2022-01-31
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: JANUARY 30, 2022
“Like [perhaps most] great theological conversations,” says Lutheran minister Katie Hines-Shah, “this one took place in the car. My son, about four years old, asked me, ‘Mama, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ It was a question he was used to hearing as a preschooler, and he tempered his answers to his audience. He wanted to be a fire[fighter] when he went to the station down the block, a gardener when the maintenance crew came by, a basketball player as we passed the teens at the park . . ..
“Driving down the road that day a few years into my first call, I answered my son: ‘When I grow up, I think I’ll still be a pastor.’
“From the back seat came an exasperated sigh. ‘No, Mom, I meant what important job do you want?’ He added helpfully, ‘Something like a dog washer or a milkshake maker.’
“Jesus was right,” says Hines-Shah. “No prophet is accepted in his own hometown. Or even in her own car.’ (https://mailchi.mp/christiancentury/sc-free-350975a-353107?e=7cee58a0df).
Luke begins the story of Jesus’ public ministry with the odd story we heard earlier, this story in which boy-made-good Jesus shows up at the synagogue of his childhood and wows the congregation with a sermon about how Jesus is the one they’ve been waiting for, the Messiah who will save them. They are all immensely impressed. And then, a mere six verses later, the same people who have expressed their awe about Jesus suddenly want to throw him off a cliff. What gives? How could Jesus possibly have fallen from such a magnificent pinnacle to such an abject low in their sight? And all in the space of just a few minutes?
As the scene begins, in the set-up that we heard last Sunday, Jesus’ scintillating reading in the synagogue has thrilled them beyond words. Jesus has spoken to them the words of God, words about how crucial it is to attend to those who are poor and in prison and blind and subjugated (4:18-19). And he’s said that in him it’s all coming to pass.
And the crowd thinks, ‘What could possibly be better! This is what we’ve been hoping for.’ This Jesus and his mission are precisely what they have been aching to experience. And here it is, in the flesh. It sounds absolutely fabulous, and they’re ready to carry Jesus around on their shoulders, singing his praises.
Until he fills out what he’s saying. His words have sounded ideal—in the abstract. When it gets to the particulars, though—well, that’s another matter entirely. Even before he comes to the specifics, Jesus knows the people will resist his words. “No prophet,” says Jesus, “is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” (Luke 4:24). It’s as if to say that Jesus’ familiarity to this crowd breeds their discontent. They’ve known him since he was a boy. What wisdom could he possibly shed on their lives?
It’s far more than familiarity that breeds their discontent, though. Because when Jesus fills out just what this good news he’s bringing to them will be like, it’s like sandpaper on skin to these worshipers. It totally upends their way of looking at the world, their way of seeing faith. He tells them the truth. And they detest what he tells them.
This is what prophets do. They tell the truth, often a disconcerting, discomfiting truth. And we who hear it are left to deal with the upheaval in our way of thinking, or our way of doing things. We’ve likely all had prophetic words spoken to us at one time or another. Maybe a prospective employer has told you you need a degree. Maybe a supervisor has accurately pointed out what keeps you from getting ahead. Maybe a teacher has made it clear you need to study harder. Maybe your six-year-old says they wish you were home more. Maybe your adult child pointedly tells you you only say negative things about their spouse. And you hear it. And you know they’re right. And it makes you steam.
Now it needs to be said that not everything unpleasant that’s said to us is prophetic truth. Sometimes people are just mean-spirited or overly bossy or terribly misguided. They may rile us with refuse or detritus. We do have to sort through the onslaught of purported guidance and advice, and to discern where the deep truth really lies.
That said, though, my guess is we’ve all had truth told to us that we were not exactly pleased to hear, or that jarred us out of what we thought was a normal and appropriate way to be. When I was still in seminary, I took a course called Clinical Pastoral Education, in which we learned to be ministers by doing ministry. Many study CPE in hospitals. I took my course in a state prison. There, I was the chaplain for the only maximum-security prison for women in the state of Maine. There were five women in that wing, all of whom had killed their spouse or partner. My role was to care for them spiritually and to be present to them.
I had two exchanges with my supervisor that summer that I have never forgotten. One day she asked me, “Why do you always wear a tie and coat when you visit with them?” I dressed that way, I thought, to convey something of my role there, and as a way of showing my respect for the women for whom I was caring. My supervisor said, “You’re so buttoned up that it seems as though you’re keeping your distance from them and not really joining them in their lives. What would it be like if you were more casual with them?” I confess I was not at all happy to have my distancing attire pointed out. Over time, though, I came to see she was right, and never again did I show up in my tie and coat.
The second thing my supervisor said to me made an even bigger impression on me. As the summer came to its close, it came time for me to take my leave of these women for whom I had been the pastor. When the subject came up about how I might approach this leave-taking, I said something to the effect that I would spend time with each one and might say something like “See ya,” or “See you later.” My supervisor leaned toward me and, with a pronounced intensity, said to me, “Don’t you dare say that. You know and they know you’ll never see them again. You certainly won’t be visiting them here or spending time with them in any other place. So don’t you dare say, ‘See ya.’ Many of them have seldom if ever had people be honest with them. Don’t pretend with them. They deserve the truth. Tell them ‘Good-bye.’ It’s a real gift you can give them.” Her counsel went so against the grain. But my supervisor was right. I needed to tell them the truth—kindly and warmly, but honestly. It may seem like a small thing. But her words were prophetic to me. She spoke words I didn’t want to hear. But they were the truth. And they were critical for me to hear.
This is something like what Jesus does. And it’s what the church does, in Christ’s name. Christ and the church speak a truth we may not like to hear, but a truth that aligns us much more fully with God. And often the truth Jesus and the church utter, and the truth that rubs us the wrong way, is, strangely, the truth about the wideness of God’s mercy. The very expanse of God’s grace seems like grit in the ointment. The Lutheran pastor Katie Hines-Shah puts it this way: “we imagine that Jesus was like us, and because he was like us, he liked us. That’s how Jesus can become, say, a light-skinned, blue-eyed Christian American who votes the way we do, or at least roots for our favorite football team. This idea that Jesus is our guy goes all the way back to the first Christians, to the first disciples, to the people who knew Jesus before anyone did—the people of Nazareth.”
This sermon of Jesus’ seems, at first glance, to be excellent news to the people of Nazareth. “[T]hey assume salvation is coming their way. The Jews of Nazareth aren’t xenophobes. They don’t wish ill on their neighbors. They simply believe what we all believe: these promises, this good news, these miracles are primarily and maybe even exclusively for us.”
Jesus, though, turns their expectations on their heads. He says that when the revered prophets Elijah and Elisha tended to people in need, they focused their care not on citizens of Israel but rather on Gentiles. Jesus says essentially: these promises, this good news, these miracles are not just for you and me. They’re for foreigners, too. They’re for people not like us. And that rankles the crowd. It ticks them off. This is not the way things were supposed to be. We’re the special ones. We’re the ones who deserve the grace. Not those others.
You might think we’d all want equal grace for everyone. We human beings, though, seem to want a special grace, a preferential grace, a grace that’s just for us. It’s like we think: ‘if you get the same grace I do, then mine doesn’t mean as much. Mine is only really significant if I’m the only one who gets it.’ It’s as though we all want to stand out, to be set apart, to be the only one God really cares for. It’s as though we want to be our parents’ favorite child, our workplace’s favorite employee, our town’s favorite citizen. If everyone is honored by God’s love, then the love of God for me isn’t really that special anymore. So we end up, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to limit the blessings of others.
How often have we seen this played out in the church and in the world. Women have been made to be second-class citizens by men and a patriarchy who have assumed privilege was theirs alone. As I’ve said before, when my mother first felt called to the ministry in the 1970s, she couldn’t even get an interview. Not one. That’s during my adulthood—that’s how recently that happened.
Trans and non-binary people have experienced numerous societal constraints. As have those who have immigrated here, and those who are differently-abled, and those who are formerly incarcerated, and those—as A Place 4 Me knows all-too-well—who have been homeless.
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have found themselves so often in a similar bind. The systems of our culture have structured in limits to the ways non-white people have been able to participate in and to thrive in this world. Which is why it’s so crucial that we not limit or constrain the voting rights of People of Color. If we’re to be true to Jesus, we open the gates wide to all people. It fries some people. It may fry many people. Yet that’s what Jesus-people do. We open arms. We open doors. We expand opportunities. We make room at the table.
When the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam several years ago, the common retort from many quarters was “All Lives Matter.” And while that is unquestionably true as a general principle, it’s also true to say that there are times when special attention needs to be paid to those who may have suffered more. If a house is on fire, the fire department doesn’t show up and start spraying water at all the nearby houses on the theory that all houses matter. If you break an arm and go the emergency room, the hospital doesn’t take x-rays of both your arms on the theory that all arms matter. Or as one writer puts it, “At a community fundraiser for a decaying local library, you would never see a mob of people from the next city over show up angry and offended yelling, ‘All libraries matter!”—especially when theirs is already well-funded.” As Rachel Elizabeth Cargle says, “when the parts of society with the most pain and lack of protection are cared for, the whole system benefits” (Harper’s Bazaar). Jesus, indeed, has his own take on precisely this matter, when he tells the parable later in Luke’s gospel of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to look for the one that is lost (15:3-7). The focus, in all these cases, is on where the need is. So Black Lives Matter is a prophetic word for us, one that rankles many precisely because it speaks a much-needed, and maybe for white people, a hard-to-admit truth.
As Katie Hines-Shah says, “Jesus came to be with us, whoever we are. This is so important because at some time or another, we will find ourselves on the wrong side of a dividing line. Our gender, our age, our race or color, who we love, how much money we make, our physical abilities or challenges, our nationality, where we went to school, how we pray—these will make us unworthy in the eyes of some. Someone once said wherever the world draws a line, Jesus steps across to the other side. His love is just that big” (https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/january-30-epiphany-4c-1-corinthians-131-13-luke-421-30?utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=53f45671dc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_EdPicks_2022_01_18_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-53f45671dc-85603527).
We’re the church of Jesus Christ. And a good part of our business is to heed the prophets. It’s to hear, and indeed to speak, the truth, even when it’s hard, even when it rubs us or others the wrong way. May we honor the deep and life-giving truth God gives us, and love everyone with abandon.