Epiphany 4 Year C
Luke 4:21-30
There
are three things I must say as I begin this sermon, one, I'm grateful that
Chris is the one from Louisville not me--this is not my hometown; two, I'm
grateful that there are no cliffs here in Louisville or at least none in close
proximity to Calvary, and three and most importantly I am grateful to stand
before you today proclaiming the Gospel, and I want to stress that you are good
people, we are good people. We are
people who I believe want to, deeply desire to, live faithful, productive,
transformative lives. We are people who
are here today because we are striving to follow Jesus and to participate in
the coming Kingdom of God.
I
said three, but there is one more thing I must say before we look closely at
the reading today from the Gospel of Luke and that is that this reading is but
a part of the overall revelation of the Gospel of Luke-in fact the revelation
that is carried through Acts. New
Testament scholar and theologian Luke Timothy Johnson writes that when
Luke-Acts (the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles) is read as a
literary unit it reveals a prophetic vision of both Jesus and the church; he
goes onto say, "as part of canonical Scripture, the voice and vision of
Luke-Acts has a prophetic function for the church in every age," and he
finishes by challenging that, "if we in the church today choose to heed
Luke’s challenge, we shall need to think of the church in more explicitly
prophetic terms and find ways of embodying and enacting God’s vision for
humans." [1]Keeping
all that in the back of your mind, I invite you to delve with me into the
Gospel appointed for today.
Jesus
has returned to his hometown and they are so proud. He's the homegrown hero. They spoke well of him; they were amazed by
him, and remember they were in the synagogue. We have no reason to believe
these are other than good people, faithful people--people who worship
regularly; people who want to live Godly lives.
Now
let's be honest here--let's read what happens, it is Jesus who seems to pick
the fight; it is Jesus who provokes them; it is Jesus who stops the love fest,
the love fest that is based on the status quo, the known, the comfortable. It is Jesus who calls them up short, upsets
the apple cart, and in their eyes, ruins the feel good party. Indeed it is Jesus, and that is because
that's what prophets do, what they have always done. The role of the Old Testament prophets was to
tell the truth about the present and also to give hope to God's presence. Prophets startle, they challenge--they name
the reality of the world. Prophets are
those both on the inside and the outside.
Jesus, as the hometown boy, was on the inside, but Jesus as the Savior
for all the world was and is also always on the outside.
Jesus
highlights for the people not the good they are doing; he doesn't give them a
trophy for belonging to the team--for being the chosen ones of Israel. No, Jesus reminds them of something perhaps
they would have rather not have remembered.
By mentioning the widow in the time of Elijah and the leper Naaman in
the time of Elisha, Jesus highlights that God chose not to use the "chosen
people, the insiders", but rather the outsiders and by reminding them of
this, the truth is in their faces--Jesus, their boy, is for everyone and God
goes into places where God was not thought to be with people who are easily
looked over--with people who are on the fringe and maybe with people we are
more comfortable with leaving on the fringe.
God goes into places we don't necessarily want God to be. Jesus points out to the people that God is
working and present outside of the beautiful walls of their synagogue, outside
of the container in which they have placed God with their liturgy and their
laws, and outside of their chosenness.
Jesus points out a reality and they didn't like it. It made them feel uncomfortable, let's face
it, it makes us feel uncomfortable. And
what do we often want to do when something make us uncomfortable? We want to make it go away. And so they drove him out and to the cliffs.
Let's
go back for just a minute. I want to
remind you of something I said in the beginning. These were not bad people; these were
faithful church going (synagogue going) people.
But they felt threatened, their faith felt threatened, their heritage,
their tradition felt threatened, their very way of being felt threatened and
they exploded. Jesus asserted a radical
concept into their limited faith perspective, a concept that in its
universality threatened their particularity.
And they did what so many people do when the status quo is threatened;
they erupted and they did whatever they could to make it go away.
I
believe that today’s Gospel reading compels us to look at many things. This reading illustrates that Scripture has
been and continues to be fulfilled and we, us people here in this place and
beyond, are invited into the process. We
are invited to participate in God’s continual revelation but in order to do so,
in order to be 100% in, we must step out of our comfort zone. We must listen to and perhaps even be a
prophetic voice. And I'm not talking
about just listening to Jon and me. We
don't have all the answers. We may not
be the ones to name the reality of the present.
(I'm also not suggesting you ignore us)
We are priests, called to ordination and to be a part of the process,
but so are you called to be a part of the process. Perhaps yours is the prophetic voice that
needs to be heard.
Last
week I had the privilege of hearing a new friend preach on the Gospel of Luke,
and she said this, "Children and prophets, women and elders. Luke wants us
to know that everything in this story happens through the presence and power of
God at work in human lives. Luke’s
pattern of prophecy and fulfillment is carried through Acts, and Luke Timothy
Johnson reminds us that “if the spirit of God continues to work in every time,
and if the spirit’s chosen instrument is the human body, then prophets are in
fact in the world as God’s agents now.[2]
There are prophets among us."[3] And I believe with every fiber of my body,
every piece of my heart and mind and soul that she is right.
And
so the question is where is God's presence in the particularities of our lives,
of our community, and where does it need to be?
Where are the prophets? What voices, whose voices will speak up? Who is willing to be both on the inside and
the outside--to name the reality of the world and place it within the context
of faith? Our world is more and more
polarized around religions, politics, economic agendas (even sports teams)--who
among us will name the realities and remind us that God is ever present even in
these differences. That God has, can
and will bring healing and wholeness.
God is calling us to bear witness in all places, in this beautiful
church and in the edgy sketchy places of the world. Johnson says, "Without the prophetic
challenge, the world quickly becomes structured along the lines of expediency
and self-interest."[4] If we don't seek out and hear prophetic
voices, our world will simply continue to run in its normal, comfortable
state--in a way in which we know it's not perfect but it’s easy and it doesn't
take much thought and for most of us it's better than average.
I
have a UVA sweatshirt that I've had since college. I love it--it's good and worn in, soft and
comfortable, fringed sleeves, paint colors on it from almost every room I've
ever painted, did I mention I love it?
Over the years, my daddy has given me new sweatshirts; he's seen this
holey (and I don't mean sacred, okay maybe a little sacred), worn out, better
not to be worn in public sweatshirt, and he's given me new ones. They look almost identical, the change of
them is not huge, and yet I continue to return again and again to the
comfortable, the easy, the familiar, because it doesn’t take much thought and
it feels good.
Listening
to prophetic voices doesn't always feel good.
These voices do not always tell us what we want to hear. In fact, they probably tell us more things we
don't want to hear, and they call us to take the steps towards
transformation--to change. Change is
hard; even little changes. We like the
comfortable, the known, the cozy--even the yucky parts are bearable because at
least we know what and where they are.
Sometimes we as Christians justify our resistance to change by saying
that we are keeping the traditions, staying true to the faith, but I challenge
that denies the power of and the inclusivity of God. Brian McLaren says, "In religion as in
parenthood, uncritical loyalty to our ancestors may implicate us in an injustice
against our descendants; imprisoning them in the errors of our ancestors."[5] We have the ancient prophets as models and as
witnesses. The sight and speech of
prophets today must be formed by the words and deeds of earlier prophets.
The
people in the synagogue were challenged, they were uncomfortable, frankly, they
were stopped in their tracks. Perhaps
they had brief flickers of realization of the truth that Jesus was speaking,
but that truth threatened them; it threatened their desire for normalcy. Their desire for normalcy outweighed the need
for change. Hearing and receiving the
message of Jesus--hearing the prophetic voices of the past threatened to
destroy their status quo. It challenged
their stereotypes, the stereotypes that defined them. The stereotypes that defined the religious and
social boundaries of their world. And
they couldn't see past it; they couldn't see that the truth and the hope that
Jesus was bringing was so much better.
Their desire for the status quo stopped them from seizing the moment,
the moment of transformation, and it stopped them from moving forward. They had the opportunity for complete
transformation--the Savior of the world was in their very midst, but it
terrified them. Even living under the
oppression of Rome was easier than accepting what Jesus was saying, and so they
drove him out and tried to throw him and
with him all their fears and insecurities and pain over the cliff. They wanted
to throw their dashed hopes, their pain and their insecurities bundled in with
Jesus over the cliff so that they didn't have to see them, to feel them, to
experience them. Isn't that what we still sometimes do?
What
if instead we listened to and perhaps were the prophetic voices today; what if
we walked to the edge of the cliff and then just kept walking? What if we kept
walking shedding the status quo with each step?
What if instead of walking just to the edge of the cliff we walked
through the discomfort, the unknown, and the pain? Kept walking, walking and listening and
believing--completely and fully believing we were walking into transformation,
into healing and wholeness for us and for the world. What would it look like if we just kept
walking with Jesus?
[1]
Luke Timothy Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2011),
[2]
Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic
Church
[3]
Wendy Claire Barrie, Sermon delivered
Feb. 1, 2013 (Albuquerque, NM—FORMA conference)
[4]
Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic
Church
[5]
Brian MacLaren, Why did Jesus Moses the Buddha
and Mohammed Cross the Road (Jericho Books, 2012)
1 comment:
Wow. Thank you, Katherine! I love standing on the edge of the inside with you.
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