Luke 4:14-21a

This is big! You Old South folks are used to it, of course, and probably don’t even notice any more, but let me tell you, this place is really is big! My own congregation meets in what people call the ‘Cathedral of Harvard Square.’ It seats six hundred people, if you squeeze ‘em in. Our baptismal font is big, our communion table is big, the cross that is suspended from the chancel dome over the worship platform is very, very big, and rather heavy (and I never stand directly under it if I can help it). But our entire sanctuary could fit in here with room to spare. This is big!

Your website describes this is a 19th century Northern Italian Gothic style building, and so it is; but sisters and brothers, you don’t need to know your Gothic from your Greek Revival to be able to appreciate the fact that it is big! And awesome. Not awesome in the way that these days everything from a snow day to scoring tickets for a U2 concert is awesome. I mean goose-bump awesome. Burning bush awesome. ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinner!’ awesome. What an amazing place!

Now, not everybody likes big, awesome churches. Some people think that old stone and stained glass, old wood and burnished brass, is just, well, old. Places like these that aim to waft you into The Presence by means of adornment so sensual that you would have to be entombed under the earth not to be transported by it are, they say, a major turn-off in the post-modern world. It seems that ‘studies have shown’ this to be the case. They claim that in order to attract the un-churched – now, there’s the second ugliest word in the language! (The first on my list is ‘illegal alien”) –  we should abandon these mausoleums and create ‘worship experiences’ in auditoriums and supper clubs, gearing everything we do, say and sing towards making people feel normal, comfortable, completely at home.

Now, whenever anyone begins, ‘Studies have shown,’ I shudder. I never, ever utter those words, unless I’m trying to make my deacons do something they are dubious about. And yet, well, other studies have shown exactly the opposite – namely, that a great many people crave mystery. They’re inspired by spaces like this one, awesome and beautiful (and did I mention big?). They’re not looking for the ordinary, because they ordinarily get a lot of that. They want to know – and feel – that there is a bigger horizon, a different reality, something unimaginable lovely and powerful that is capable of reorienting their hollow, hungry and helpless hearts.

Studies have also shown that studies show whatever you want ‘em to show. Given that, we can leave this subject now and duke it out on another occasion. For now, let’s just agree that this is big.  And it’s awesome. And just in case you think that I grabbed a church growth manual by mistake and left the installation sermon on my kitchen counter, I want to assure you that all this talk about big things is leading someplace.

To Nancy Taylor, in fact. Because it’s no secret that Nancy tends to think big. If you’ve been half awake during the last four years, you know that she has elbowed her way into the public eye, insisted on a seat at the public table, influenced the public debate, and increased the holy ambition quotient of the UCC in Massachusetts. And she has said it so often and with such persistence that I doubt there’s anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know that ‘The United Church of Christ is the largest Protestant denomination in Massachusetts.’

Now, I know that the Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor who did all that and more as Conference Minister and President has not undergone a personality transplant or a soul graft since her call and election as the 20th Senior Minister of The Old South Church in Boston. It is, then, a safe bet that something big is going to happen here too.

Well, truth to tell, big things have always happened in this place. If you know the social justice history of Old South, you know that this has not historically been a destination of choice for ‘bliss ninnies’ – folks who believe in being very, very spiritual; and for whom spirituality is all about relating to a nice clean God who assiduously avoids contact with the earth and the human body. This Divine Niceness is uninterested in what goes on in our boardrooms, our bedrooms, our courtrooms and in all the inns in all our towns that still have no room. Bliss ninnies protect God from such worldly and depressing concerns by keeping God in beautiful surroundings where no harm can befall God and where God also can do no lasting damage. In churches, they brandish invisible cans of spiritual disinfectant for keeping faith free of impurities. When the preacher mentions politics: Psffssst! Or money: Psffssst! Or anything that is demanding or complicated, or that disrupts the church’s etiquette: Psfssst!

But the people of Old South are just not that nice. You have often made rather big nuisances of yourselves in the world. So, in a way, Nancy with her big, expansive, public vision of mission and ministry will not be bringing something completely new to you. But since God always asks and gives something completely new in every change and challenge, it’s probably time we listened to God, in Jesus.

Who, by the way, was not standing in a big awesome 19th century Northern Italian Gothic church when they handed him the scroll to read the words of Isaiah that he then claimed for himself. He was in a small, plain synagogue in his insignificant hometown. And this should be good news to you who belong to and serve smaller congregations that meet in simpler buildings and who are by now probably tired of the big number of times I’ve used the word ‘big’ in this sermon. Big awesome things can and do happen in small spaces and by means of seemingly small people. But you know that. You read that big awesome book we call The Bible.

So, back to Jesus…

As I just said, in the text we heard today Jesus takes up, for his first official sermon, a great, overarching divine theme – God’s plan is to thwart the bliss ninnies. This theme is not original with Jesus, as we’ve also said; he had surely read it many times in scripture before that day in Nazareth, and he had also, I am certain, learned it from his mother. Remember the song she sang? Magnificat anima mea Domini! ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, for God has looked on my smallness. The hungry God has filled with good things, the rich God has sent empty away.’ This ancient manifesto gives the lie to all attempts to spiritualize religion and make its practice a matter of attending in a vacuum to the disembodied soul.

But we know this already, don’t we? We are the UCC, after all, the denomination that our critics love to criticize by saying we never met a cause we didn’t love, a bandwagon we didn’t jump on. We’re in familiar social justice territory here.  But I pray that it is not so familiar that we miss the most important part of what Jesus says, that opening line. ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me….’

That big, public, prophetic, grounded vision of justice and joy, that ministry of cosmic dimensions that liberates and delights all creatures? The mission all God’s people are called to share? The social justice agenda? It all originates in God’s Spirit who comes upon us. In God’s Spirit it begins, not in the UCC’s imagination and creativity, nor in Nancy’s, nor in ours; not in the UCC’s politics, nor in Nancy’s, nor in ours; not in anyone’s ambition or ideology, not even in simple human compassion or conscience or good will, as precious as all these things are. But for those of us who believe in the biblical God, we can do and say no other: the mission of justice and jubilee that Jesus claimed, in line with all the prophets, is first, last and always a gift undeserved and unearned – a free initiative, a calling, a surprise, a refreshment, an anointing from the Spirit of God.

Now, we know from long and unnerving experience that God’s gifts are not as free as they look! If they were, we would seldom accept them, because more often than not they are not all that attractive upon close examination. They come packed with a kind of odd coercion. (Once when asked to name the greatest attribute of God, somebody – I can’t remember now who it was – immediately answered, “Sneaky.”) When God gives us gifts, it is only at great spiritual expense that we resist them. When the Spirit anoints you, no matter your protest or excuse, you eventually do what God says. Jonah knew it, and so do most of you. The Spirit of the Lord is upon us… Guilt by association, I’m afraid. Jesus was called, and now because we are by baptism ‘in him,’ we are called too.

This means at least two things. One, that if you style yourself a follower, finding some way to do justice is not an option. It’s not something that is or isn’t compatible with your Myers-Briggs. Not something that one committee is supposed to take care of while another one sees to the investments, and another to the choir. You can’t say that you are just not a ‘social justice type,’ that you have other gifts. If the Spirit lays the mission of justice and joy upon us all in Jesus, and She has, we aren’t free to marshal the huge human and material resources of a big place like this, or of any other place of any other size, and use them to make the church a little chaplaincy for the private consolation of those who belong. Not for bliss ninnie-hood did God plant you, Old South Church, in the midst of this city which has so many very big problems you could be working on, and so very many even bigger gifts to give you that you could be enriched by if you would only go to it with your hearts open, ready to share.

The Spirit is the origin of the great mission, the charge to announce God’s jubilee. We are not. And that means, second, that the last thing you should settle for is, well, ‘activism.’ And if that seems a contradiction of everything I just said, let’s see if I can tell you why it’s not, paraphrasing writer Kari Verholst.

Yes, we’re summoned to action. Yes, we’re gifted for a mission of justice and joy. But too often we understand this gift—the prophetic word, the cry of challenge to unjust systems—as something deposited in us, rather than something given to us that flows through us. So we are always fretting about our faithfulness to the gift, examining the extent and quality of our involvements, always putting pressure on ourselves about our responsiveness to endless needs. We spend far less time and attention on our relationship with God, who is, we always say piously, the source of all gifts and callings.  Almost unawares, then, we gradually separate the ministry of justice and care from its tap-root in contemplation and praise. This is the opposite of what the bliss ninnies do in separating prayer and worship from the body and the earth. Both separations are forms of idolatry.

Unhinged from our life’s Source we inevitably start thinking of ourselves as of singular importance; we become persuaded that if we are not working than neither is God.  Or our already pervasive sense that (even trying so hard) we are always failing grows greater and greater, and we get depressed or exhausted or cynical. You know what I mean about this self-importance and this pervasive sense of failure, because some of you probably once swore you’d stamp out world hunger by the time you reached forty, and now that you’re fifty you realize that you have been, shall we say, unsuccessful. If Christian action in the world is fueled by arrogant over-estimations or by anxious guilt or by fatigued cynicism, we’ll easily turn into just one more soulless force out there jockeying for position, trying to impose a vision and a will upon the world. And that’s the last thing the world is asking for.

And so when it comes to doing justice, we need not to be activists so much as simply who we really are – people of daring faith rooted in prayer. And when I say prayer, I do not mean self-consoling escapism. Nor do I mean the lip service we often pay to the Holy Spirit at the beginning of meetings just so that later we can make the Spirit take the rap for the dumb decisions we make because we don’t really listen to the Spirit at all, or to each other. No, whether in a place like this, big and awesome, or in any other place where God’s Spirit is alive – which is to say, everywhere – the thing that makes it possible for people of faith to respond humbly, hopefully, confidently, perseveringly and in a big way to the divine charge to bless the world is a mysterious, compelling, cultivated and lasting friendship with the Holy.

The saints, who knew by heart so many things that we are still learning, knew this secret well. They are with here us today, we know, a cloud of witnesses. I think that one of them, Simeon, called the New Theologian, is right about now itching to ask us a question he once asked his contemporaries , hundreds of years ago. One question, just one – but (you guessed it) it’s a big one:

If – he wrote and I paraphrase rather freely – if you have not known that the eye of your life has been opened; if you have not tasted the sweetness of the holy; if you have not shed tears when contemplating that your life has been changed and your heart restored; if you have not found Christ in you, in others and in the world, contrary to all sense and expectation; if you have not suffered in your own flesh the agony of this world and still emerged in the new day alive with song – if not these things, how will you not tremble when [the city] says to you, "Speak to us of God!"?

How, indeed?

Sisters and brothers of The Old South Church in Boston, today we gratefully install Nancy Taylor as your pastor and teacher. I’ve checked her credentials, by the way, and the rumor you heard is true. She is a sinner. I’ve checked yours too, and it turns out that y’all are sinners too – a match made in heaven! And if –  in this awesome big space, grounded in your big awesome heritage and called out of it into the big amazing city by your big amazing God –  you and Nancy vow sincerely, relying on God’s grace, to enter this mystery of the love of God and neighbor today with all your heart, mind, strength, soul and body; and if over the years you keep that vow, with the help of the gracious Spirit, well, that would be awesome, would it not? Oh yes. That would be big.