Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 10am Worship

Audio of Pastor Darren's message on 1/26/25, "The Better Life: Why This?"

Transcript

The Better Life: Why This?
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We are in a series that we are talking about a better life, right, and most of you recognize that as part of your vision statement, of our vision statement here at the United Methodist Church of Westlake Village, setting course for a better life. But we haven't always thought so much about what that better life is.

It's almost, it's not that we don't move toward good places, but have we really nailed down exactly what that is? And that's why I, I come up with this title. Why this? Why this? The way we are living out our lives in faith. So we're going to wrestle with that today. Uh, we're in a scripture. In which Luke is, uh, um, showing Jesus, uh, heading off to go back home to preach in Nazareth, where he grew up.

Now, I don't need to tell you, I imagine, about the, uh, dangers in going back home. Back to the people who knew you when. Back to those people who know about that time you got in trouble for chasing the sheep. Uh, you know, that time you got rejected for that prom date. Those are the people that you're going back to and looking to preach to.

So it has its, its dangers. At the same time, home for a lot of us is that safe space. That place where, uh, you can, uh, find some comfort. Maybe find a kind eye or two and, and get the courage. To get something done, especially when you know it could be a difficult task. So that's the, a bit of the context as we lead into this.

Um, now something else that's interesting, at least to me, is this is the first thing that Jesus does as ministry in the Gospel of Luke. You might remember last week we were in the Gospel of John, and we had that passage about water turning water into wine. That too, the first thing. That Jesus does in his ministry in the gospel of John.

So a lot of times with a writer you can kind of get a sense of what they value by how they order things. Luke here starts Jesus's story, at least the ministry part of his story, with this one right here. And he's preaching to this hometown crowd. And he goes to synagogue And he gets up and he reads scripture as one might do in synagogue.

He then sits down, steps away, sits down, and then we wait. And as the passage starts to roll out, we see that the crowd starts getting a little contentious, a little disappointed, a little aggressive with him. A lot of that part of the story we're going to deal with next week. But it helps us to know that that's where it ends up as we're reading through today's scripture.

Because it leaves us to wonder a little bit of, well, what happened with this crowd? Why did they get fussy? Some people even hint that they were looking to do some pretty violent things to Jesus before he was able to get away. What happened in this situation? So I'm going to start with a potential reason for this conflict.

It's possible he came off a little overconfident. I'm going to read this part of the scripture here, the part of Jesus quoting Isaiah, and I'm going to read it, pretend this is my first Sunday here at UMCWV. 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, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Jesus reads it, then he goes and he sits down, and from his seat, he presumably yells out somewhat loud from his seat, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Can you hear a little bit of maybe what was getting people on edge? There were a lot of me's there. And need I remind you, this was the first thing he was doing in ministry in Luke. So he had established himself to a certain extent. There are hints around that. But he was pretty new to this. And he went back and sat in front of his old rabbis and Sunday school teachers.

And use the word me. A lot. So there might be something there. I, I don't know about you. I don't see smiles out there. So maybe like, ah, you know. You know, that's how I speak. I'm talking about saving the world too. I don't know. Maybe. Another reason. I think there might be something in the message that got people a little bit stirred up.

Now, you might be asking yourself, you know, we look back 2,000 years ago and those people, you know, Jesus hadn't really gotten to do his whole thing yet. So they don't have the context. Those poor people, they don't understand the power of this scripture. But today, when we read scripture, when we speak of great theological things, it is never confused or misunderstood.

We know exactly what God wanted, and I'm not sure you're hearing my sarcasm yet. We never have problems arguing over religion these days, even within Christianity. All right, I'm going there. Are you ready? Did you hear the Episcopalian bishops inaugural sermon, the message? Ah, pretty provocative, pretty provocative.

The right reverend Mariann Edgar... is it Budde? She was invited as the resident bishop in the Episcopalian denomination to be the preacher for the worship around that Presidential inauguration, right? So, just I'm gonna venture in a little bit here too and try as best I'm able to summarize my sense of what was said.

So I'll ask for a little grace. What I heard was, there are many whose future and safety will be put in jeopardy by your governing intentions. Please have mercy on those people. I also heard her pointing at that some of the descriptions of the people, those who might be in jeopardy, weren't always fully accurate.

Not all the immigrants are bad. LGTBQ people are children of God. Deserve Christian love and respect. I think those were the kind of the two things that got provocative, right? And in many ways, those are messages that aren't unfamiliar for us. Preaching today, learning from scripture. But guess what? Not everybody heard the same thing.

For others Her words came off as very political, especially given the context, right? This, this inaugural worship with so many eyes on these people. The argument is that, that these, this new administration, they're needing to make very, very big, difficult, tough decisions. And those are decisions being made in their minds for the overall good.

Of the society, of the nation. So when we jump in with reminders of mercy, it makes doing a difficult thing maybe that much more difficult. Even if they are biblical reminders. I hope I've captured a fair summary of that. And I'm being very cautious because I know it's so provocative. So if you want to give me feedback on it, please do.

But, uh, I think from there, with that dichotomy being done, that polarization, all we had to do was add in our two sided nation, and the way we've picked this side and that side, and then, perfect. We've got the controversy, many would argue, we've kind of established for ourselves. I wonder if that is a little bit of what's going on here.

When you talk about that scripture, it is provocative scripture. To bring good news to the poor. Well, if we're bringing good news to the poor, that might mean somebody else is not going to be as advantaged because we're looking to take care of the poor. Proclaim release to the captives. Well, what does that mean?

Who is captive? Who are you going to relieve of their responsibilities? Recovery of sight to the blind? Are you telling me we're gonna, the world needs to change? We're not seeing it right? Oppress it, go free. These are provocative things to say in a society because sometimes when you think about how a correction might happen, it may not always put you on the side that you're comfortable being on.

So potentially, you know, that pushback that Jesus gets might be in the very message itself.

I have a personal theory. I'm going to play it out for you here, and you guys can give me feedback on this too. Take our scripture for today. What I have come to realize, is that this is a five point message that Jesus makes. Good news to the poor, release to the captive, sight to the blind, oppressor go free, proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Five point message. What I'm noticing here is that many of these descriptions can be read literally and figuratively. When I say good news to the poor, we know, we'd all accept there are people who are more poor, have less resources in this world. But we read that scripture sometimes metaphorically too, don't we?

That poverty isn't always resources. A lot of times poverty is spiritual. That they are spiritually poor, undernourished, under comforted, under, uh, uh, committed to an understanding of God, that there's a spiritual poverty that can happen as well. Release to the captives. We know there's people in the world who are in essence, captive.

And maybe not just in essence, but they are in a situation in which they are not in their own control in this world, financially, socially, culturally. Right? So you've got literal, but then you've got metaphorical too. Sometimes people feel that if they are in a place that they don't get to, they aren't free to believe what they've come to believe.

That, that's a captivity, too. So there's a metaphorical understanding of that, too. Sight to the blind. Obviously, there are those of us who are physically blind and cannot see. But we also look at that as miracle. We also look at that as a metaphor. This idea that we're not quite seeing all that God wants us to see.

We're not doing all that God wants us to do. You know, we're spiritually blind, right? So, there's a metaphorical understanding of that too. And the oppressed that go free, again, it's like captivity. Yeah, we know there are those who are oppressed. But often, in a metaphorical sense, in a figurative sense, People look at being spiritually oppressed.

I'm not free to believe as I want to believe. So you can see this dynamic we've got in play now, where we're reading these scriptures, and sometimes we're reading literally, sometimes we're reading figuratively, but all the while we've got these permissions to look at ourselves as the victim. And you see kind of how maybe some of our problems start to develop.

Right? When we get in together and we read something like good news to the poor. Well, some of us who have less resources are like, thank God. And some of us who feel oppressed, who feel like they aren't free to, to, uh, um, worship as they want to worship. They start going, Amen to that. And we look at the same scripture and see two different things.

I mix those up. Proclaim release to the captives. All of those who are victims of humic trafficking. They love this passage because they think God is going to do something to help us get freed. But then other people look at it. And they recognize or feel a spiritual captivity that they have. And so they feel victimized, and they're glad to see what's here.

And all of a sudden, we're in a room, and everybody feels like they're the victim. Everybody feels like they're the ones that God is talking about with poor and oppressed, captive, oppressed. Right? And none of us look at the scripture and recognize how we're the wealthy. How we might be the oppressor. We don't take in the full message I think that God was wanting us to get.

The message that Jesus was wanting us to get. We're just a room full of people who are feeling cheated. That's a hard space to solve problems in. That's a hard space even to have a conversation in. In the end, we can ask ourselves or question why these ancient people got angry with Jesus and we can talk about how, uh, how lowly developed their Christianity and their Christian faith was at that early, early time.

But I might ask you and myself, are we really any better today? At understanding even what is a pretty straight forward message from scripture. Are we really any better at doing those five points? Or have we locked ourselves up in some sort of controversy and disabled any sort of movement forward? Any sort of ministry?

I think the message of this passage coming to us at this particular time, having happened what happened this particular week, to me, it's an invitation for us to get back to some basics. Right? We need to get back to things that we actually can control, which we, as people in Westlake Village, for the most part, have control of our lives.

To me that brings us back again to that vision statement, a better life. What do we mean by that? How are we living our lives in a way that convey that we've shaped that better life? We've defined it for ourselves. We know where we are headed. I want to challenge everybody here to come up with your own five point.

Plan. Jesus made his. He showed up. First thing he does is go to church and say those five things. What are your five things? What is that better life for you? To me that can be individual work that you do with God. But it can also be work that you do with resources like our scriptures. In fact, some may argue the way we've locked ourselves up as a society that maybe we do need to go back to some of the basic principles we find in scripture.

Figure out some, uh, outside of our own locked in controversies and get some voice into what we're dealing with. Maybe we aren't ready for the freedom to deal independently with God. Maybe we do need to ground ourselves in something a little more concrete. Stories of the faith from 2, 000 to 5, 000 years old.

And when we do it, the goal, to me, would be that elevator speech. You guys know what the elevator speech is? Right? You, you figure you got, you got 30 seconds sometimes to get something across to somebody. Right? It might be somebody you got to inspire, somebody you got to guide, somebody you got to teach, somebody you got to convince, maybe, to help you out in some way.

In any case, you've got about 30 seconds to lay it all out. Because who knows, you might end up somewhere where that's all you have. Like an elevator. My question to you is, have you put that 30 second conversation, that 30 second statement together for yourself? Do you know what you would say if you had just 30 seconds to describe why you go to church, why you follow God, why you do the things that you do?

If a friend came up to you and said, you know, this morning I had waffles, strawberry, and I watched the cowboys get beat right in front of my eyes. And you were there in church. Too many cowboy fans? Was that a shot? I mean the odds are they lost. I mean.

But have you got that? Has that approach happened? Where somebody says, really? Boy, you give a lot of time every Sunday morning over there. There's a lot of other things you could do. Why do you do that? What would you answer? Do you got that 30 second answer? Is it that accessible? Have you done that work?

What if a friend says to you, you know, you give a lot of time and energy and resources, not for yourself, but for other people. Why do you do that? What would you say? Do you know what you would say? Could you sum it up in five points, 30 seconds? Friends, sometimes that conversation is really significant and heavy.

You might have a friend come to you and say, my son died. I am heartbroken.

Do you know what you would say? Have you thought that through about how you understand a loving, comforting God?

The question is, have you done that work? Because sometimes that moment is that weighty, is that significant. To me, that's the message for us in this scripture today. We talk about a better life, but the way we might describe that life, to me, often feels assumed. We've all got an idea, you know, you know, the Christian life, you know, love and peace and feeding people.

We've all got that. And we have set course to a certain extent. We're all, we're doing stuff. We're moving around. A lot of it is really good stuff. But have we done the work to understand what a better life means for each of us? Individually. Have we done the work to understand what a better life means to us as a body of faith walking a journey.

Cause once we've done that work setting course becomes a little more clear, shall we say. We may not go straight there, we might have to tack a little bit, but at least we know we're supposed to get there. For me, what I'm excited about, when it starts taking shape, when we're pinning it down to a few scriptures, or a few sayings that, that really define who we are, I want to start putting them up around the church.

We get a fair amount of people come on and off of our property throughout the week. And our property looks nice. It's well taken care of. We are a good spot. We can feel good about who we are renting to and what we offer to them. But do they find out who we are by walking on this property? They do a little bit.

They find out we're pretty clean. We take care of ourselves, which is good. But do they know what we believe? Do they know what we want to offer to them? And to the world,

I invite us to take that journey, to really sharpen that, what it means, that better life. Because I think we will be enriched by that, not only individually, but we'll be blessed by the work of this church and blessed by knowing we are part of it. Amen.