Ordinary 4
February 3, 2019
William G. Carter
William G. Carter
Then Jesus began to say to
them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke
well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”He said to them, “Doubtless you will
quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here
also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at
Capernaum.’”
And he said, “Truly I
tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth
is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was
shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the
land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath
in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet
Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”
When they heard this,
all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of
the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so
that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of
them and went on his way.
This winter we are sitting before Jesus, the remarkable prophet
preacher of the Gospel of Luke. We have heard how he comes from God, how he
works through the temptation to be famous, and how he brings the ancient
promises of God into the present tense. Now we hear the whole sermon.
And some sermon it is! He says, “Today the scripture is filled up
to the brim.” It’s about to bubble over. It’s completed, it’s consummated, it’s
carried through to the end. That’s exactly what we want. The Word of God
becomes an event right here, right now. The crowd in Nazareth roars with
approval. They are delighted at the words of grace that dance off his tongue!
Five minutes later, they want to kill him. Now, that’s quite the
sermon.
I probably should have thought more about this, especially on the
day when all of you vote on my salary. The preacher speaks so graciously that
he ticks offs the congregation. Jesus preaches to his own people and they want
to get rid of him. And by Luke’s account, this is his very first sermon.
Generally speaking, that’s not the way it works. Most of our visiting
preachers have stood in this pulpit, and you’ve been very gracious… at least to
their faces. Once in a while there might be one who comes across like some of
the hymns that I select, and one of you will say, “We don’t have to hear that
one again.” In fact, somebody said that to me just last week: “Don’t ever pick
that hymn ever again.”
The same has occasionally been said of the visiting preacher who was
declared substandard: “Never again!” Although I have to say this is a gracious
congregation. The criticism would be infinitely more polite. Like the lady who
stopped me in the hall after I returned from vacation. She said, “The guest who
filled in for you was different from what we’ve come to expect. After one
sermon, I think we’ve heard all she has to say.” I got the message.
Somebody else offered a different critique of another guest
preacher. “Hey Rev,” he said, “who was that joker you lined up while you were
gone?” I said, “A joker, eh? Was he funny?” “Yeah,” was the reply, “he was so
funny that when the ushers passed the offering plates, I asked for change.”
Once again, I got the message.
Now, of course, I need to mention that next Saturday night, I’ll
be getting back late from a conference. In case the weather is bad or I’m tired
out, I’ve booked the first substitute preacher of the year. Be kind to him. He’s
going to do the best he can. Besides he is one of our own. So don’t throw him over
a cliff.
That’s what they wanted to do to Jesus. I’ve seen that cliff in
Nazareth, stood right on the edge of it. It’s eight hundred feet straight down.
They wanted to throw him over – and, here’s the point, he was already one of
their own. He was not a visitor. He was the hometown boy, the hometown hero. According
to Luke, Jesus was already building a big reputation, and here he comes to the
hometown synagogue to open the scriptures for them.
I’m sure it was a big day. His brothers were there (remember, he
had some brothers). I’m sure were there. Joseph might have been there, a few
splinters in his hands, callouses on his fingers. The people say, “He’s really
good. This is Joseph’s son, right?” I mean, what did they know?
We can be sure his mother Mary was there. She wasn’t sitting with
the men. This was a first century synagogue, and the women were kept out of sight.
But Mary was there, and her daughters were with her. And Jesus comes to preach.
Everybody knew him. He was one of their own. They were glad to see him. They all
knew the passage that he read from the book of Isaiah. He was feeding them out
of their own basket.
But then he told them two more stories out of their own Bible, and
that’s when they decided to kill him. So what are the stories? A wise preacher
ought to be careful of such stories.
Story Number One: Once upon a time, there was a famine in the
land. All the crops dried up. Food disappeared. Everybody was hungry. Nobody
had anything to eat. But there was a man of God, and his name was Elijah. He
had power from God, the power to do whatever God called him to do. And in that
time of famine, Elijah was not sent to feed any of the children of Israel. But
he did go to feed a widow in Sidon, and she was a foreigner.
Story Number Two: Once upon a time, leprosy was a scourge across
the land. The disease was filthy. It separated you from the purity of God. Many
people in Israel were afflicted with the disease, separated from the society,
segregated from the people, kept away and out of sight. But there was a man of
God in the tradition of Elijah, and his name was Elisha. He had power from God,
the power to do whatever God called him to do. And in that time of illness, Elisha
did not heal any of the lepers of Israel. But he did heal a leper named Naaman,
who was a commander in the Syrian army. He was a foreigner.
With that, the good people of Nazareth were inflamed with wrath. They grinded
their teeth. They saw red. They began to shout. They grabbed Jesus the preacher
and pushed him to the brink of that eight-hundred-foot cliff. They didn’t care
if he was the former youth group president. They were going to shove him over,
get rid of him, purge him from their midst.
Why? Because he told a couple of Bible stories? Oh, it was more
than that. He was telling them the truth behind the Bible: that God really does
love everybody. That was Christ’s vision. That is what he saw: he could see the
wideness of the mercy of God…and his own people didn’t want to hear it.
It’s a painful moment, a premonition of the crucifixion, when, in
words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jesus is pushed out of the world and onto a cross.
It’s because the preacher sees what the people don’t want to look at.
I remember a painful moment from my own life. One night when I was
studying to become a preacher, my father stopped by to spend the night. I was
thrilled. He offered to sleep on the floor of my dorm room. I was glad to get
some uninterrupted Dad Time. I said, “Let’s go down to the school cafeteria,”
and he said, “We can do better than that.” So we walked downtown in Princeton
to a wonderful Mexican restaurant.
We had a great meal and a couple of margaritas. The restaurant offered
a delicious green salsa made from pureed jalapenos, so we had a couple more
margaritas to wash them down. Then some more of that salsa and another round to
wash them down. We walked, and hadn’t driven, and we were in a jovial mood.
As we walked back to the dormitory, we started talking about
preachers we had known. For the first and only time, my father started opening
up about one of the preachers who had served our church. This was not typical.
My dad was a professional and kept such opinions close to the chest. He was
never much of a drinker. But that night, he was in a talkative mood.
“That minister was bad news,” he said, “and really hard to take.” Did
he do something wrong? “Oh, he was a rabble rouser, fashioned himself to be a
prophet.” We walked a bit more and I just listened. I asked why he didn’t like
the guy.
Dad said, “He didn’t know when to shut up. Apparently, he had
walked the bridge in Selma with Martin Luther King, and he couldn’t stop
talking about it. Every Sunday, it came up somehow in his sermons. I mean, this
was six or seven years after Selma, and we kept hearing about it. We didn’t
have any black people in our church. I didn’t know why he had to keep talking
about it.” I was quiet. I didn’t know what to say.
My dad said, “You can only put up with so much from a preacher
like that. So a few people started talking about getting rid of him. Quietly, you understand. Pretty soon, the preacher got the
message and moved on. They made sure the next preacher in our church wasn’t
going to annoy us like that.”
I loved my dad. I respected my dad. He was the tallest man in my
world. He was a church elder, a presbytery moderator, chair of the Boy Scout
council committee, a wise and compassionate Christian. There was a packed house
at his church funeral and some of you were there. But like any of the rest of
us, there was a season
in his life when a preacher got under his skin.
And why? Because that preacher saw what Jesus could see: that God loves
more people than we do. Any prophet preacher is going to see that. And that is
the risky work of speaking the Gospel and living it.
To this day, I wish I would have had the clarity and the courage
to have an additional conversation with my dad, because there was a lot more
that needed to be said. But I do know he was a very good man who kept getting
better with age. And I trust that the Risen Christ can forgive all of us and
widen our view.
As for me, to this day whenever I hear somebody put down a group of
people because of the color of their skin, or the language they speak, or whom
they love, or how they worship, or where they are from, I flinch - - because I
know God doesn’t see it that way. God looks at every single person, whoever
they are, and God says, “That one looks like me.” We bear the divine image,
every last one of us. We are, all, worthy of the grace and love of God.
That’s what Jesus could see, even if his own people didn’t want to
hear it.
So I guess the question is this: do we clam up and not say
anything, or do we speak up and live like it’s true?
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