Sermons

“Hearing the Word – Part Two”

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 31, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that our love might be strong enough to help us welcome your word for all the world. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this story, but the summer after my first year of seminary, I went back home and worked as a full-time intern at the church I grew up in. It was before I did my official field education, and I had the privilege of working with a seminarian from Germany who was doing an internship there at the same time. The associate minister had left earlier that spring, so together we were sort of filling in her spot. I didn’t feed any starving widows or heal any lepers that summer. My greatest accomplishment, I’m pretty sure, was finding the right person to make a camel costume for Vacation Bible School and the perfect person to wear it.

Fortunately, there aren’t any cliffs in Eureka, so I wasn’t in any danger of getting thrown off of one. And mostly, the congregation was pretty good at accepting me as part of the ministerial staff. The pastor was not the same person who’d been there most of my growing up years, and the congregation itself had also changed somewhat in the 6 years I’d been away. Probably the most “prophet in her hometown” moment I had was when someone got up in worship, to do a reading or something, and talked about me roller-skating down the aisles as a child. Which, by the way, I have no memory of doing, although those aisles would have been perfect for it.

But knowing how that summer went does make me ask one question about this story we just heard from Luke. Jesus may have been just passing through, but were his parents still living in Nazareth? The townsfolk refer to Joseph when identifying Jesus as a local kid, so presumably they were still around. And I’m guessing they were still going to be around after he left town. So shouldn’t he have considered the impact of his behavior on them too? They were the ones who were going to have to live with the consequences.

But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Last week, we were comparing the earlier portion of this story with a passage from Nehemiah in which the law was being read to the Israelites, and the Levites were interpreting it, and encouraging the people to eat and drink and be merry, even their original response to the scriptures was weeping. We mentioned that the shift in reaction in Jesus’ story was just as dramatic, but in the opposite direction. That is the part of the story we heard today. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” So far, so good. It wasn’t like the residents of Nazareth hadn’t heard the stories about what Jesus had been doing in other parts of Galilee. Their first reaction was to “speak well of him” and note that he was a local boy. The implication here, or at least the inference Jesus made, was that since he was a local boy, he would, no doubt, be even more generous and focused with his miraculous powers here in his hometown than he had been elsewhere.

But abruptly we learn that something about this assumption rubbed Jesus the wrong way. He wastes no time in disabusing them of this notion, in no uncertain terms and graphic detail. Maybe that thing was happening, where when you go back home, you suddenly can’t help acting like you’re 14 again. Whatever it was, he didn’t hold back. Who knows what kind of baggage he had from his growing up years? There had been, no doubt, rumors about his sketchy origin, what with his mother turning up pregnant before his parents were married. Were they trying to kiss up, when they pronounced him obviously Joseph’s son? “You think you’re going to get special favors,” he seems to ask, “when you were the exact people muttering rude things about my mom when she went to market and making fun of me in the play yard?”

It would be easy enough to see his reaction as a personal grudge, except for where he goes next. Once Jesus brings in the examples from Israelite history that he does, it becomes clear that this proclamation is about way more than personal baggage; the frustration coming through is an eternal gripe God has had all along with his people: that they continually seem to refuse to understand that God’s blessings are for all people and not just them. Don’t you think there were plenty of widows in Israel during that 3+ year-long famine back in Elijah’s time? But the one God sent Elijah to live with, the widow for whom God provided a bottomless cask of oil and a constantly refilling jar of meal, she was from Zarephath, not Israel. Don’t you think that probably means something? And yes, there were plenty of lepers during Elisha’s day. But whom did Elisha send to the Jordan River to be cleansed of his disease? Not a pious Hebrew leper, but Naaman, a captain in the conquering army of Syria. Shouldn’t that probably tell you something?

The Nazarenes seem to have gotten the message. Now before we get all judgy about their angry reaction, let’s stop and reflect for a moment. Imagine that someone from VLM had won that billion dollar Powerball a few weeks ago. How cool would that have been? But what would you be thinking if this imaginary VLMer had not done anything at all for our church from their winnings? Would you be okay with that? You, sitting here a little chilly because we haven’t figured out what the best use of our available funds is yet, with regard to the heating in this room? Would you feel like walking that lottery winner to the edge of a cliff and having a little “come to Jesus” chat?

Our human impulse is to assume that if we have a special connection to someone, their good fortune ought to mean special treatment for us. The Israelites, called the Chosen People for so long, certainly could be forgiven for making such an assumption. And yet, even as Jesus is making clear that this isn’t what’s going to happen with his ministry, he’s drawing on their own history to remind them that that’s never how God has operated. Was he holding onto the promise God made to Jeremiah when he threw out this challenge to his hometown mates? He had to know that God’s prophets were rarely well received. There was a reason God promised to protect and deliver Jeremiah; it’s because he was sending him “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow.” Nobody was going to be giving him the keys to the city for doing that. He was going to need protection. Was it that same protecting Spirit that helped Jesus slip through the crowds and get away from that cliff’s edge?

I’d like you to try something with me now. Hold out one of your hands like this, just open and extended in front of you, palm up, fingers open and relaxed. Try to find a place where you can’t really tell if you’re giving or receiving. Go back and forth between the two. But don’t close your fingers when you’re receiving; imagine that in order to receive it is vital that you keep your hand open and relaxed.

Because it is. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing to hear the word of God and know that there are blessings there just for us – the word of comfort right when we needed it, the push forward just when we needed courage, the validation that we did the right thing and God will see us through the consequences. But none of that personal blessing in any way implies that those same blessings and others as well aren’t also poured out in abundance for everyone else. The Good News is for sharing. If we try to limit who can receive God’s Word, we won’t be hearing it any longer ourselves. If we aim to hoard God’s mercy, it won’t be able to flow through us. If we try to restrict God’s love, we will find it slipping through our grasp like water.

The residents of Nazareth didn’t want to hear about people in Zarephath or Syria or even Capernaum getting God’s blessings. They wanted to feel special. They wanted God’s blessings for themselves. And we’re not much different. We are prejudiced and tribalistic and covetous. We just want to bask in God’s love for us and not worry about anyone else. And when Jesus insists on reminding us that God’s love is also for the people of Congo and Flint and Syria, we are tempted to stop listening, because suddenly there are strings attached. God’s love is one big thing. If we’re going to grab hold of it, it’s going to connect us to all those other people who have it too. If we’re going to love God and be loved by God, we’re going to have to love all those other people too, the ones we already know and love most of the time, and the ones we don’t understand and find difficult to love.

There’s a reason the church has a history of shooting its messengers. It’s because the thing God has been trying to tell us since the beginning of time is something we don’t want to hear. We don’t come to church to get God into our lives. We come to church to get ourselves into God’s life. We come to get with God’s program, not the other way around. And that means loving what and whom God loves, because we ourselves were first loved by God. And this isn’t some easy, sentimental love that remains a warm affection we hold in our hearts. It’s about feeding and healing and reconciling and saving. It’s a hands-on love that requires our lives to change. It will offend every selfish and tribalistic part of us and even make us feel betrayed. Part of us will want to insist, ‘If you really loved me, God, you wouldn’t make me share.’ But we know that’s not true. And we know that’s not where the path of true blessing lies.

We don’t have to be like those people in Nazareth. Jesus offers us the grace we need to hear the word with joy and thanksgiving. We gather together, to strengthen one another’s faith and courage to share God’s love with everyone. We come to this table, to confess our self-centered tendencies and our utter need for God’s redeeming love. And we listen for God’s Living Word, coming to us through the scriptures and through our ministries. May we hear and rejoice. Alleluia and Amen.