Luke 14: 14-21 & 1 Cor 12 12-31a
May I speak in the name of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit.
Today, Nazareth is Israel’s largest Arab city. It bustles with life, horns blare out, and traffic gridlock is part of daily life. The old city is filled with tourists and traders and decaying Ottoman mansions. And dominating the skyline is the lantern of the Church of the Annunciation built over the site believed to be Mary’s home, where the Angel Gabriel told Mary that she would bear God’s son and ‘the Holy Spirit would come upon her’. Here in Nazareth, God chose to begin a new thing, and to start a new relationship with His people. In the great mystery of the incarnation, the young virgin Mary was chosen by God to play her part in the new thing He was about to do, to show us His utter commitment to be with us always, and come among us, as one of us.
Nazareth is again the site of new beginning in our gospel reading. Jesus is back in his hometown after his baptism and temptations in the desert. In the synagogue he reads words from the prophet Isaiah beginning with ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’ and then he takes up Isaiah’s prophetic words and sets out the radical shape of the earthly ministry he is about to begin. He has come to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and free the oppressed. Here in Nazareth, Jesus proclaims that through him, God is doing a new thing. But notice that Jesus is not talking about something way in the future, but rather, he is saying to the expectant crowd ‘I fulfil the promises of this scripture now- here in your presence’. Now the Kingdom of God is at hand, because in me, God has fulfilled his promise; in me God ‘s faithfulness is revealed and in me the new thing spoken of by the prophets is happening. And this is just not Jesus making a statement, because with these words, he is inviting everyone who hears him to be partakers in God’s kingdom, to be set free, to open themselves up to the transformational love of God, to receive God’s forgiveness and to realise the hope promised in God’s beloved son, born of Mary, the Messiah. In other words, Jesus at the beginning of his ministry is offering an open invitation to join in with the new things brought about by God through Him.
And so, in the gospels, what we find is that those who responded to Jesus’s words, who sought his company, and whose company he sought, discovered that for them, the Kingdom of God had indeed come. Through their acts of repentance and faith, they were swept up into something new and powerful which gave them new life. Those who had experienced only helplessness and despair, were given a future when one never seemed possible, eyes were opened, and they could see. As their lives were transformed, and they began their new life of faith in Jesus as God’s son, God with us, they were able to claim for themselves the reality of Jesus’s words ‘today the scriptures are fulfilled’.
And as we know, after the end of Jesus’s earthly ministry, God began another new thing as St Paul and the other apostles preached, baptised and ministered in the name of Jesus: Christ crucified and risen. They continued Jesus’s ministry and took the gospel to the rest of their known world, establishing communities of new believers on the way. And it is to the new community in Corinth that Paul in our reading describes the way they should live as a new radical community, as the Church, the body of Christ. What Paul describes as the Church is a community of new belonging, where everyone has a gift to offer, everyone’s gifts are valued, everyone needs each other’s gifts, and everyone deserves respect, support and loving care. A community bound together by the one spirit in which they were baptised. They are to give and receive from one another and most importantly to become the place where Christ is found and grows within them. But that’s not all, for the Church as the body of Christ does not only exist for its own sake, or the sake of its members, it is called to go out and proclaim the good news of Jesus, and work to establish the Kingdom of God now in the world.
On this special day of Astrid’s baptism, we witness Astrid taking up the invitation to a new life in Christ as she turns to Christ as her saviour. It marks a new beginning as she publicly joins the community of the baptised- the Church. The community described by St Paul as the body of Christ, called to be the place where the gospel is proclaimed, where Christ is found, where God’s love is embodied and in the power of the Spirit to continue the work of God’s Kingdom throughout the world.
And today we also have an opportunity to reflect anew on our own baptism, and to open ourselves up again to the Holy Spirit and the new possibilities this life of faith might offer us. In celebrating Astrid’s place in the body of Christ, we are also challenged, firstly, to reflect on whether this community is a place where everyone is valued as a child of God and where each of us mutually give and receive the gifts we have all been given to build one another up in love. And secondly, we are challenged to ask some searching questions -do we as a Church recognisably embody God’s loving purposes for the world – how are we bringing good news to the poor and release to the captive? And how open are we to God doing a new thing through and in us and bringing about His kingdom here, now? Amen.