| February 14
Providence, Rhode Island - February 14, 2010
In today’s text Jesus is preaching in his hometown, which turned out to be his toughest audience. Sometimes those who know us best like us least, for various and sundry reasons and/or excuses. They were familiar with him; they knew his Mamma. He’s one of their own, “Is not this the carpenter’s on?” The Nazarenes just thought they knew Jesus. But as John put it: “His own knew him not.”
Luke’s story about the first time Jesus preached has to do with boundaries. The ones we set, but not God. Jesus upset the local congregation because he messed up their comfortable sense of community. He made the Jews mad, but it ought to make us Gentiles glad. Luke uses the first landmine Jesus stepped on to portray him as not only the one who rescues us, but also those who challenge us and threaten us. And he told it so clearly, that they were dead-set on shutting him up, even if it kill him.
Of course Luke’s fronticepiece is a portend of what was to come only on a larger scale. God has this nasty habit of sending offensive people our way to yank our chains and upset our equilibrium to prevent us from mistaking our ideas of God with God. That’s awful easy to do, with religion, family, or politics. We’re tempted daily to believe our ideas about the world and especially the solutions to the world’s problems are better than those other guys.
As people move out to get away from some of the changes taking place around us, more people move in. It’s good for the economy I guess, but scary for the community. A lot of folks join a church because it has “like-minded” people in it. But not our place, we’re as different as can be. We don’t talk alike, or think alike, or act alike and that’s not bad; just different.
A classic example of community takes place every day in our kitchen. None of us agrees on controversial topics, but we maintain a respectful, humorous sense of community, because our only rule is “We must listen to both sides.” People who walk in on it are amazed and frequently come back, I think to see how we keep from killing each other! But I’ve tried to analyze it, and it could be because we concentrate on what we have in common, this church, rather than what separates us. That and we learn what we can say and what we can’t say. Like I did as a kid, who I could cuss around. Otherwise I got my mouth washed out with soap! Language boundaries. Every community has boundaries, including churches – wide in some places, narrow in others.
And let’s not look down our noses at those who kicked Jesus out of church. We all have secret people we’d rather not get close to. Some have names, others are certain kinds of people. You know who they are. Some are on the list because of our snobbish tendencies, but others are there because we think they’re sinners. And 99 times out of 100, we’d be right about that. Assume the worst, hope for the best. Whatever you call it, they’re on our list because they offend us and because we think they are offensive to God. It’s about this dicey matter of community that Jesus crossed the line in Nazareth and it darn near got him killed! Everybody spoke well of him at first. They were amazed at his graciousness until he abrogated their communal boundaries. They’d heard such good things about what he was doing elsewhere and they just wanted him to do some there. He grew up among them, for God’s sake, they weren’t strangers like those folks over at Capernaum. According to their way of thinking, he belonged to them and they laid a special claim on him, and they expected he would honor those ties of kith and kin.
But as the gospel tells it, he didn’t do anything but remind them of God’s sense of community – which was a lot bigger than theirs. That’s what riled them up; when he told a couple of stories about how God passed them by to care for foreigners: a widow from the “wrong side of the tracks,” in Zarephath. Then a Syrian warrior named Naaman, in the army of Israel’s age-old enemies. It would be like saying God loves Sarah Palin at a Brown graduation. Or was chaplain of Al-Qaeda. And the thing is, it wasn’t anything new. He was just reminding them of stuff in their own scriptures, from the Book of Isaiah. Only that isn’t how we use the scriptures is it? We cite the Bible to close ranks on outsiders, not open them.
The minute Jesus denied their special status, he went from “favorite son” to degenerate eccentric, who offended them so badly, they tried to waste him. That’s how irate we can get when somebody dares to suggest our enemies are God’s friends. Or that God loves people we don’t wanta sit next to; who offend us, yet who belong to God as surely as we do. No matter how hard we try, we just can’t get God to respect our boundaries. So he keeps barging through them and invites us to follow or step aside. It’s not that God loves us any less. It’s that people we can’t stand are loved as much as we are. The Jews believed they were God’s chosen ones, that they were special over all other peoples on the earth, because they were tight with God. But it’s a rude awakening to realize God has no favorites.
I live on the 8th floor of an apartment building, only a few blocks from here, overlooking our city’s downtown parks. To get in and out of our place, we have to take the elevator. Sometimes we stop on other floors and people get on to travel with us, who, truth be known, we’d just as soon not sit next to. Yet we don’t attack each other because the only thing we have in common is that we’re human beings. Publicly, we show politeness and act kindly toward strangers as with friends. We make room for each other; sometimes we nod or say “have a good day.” Community in a public elevator doesn’t depend on agreement or liking each other. We just share the same space because we both belong.
On a national and international level, I wish we could be that way, because we’re seeing our public life deteriorate precisely because we just can’t get away from viewing strangers as enemies. After 9/11 perhaps, for good reason. In a world that grows scarier every day, people retreat behind well-defended boundaries and sort ourselves into tribes suspicious of other tribes not like unto our own. So Jesus learned a good lesson that day in his hometown synagogue: “There’ll always be wars and rumors of wars.”
Our text reminds us that the church is not immune from this sort of thing. But we know better.We listen to Luke’s story about Namaan the Syrian and the poor widow of Zarephath. And we know about Jesus who preferred the company of misfits to religious folks, who were his chief opponents. We believe the Lord cares for those not like us, who comes to us as one of us, but to get us to see that while he is with us, he doesn’t belong to us.
In this church, or any other where people who are different have learned how to get along, it’s because God makes us a community, not us. And the best of our faith teaches us that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to the truth that is bigger than our understanding of it. Truth is found not in any one of us, but between all of us. And that’s why it takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell us the parts we can’t see. And sometimes the truth is so hurtful, we’d prefer to be rid of them.
I like this story because it says even Jesus couldn’t please everybody. Even Jesus stepped on church land mines! “He came unto his own...” and they tried to kill him; more than once. And finally, in the end, they got’er done. But in this initial instance, he “passed through their midst” and went on his way. And incidentally, he never returned to the place where he grew up again, because “he could do no mighty work there.” And I always thought Jesus could do anything!
So a church mob has him surrounded and he passed through their midst? How did he do that? I don’t know but that’s how it still works. Jesus “came unto his own,” and they didn’t want to hear what he had to say, even though it was based on the Book of Isaiah. When somebody is saying something that offends us, we still don’t want to listen to it. And if we won’t listen to what God’s Son has to say, God won’t try to change our minds. He respects our freedom to choose. But he will “pass through our midst,” and go someplace else, with or without us, where he can do a mighty work.
Did they know him or not? If they knew him, why try to kill him? Why didn’t they know him? The problem with Jesus was not between the known and the unknown, but between the people of God and their own memory. Because proximity to and familiarity with the persons, texts, and ideas of religion is a privilege that also binds, stalls, impedes. That’s why every church needs to listen to this, because just knowing stuff isn’t always enough. We know and sometimes knowing is our undoing. We can know too much. What we know can hurt us.
Some wish people knew the Bible better, but I’m wondering is it possible to know the Bible too well? Adoring the scriptures, knowing them, owning them, may be the most dangerous kind of knowledge. The worshipers in Nazareth knew God blessed an undeserving outsider through Elijah’s ministry. They knew that God cured a Syrian terrorist through Elisha. But it was a lot more than they wanted to know. That knowledge offended them and they were trying to forget it. But they almost shoved Jesus over a cliff, because he painfully reminded them of what they knew -- that God is free, and gracious beyond the boundaries of our ability to know and doesn’t always play by our rules.
They failed to get rid of Jesus in Nazareth that Sabbath day. But not many months hence, after a few more Jesus-sermons and land mines tripped, they succeeded. Like all of Israel’s prophets, Jesus too was a “troubler of Israel’s” ignorance: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Ignorance killed Jesus. They didn’t know! They should have known, because this kind of ignorance can’t be remedied in a library, because it is blind, willful ignorance, that comes from the heart. Which may be why the Gospel of John says in the very first chapter: “He came unto his own, and his own knew him not” (John 1:11). Naw, they knew. Knowing wasn’t the problem.
Providence Prayers: (2-14-10)
We thank Thee for everything and anything that humbles us before the mystery of life and prevents us from worshiping the works of our puny hands. For selfish prayers, unanswered; for problems that challenge our best minds that lead us to discover capacities we never knew we had; for the ageless scriptures that guide our way, even while our circumstances change; for the winsomeness of Jesus that excites even the least religious; and for Thy tender mercies that hold us fast, even when we’re hard to hold.
Teach us the things that make for community and hold us together in spite of all that would tear it asunder. For the Christ who both comforts and confronts; who would spare us the hypocrisy of assuming our convictions are pure while our brother’s point of view are laced with self-interest. May our church continue to be a place in which the welfare of one becomes the concern of all. Give us to see our differences as assets, not liabilities, occasions for growth not grounds for tension. Bless all who run the risk of transparency, allowing their humanity to shine through, as we try to relate Jesus’ preaching to life on this hill as well as the valleys.
Make us grateful for each other’s presence, open to each other’s needs, mindful of each other’s sorrows, and happy for each other’s gains so that our faith community will be a place people will want to come back to.
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