A Sermon from Falmouth Congregational Church…

A Sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship service of the Falmouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Falmouth, Maine on the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, January 31, 2010. The scripture readings were Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Luke 4:21-30.

“Today this passage is fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21).

 “The Walk to the Cliff”

Last Sunday’s reading from the Gospel of Luke left us right in the middle of Jesus’ homecoming appearance in the synagogue at Nazareth, when he read an inspiring passage from the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2), and followed it up with a simple yet powerful address in verse 21: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Today’s reading picks up the story where we left off, describing the initial, enthusiastic response of the crowd as they marvel at Jesus’ “gracious words.”

The warm reception lasts all of two verses. And then Yeshua (or, we would say, Jesus), not knowing enough to quit while he is ahead, starts explaining things. It is both a truth and a tactical blunder. He speaks of ancient times of famine and illness, when a divine visitation was needed, and when God did indeed come, but not to the folk who were waiting eagerly but to a bunch of Gentiles, foreigners, no less.

When Jesus proclaimed the words of the prophet, his listeners believed that they had him figured out; they also thought they had God figured out. They believed they knew all about God and about the scope and limits of God’s love. When Jesus describes God’s care for foreigners and enemies, Jesus violates the theological mores that were at the heart of his neighbors’ faith.

The temperature in the synagogue falls dramatically. What kind of talk is this? Who does this neophyte preacher think he is to say that nonbelievers are of more concern to God than those who show up here regularly to honor God’s holy name?

It is heresy. It is blasphemy. It is an abomination. The temperature rises beyond the boiling point. Years ago, Clarence Jordan translated the verse describing the people’s reaction as, “When they heard that, the whole congregation blew a gasket” (The Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts, page 25).

The story literally becomes a walk to the cliff. Not waiting for the end of worship, the irate congregation hustles the preacher out of the synagogue. They have a plan: they are going to toss him over the highest cliff they can find and be done with him. It will be the just end of a hometown boy who comes back under false pretenses and tries to tell off his elders.

We know the rest of the story. Somehow, perhaps because of the descending night or the general confusion of the moment, Jesus gets away but instead of learning from the experience, he continues to preach and teach to others the same disturbing message. A couple of years later another mob gets its hands on him, takes him to another hill outside another city, and makes sure this time that he does not get away.

The reading is an edgy one, challenging us to recognize that prophetic voices that call us to practice God’s ways sometimes speak words that we would rather not hear.

In defense of the synagogue congregation, let us remember, Isaiah’s vision had sustained the people as they had struggled to rebuild their nation after exile in Babylon, as they had suffered under the successive heels of the Greek and Roman Empires, and as they had looked forward in faith to a day when God would make all things right and whole again. Jesus had announced that the day was “Today!”

A Healthy theology knows its limits. While we can affirm the truths of our faith, we must also recognize the relativity of our most important doctrines. I believe that the creative interplay of truth and limitation is essential for a healthy and a growing faith.

On the one hand, if God is truly present, then God is moving through our lives and inspiring us and correcting us in every encounter. God speaks through prophets and preachers, but also through children and elders. Each one is touched by God and can accordingly experience and describe his or her encounter with God.

When I feel inspired in writing a sermon, I can legitimately give thanks for God’s movement in my own creativity. But on the other hand God is beyond my powers of comprehension and description; God is more than I can ever fully fathom or explain away. Accordingly, even my most inspirational sermons are limited, finite and imperfect.

Perhaps the most moving way to read today’s text is to let it read us. What Jesus was doing that day in Nazareth, more than just reading the text aloud, was allowing the Scripture to read him. He reminds us of our human nature, our persistence in drawing lines and circles that create a world of insiders and outsiders, and the dismaying way we have, once we are on top, of stepping on those below us.

He is telling us, God is indifferent to “who” we think we are. God is not interested in faces but in hearts. Not beautiful hearts, not pure hearts, nor perfect hearts, but hearts that know their need of God. We might add that our need for God and our awareness of it levels the playing field for all of God’s children. There are no lines, no protective barriers or walls. “We may have all come (to the United States) on different ships,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., “but we’re all in the same boat now.” What is true in this community and nation is true worldwide.

If we just sit quietly with this story for a time, would we be able to feel ourselves in that crowd around Jesus in the synagogue so long ago? The story can expose our deepest anxieties about hope itself, and our refusal to try to give ourselves over to a whole new vision for our lives and our church, to risk what we have for what might yet be.

Perhaps, the story of Jesus being driven to the edge of the cliff by the crowd is a story about us, too, because we do not necessarily want to hear the truth about ourselves, and we do not want to think that “the other guys” could ever be like us, with us, or one of us.

“At the heart of any authentic religious experience,” the Quaker Palmer Parker writes, “is recognition that God’s nature is too huge, God’s movement too deep, ever to be comprehended by a single conception or point of view….God’s truth is singular and eternal, but the forms in which we give it expression are as finite and fragile as clay pots, and we must always be ready to break them open on behalf of a larger vision of truth.”

If Parker is correct, and if our reading of the text is true, then it is also true that God calls us, who claim to follow Jesus, on to a path that may get us into big trouble with our contemporaries but impels us toward an expansive, more generous, justice-seeking vision of the world, a vision that shapes our several ministries to and with all of God’s beautiful children.

What would it look like for Jesus’ first sermon and his reading from Isaiah to be fulfilled this day in our midst, here and now? Might it result in more interfaith respect and dialogue in spite of our living in a world that is becoming increasingly polarized around religious, political and economic agendas? Would his words take us, too, out to the cliffs we would rather not face? How large is our view of God’s nature, how wide is our understanding of God’s embrace, how deep is our sense of the movement of God in our time and place? Will we run from such a love, and such a call, or will we seek it with all our heart, and let it take us out to the edges, where risk, and hope, and courage all lie?

The mission of the Christian church is not confined to enlarging its membership, or to bringing and bending outsiders to accept our terms and ways.  We are simply to love this old world in every way possible, to love the world as God did in Nazareth and does in Falmouth, and far, far beyond. If we are able to visibly love the world and all its peoples that will be the best demonstration of the truth which the church has been given since its beginning in that Sabbath service in the synagogue at Nazareth.