What Child Is This?

Sermon

Do you believe in the oppressed going free?

That is essentially the question Jesus presents when he first reads that passage we just read. Jesus is an adult just starting out his ministry, and at the temple, he reads a portion of our text from the Hebrew Scriptures.

“The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”

And then, with those listening enraptured, he stops the reading, he rolls up the scroll. and then adds his own words “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus was being provocative in using this text in this way. This essentially becomes his mission statement for why he’s here and what he and therefore God is up to.

This shocks the room, many whom are religious leaders. What are you talking about? Who do you think you are, you’re just a carpenters son!  Do you see any captives being set free? You actually gonna do anything about it? And what are you saying about us, are we the oppressors?

What Jesus is saying upsets the religious leaders enough that they try to kill him, then and there!

I’ve witnessed a similar scene in the modern day, though I promise, no death threats. I was at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, in the upper east side of Manhattan in New York City. And the head pastor was giving an advent adult education, saying that Jesus came to turn the world upside down, and all its systems and structures. And then a woman raised their hand and said, “well, I’m a pretty well off middle/ upper class white person in manhattan with a nice living situation and some wealth. What if I don’t want the world turned upside down?”

And you know what? I actually respect that person, cuz that’s one of the realest things you could say. She got it. She realized the implications of what Jesus Christ was actually about. And.. she didn’t know if she wanted to believe it!

Do you? Do you believe in the oppressed going free, even if it meant your world would be turned upside down?

It makes sense that Jesus would want it. Cuz I wondered, why would Jesus gravitate toward a text like this, when there are so many other Hebrew Scriptures that may have, you know, sat a little better with the powers that be.

And then I remembered Jesus’ childhood. Specifically there’s something that happens after all the more famous Christmas stories that make the Christmas pageants. After the angels and the shepherds and the mangers and the baby Jesus and the sheep, though certainly that’s all good, and if you want more of that, please come to our Christmas Eve services next Sunday, at 5pm or 9pm!

But specifically there’s a story that happens the so-called Wise Men, the visitors from the East, come and offer the Christ child gifts, tradition says Jesus would have been about 3 or so. They have a dream that tells them to not to go back to King Herod who sent them, and when King Herod, a Jewish client king of the Roman Empire, hears this, he is so threatened by the child that the Wise Men called “King” that Herod orders the massacre of all children under 2 in and around Bethlehem. Jesus was born among a genocide of children. And so, Joseph and Mary, the family that could only offer the poor person’s offering at the Temple, fled with their son to Egypt.

Of course Jesus identified with the text that offered good news to the oppressed and binding up the brokenhearted. His childhood was defined by heartbreak and by oppressive forces. He grew up in poverty, he carried his family’s trauma.

These stories illuminate who God chooses to identify with. To be in solidarity with. To clarify who God is talking about when scripture says “good news to the oppressed, setting the captives free.”

Who could God be asking us to identify with today, through a story of asylum seekers from Palestine fleeing a massacre of children trying to head to Egypt?

Since October, more than 18,600 civilians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli IDF occupation forces. That includes more than 7,700 children. Thousands more are missing and assumed to be under the rubble. Nearly 25,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both parents. 60 percent of housing units in Gaza have been completely destroyed. About 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced. An Israeli blockade is starving food, water, medicine, fuel and electricity from the entire region.

There are reports of horrific acts, extraordinary cruelty even under the low standards of warfare. Using internationally banned weapons, like white phosphorus bombs that burn the lungs, trigger organ failure, and trigger massive fires. Reports of tanks and soldiers razing over a gravesite, turning over tombs and completely desecrating the area. Of soldiers going into abandoned small businesses and cheerfully destroying people’s livelihoods. Of civilians being told to go to one region only for bombing and violence happening, pamphlets with threatening messages falling from the sky. Of snipers killing two Christian women in a church, with, and quoting the church’s statement “No warning given, no notification provided… shot in cold blood inside the premises..” where there was no signs of fighting.

Does this seem normal to you? Cuz it’s not. And this isn’t some far away tragedy that has nothing to do with us. I don’t need to explain decades of U.S. foreign policy to you, you know it. This is our money in our name with our government leadership and power moves and vetos on the UN Security Council.

Our money funds missiles burying children under rubble.

What does this do to our collective soul? Do you believe in the oppressed going free?

…I wonder what Jesus was feeling when he was reading that scroll in front of those religious people. Maybe he was feeling the pain and trauma of his ancestors through his veins. Maybe he was holding the weight of survivors guilt, knowing the children and families that didn’t make it out. Maybe he was thinking about his community, his people, who survived, whose resilience is his own, and thinking, I’m here now, and I won’t forget where I came from.

I mean, I know the feeling. My ancestors in the Philippines were devastated by centuries of colonialism by Western Empire. In the early 1900s, just over a decade after Westminster Presbyterian Church was founded, American occupying forces went back on a treaty they made with Filipinos, and went to war in one of the bloodiest conflicts barely talked about in history classes, colonizing the land for American strategic self-interest in the Pacific region, under the guise that the quote-unquote “savages” they literally called Little Brown Brothers couldn’t govern themselves.

Because of centuries of colonialism under the Banner of Jesus Christ ravaging these islands, my mother grew up as a child begging for rice in her village. She and my dad came to America through nursing visas, as part of a Filipino policy strategy of sending their own talent abroad in order to get any wealth back home, and part of a wave of Filipino healthcare words that disproportionately died and burdened by overloaded hospitals through COVID. I’ve experienced the weight of racism, the pain of survivors guilt, the grief and loss in assimilation.

And I’m here now.

And I’m here to tell you the spirit of the LORD is upon the oppressed and broken hearted and captive.

And I believe in the oppressed going free, not out of a false optimism that things will just work out, but because of the spirit of peoples in this country alone who have taken their struggles and turned them into freedom movements, in Black abolition movements soundtracked by spirituals and Black Lives Matter marches soundtracked by Kendrick Lamar, in indigenous land movements protesting oil pipelines and preaching Land Back, in women’s movements crying out Me Too and calling for equality, in LGBTQ movements holding up love as the answer, in unions and poor people’s campaigns and affordable housing movements singing the tune of economic justice, in young people declaring enough with gun violence and do something about climate change.

And now, in a massive cry for peace and freedom for the Palestinian people rising up worldwide from all different countries and races and cultures, young people especially calling for a drastic change in the United States relationship with settlements and blockades and funding, Jewish Voices for Peace blocking eight bridges in the US on the last day of Hanukkah, massive menorahs declaring Ceasefire Now.

Do you believe in the oppressed going free? This was Jesus’ opening mission statement. And this is our altar call, this is our decision of faith. In some senses, believing in some doctrine or idea of God is the easy part. But are you willing to live your life and change your behaviors accountable to believing in the oppressed going free? Can that be your mantra that you hold up your every day decisions accountable to – does this action show I believe in the oppressed going free – much less propelling us toward larger collective movements for justice?

Because Jesus has told us, this is where the Spirit is headed. Are you going to get on this train or not?