Becoming an Inside-Out Church (Progressive: Our Outreach)

Sermon, 10/30/11   

Reformation Sunday

Scriptures   Isaiah 61:1-4, 8   Luke 4:14-21

Free From to be Free For:
Becoming an Inside-Out Church
Our BPC Identity: “Progressive: Our Outreach”

Two congregations I served as a staff member – one on the West Coast, one in the Midwest – closed their Worship services with the same unison charge. This particular charge – these words of commissioning, or sending forth – paraphrased Isaiah’s words today, read by Jesus in Luke’s gospel in what some have called his inaugural address.

Week after week, over a period of many years, I repeated this charge with these two congregations so often that I feel like it’s stamped on the back of my eyeballs:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
anointing me to preach good news to the poor.
sending me to proclaim release to the captives
and receiving of sight to the blind
to set at liberty those who are oppressed
   and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

“The year of the Lord’s favor” – also known as the year of Jubilee. A vision for God’s people found in Leviticus, where all debt would be relieved every half-century so all could begin anew on a level economic playing field.

Recently, I floated this charge among one of our own as a possible unison sending forth for our congregation at the end of our Worship services. With due permission, I share some of this member’s emailed objections:

How about some joyfulness? What you have here is God’s to-do list for humanity: “Just pile on the work: mow the lawn; balance the check book; preach release of the captives; call Mom; walk the dog.” Send us out with joy and love in our hearts. Church shouldn’t just be a drag … Proclaiming the year of Jubilee? I suppose people with too much credit card debt would love that … No one knows what the Jubilee is; and even if they do, it’s not happening in 21st century America; and who gets anointed these days, anyway? Plus anointing is usually something kind of solemn.

A very honest response, on all levels. And objections I have harbored about these words, as well. God’s to-do list for humanity, indeed! Jubilee? A pipe-dream. As for anointing: How odd! How … Halloween!

What are Isaiah – and Jesus – really saying here? And what might it mean when Jesus asks, at the end of reading this supposed to-do list, that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled … in your hearing?”

Clues abound in the staging of today’s gospel set – a compelling spectacle! Our protagonist a hill country carpenter, fresh from rabbinic boot camp: a desert wilderness outpost where he had successfully repelled spiritual forces lurking at every seminary turn. And now, his initial public offering: If you’ll pardon the pun, in Luke’s gospel we find a profit at every turn.

Until, that is, Jesus arrives home. Where it all began. Where the Spirit first called him, in words perhaps like these:

“Yeshua ben Joseph, you’ve been living your life consumed by the wooden backdrop of your world. Not unlike your forebears, you have been apprenticed to absentee owners of your soul. External forces, of political empire and social expectation both, have formed and informed what others think you should be and you should do.

“Yeshua ben Joseph, I the Holy Spirit am calling you now. I am calling you now to cultivate the native soil of your village experience. I am calling you now to live out your ministry from within that experience. I am calling you now to live inside-out – through the power of your parables and the healing of your calloused hands. And to set at liberty others to do quite the same.

“Yeshua ben Joseph, I the Holy Spirit am proclaiming you free from your hallowed churched world to become free for my wholly created world.”

And so Jesus arrives home, whence the Spirit had called him – where it all began. Homecoming Day! Welcome home, rabbi-made-good! We, your townspeople, know who you are and whose you are and who and whose you have always been. We know you, in other words, from the outside-in. We are the ones with ultimate claim over your name.

Or so his villagers must have thought to themselves. Until Jesus read what is one of the most liberating passages of all of Hebrew scripture:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
anointing me to bring …
sending me to proclaim …
   the release … the receiving …
   setting at liberty …
   proclaiming ...

Liberating words, grounded in God’s action – not ours. Words which became prospectively more liberating when Jesus suggested this scripture had been fulfilled simply in their act of hearing it – that very day.

Not what the hometown crowd was probably expecting. These outside-looking-in folks – projecting their own expectations onto Jesus – never saw it coming.

They never dreamed – never dared to dream – that he, or they, could be freed from being so good in order to be free for responding to God.


This story and this passage serve as a kind of homecoming for us at BPC, as well. A homecoming celebration for God’s dwelling among us. Showing us how good God is when working through us, versus how good we think we must become for God. Coaxing us, compellingly, to become the inside-out congregation we are called to be.

The progressive way of outreach – living inside-out: God’s trajectory of justice arching through us, versus the flat-lining of activist burnout known as “saving the world”.

For a promise of Utopia this passage from the prophet is not! Its focus is not on the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed per se. And neither is the focus what we, the dutiful, can do for them, the desperate.

The focus is not “us” doing for “them”; the focus is on God doing through us, the church. The Spirit of the Lord upon us, anointing us, and sending us.

The church from the inside, looking out – reaching out.

The spirit of outreach, rooted in the spirit of our Presbyterian forebear, the Protestant reformer John Calvin – a man who made his ministerial bed in a Geneva expanded by fifty percent with refugees. The spirit of outreach, rooted in what I believe is the greatest legacy of the Protestant Reformation entire: the centrality of the grace of God.

Free from ourselves … to be free for others. A natural, joyful, outward flow, from human rights to human responsibilities. Responsibilities which, after all, are among the greatest freedoms of all: the abilities to respond.

As Martin Luther wrote in his classic essay, “On Christian Freedom”: Through Christ Jesus, we are set free. And because we are set free, we cannot help but serve.

A truly Reformation sentiment, not just for Protestants anymore! Calvin called this two-step justification and sanctification: being justified by God to be sanctified for others. All summed up quite nicely by the sign I passed several times weekly in my first pastoral call – the marquee of a little Mennonite chapel in the town of Meno, OK. The marquee always read, quite simply, “Saved to Serve.”

For as a church living inside-out in the power of the Holy Spirit, the question is not: Will we reach out? The question is, how can we not?

Outreach is inevitable – and ultimately a joy. Because the burden of serving is not ours. The freedom to serve is.


I invite any of you care to join us in the Fellowship each Saturday at 11 am to do so, and do nothing but visit. Sit awhile and converse, with the poor/captive/blind/oppressed around our lunch tables. As several of our number have discovered over time, when we eat at the same table together, “they” no longer become objects of “our” outreach. “They” become “we”: subjects of God’s Spirit. In fact, in responding to God through simple table fellowship, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who’s captive and who’s blind.

Speaking of our weekly Saturday lunch for the hungry, I am told on good authority that, several years ago, a Jewish lad in this area was preparing for his bar mitzvah. In his preparation, under the rubric of sacrifice, he was required to perform several hours of community service, and so he decided to serve as a volunteer at our Saturday lunch. But after a couple of weeks of coming here, he became quite distressed.

“What’s wrong?” his father asked him.

“Well,” the boy mused, “the rabbi said this must be a sacrifice. But if it’s a sacrifice … why am I enjoying it?”


If you are like me, from a very young age, you internalized two pieces of well-intentioned advice: Count your blessings and do your duty. Actions focused on what’s found outside, the fulfillment of which I was told would fill a God-shaped hole within me.

Outside-in: Count your blessings and do your duty. One-two-three – left-right-left: doing my best to be the best little boy in the world.

Only when I had finished trying to fill that so-called God-shaped hole with every spirit I could find, did I dare hear what Jesus wanted his townsfolk to hear. Only when I tuned out the din of a thousand pleasures did I dare hear what God was whispering to me, all along – from the wings of my self-righteousness and from the very center of my soul.

“Hey, Chuck. Are you in there? I am. I am.

Why count your blessings? You are already blessed.
Why do your duty? There is no duty to be done.

“For the Spirit of this Lord is upon you, Chuck. You are set free from being good, forevermore. For I am carrying that load now, through you.”

No wonder Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Not in our doing for God – but in our hearing of God.

No wonder Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Handel both appended three initials to their compositions sublime: SDG. For the Latin Soli Deo Gloria. To God alone be the glory.

Progressive: Our Outreach. From the inside-out. Freed from to be free for. For God’s alone is the glory.

  Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.