Third Sunday After the Epiphany (2007): "The Habit of Vision"

Third Sunday After the Epiphany (2007): "The Habit of Vision"
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10;
Psalm 19;
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a;
Luke 4:14-21
Preached on January 21st,2007, by the Rev. Preston Parsons

Last week I spoke briefly about a vision, a vision where a young monk meets his spiritual father at the Wedding at Cana.

Vision is a particularly good topic for us, and I will continue speaking about vision today.

Last week, that young monk's vision changed him so profoundly that he awoke from it with a new resolve, and a new strength. That's what vision can do for a person, and it's what vision can do for a community. A vision can give us new strength.

***

In our Old Testament reading, Ezra and Nehemiah are reviving the religious and cultural life of Jerusalem, and describing a vision where the past and the future flow together. Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the governor were rebuilding Jerusalem after it had been mostly destroyed.

But led by Ezra and Nehemiah, much of the culture and religious identity of the Israelites was being revived. The Jews were looking at a glorious future, a future that was governed by the past. The vision that Nehemiah presented to the people was of a rebuilt Jerusalem, where newly built walls stand upon the foundations of old walls; and the vision that Ezra brought before the people was of the religion of the old ways, the religion of the law of Moses, a religion once followed and now being revived and practiced again. The past and future flowed together in one moment, a moment when the ancient laws were being read anew to a people who thirsted for them, a moment when a homeless people stood by a re-built gate in their own Jerusalem.

It was a glorious time in the religious history of Jerusalem! Finally, what had been waited for, was coming true.

But a curious thing happened: the people wept. Why in the world would you weep at a glorious cultural and religious revival!

Perhaps even this new and glorious future meant a transformation, and in any transformation something is lost. The historian Jaroslav Pelikan describes this kind of change. He might say that the people were giving up their traditionalism; they were giving up the dead faith of the living. They were giving up this dead faith of the living in favour of their larger, and greater tradition; they were giving up the dead faith of the living in favour of the living faith of the dead.

Even if the Jews were giving up the dead faith of the living, in order to revive the living faith of the dead, it still meant that they wanted to weep. Because even what is good can be hard.

This is made more curious because Ezra and Nehemiah were not kings. One was a priest, the other a governor. It was the people who were reviving their religion; it was the people who were rebuilding the walls. The people were weeping for their tradionalism, even though they were the ones who wanted the great Tradition to be revived. Even the carriers and seers of a vision can mourn the passing of what they themselves wanted to see pass away.

Nevertheless, by the strength of their vision and by the grace of God, they rebuilt the cultural and religious life of Jerusalem, to the great benefit of the people they passed that life along to.

***

Our passage from Corinthians underlines something else about vision, that if we don't have a vision about what we could be we get very stuck in what we are. If we can't see what we ought to be, we will not have the ability to see what we could be doing far better.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians, he is writing to a group of Christians who were in deep and significant division. They were a people who couldn't see past their own individual interests.

Now the church in Corinth was a very gifted community, and Paul tells them so- among the Corinthians there are prophets, and teachers; people were doing deeds of power, healing, leading, and speaking in tongues. It's awesome! But the Corinthians needed to hear something from Paul. They needed to hear that was there was a greater good, a greater vision for what the Corinthian church could be. The Corinthian church could be a body.

This vision of what this bunch of loveless losers could be, was that they could be a body where each worked with each other for the greater good, and for the gospel of love.

Without vision, the Corinthian community was going to perish. And the vision that Paul offered them was not of what they were already, because what they were already was a bunch of loveless losers who couldn't get along. Paul had to give them something to grow into, Paul had to tell them what they weren't, Paul had to give them something to grow into for the sake of the gospel.

***

There's a lot in our passage from Luke, and I hate to short-change it. It's important to say that the text is primarily about who Jesus is in the history of salvation. Luke recounts a story about Jesus reading a text from Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." When Jesus sits down and says that this text from Isaiahis about himself, an important claim is being made. The claim is that Jesus is the Messiah, the one Israel was waiting for. Jesus is the one who will save us. I don’t want us to lose sight of this claim.

But Luke continues, writing that when Jesus sits down "the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him." Luke starts by quoting Isaiah, a passage about how the messiah would come and give "recovery of sight to the blind," only to say that the whole synagogue turns around to stare at him.

Luke is saying something profound here, alongside that Jesus is the Christ - Luke is saying that the one on whom we fix our gaze, this Messiah, Jesus the Christ, is the one who will cure our blindness. It is Jesus who will give us our vision.

For us to proceed without Christ, is to walk in blindness, it is to proceed without vision. And we are to fix our eyes on Christ, to ask for for the recovery of our sight from the one who has the power to give it.

If we are to have a past, a present, and a future, as a Christian church and as the parish of St. Mary Magdalene, it will be by fixing our vision upon the one in whom we believe, the one spoken by the prophets, the one spoken by the church through the centuries.

To have a vision is to know the great Tradition, because in the great Tradition we will discover what traditionalisms will either be vindicated by it, or to be set aside. To know the great Tradition is to know where we have come from, and to know where we have come from is to know where we are going. To know where we have come from is to have a vision of the future.

Without this vision of what we can be, of what kind of a people we can be, we will only remain who we are, and what we are is never the fullness of who God is calling us to be.

And to have a vision, an idea of who God is calling us to be, is to stop reacting and to begin seeing, seeing the greatness of the church, and who, and what, our very own parish of St. Mary Magdalene can become. We are beginning our own season of visioning, where we will be developing the habit of vision.

And we will come into this habitual vision by looking first to Christ, the one who has come from God, who is fully God, the one who has made us and who is already remaking us by the power of the Spirit, inviting us into the fullness of the life of the Holy Trinity.