Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany

Sunday 24th January 2010

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

This is nearly the end of January already! When I told someone recently that our daughter, Lydia, is twenty next month, they nearly fell off their seat. And last Christmas was our third Christmas in our ‘new’ house in Holywood. Approaching the end of last year, someone said to me, I’m only just getting used to it being 2009! There’s no doubt that our perception of time (and maybe it’s just an age thing) is that it seems to be getting faster. Certainly within time, our lives are getting faster and more frantic, even compared to, say, twenty years ago!

I find time an extraordinary thing. For example, to watch Usain Bolt run 100 metres in 9.69 seconds at the Beijing Olympics on the 16^th August 2008, seemed to last a lifetime and it was phenomenal; you watched every movement as if you were in another time zone. To run the 100 metres, yourself, let’s say in a race final at school puts you in to a different time zone! Yet 9 or 10 seconds put anywhere else during the day, one would hardly notice. You know that since Beijing, Usain Bolt has run 100 metres in 9.58 seconds at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin on 16^th August – exactly one year later to the day! Usain Bolt famously slowed up some 15 metres from the finishing line in Beijing, and, even now, many say there is yet more power in him to come! It is extraordinary that up to Usain Bolt, in fact for a whole forty years, world records in the 100 metres only ever fell by 100ths of a second at a time – then came Usain Bolt;

his running is that remarkable. I often wonder are we just going to get faster and faster until humans can run 100 metres in, say, two seconds or one second, or is everything eventually going to happen simultaneously? And that, perhaps will be the end of time. Time is such an extraordinary thing! To Ireland Rugby fans, I bring you back to that kick in the Millennium Stadium in 2009 by Steven Jones, the Welsh out-half, who missed the posts in the last seconds of that match to give Ireland their first Grand Slam in 61 years. It was as if it were in slow motion! There seems to be perceived time and real time; that would be fair comment, I think

But what a difference a year makes for Usain Bolt! To run 100 metres in nine and half seconds is mind-blowing; but yet at any other time, you would hardly notice nine or ten seconds going by!

What about our friend, in the USA, Barack Obama, who has been in office over a year already, inaugurated as he was on 20^th January 2009? Although, I have to say, that his presidency has been watched with such scrutiny all over the world that it may seem like more than a year! Political commentators are now asking is his ‘honeymoon period’ over; indeed, did it ever begin?

The passage from Luke chapter 4 is one of my favourite passages in the NT. Jesus has had his ‘honeymoon period’ in Galilee where “everyone praised him”, and now he is in Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and there he proclaims ‘the year of the Lord’s favour’! What an extraordinary moment! “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today!

‘The Year of the Lord’s Favour’ or ‘The Acceptable Year of the Lord’ or, indeed the phrase, ‘The Year of Jubilee’ are all now generally accepted as referring to the same event. The Year of Jubilee was part of the Law of the Sabbath, the 50^th year, when prisoners were released and debt was cancelled! It certainly sounds like good news, but you can understand why it was never practised.

Jesus read those verses from Isaiah; he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. To us, it may give the impression that he had finished; in fact, he was only just beginning! This was really the defining moment of Jesus’ ministry when it all began – it was as if time stood still for “The eyes of everyone in the Synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’” Today!

I’m sure his reading included the rest of that amazing passage in Isaiah 61 (it couldn’t have been just a few verses)... “to comfort all who mourn...to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” How the people of Haiti, and those who work there, would love to hear those words today or those who are about to commemorate the holocaust on 27^th January.

You see, the good news is about now; it is about today! Jesus, that day in Nazareth two thousand years ago, read from a book of scripture which was, roughly, half as old as that again; but it’s as if time doesn’t matter. Today is all that matters. We talk about years and days and even seconds, but all that really matters is right now. Right now, in 2010, Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour.

He pleads with us to bring good news and relief to those who suffer and mourn, today.

To believe as Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that we are but ‘an empty bubble on the sea of nothingness’ would depress me beyond belief. How, on earth, would that help the people of Haiti? Perhaps it is precisely because Christians are ‘otherworldly’ (where time does not exist at all) that Christians can really do so much earthly good.

We are to bring about the year of the Lord’s favour precisely because we are working towards a world where time doesn’t exist. Can you imagine a place where time doesn’t exist? It’s difficult, I know, but for the time being, we are proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favour, for the Spirit of the Lord is upon Him because he has been anointed to preach good news! It’s time.