Set It Off

Read: Luke 4

The phase “set it off” means to start a fight, or to get into it. We see in Jesus’ inaugural message in Luke 4:18-21 that he boldly declares that he came to do just that. 

In this passage, Jesus has a sankofa moment: a moment of going back to the past to retrieve what is useful for today. He reflects on his own lineage of freedom fighters when he declares that he is here to get in on what Isaiah prophesied! The passage in Luke 4:18-19 is referring to the prophecy in Isaiah 61:1-3, which foretells that a Messiah would come to restore the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity. Announcing the good news is a theme throughout Isaiah. The Jews had been promised that they would be set free, and Jesus wants his people to know that he had been sent to bring liberation to them and to all people. 

Jesus was a brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew who grew up in Nazareth, a town that was poor, marginalized, ruled and miltarized by the Roman Empire. The society was dominated by oppression of the peasant class, as well as by purity codes and patriarchal concepts. Peasant societies were marked by an enormous gulf between rural peasants and urban ruling elites. Peasant society was politically oppressive, economically exploitative and religiously legitimated. The purity ideology central to the structure of the society was created by the temple elites and generated a class of untouchables and outcasts. The patriarchal structure of society ensured that men held all of the power and the women were excluded. 

Jesus, who was a peasant himself, saw all of these things happening to his people. He knew that he could not be a chaplain of the empire but was sent to be a prophet of God—one anointed by God and the people to do the work of love, justice and liberation. 

We see Jesus set it off in a nonviolent way during his ministry: he gives sight to Bartimaeus, and he stops a woman from being stoned to death for adultery by telling her accusers that anyone without sin could be the first to throw a stone (John 8:7). In Jesus’ final week before being crucified (during the Passover, which celebrates the Jewish people’s triumph from slavery), Jesus goes into the temple. There he sets it off by flipping the tables of the money changers and declaring that God’s house is a place of prayer and not a den of thieves. 

A man considered a nobody set it off by showing radical love and revolutionary compassion and by speaking truth to power. Jesus turned the world right side up. The empire thought that it had shut Jesus down by lynching him, but all it did was plant a seed. 

That seed has produced a great harvest of freedom fighters such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Josephine Baker, Septima Clark and Martin Luther King, Jr. We must honor those who fought the good fight before us, but we must remember that the fight did not stop with them. 

Each of us is being called to set it off. It does not matter what your pedigree is: God is calling you to stand for truth and justice. That is why I have dedicated my life to ending poverty now. When you have over 140 million poor and low-income folks in the richest nation in the world, it is time to set it off. 

So I plan to set it off in every space and place until every person has an adequate place to stay, food to eat, healthcare and all the basic things they deserve. I promise to give my all to the righteous struggle until I give my last breath. Will you join me? 

Love and power, 

Rev. Erica N. Williams Inaugural Yvonne V. Delk Theologian in Residence

P. S. Working together, with one voice and many hearts, Community Renewal Society fights for what we believe—justice and equality. We encourage you to get involved in our work by taking action. To stay informed on our advocacy, please subscribe to our email updates and follow our Facebook and Instagram.