Writings: Jesus' First Sermon

By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal

First sermons are terrifying. Most new preachers are worried, afraid, and keyed-up about preaching their first sermon in a worship service. Oh, when aspiring to enter the ministry many will be exited about standing in a pulpit for the first time and speak about God before others. Still, it can also be frightening because what you’re actually doing is a weighty proposition: you’re doing a very important thing and you really don’t want to mess it up.

And, so, you prepare for days, weeks, or perhaps even for months; you spend extraordinary amounts of time studying the passage of scripture you’ve either determined, or been assigned, to preach. You write and write, then change your mind and write some more. Once you have a sermon manuscript, you then stand in your bathroom, in front of a mirror, and go through it multiple times, trying to make sure you know it and understand it and can speak it with clarity and conviction. You pay attention to facial expressions and body language, and you worry about accidentally conveying something you didn’t intend to via the tilt of your head or the tone of your voice. You agonize over every little bit of the message and how you plan to deliver it. Indeed, you find yourself preaching it, repeatedly, even in your sleep.

And, finally, after all that worry and work, when you actually stand up to preach your very first sermon, you can’t help but hope that the people who are there to hear you are kind and forgiving, that they’re not going to be offended, upset, bored, or sleepy. Let me tell you ... few things are harder to get around than a great big yawn from someone in the congregation during the middle of a sermon. When it first happened to me, I not only lost my place in my notes, but I got totally self-conscious about what I was doing at that moment. Being self-conscious is the last thing I want when I’m preaching: my focus needs to be on God, the Word, and on those gathered for worship.

In my first sermon, preached at Westover United Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November of 1989 – thirty-one year ago – I was absolutely terrified. I had yet to take a preaching class, but I had heard many sermons and, therefore, hoped that I had at least some idea of what to do. I was pulling from a passage of scripture that I dearly loved and was trying to put together a message that made some sense to me, but my time of preparation had been disjointed unfocused, and undisciplined. In other words, I knew I was very unprepared and so I was also very afraid. I had a very senior, highly respected Pastor sitting on the platform near me, listening and taking notes; I had a professor from Duke Divinity School, where I was a student, sitting in the congregation, and I knew I would hear from him many words of analysis and criticism when I was through. As a result, I didn’t just have butterflies in my stomach: I had a whole thunder of dragons flapping their wings inside me. I felt so sick that I thought I was going to throw up, right there and then. My knees were constantly buckling as I stood in the pulpit and looked out on all those people. And, when I first opened my mouth, only a croak came out. Yes, I sounded like a frog! To my further horror, when I finally began talking my first words came out in a stuttering mess of jumbled up word-salad! I stopped speaking and just stood there, trembling, until the pastor got up, put a hand on my shoulder, leaned over to the microphone, and asked for a moment to pray for me ... which he did, quietly, gently, with his hand still resting on my shoulder. When he was done, and when he had sat back down, I opened my mouth, began to preach, and discovered that the words were there, my notes were clear, and I knew what to say. That’s what first sermons are like: terrifying for the preacher – and, I also know, terrifying for the parishioner!

At the beginning of his ministry, speaking at his home Synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus selected a passage in Isaiah from which to preach his first public sermon. According to the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t get much past the first two verses:

"The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’S favor...." (Isaiah 61:1-2)

After reading this far, he rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, and then says: “Today, this passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, Jesus proclaims himself to be the one to fulfill this ancient, world changing prophecy.
Because of all that has happened in 2020, it is strange to hear about “...the year of the LORD’s favor.” Indeed, some translations render this as: “the acceptable year of the Lord,” which sounds even more odd because, in my opinion, 2020 hasn’t been a very acceptable year. And yet, this passage is talking about the Hebraic “Year of Jubilee,” a time of national forgiveness in which all of the debts of the people were to be cancelled. According to Leviticus 25:1-10, it was supposed take place every forty-nine years in Israel. It wasn’t perfectly observed, but the effect was to cancel all of the crippling debt that could easily bog down a society. We need one of those, don’t we? Many of our society’s inequities could be significantly addressed if we could just wipe out the paralyzing cycle of debt so often weighs us all down. Indeed, even just a symbolic, theological Year of Jubilee would be great right about now. And, guess what ... we actually have one! Not every 49th year, nor every 49th week or day, but in every moment that we live in Christ we have God’s amazing Jubilee. Jesus begins in ministry by proclaiming God’s forgiveness.

"The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me;"

We miss it when we read or hear it in English, but the Jews didn’t miss the significance of this statement. The phrasing is unmistakable: “The LORD has anointed me.” The word translated “anointed” is, in Hebrew, messiah. The Messiah is the anointed one of God, and in his first sermon Jesus is identifying himself with this messianic anointing.

“[God] has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’S favor....”

These are among those things that the Messiah was expected to do while establishing right worship, good government, freeing the people, and overthrowing the yoke of the Roman occupation. To put it simply, Jesus’ first sermon was rooted in a very powerful, socially subversive proclamation of God’s will. It’s no wonder that the people of his hometown Synagogue didn’t like or accept it. I don’t think anybody yawned, but they certainly questioned that the son of Joseph and Mary would be the one to fulfill this passage. They rejected him ... but rejection didn’t stop Jesus.

"I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations." (Isaiah 61:10-11)

I keep coming back to this part of the passage. When I’ve preached on this section of Isaiah in the past, I usually never get this far. Yet, these words have followed me around this week, demanding attention as I have pondered this sermon. That earlier phrasing: “The acceptable year of the Lord” nearly tripped me up this year as being absurd. But then, this passage rescued me:

“I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God;”

In the times of our distress, in our nights of questioning, in our days of feeling lost, abandoned, rejected, disregarded, denied, and forgotten, it can be hard to rejoice, worship, and “exult” in our God. But that’s what Isaiah is telling us to do. Even in the midst of the cold, wet, rainy days of December, with a pandemic raging, we are called to worship, praise, and exult in our God. Why?

“... for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”

Yes, we don’t make salvation for ourselves or work our way up out of this pit that we’ve dug for ourselves. Rather, Christ’s jubilee is given to us. God has clothed us; God has covered us like a bridegroom and a bride. Our houses may have garland on the mantel, like we have garland on the communion rail here in the Sanctuary, but it can be tempting to just wander around in darkness. No! Deck the halls! It’s time to rejoice, for we’re preparing to celebrate the incarnation of God in our midst! Allow no plague, no pandemic, no fear, and no sense of loss to overcome the Jubilee that we have in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

© 2020, Dr. Gregory S. Neal
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