Choose Your Stories Well

Luke 4:14-30

Last week a wee little snowstorm interrupted our ability to worship together, and so our gospel text is, in fact, the assigned gospel from both weeks. I think we need to hear the whole story in order to understand the good news this gospel Luke brings to us today.

Last week’s text sets up the situation and gives us a taste of what the people might have experienced in the synagogue that day. Jesus is at the beginning of his public ministry.  He comes to his hometown of Nazareth, and on the Sabbath, he goes to the synagogue, just like the rest of the observant Jews of his hometown did. The congregation is made up of old friends and neighbors who listen while scriptures are read and preached. Jesus takes a turn reading.

He is handed an Isaiah scroll and from it he chooses this familiar passage to read out loud – and it’s one of their favorite passages. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ……. he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The crowd lingers on each word, especially coming from the mouth of this man who is one of them – “Is not this Joseph’s son?” They are so proud of him - a fine example of a hometown boy-done-good.

The text Jesus has just read is one of hope and promise. It is the promise of grace and mercy and God’s unending compassion – for them – for God’s chosen people.  They are full of anticipation for what will come next from the mouth of Jesus. They are prepared for him to confirm that this good news has been saved and presented just for them – for the good and faithful Jews that they are.

They are in for a surprise – a shock, in fact.

Have you ever known of a surprise to backfire? Not all surprises turn out the way you expect them to, do they? Take my 50^th birthday party, for instance. It was so well planned that I hadn’t a clue that it was coming, so, I unwittingly went shopping and dawdled my time – and lots of it, away – leaving a houseful of guests waiting and waiting – for I don’t know how long, for me to return home.  In the end that story, turned out okay. Such is not always the case.

Not all surprises are good surprises; not all surprises are well-received or turn out okay. I’m sure you can think of examples of those, too. Things can simply go wrong sometimes.

Jesus has this uncanny ability to surprise people, and they aren’t always pleased by it. That’s what happened on the day Jesus read and preached in his home synagogue in Nazareth.

To give a little background, this story really has its beginning about 500 years earlier, as the exiles return home to reestablish their lives in the Promised Land following decades of captivity in Babylon.

A controversy arose then, which was still alive when Jesus came along. It has to do with how far God’s care and love extend into the world. Who is inside the circle of God’s love and protection, and who is on the outside?

Tradition said that in order to maintain the purity of faith it was necessary to eliminate all foreign influences. All you had to do to support this argument, was to point to the historic debacle of Solomon. It was his foreign wives who brought the pagan religions to Judah, sending the kingdom on a downward spiral that led to defeat by the Babylonians and the exile of People of Israel in the first place.

There were many who were quite certain, therefore, that God’s care could not extend beyond the bloodlines of the Hebrew people. “No intermarriage!” cried Ezra, the priest, and Nehemiah, the prophet. The race had to be kept pure. Old tales of caution such as those about Esther and Daniel were recited, in which the preservation of God’s people in the face of the demonic influences of foreigners was the clear point.

But then, at the same time, there were people on the other side of the argument. While holding just as much reverence for the law, they did not believe God’s grace was limited to those of their own race.

They told stories too; like the story of Jonah, who refused to believe that the foreigners of Nineveh could possibly be saved. Jonah only preached in that God-forsaken place after being spit up on shore by a great fish, but then God changed God’s mind after the people repented, didn’t he? God saved those people. Then there is the story of Ruth, a despised Moabite, who not only was accepted into the community by marriage, but became a part of the royal bloodline of David – and Jesus.

Imagine that: two opposing camps. Each equally dedicated to the faith. Each with their own interpretation of the law, each with their own stories to support their position. At odds and increasingly polarized in their arguments and practices. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

We see the same kind of thing today. There are insiders and outsiders. There are those we are certain live within God’s grace and those who don’t, because in our human economy, there are limits to God’s grace, mercy, compassion, and to blessing.

Our lines may be drawn based on race, color, religion, socio-economic standing, lifestyle sexuality, gender, or political leanings.

Not surprisingly, Jesus took a clear position on the matter. He declared that in God’s divine economy of love, not only did God care about those who were not Jews, sometimes God even seemed to favor them. There are, according to Jesus, no limits to God’s love and inclusion.

We tend to build borders around God’s love, rejecting those who do not fit our definition of God’s people. Who might those people be for us today? The religious conservatives? The liberals? Immigrants? The refugees? The homeless? The addict? The prisoner? Those of a particular race or color? Those of a certain religion or philosophy or lifestyle?

The thing is that every time we approach what we declare as the limits of God’s love, Jesus is ahead of us, tearing down walls, building bridges, and urging us to do the same. Jesus is always ahead of us, claiming those we place on the outside as ones that God embraces, loves, and lifts up.

I won’t lie - it can be tough to swallow Jesus’ claim that the divine blessing could possibly extend beyond our own kind, just as it was for the Jews in the synagogue that day.

Jesus also used stories to drive his point home, and that day he chose two that were not real popular among the isolationist crowd. First, he described how Elijah took care of the needs of a woman from the hated land of Sidon at the time when Hebrew women were starving.

The word of the Lord came to Elijah telling him to go to Zaraphath where he would meet a widow gathering sticks for a last meal before she and her child dies. Elijah ends up not only seeing that she had food for the rest of her life, but also brings her child back from the edge of death. Jesus drives the point home. This was a foreign woman in an age when foreign women were considered the curse of Israel.

Young preacher Jesus could have found a thousand other stories to use as illustrations for this sermon. But he wanted to make the point perfectly clear at the outset of his ministry: God’s love did not have national or ethnic boundaries, and it was that love he, Jesus, was sent to proclaim.

The second illustration was not much better. Quoting a story we find in 2 Kings, Jesus recalled how Elishah healed a man named Naaman, who happened to be an officer in the Syrian guard. Not only was the prophet helping foreigners, this particular foreigner was a member of an alien army!

God’s love for Sidonians and Syrians was not what the hometown crowd had come to hear, particularly since they could easily interpret “Romans” and “Samaritans” for Syrians and Sidonians. Instead of playing to their prejudices, Jesus claimed that God’s love was alive despite their prejudices.

We can imagine what this was like. Imagine your pastor at the height of the Cold War talking about how God has a preferential love for the Soviets and Cubans. Or, imagine that same pastor suggesting that God has a particular affection for the black activists that had just burned parts of the major cities of these United States during the racial wars of the sixties. Or, imagine your pastor suggesting today that we pray for the North Koreans, Muslims, the Iranians or even ISIS – or whomever YOU consider to be our enemy. Do we get the picture of what is going on here in the synagogue in Nazareth?

“They were filled with rage,” our text says, “and they got up, and drove him out of the town.” A church-going crowd suddenly became a lynch-mob. And Jesus learned that it is dangerous to talk about love to those whose lived feed on fear. It is risky business to describe how God’s affection extends toward those the audience despises.

And yet, my friends in Christ, the Gospel is clear. God’s love is always more pervasive, complete and powerful than our hatred or even the ways we define and limit grace.

Our nature wants to protect what we claim as ours and to reject what we don’t like or want to know. So often we project that onto God, making claims for God that exclude others. We want, by our very nature, to make the tent of God’s love an exclusive club. Jesus is telling us this day that God’s love is greater than we can even imagine.

How far is God’s love willing to go? All the way to the cross. And who is included in God’s circle of love? All whom God created.

Each week we confess that we are unclean, sinners in need of redemption. We believe that God’s forgiveness extends to us, sweeping us into God’s embrace. Jesus tells us that God’s arms, stretched out on the cross of Jesus, embrace even those we deem unworthy, even those we seek to reject.

The truth is that despite our sinfulness and the stubbornness of our prejudice, God loves us. The good news is that despite the walls we seek to build, God is already ahead of us in Jesus Christ, tearing them down and inviting us into something larger than ourselves. Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue that day is for us – both a reminder and an invitation to embrace the surprising truth of God’s love –unmerited love that claims us and unites us as one in the expansive, inclusive, Kingdom of God.

All images used by permission, Sweet Publishing/FreeBibleimages.org