everything upside down. The line about the year of the Lord’s favor sums it up- it refers to the idea of the year of Jubilee, a part of the proclamation of the law of the people of Israel that every 50 years, all debts would be forgiven, slaves and prisoners would be freed, land would revert to more equitable ownership, and everyone would basically rest and rejoice for a year. Most scholars don’t think it ever actually really happened because… well, you can imagine what would happen if we tried to proclaim a year of jubilee. It bumps up against some things that are pretty firmly in the category of “the way we do things.” Property ownership and wealth and prisons and hard work- these are a lot of the big things that make us feel safe, as humans. We hold onto their safety, and the ways that they give predictability to our experience. We often resist changing things about them.
And here’s the connection between traffic and justice- this made me think of my somewhat more trivial and even a little bit silly experience learning to drive in LA- as maybe a useful metaphor. My careful plans and my self-imposed limits made me so happy. I didn’t want to deal with the feeling that it was scary to drive there, and I didn’t want things to be any harder than they were, and I was afraid of what would happen if I tried something I couldn’t yet imagine doing.
I have compassion for 2007 me- I was then, like I am now, a person with limits, a person who needs a certain amount of predictability and feeling of security- we all do. But eventually, the desire to live a fuller life, and love for my church community, and love for my students, drew me out beyond those limits. And eventually, by being willing to part with those safe-feeling walls around my willingness to try things, I learned a different way of being in the world- one where I could trust my experience and my ability to navigate challenges as they came up. One where I was freer to travel where I was called to go. Giving up those self-imposed limits gave me freedom, even if it didn’t seem that way at first. Even in this relatively small part of my life, being able to live in that way was life-giving, healing, helped me to grow, helped open me to my own capacity.
And so, I wonder what it means that Jesus shows up to speak to his community and proclaims himself as one who has come to overturn all these walls and boundaries and limits we have as humans. Jesus is there to proclaim that he is about some really deep level change- and specifically, that the justice and healing he comes to proclaim is going to break down some limits and turn things on their heads. Jesus is not, in this story at least, gently nudging everyone along, gingerly inviting them to consider stretching 10% beyond their comfort zone. Jesus is talking about deep, radical work, the type that many people, especially people more comfortable with the status quo, tend to find threatening.
Spoiler alert for next week’s Gospel- a continuation of this story- everyone hearing him, all those people he grew up with, they freak out about what he says, and then they all try to kill him. I think we can understand how that happened- certainly we are living through a time right now when calls for deep justice, of transformative understanding of our history, of changes that would be significantly different to our established ways of doing things, have led to deep and even sometimes violent backlash.
And so what does this call for change mean for us, we who are seeking to hear Jesus’ words and call to us, but who are also limited humans who don’t have capacity to change everything at once? Well, I don’t think it means that we are horrible if we can’t envision the whole thing all at once. Jesus goes on from this moment in his home synagogue in Nazareth and journeys, slowly but surely, with the disciples, teaching and healing as he goes. Jesus certainly embraces the incremental nature of human change.
But I think Jesus is also letting the community, and us, know up front, that Jesus won’t be boxed in by the limits we’d like to place on the justice and healing he comes to proclaim. And I think, especially those of us who are more comfortable with the status quo, those of us who benefit from white supremacy and/or sexism or homophobia or classism, or any system of oppression, we are generally eager to place or accept limits on justice and healing, especially if it’s going to upend things that are comfortable and beneficial for us. And often, in placing those limits, or accepting them, we shut down the possibility of learning, or change, or growth. So I think this passage encourages us to listen to Jesus’ words and actions with the knowledge that they are not going to leave us where we are, even if we aren’t quite ready to see beyond the next few steps. Often we can’t know what it would be like to be healed until we’ve walked a few steps down the path. Often we can’t imagine justice until we’ve begun to see it unfold. We are called to embrace that, even when it is beyond our limits, because we know that there is freedom and fullness of life beyond the oppressive limits that can make us feel safe, but ultimately hurt us all.
The other thing about this passage is that Jesus doesn’t stand up with some brand new words to say. In quoting from Isaiah, Jesus is aligning himself with a prophetic tradition- with calls for justice that go back many generations. He’s aligning himself with the history of prophets who have said- look around! Things aren’t going that great here in our community, and it’s because we’ve forgotten about justice, we’ve neglected the vulnerable, we’ve let the rich people get too rich and we’ve been exploiting the poor. And so we need to set that right, if we want our community to flourish. God wants all of us — me, you, everyone — to set those things right, so that our community can flourish. God is calling us to that change. Jesus, here, sets himself firmly within that tradition of messengers who come to tell us that God is calling us to that change.
I wonder who the prophets of today are? Who are you listening to, and reading, and paying attention to, who might be pointing you toward the kind of healing and justice to which Jesus is calling us today? If you look at that prophetic tradition, you can be sure that those prophets come from places that the world would not call powerful. And today is no different. If we’re to honor that tradition, we must know that we’re called to listen to people of color, to people whose gender expression and sexuality are more often marginalized, to people who are poor. If their words make us uncomfortable, it’s a good sign that we’re getting closer to that prophetic tradition that Jesus places himself in during the Gospel today. That prophetic tradition continues.
The purpose of this isn’t to burden us, or to push us beyond what we can handle, or to make us feel shame and guilt. It’s not to set us loose on a freeway that we’re not ready to handle yet. Jesus comes to free us from those limits that keep us from fullness of life, from living in a flourishing community. Jesus comes to heal us of the wounds that come from living within unjust structures, Jesus comes to teach us about the deep justice that makes us deeply whole and healed. His voice is the one we are called to hear, to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay