Text: Luke 4:14-30

Speaker: Joel Miller

Rock a bye baby, in the treetops

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall…..

And daddy will catch you, cradle and all

This was a favorite bedtime song for all three of our girls. 

We would start with me rocking them up high – Rock a bye baby in the treetops.  Just a couple years ago.

Then came the wind and the increased rocking – When the wind blows (blow in their face), the cradle will rock

Then the bottom drops out – When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall

Followed by the grand finale – And daddy will catch you, cradle and all

Followed by laughter and demands to do it again.  This was not a great strategy for winding down for sleep, although it did make me tired.    

It was a favorite of mine for reasons likely embedded in the deep recesses of the evolutionary development of the dad brain.  Exercising strength and protection.  World-building.  Calculated risk taking in which I am both the cause of and the deliverer from danger.  And, of course, making a joke that gets your kid to laugh hysterically.  This gets harder as they age, but we still try. 

Also, and this is what I was most conscious of every time we did it, it was a favorite of mine because I felt clever for having changed the ending of a shockingly dark and confusing nursery rhyme.  So peaceful, so violent.  And down will come baby, cradle and all. 

And sometimes I even felt prayerful.

Who doesn’t want their child growing up in a world where they are surrounded by caring adults who offer unconditional love and support when they fall.  It beats a world where the isolated individual is suspended by one branch holding them precariously in the air which could snap any moment, causing them to plummet towards who knows what.

So, even though the original lyrics paint a picture of that frightful world, we can change the lyrics.  We tell a different story, because it better represents the world for which we hope.  The world we try, however imperfectly, to live out. 

Strangely, perhaps, I thought of this nursery rhyme this week leading up to the 250 year celebration of the United States.  Let’s all add semiquincentennial to our vocabulary.  There are, you may have noticed, contested stories about the founding of this nation.  Or, there are many stories, and it has always been contested which ones we emphasize.  These are sometimes about history – what actually happened.  They are, more often, like a revisionist nursery rhyme, about the world for which we hope, right now.  The one we want our children growing up in.  So you can tell the story of a Christian nation.  The story of an undeveloped wilderness settled and made productive by White people.  You can tell the story of enslavement and land theft and resilience of the oppressed and the unfinished business of reparation.  You can point to the self-evident founding principle that all men are created equal, and then you can either emphasize the “men” part, or the “equal” part, no matter gender, race, and class.  You get the idea. 

One thing many of these stories seem to hold in common these days, is that we agree that the wind is blowing, the bough is cracking and maybe breaking, and we might even be falling.  So who or what will catch and protect us?  Will it be a strongman who projects confidence and promises greatness?  Will it be technological breakthroughs?  Or is that the out-of-control wind?  Will diverse local communities safeguard us?  Will it be a strong military?  Or a better social safety net?  Is it time to get a passport to another tree with stronger branches?  Again, you get the idea.                          

At the risk of making too close a connection between America and Jesus – which, I assure you, is not my intention – I suggest that the story from Luke chapter 4 has something to say to us American nursery-rhyme-and hymn-singing Anabaptists.

The first thing to note about this story is where Luke places it.  Jesus has just been baptized, and he has just returned from 40 days in the wilderness where he has been tempted by the possibilities of his powers. 

What Luke wants to do, is he wants to tell a founding story of Jesus’ ministry.  Luke wants his listeners to know, from the beginning, how Jesus understood his purpose and mission.  It’s not a Declaration of Independence or Constitution, but it is something like an inaugural address.  It takes place in Nazareth, where Jesus was raised.  Where Mary and maybe Joseph sung him lullabies.  And it is, significantly, not even his own words Jesus uses. It’s an old lyric from a Hebrew prophet that everyone knew, with a noteworthy twist at the end.

It’s the Sabbath.  It’s time to gather in the synagogue.  Jesus is back in a hometown worship service and gets roped into reading the scripture.  Invited.    

And now it’s time for the reading.  Jesus stands up.  He is handed the Isaiah scroll.  He unrolls it.  It’s either the lectionary reading of the day, which scholars think was probably a thing even back then, or Jesus selects it himself.  He recites the words of the ancient prophet:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because God has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

One and a half verses.  He rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the worship leader, and sits down. 

Except don’t picture him going back to his seat to be part of the congregation when he sits down.  In synagogue, you stand up to read, and you sit down to teach.  Jesus is about to preach his first sermon in Luke’s gospel. 

The NRSV says, “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.”

What is he going to say? 

Maybe one of reason everyone was so fixed on listening was because of what Jesus didn’t recite from Isaiah.  Had he continued, the very next thing Isaiah writes after “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” is, comma, “the day of vengeance of our God.”  But Jesus had stopped mid-verse.  He changed the ending.   Rather than the day of vengeance getting the last word, it gets left out.  It’s the Year of the Lord’s favor as the new ending.  That’s the Jubilee year.  That’s when everyone is supposed to redistribute all the land and resources back to an equitable share.

What is Jesus going to say now that he has sat down?  Will he finish the verse?  Something else?

With everyone’s eyes fixed on him, Jesus follows up his verse-and-a-half reading – about good news for the poor, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, Jubilee – with a one sentence sermon:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

That, as Luke tells it, is the founding statement of Jesus’ ministry.  The world for which Isaiah hoped, the world for which the poor and oppressed pray, is here.  It’s being fulfilled, today.  In Jesus, the Divine future is arriving in the present moment.        

That’s not the end of this story.  After getting rave reviews Jesus tanks his popularity rating by highlighting some stories from the time of Elijah and Elisha where these acts of liberation happened among foreigners on the wrong side of the border – like the widow of Zarephath who survived the famine with her miraculous jars of flour and oil.  And the healing of Naaman the Syrian army general.  Good news for the poor, and freedom for the oppressed isn’t just for our poor, and our oppressed.  And now we don’t even get the day of God’s vengeance against our enemies. 

It’s not what this crowd wants to hear.  They drive Jesus out of town, and almost push him off a cliff.  “But,” Luke writes, “he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”

The songs we sing our children, the stories we tell about the founding of our nation, the stories we tell about the purpose of Jesus’ ministry, speak volumes.

Anabaptist-minded Christians have always been skeptical of any claims by the state to be agents of God.  This tracks with the violence of the state being directed against the early Anabaptists, which tracks with the violence of the state being directed against Jesus.  We celebrate the goodness of our nation in-as-much-as we reflect the kind of freedom and liberation Jesus proclaimed and lived.  We lament our shortfalls as a nation inasmuch as we ignore those calls.  We seek to join with Jesus whose vision of God’s healing and hope spans across national borders.  We wrestle with how to love our country without falling into the idolatry of nationalism.  Simply put – when and if the bough breaks and the cradle falls, we do not place our ultimate hope in the nation state. 

There’s something bigger going on.  Something much older than 250 years.  It’s a story so wide, so deep, so vast, that it includes not just all of humanity, but all of creation.  It has to do with captives being set free.  The poor receiving an equitable share.  The blind having their eyes and minds opened up to this deeper reality.  This is what Jesus came to do, and this is what the Spirit of Christ continues to do.

Let’s declare interdependence and continue to tell stories about the world in which we hope to live.