Jesus' Inaugural Address

 

Jesus’ Inaugural Address

For

Northshore United Church of Christ, Woodinville, Washington

February 2, 2025

 

Scripture: Luke 4:16-21

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our salvation. Amen.

For most of my life I have heard people say that we shouldn’t mix religion and politics. Well, I don’t believe that; and today I am going to violate it. The gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not political. I trust that that truth will become apparent in what I have to say this morning. Our Christian values speak powerfully to the political context we find ourselves in, as I hope now to explain.

Every four years our country inaugurates a president. Typically, crowds gather in front of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, to witness the ceremony (although this year the inauguration was held inside that building because it was so cold outside). Traditionally, after having been sworn in, the president gives a speech. We call that speech an “inaugural address.” Most commonly the newly sworn in president presents his (and I hope someday her) vision of what they want done during their term in office. A good inaugural address sets the tone for the pending presidency.

Donald Trump gave an inaugural address two weeks ago tomorrow. It truly does set out what he hopes will be tone of his turn as president this time around. In that speech, he paints a picture of an America in ruins. Justice denied. Despised around the world. A complete disaster. Then he says that he will make everything that he says is wrong right.

As soon as he was in the Oval Office he issued a bunch of executive orders that, I guess, he thinks will make everything right. Here’s what some of them do: End birthright citizenship. Declare migrant crossings of the US-Mexico border to be a national emergency. Terminate DEI programs. Declare that there are only two genders. Withdraw the US from the Paris climate change accords. Open the Alaska Wilderness to more oil and gas drilling. Eliminate environment justice programs across the federal government. Withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. These are just a few of the executive orders President Donald Trump signed as soon as he was sworn in as president this time around. Many Americans, I guess, agree that these are good things, though a great many of us, myself included, consider them to be horrific. Whether we like these orders or not, they tell us a good deal about what Donald Trump thinks he is all about.

Here’s something few people know about Jesus. He gave an inaugural address too. We just heard his inaugural address in the Gospel of Luke. It sets the tone for his ministry to come. It tells us what he is all about. In the synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath he reads from Isaiah:

‘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….’

 

“Let the oppressed go free.” It’s hard to find a more concise and direct statement of what Jesus thought he had come to do. Let the oppressed go free, and nearly everyone in Jesus’ world was oppressed. Most of them were so poor that they lived only at a subsistence level. They lived under an economically oppressive system in which very few were very rich and most were dirt poor. They had no political rights. Rome ruled them with an iron fist, and they had no say whatsoever in what Rome did. They lived under a politically oppressive system. In his reading from Isaiah very early in his earthly ministry Jesus really does tell us what he thinks he is all about. Jesus called for the liberation of all people everywhere from every form of oppression.

Jesus calls us to work for the same end—liberation from oppression. With the possible exception of the years of the Vietnam War, today we have to proclaim that truth more loudly and more often than we have ever had to before. Donald Trump’s MAGA movement wants to preserve and even strengthen oppression not free people from it. It attacks and wants to destroy the core values that America has always claimed to live by (not that we ever really have lived by them all that well). Even worse, the MAGA movement attacks and wants to destroy the core values of the Christian faith.

We cannot be silent in the face of those attacks. We cannot let our country’s current political and cultural climate destroy the values we hold most dear, the values that Jesus Christ lived and died for. Jesus said the Lord had anointed him. Well folks, the Lord is anointing us today too. There’s no one but people like us to proclaim God’s truth against the world’s lies that so thrive today. I wish I knew better than I do how we are to do it. I just know we have to do it.

We must counter the lies whenever we hear them. We must proclaim God’s truth every chance we get. Doing it won’t be easy. Speaking God’s truth to people committed to worldly lies can make you a lot of enemies. So be it. Jesus had enemies too. We live in extraordinary times, and they certainly aren’t extraordinarily good ones. God calls us to extraordinary actions. God calls us to proclaim God’s truth from the rooftops and to everyone we meet. God has anointed us to proclaim Jesus’ inaugural message of liberation as often and as loudly as we can. I pray that I, and you, may respond to that call as constructively and effectively as we can.

An please remember this wisdom I learned yesterday from John Palovitz. Dark times like these are what people of light are made for. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. May we be stars in today’s darkness. In the Gospel of John we read that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” John 1:5. May God grant us the wisdom and the courage to be light in today’s darkness. Amen.