The Threat From Within

Luke 4:21-30

Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Rev. Dr. David A. Van Dyke

The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time  

Prayer: Guide us, O God, by your Word and Holy Spirit, that in your light we may see light, in your truth find freedom, and in your will discover peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

What happened that morning in Nazareth when Jesus preached in his hometown synagogue?  What turned those people from admirers into an angry lynch mob?

Well, here’s the answer: It was the sermon!   

Now, the subject of controversial sermons and the extreme tension and hostility they sometimes evoke in congregations, may not be the best topic for us to consider on a Sunday when our worship will conclude with an annual meeting and a vote on my salary.    

But then again, maybe it is? 

Jesus has entered the synagogue in Nazareth, where he had been raised and was known by those people.  He’s been invited to give the sermon and he reads from the prophet Isaiah about being anointed to bring good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and about letting the oppressed go free and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor.  Then, rather dramatically, he says, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

And initially, they are with him.  They liked his gracious words about the Lord’s favor, especially when they assumed that the Lord was speaking about them.  But when Jesus continues on, he loses them—he infuriates them, actually.  When he retold the story dating back to Elijah’s time, about God miraculously providing food for a poor pagan widow, it brought to mind the fact that there were plenty of poor hungry widows in Israel who were not on the miraculous end of receiving food, and it made the crowd start to squirm. 

What is he saying?  Does God like the Gentiles better than the Jews? 

And when he reminded them that during the time of Elisha, God miraculously healed Naaman, a pagan leper, they immediately thought of all the sick lepers in Israel they were aware of, none of whom received the kind of miraculous healing that had come to that outsider.        

Wait just a minute.  Is he saying that God loves pagans? 

I don’t know about you but that’s not what I came to hear this morning. 

My family has been coming to this House of Worship for generations and I don’t know who he thinks he is coming in here and saying these things. 

We don’t want to listen to this.  We want more judgment. 

He should be warning us to stay away from the Gentiles—those bad people, not telling us how much God loves them. 

If God loves the Gentiles so much, then what’s the point of being a Jew? 

I thought membership had its privileges? 

That’s what the crowd is angry about.  They thought Jesus was blaspheming them and their religion and that was an offense punishable by death.  And the fact that Jesus quotes the famous saying about no prophet having honor in the prophet’s hometown, in no way means to suggest that had he been from some place else his message would have been any better received. 

The people in Nazareth marveled at this gracious words, but when that grace was turned toward outsiders—those outside their tradition, outside their own ethnic background or their comfort zone, their feelings turn to rage. 

No prophet was ever warmly received.  Amos was run out of town.  Isaiah was chided and harassed.  Jeremiah was scorned and twice tried for blasphemy. So why is it that no prophet could be honored in his own country?  Old Testament scholar James Sanders points out,

Because a true prophet in the biblical tradition interpreted Scripture or tradition as to emphasize the challenge it brought to the very group that found its identity in that tradition (from a sermon preached at the Riverside Church in New York City, June 20, 1971).   

True prophets proclaim what is the will of God, as found in scripture, not what is the will of the people or the majority.  And there’s the rub for those whose notions about God are firmly in place, or whose notions about grace are already established. 

Because what is going to happen in the final analysis is going to be what God determines not what we have determined for God.  What is truth is not necessarily what pleases us, what make the most sense to us or what we might prefer, but it’s what makes sense to God. And often, that truth, especially when it gets pointed out to us from within the pages of our own scripture, and from our own pulpits, has a way of threatening us, because it exposes how unfounded many of our own views of truth really are—on what shaky theological footings they’ve been constructed.

That is certainly my experience as I attempt to live faithfully, according to what scripture requires of me.  I mean, I’m not wild about the idea put forth in Jesus’ parable about the laborers all being paid the same amount at the end of the day, because according to my way of thinking, those who worked only one hour don’t deserve the same amount as those who endured the scorching heat all day long.  That just doesn’t make sense. 

And we all love the idea of the prodigal son until we realize that at the end of the story the gracious father is running down the road to embrace someone else—someone who has not been faithful.  And if we’re honest, our hearts are warmed when we hear about angels singing over the one lost sheep who has been found, until we realize they’re not singing about any of us, inside the church. 

Some threats are perceived and some are real.  Some are from the outside but some are from within.  If the people in the synagogue that day were threatened, and they were, it’s because the threat was coming from within their own sacred texts and the very best of what their tradition required of them.

Jesus upset the hometown crowd because he reminded them of what they’d conveniently ignored, or because he didn’t say what they wanted him to say.  But Jesus is not rejecting Judaism as many assume and as some scholars argue.  Fred Craddock, the great preacher and Luke scholar, says this about the text,

Both Elijah and Elisha, prophets in Israel, took God’s favor to non-Jews. That those two stories were in their own Scriptures and quite familiar, perhaps accounts in part for the intensity of their hostility. Anger and violence are the last defense of those who are made to face the truth of their own tradition which they have long defended and embraced. Learning what we already knowis often painfully difficult. All of us know what it is to be at war with ourselves, sometimes making casualties of those who are guilty of nothing but speaking the truth in love. For Luke, the tension that erupts here and will erupt again and again elsewhere is not between Jesus and Judaism or between synagogue and church; it’s between Judaism and its own Scriptures (Interpretation, p. 63).   

And I’d like us to consider that even though we are about two thousand years removed from that angry synagogue crowd, we are in many ways not very removed from them at all.  Aren’t we just as guilty as those synagogue worshippers that day, who failed to realize what their own scriptures and tradition required of them—aren’t we just as guilty if we don’t consider the ways we’ve failed to do what the gospel requires of us? 

Like he was preaching to them, I know Jesus is speaking to us when, for example, I look at our nation’s weak justification for the use of military force—using terms like good and evil, and displaying a cocky, bullying swagger in a world that can’t stand us.    

Or when I look at our denomination’s ongoing tension over the ordination of gays and lesbians, and how we understand or ignore, depending on your point of view, what scripture is saying—and when I listen to the hysteria in some corners of the Presbyterian Church that accompanies the debate, I know that the message of grace has stalled somewhere along the line. 

When I hear the stories of colleagues in ministry who have been run out of their churches for not preaching what the people want to hear, I know that this text speaks to us today.   

And when I see some of the religious publications that top the New York Times best seller list for weeks, selling millions of copies—books that promote a watered-down-but-yet-sugar-coated-gospel-message about prosperity and your own comfort and happiness, it’s not difficult to see what a large percentage of people of faith want—what they seem to think will feed their souls.   

I knew a minister who was asked to leave his church in the turbulent 1960s because his congregation thought he didn’t spend enough time preaching about sin—all he talked about was the Vietnam War.   

And I know that when people have been unhappy with me, it is usually over remarks I’ve made in a sermon or things I’ve written in the newspaper.  And it’s tough because my convictions come from reading scripture, which often challenges me to the core.  But I know what gets said.       

If only he’d keep his views to himself.  If only he didn’t spend so much time worrying about gays and lesbians in the church. If only he’d keep his politics out of the pulpit.  If only he’d work as hard to get the dirty magazines out of Wal-Mart as he does on capital punishment issues.   

But here’s what I’ve learned: anytime you are faithful to scripture and what it says, it will place you in conflict with yourself.  If we really understood what we were doing, as people of faith, we would find the prayers, “Not my will but thy will be done…” and “…on earth as it is in heaven,” the toughest prayers to utter with any kind of integrity.  

We would rather have God behave the way we want—according to our image of God than to open ourselves to the possibility that God has other ideas.  We simply cannot know what God is going to do nor can we tell God what God should do. 

If God wants to miraculously feed a pagan widow, that’s what God will do.  And if God wants to heal a Syrian leper, that’s what God will do.  And if God decides to give added blessings to someone who, in our opinion isn’t deserving, according to the way we’ve ordered the world, someone maybe even outside the church, than that’s what God will do.

What happened in Nazareth that morning?  Jesus read scripture and interpreted it, daring to remind people of the difficult, but genuine, life-giving qualities found within their own sacred texts and traditions, and in so doing, he challenged the preconceived notions of truth and fairness, and of right and wrong that they brought with them to worship.

That’s what he did.  And for that, we tried to lynch him. 

Amen.    

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