The Divine Agenda, a sermon based on Nehemiah 8 and Luke 4: 14-24, preached on January 26, 2025

A good friend of mine is the president of the chamber of commerce in Bentonville, Arkansas. Every Sunday, he listens to my sermon, and every Monday, he calls to let me know how it could have been better. He’s a good friend. Last Friday, we were talking. He asked me how this sermon was going, and I told him that after reading and studying our Gospel lesson, “I can’t help but think that Jesus might care more about the poor than we do.” “I don’t think there’s any might about it, Joe. Jesus definitely cares more about the poor than we do,” my friend said, and he’s right. The Bible spends more than 300 verses telling us how much the poor matter to God, and Jesus, God incarnate, having been baptized by John and having turned the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, is now beginning His preaching ministry by declaring: Our God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. This is His divine agenda. This morning, let’s take time to realign ourselves with His words and His priorities because the human agenda and the divine agenda are not often the same thing. As we always have, we are distracted by issues that matter to us but hardly matter to God. There are more than 300 verses in Scripture concerned with the poor. Jesus begins His earthly ministry, declaring, “God has anointed me to bring good new to the poor,” and our church does a lot: We feeds hungry people every Tuesday, and our church members fill up the church vans with cold families looking for a warm place to sleep all winter long, yet think with me about why churches divide and what gets Christians really upset. I’ve witnessed near fistfights break out over the color the poinsettias should be at Christmastime. So much time and energy has been spent deciding who can serve as a church’s pastor and who cannot. The elders will ask, “Now, when is that meeting?” And the deacons will ask: “When I light candles, is it the right and then the left, or do I light the left one and then the right?” When Jesus stood in the synagogue to make plain His purpose, how close to the top of His agenda was lighting candles in the correct order? He was focused on the poor. He was focused on people. In this new year, let our agenda be realigned with the divine agenda. Let us take notice of the words of Jesus, who laid out His purpose clearly in the synagogue. He told the people clearly what He was about and what He had come to do. It was all rooted in Scripture, for He read from the scroll handed to Him. Likewise, the priest Ezra, in our first Scripture lesson, did basically the same thing. When the people returned from exile in Babylon where they were exposed to so many new ideas, where they had lived in a foreign culture, they returned home, and he read to them from the book of Moses, that their agenda might be realigned with the divine agenda. That’s what it takes. We return to Scripture, to see what it says, and to judge our agenda against the divine agenda. Our minds and our purpose must be realigned by what Scripture says and what Jesus said He had come to do because sometimes, our focus drifts to poinsettia colors and candlesticks. That’s just human nature. We are easily distracted, and once distracted, we get stuck in our routines. I’ve told you before about Neale Martin. Neale Martin sits in the balcony at the 8:30 service. He just had knee surgery last week, so he’s not here with us this morning, but I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Neale. Neale is an expert in human habit formation, and so he’s consulted with product developers who want to get their products on the grocery store shelves so that they can meet the daily needs of consumers and make a lot of money in the process. Neale told me that introducing a new product in a grocery store is incredibly difficult, and it doesn’t always matter how great your product is because it’s so hard to grab the attention of shoppers. A typical grocery store carries anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 products, but when we go to the neighborhood Kroger, we end up buying the same products again and again. We don’t spend time debating which mayonnaise to buy. There’s no time for that. We just buy Duke’s or Hellmann’s or the cheapest one on the shelf. There’s just not enough space in our brains to make decisions about everything. We walk into the grocery store and we’re thinking about stress at work or if our kids are going to get into college. We’re not thinking about the best toilet paper brands or a whole lot about which carton of eggs to buy. We’re just grabbing the same one we bought last time again and again and again, until the day a dozen eggs costs $7.50. The only time the masses are likely to entertain a new product is when we are shocked out of our patterns. We won’t consider having toilet paper delivered until it’s gone from the shelf. We’re not interested in raising chickens in our backyards until we have to take out a loan to buy a dozen eggs. Something has to happen to knock us out of our routines. Likewise, people are going to go about their business Sunday after Sunday. If they go to church, they’re going to go to the same one. If they don’t go to church, they’re going to sleep in. If anything disrupts their patterns, if suddenly they walk through our doors, it’s because they went to the shelf and the shelf was empty. If you break a habit and walk in here, it’s no small thing. The first time you came here, it’s because something big happened. You moved, or your old church didn’t feel right anymore, or your mother died, or you hit a dark time in your life. If you suddenly go from not going to church to going, it’s because you’re looking for something, so the work of the deacon is not to pay attention to the candles but to pay attention to the people who just walked in the door. The primary task of the elders and the pastors is not to review the words that they have to say or worry over the next meetings, but to greet the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd is calling home. Pay attention to the people, Jesus was saying. Especially the poor ones, whom we are often slow to see. My friends, we all need a wakeup call. I need one, for I find myself worrying about the state of my car until I look out my office window to see how many people are waiting outside in the cold for the bus. I get stressed about how much work I have to do until a landscape truck drives by, and I remember that I used to cut grass and blow leaves for $7.00 an hour. I avert my eyes from some people walking towards me on the sidewalk, worried about making it on time to my next meeting, until I remember the divine agenda. Did you see the front page of the paper yesterday? My favorite reporter who writes for the Marietta Daily Journal is Hunter Riggall. His article made the front page, and there were these numbers: 1,535 – That’s the number of homeless students enrolled in Cobb County Schools. 259 – the number of homeless students in Marietta City Schools. 283 – the number of people living in tents within the city limits last January. Jesus said, God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. The poor are everywhere. But do you see them? Do I see them? Or am I so stuck in my own concerns and my own routine that I am blind to God’s people? Maybe you’ve heard the story of the man who wrote that great hymn of salvation, “Amazing Grace.” The man who wrote it is named John Newton. His name is listed in your hymnal, for all the hymns in our hymnal list the name of the one who wrote the words and the name of the one who came up with the tune, if we know the tune writer’s name. Who came up with this great tune? Where did it come from? Well, you may know that John Newton sailed on slave ships. He made a living shipping people from the western coast of Africa across the Atlantic, and one tradition tells us that from the belly of that ship, he heard the tune sung by the men and women who were chained in the bowels of that boat. Can you imagine that sitting upon the deck of that ship while those people were taken from freedom to slavery, Newton heard the tune coming up from the people below and began to realize that he, who called himself a Christian, was complicit in putting men and women in chains? To the tune he heard them singing, he penned the words: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see. My friends, we are all blind to the suffering of people, yet Jesus said, “He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind.” Coming out of the 8:30 service, LouAnn Sago looked me straight in the eyes, and she said, “When I could no longer look away, He set me free.” When we recognize the poor as our brothers, the imprisoned, our sisters, and remember that their struggle is our struggle, we are made whole. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to feed hungry people and to pay attention to all God’s people in our midst, and that’s not just in response to their need. We serve in response to ours. I’ve had the recent pleasure of interviewing about 20 members of our church, several of them because they’re involved in our food distribution program, and I’ve asked them why they do it. Why do they give out food? Why do they come back again and again, in the rain and the cold, to help people they don’t know? Is it because Jesus told you to? Is it because of some sense of duty? They all said the same thing: “The reason I do this is because it makes me happy.” I used to be a kid most concerned with making the baseball team and having the right kind of shoes on my feet. Then, one summer this church took me on a mission trip to Mexico, and I looked into the face of the poor, and I was set free: set free from a culture that worships wealth and beauty, where people have so much stuff that we fill our attics, and when our attics can’t hold it, we rent storage units; where doctored pictures of beautiful people flood our consciousness and keep us chained by insecurity. Consider with me that the more money we have, the bigger the house, the bigger the yard, the more isolated we become. My friends, when He said, he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captive, and recovery of sight to the blind, He was talking about setting all of us free. He was talking about setting all of us free from this consumer culture, where people are isolated and afraid, to care about each other again. Let us follow Him in the path of our salvation. Amen.