Goodness: Our Story and We're Sticking to It

 3 Epiphany C January 26, 2025
 Neh. 8:2-10 Ps. 19
1 Cor. 12:12-27 Luke 4:14-21

 Lectionary Link

The actual conditions of living bring an obvious insight that we live within the conditions of weal and woe, and when the conditions of woe seem to be prominent, we might even think that what is woeful will eventually be victorious.

However, in the middle of what probably can happen, there has occurred the experience of hope and when language users came to point of pondering this feeling of hope, they came to believe and express this presence of hope as arising from an original goodness.  It came to language users to think that hope and goodness were so poignant that they had to be named as indicative of a Personal Proto-language user, even the Divine One.  This Divine One must have wedded language to the awareness of things existing, and from the Divine Speech, good things came to be known.  Language users in the middle of the experiences of good and bad and everything in between, came to proclaim this Original Goodness as the anchor and purpose of our human existence.  The biblical Psalmist even anthropomorphizes the heavens and states that the heavens declare the glory of God.  The heavens tell us that there is a glorious Goodness at the basis of life itself.

The biblical witness, is Goodness is the Original Blessing and it is our story and we're sticking to it.  The living of this original goodness has required endless attempts at human strategies to make it actual in human practice.

The biblical witness of Hebrew Scriptures proclaims the Torah, the law as the ability to discover best human behaviors and promulgate them, as the promotion of the original goodness of existence.  The biblical witness is a record about what happens when people forget the best behaviors and lose their worthy exemplars.  Our lesson from Nehemiah today, is a celebration of the rediscovery of the Law, the Torah for the people.  Good news returned to a people trying to regroup in their homeland; the law as the strategy of knowing goodness was good news for a people who had been long captive in exile and for those who had stayed behind who had lost touch with their most important Rule of Life.

The prophets of Israel were certainly aware the conditions of woe.  The human condition included many people in poverty, people in actual blindness and intellectual and spiritual blindness, and people living in conditions of oppression by the powerful and the greedy.  The prophet Isaiah said these conditions required one who could re-state the original goodness of life, one with good news for the poor, the blind, and the oppressed. He wrote that these very conditions of bad new gave him his calling to good news.  His good news calling was to bring people out of poverty, to enlighten people to see, and to free people from oppression.  And when Jesus of Nazareth read these words of the prophet Isaiah, he confessed that this calling to bring good news was the purpose of his life.  And not surprisingly, Gospel or good news has become the title for the books about Jesus.  Jesus became for us the supreme exemplar of what good news looks like in human saying and doing.  Jesus became the personal exemplar of the original goodness of life.  And it is the expression of this good news that we seek to promote in our living today.  Our life calling should be about lifting people out of poverty, enlightening people with knowledge and wisdom, and ending every de-humanizing condition of oppression.  This is the Gospel program which the witness of Jesus has given to us.

And how does this good news mission get energized.  St. Paul believed that the Holy Spirit energized the followers of Jesus with the impartation of gifts for the common good, not to glorify the gifted person, but to edify the common good with love.

Let us accept the gifts of the Spirit that we have been given to edify the poor, the unenlightened, and the oppressed and do it from the motive of love.

Many people might scorn our vocation of good news today.  Freud would call it our sorry illusion.  Marx would call it our opiate to dull us to our sad conditions.  But we are not those who would mock hope as some cruel hoax to motivate us to always believe that life can be better for us and for everyone.  The cruel hoax is to believe that evil, badness, greed, mass ignorance, sheer power to oppress, are going to win the day, so you should just give up.

We don't have the illusion that goodness has fully won; and yes we do rely on hope as an analgesic, our opiate from the pain of what can be healed, enriched, enlightened, and freed.  

People who do not believe in the Gospel program do not want to acknowledge the valid and mysterious reality of hope which is an important survival but unseen energy to accompany in our lives so that we can continually assert the original goodness of our existence.

If hope is our illusion and our opiate, then it is the evidence of our original goodness.  That our story and we're sticking to it.  Amen.