Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
October 5, 2008 World Communion Sunday
Luke 4:16-30
A colleague writes, "I have a friend who is a devotee of His Holiness the Dali Lama. He recently returned from an audience with the Dali Lama in New York. The man reported. 'When His Holiness speaks, everyone in the room becomes quiet, serene.'"
Quite a contrast to what happened when Jesus showed up in his hometown of Nazareth. He was invited to speak at the local synagogue, local boy who has made good. He stands up, opens his mouth, and all heaven and hell break loose. The same people who couldn't wait to hear him are upset, they're angry. And this was his first sermon! You may not know this, but that day in Nazareth, Jesus pretty well broke all the standard rules for preaching a first sermon. He must not have listened to a word he was taught in his preaching class in seminary. Everyone knows you start slowly. Don't change anything, don't challenge anything. Use that first sermon to ingratiate yourself to the people, help them to get to know you. And by all means, don't say anything inflammatory. Build trust, win their affection, tell them a cute story about Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
But did Jesus do any of this? Noooo! His first sermon was a frontal assault on the people, antagonistic, in your face. The great Danish theologian and philosopher, Kierkegaard, noted that so many great minds of his century had given themselves to making people's lives easier - inventing labor saving machines and devices. So he said he made the decision to dedicate himself to making people's lives more difficult. He would become a preacher! Well, you get the feeling Jesus must have read a lot of Kierkegaard, or perhaps the great Dane read a lot of Jesus.
Just what was he up to in Nazareth and why were his words so upsetting? Could it be that he was bringing the Kingdom of God so close that it was making people uncomfortable? Could it be that the words of Jesus, the very presence of Jesus, were an intrusion, a disruption, a challenge to all the comfortable alliances the good citizens of Nazareth had made with the powers of the world, indeed to the comfortable religious assumptions they had made about themselves and God?
Let's take a closer look at that sermon. It all starts well enough. Again, as I said, a local boy had done quite well. He comes home and they all turn out to see and hear him. He takes out one of his scrolls and reads from the prophet Isaiah - Isaiah 61. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me..." They are amazed at his teaching and impressed. We are told "all spoke well of him." And so that would have been the perfect time to close the book. Have a benediction, go to the Fellowship Hall for some coffee and cookies. Everyone would have patted him on the back and told him how proud they were of him. But Jesus isn't quite finished.
He has a couple of stories to tell - stories from I and II Kings, stories that produce shock and anger. As one minister has said, "In this first sermon, Jesus threw the book at them, hit them right between the eyes with Isaiah, followed by a jab from First Kings and then a right cross to the jaw from Second Kings. What was in these stories? Why the controversy? The first was a story about the prophet, Elijah, and told of a time when there was a great famine in Israel. God called the prophet and sent him to the home of a widow in Zarephath, in Sidon. There she shared her meager food with him and as a result she was blessed with food by God. It's a fine story, a story of trust, of faithfulness. Except for the fact she was a Gentile. In a time of crisis in Israel, God had Elijah reach out to a Gentile, a foreigner, one of them - not one of us.
The story from Second Kings has a similar theme. It's a story of healing. This time the prophet Elisha is healing Naaman, a Gentile and commander of a foreign army, of leprosy. Many in Israel had leprosy. He heals a Gentile. Again, God reaching beyond the borders of Israel with healing grace, this time even for an enemy.
In his sermon, Jesus chooses to remind the people of these two rather painful stories from their own religious tradition. He isn't making this stuff up. And you may have noticed that there is a slight change in the mood of the congregation. Suddenly the good people of Nazareth are outraged. Who does he think he is? The congregation quickly becomes an angry mob with murder on its mind. They drive him out of the synagogue, run him up to the top of a hill, and are going to throw him off the cliff. But we read, miraculously, Jesus walks through the crowd, gets out of town never to come back. Just another ordinary worship service in Nazareth! As I said earlier, who would have ever thought that Jesus would take Kierkegaard quite so seriously? We are back to Jesus bringing the Kingdom just a little too close for comfort. As I once heard a preacher ask, "How much Jesus are you really prepared to take?"
Now, here he is in the synagogue, surrounded by people who know the story of their faith. They are people who are pretty sure they know the truth about God. They follow the law, they do what they are supposed to do. And they know - they know – who’s an insider and who’s an outsider, who has God's blessing and who deserves God's condemnation. Who is good, who is evil. A little self-satisfied when it came to their faith? Perhaps. And so, using their own story - I and II Kings - He reminds them that God has the whole world in God's hands. That their concept of God is way too small, their concept of God's love and grace way too limited. God cannot be contained by their house of worship, their law, their traditions, their town, their political party, their country. If God chooses, God can even show mercy to pagan gentiles, even to enemies, even to that guy across the street who never mows his lawn or washes his car. God is working wonders and loving people outside the church, outside Christianity, outside the city limits of every Nazareth we can imagine. Right now, God is loving us to be sure - praise God. But God is also loving people in Iran, North Korea, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, on the Mexican border. Here in the United States God is loving people who will have the nerve not to vote as I do in the upcoming election, even people whose limitless greed helped create the mess we are in right now. That's the big God preached by Jesus, the God his hometown folks do not want to hear about or allow too close. Are we ready for such wide-open, messianic hospitality...both here and around the world?
Again, how much of this Jesus can you take? Are we ready for the inclusive Kingdom he preaches? In a world where we scramble to protect ourselves from each other, can we tolerate his wide-open hospitality? Clearly it was too much for the folks in Nazareth: too challenging, too threatening, too demanding. I mean they had their God pretty much under control, comfortably created in their image. Here was a God who blessed and reinforced their view of the world. And this was just about all the God they needed or wanted.
How about us? Can we, asks Old Testament Professor Walter Brueggemann, abandon the script that has heretofore given meaning and purpose to our lives and embrace a different script? The alternative script found in the life and teaching of Jesus? Can we re-imagine, re-describe, our lives, each other, our God, as Jesus invited the folks of Nazareth to do? Can we imagine reaching across the aisle, beyond our friends and family, beyond our comfort zone, extending our care and concern beyond our tribe, beyond our values and traditions?
You know, sometimes - most of the time - the most challenging thing about following Jesus is Jesus!