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The Bishop's Journal
Summer 2000
NOW IS THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD!
This month's Bishop's Journal is drawn from a portion of Bishop Pryse's sermon delivered at the opening worship service at Assembly 2000. The Gospel Text is Luke 4: 16-21. In this lesson, Jesus reads the jubilee message of the prophet Isaiah and then stuns his listeners by saying, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
We love to distance ourselves from things which challenge our understandings and pre-suppositions. I suspect that's why many of us unconsciously prefer to sit toward the back part of the church. It's a distancing tactic! But that's one of the disconcerting things about Jesus. He doesn't let us do that.
In Jesus Christ, God jumps feet first into our lives. This is an incarnate God; a flesh and blood God; a living, breathing, dying and rising God; an 'in your face', stumbling-block God who cannot and will not be easily relegated to some distant, otherworldly realm.
I remember the day in a first year seminary class when Delton Glebe gently lamented the orientation of Christians who were "so heavenly minded that they were of no earthly use." Delton didn't have anything against heaven! What he was saying, however, was that there was something amiss about a faith orientation that is so fixated on the afterlife as to render this life largely insignificant. There was something wrong with a faith orientation that failed to take seriously the fact that, at its centre, was the story of a God who, for the sake of a good and beloved creation, took on the flesh of creaturehood so that we might have life and have it more abundantly.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of the Christian religion is it's incarnational, here and now, orientation. Look, for instance, at Paul's description, in 2 Corinthians 5, of the new identity that has been conferred upon us. "You are a new creation," he tells us. There are no can be's, might be's, could be's, should be's or oughta be's, but you are! Christ says that we already are that which we are only hoping to become.
He's already answered the hopes that we carry; he's already fulfilled the dreams that we dream: "Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing"; "Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation!" Do we dare take the risk of believing that it really might be so?
Jesus called the listeners of his day to shift their perspective, to re-focus their orientation. As Jesus listener's today, we are being called to make the same shift and it's not an easy thing to do. Our eyes aren't much better than those of the congregation at Nazareth when it comes to identifying signs of the kingdom, signs of God's on-going creative presence. Too often we've focussed exclusive attention on identifying what God has done in the past or might do in the future.
Near the end of his book Life Without God, Douglas Coupland tells a friend about an experience that he had while rollerblading with a friend in Stanley Park in Vancouver. It goes something like this. "Did I ever tell you," he writes, "about the time last year in Stanley Park when Mark and I went rollerblading?" "No," his friend replies. "There was this group of blind people, with white canes and everything; a CNIB tour or something. They heard us coming and they motioned for us to stop and we did. Then they handed Mark a camera and asked him to take their picture." "Blind people?" the friend exclaims, incredulously. "Exactly! But the strange thing was, they still believed in sight; they still believed in pictures."
What about us? Do we still believe in pictures: "sight to the blind and release to the captives?" The Jubilee theme calls us to see the world, our neighbour and ourselves with new eyes. "Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Do we dare, even in the face of our world's brokenness and neediness - even in the face of our own spiritual blindness, to believe and live as if it really might be so. "Now is the day of salvation." Do we dare believe it - even if we can only claim fleeting glimpses of what God is doing in the world? Do we dare, in spite of so much that is less than clear, so much darkness - to still believe in light, to still believe in pictures?
Jesus' message of release is as much for our synodical congregation as for the village congregation at Nazareth. We too are an expression of Christ's body and as such the spirit of the Lord also rests on us. May the work that we do in our life together testify to the presence of that Spirit, in all it's manifestations. Remember, now is the acceptable year of the Lord. May we be faithful enough and bold enough to live as if it were so! AMEN
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
