"A Short, Infuriating Sermon"    San Williams, UPC

Luke 4:4:21-30

Most parishioners appreciate a short sermon.  I’ve heard it said that a good sermon is never too long and a bad sermon never too short.  I suppose there’s truth to that. In any case, I have a  hunch that, given a choice, most folks in the pews prefer a sermon that knows when it's over, and a preacher who knows when to stop.

 I heard about a seminary student who was required to preach before his Presbytery Candidates’ Committee.   Understandably, the fellow was nervous. To make matters worse, he’d cut himself shaving that morning, and when he stood up to preach, he was sporting an unsightly band-aid on his chin.  His sermon lacked coherence and he rambled on for too long.  After the sermon, he sat down to hear the committee’s feedback.  An elder asked, “What’s that band-aid on your chin?"  The student explained that when he was shaving that morning, he'd been thinking about his sermon and cut his chin.  The elder shot back, “Well, you should have been thinking about your shaving and cut your sermon.”

Well, Jesus’ sermon at Nazareth, his very first sermon in Luke’s Gospel, was exceedingly brief—one sentence in fact: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Now, Luke may have just given us a one-sentence summary of what was, in fact, a longer sermon.  But we don’t know that.  All we have to go by is that one sentence:  “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  What did Jesus mean when he said that this scripture giving good news for the poor, release to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed had been fulfilled in their hearing?   Even as Jesus spoke, in Nazareth and elsewhere, there were still captives who had not been released, blind people who did not yet see, and oppressed persons who were still trapped in their poverty.  Yet in Jesus that vision took on flesh and blood, power and promise. God’s Kingdom no longer seemed just a distant hope, but in Jesus it became a present and urgent reality?   

In any case, the congregation in Nazareth obviously liked what they heard.  Luke sums up their praise:  “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”  Surely the congregation began to nod their heads in approval the moment Jesus started reading those stirring words from the prophet Isaiah proclaiming good news to the poor. After all, they were poor.  Not only was Nazareth a poor region economically, but also Nazareth was poorly regarded by their countrymen.  “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” was a commonly heard put-down. But Jesus, one of their own, might be just the help this beleaguered town needed.   And when they heard the part about release to the captives and freedom to the oppressed, some may have leapt to their feet, shouting “Amen!”  They were captives who were oppressed by the Roman occupiers.  Moreover, they were surrounded by pagan influences—Phoenicians to the west and north, Samaritans to the south, Greeks to the west.  Jesus, they assumed, was declaring God’s favor on his hometown crowd.  His sermon that day may have been short but, at least initially, it was well received.  The townspeople were bursting with pride.  They whispered to one another “Mary and Joseph certainly raised a good son.”

But then things in Nazareth took a precipitous turn for the worse.  Instead of basking in the praise of his townspeople, Jesus brought up the story from Elijah’s time about how the Prophet Elijah bypassed many widows in Israel in order to offer assistance to the widow at Zarephath in the Gentile region of Sidon.  With that comment, the people’s praise turns to dismay:  “Is he saying that God likes Gentiles better than Jews?  Who does he think he is?” 

Then Jesus makes matters worse by giving them yet another story of God’s inclusion of outsiders. He now cites a scripture in II kings, about how there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except one, and he was Israel’s number one enemy, Naaman the Syrian.”  Now the dismay turns to outright rage:  “Where is his loyalty to his own kind?   Is Jesus saying that God prefers the pagans to us?  This is blasphemy!”   

If only Jesus had been content to stand at the synagogue door, shake hands with the congregation, and enjoy the praise of his townspeople, he would have remained a local hero.  But here’s the thing about Jesus:  He came to follow God’s agenda, and thus refuses to place himself under the control of, or be confined by, his hometown people or even his own family. Theologian Fred Craddock notes that Jesus didn’t go to outsiders because he was rejected; he was rejected because he went to outsiders.  He kept pushing the boundaries of God’s favor outward, to the marginalized, the lost, the sick, the oppressed.  Why?  Because inclusion of outsiders is God’s agenda, and Jesus made God’s agenda the sole focus of his life.

As we saw, such an agenda infuriated the people of Nazareth and, if we’re honest, it continues to rankle today. The tendency to claim God for our side, to believe that we are the favored people, nation or faith is still very much with us.  Such a tendency cropped up in some people’s attitude toward aid for Haiti.  An article on Haiti this week noted that while there has been a general outpouring of generosity,  other voices have objected,  asking why our nation—in debt ourselves—should pour money into Haiti, which they contend is hopeless anyway.

Or consider columnist Leonard Pitts’ editorial this week, titled “Wielding faith as a weapon.”  He told of a company in Michigan that has a $600 million contract to provide gun sights to the U.S military. The company had a policy of inscribing coded references to Bible verses on the gun sights for high-powered rifles used by U.S. service personnel.  These so-called Jesus rifles—besides being a gross affront to the prince of peace—is yet another smug and misguided effort to assume that God is on our side. 

Pitts notes a University of Chicago study quantifying how people tend to create God in their own image, to ascribe to the deity their own opinions, interests and beliefs.  “The problem,” suggests Barbara Brown Taylor, “is not that God loves the despised 'other' more than God loves us.  The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are by a God who has an upsetting sense of community." And Brown goes further. "No matter how hard we try," she writes, "we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries.  God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way.”

And this is just what Jesus was doing in Nazareth.  Our episode concludes with the observation that Jesus “passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”  From Nazareth, he will go on his way, breaking down barriers and crossing boundaries.  Jesus breaks the barrier between men and women by speaking to the Samaritan woman. He breaks the barrier of legalism by healing the blind on the Sabbath.  He blurs the boundary between clean and unclean, righteous and unrighteous, worthy and unworthy, by eating with sinners, embracing tax collectors, forgiving thieves, touching and healing lepers.  And every time Jesus welcomed outsiders he met opposition from people who considered themselves insiders.  Yet no matter the opposition that Jesus encountered—first at Nazareth, then elsewhere, and finally in Jerusalem—he continued to press on.  He went on his way, and his way was to proclaim and live out the inclusive love of God.

So the only question for us is whether we will go with him.  Can we turn the church inside out and go with Jesus to those outside our church doors, outside our faith, outside our boundaries of acceptability?  We all want a gracious God, but as followers of Jesus we know that we can’t claim a gracious God for ourselves if we don’t believe that this same grace is given to outsiders, even to our enemies. This is good news. This is the kind of religion that the world needs today.  This is the kind of Christian, the kind of church we want to be.

Well, I better stop before this sermon gets too long.