We reach a point in aging at which we realize we have morphed into our fathers, or mothers, and our parent-like mentors.  One for me was Alex Stewart, the bishop of Western Massachusetts who ordained me.  He had a touch of Attention Deficit Disorder, an issue when it came to details. I was once speaking with him about my vocation on the phone when he said ‘wait a minute…’, I realized he was checking the Red Sox  game on the TV, then I heard ‘OK, safe at third, what did you say?’ He should be forgiven that.  He also said some very wise things.  Before leaving for east Africa, he told us that if we were ever in trouble, and couldn’t get in touch with anyone, we should do what we needed to do, and he would backstop us- a contingency that did take place when a family member died back home.  We would have walked across burning coals for him.  From Alex I learned how leadership in the church, probably anywhere, is about trust and loyalty, the rest following after.  But this afternoon I want to highlight something else he said. He was talking with me about what is nowadays called self-care. He said that the parish priest works five days a week (this from the man who also said no priest ever died from working too much, but many from playing too much - not sure that was right).  Five days a week, and then your day off, and then Sunday.  I said, ‘wait a minute bishop, Sunday sure feels like work…’  He retorted, ‘no, no, you gather with all the rest of the people of God on the Lord’s Day, you just happen to be the celebrant…’ 

The point he was making was in a deeper sense right.  There is no churchly professional class, no masters of divinity, to functionaries of religious things.  We do labor in aid of the life of the Body.  But Sunday morning you and I enter the sanctuary in order to hear the same thing our parishioners come to hear, the wonderful word of the forgiveness of sins by and because of Jesus Christ.  Now the forgiveness of sins is one shockingly simple thing, and it also is a vastly rich expression, needing theological anthropology and salvation history and eschatology and ascesis and much more to unpack - three years here (at Nashotah House) is a good start.  But it is also the one thing needful, and being a priest or pastor is being reminded every Sunday that you come here to hear that performative word spoken to you first of all, and then to labor on its behalf only afterwards. Hearing the word of forgiveness reminds us weekly how we got into all this, or rather, how the Holy Spirit got us into this, we recall our first love, and you and I need that constantly in the long obedience in one direction that is the pastoral life.

Today’s Gospel draws everything into focus around Jesus Christ.  He interprets the prophetic word from Isaiah about the year of God’s favor in terms of Himself, and then applies the passage to the invitation to the Gentiles expected at the end-time, also in fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah’s.  The Scriptures circle around Him, all our mission follows from identifying Him, as does our understanding of what time it is.  And the ways to describe who He is in relation to our broken lives are words like healing, freedom, release.  In whatever season, of encouragement or discouragement, we find ourselves opening up the Church on an early cold Sunday morning in your ministry, you are really there is hear the proclamation of the year of God’s grace, who is Jesus Christ. Like an accordion, the Gospel is as concise as this, and as patent of explication, wonder, illustration - ‘oh for a thousand tongues…’, a good song for a seminary which after all what Luther called Church, a mouth-house.

 Going back to basics every week, and identifying yourself with the body of the faithful, are important, since congregations are an unpredictable and complex thing. Talk about a tough - we are dealing in Nazareth with a parish whose seminarian intern is no less than Jesus himself, and they want to throw him off a cliff.  But, lest you become discouraged, you are told in the next verses that the synagogue in Capernaum, whose stones, I might add, you can still see in Israel, welcomed him and received his message. In your pastoral walk, under the banner of the forgiveness of sins, you will meet both, usually in the same congregation on the same Sunday.  There is much to be learned from the fact that Luke 4 sets Jesus’ inaugural preaching right after his testing in the wilderness and right before his sending of the disciples in mission to proclaim the dawn of the Kingdom of God.

Luke 4 is a drama between Jesus and his hometown congregation, too accustomed to him, or so they thought, to recognize who he is. As such they are but the extreme example of all congregations, on which I would like to focus in the minutes remaining to me.  The congregation, gathered on the Lord’s day to hear the word read and interpreted, to sing and intercede.  The form goes back to the exile, and comes to us in the 21^stcentury down 25 centuries.  What it means to be a congregation has shifted radically over time under the influence of exile, the underground church, the parish system, urbanization, and modern market forces. The congregation is where you come from, and most likely, if you are in Divinity, where you are going.  While they are not all as hard as that Nazareth lot, they all think at some level that they arethe Church.  Their demise has been in our generation greatly exaggerated. They have been, in the years I have been in ministry, poked and prodded by narrative theory, systems theory, transition of size theory.  But it is still true that, by the grace of God, the weal or woe of the Church to which many of you head lies with the congregations.  They remain, as Newbigin said, the hermeneutic lens for the hearing of the gospel in our post-modern culture, not less than in preceding generations. But it depends not really on congregations themselves, but rather on the proclamation of divine favor who is Jesus Christ heard and embodied in them.  Rather, they are the broken pot wherein is found, by God’s own will, the treasure we and they get up Sunday morning to receive. I am reminded of the joke, originally I think from Groucho Marx: a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs.Unlikely and broken as it is, as often recalcitrant as receptive, the congregation is where and whence saving word comes to be heard and transforms lives.

Let me close with a word of encouragement and exhortation to this seminary in particular.  In the renewal of congregations, and the preaching of the Gospel and its celebration in the sacraments to that end, your ministry remains pivotal, even if some days it feels as if you would be thrown off a cliff.  In this technologized era, the uncompromisingly retro reality of human gathering face to face, in a particular place, to hear words ordained and infused by the Holy Spirit, the congregation is where renewal must come, and the residential seminary is its equally retro servant.  And the heart of preparation for that task, quite beyond us as it is, it also goes all the way back to the beginnings of the congregation. It was a rabbinic calling, so it was for young Jesus, so it is still, the reading of the scroll, exegeted in the midst of our time’s peculiar travail, as pointing to Jesus and his year of divine favor.  To this we are, thanks be to God, driven back again, we who are still and always hearers of that word of forgiveness and new life. Amen.