What went wrong in Nazareth? That’s the question we must ask this morning in response to our lesson from Luke. It all began so well, didn’t it? The story of Jesus’ return to his home town to preach for the first time. John Weicher began the story last week – our lectionary planners split it in two – and I liked reading in John’s sermon how attentive he was to the way Luke tells us Jesus took up the scroll of Isaiah, opened it, read from it, rolled it up again, and gave it to the worship assistant to put away. A series of very deliberate actions. Even as he’s doing it, we get the idea that Jesus is getting the idea in that moment of what he’s about and where he’s headed.
Going back to one’s home church to preach for the first time as an ordained pastor can be quite a heady experience. I suspect both John and Lisa have done that. I have. Even though I wasn’t a young person when I graduated from seminary, my parents were still vital and active members of the congregation that first morning I went back to preach since preaching in a youth Sunday service some 25 years before. “That’s Richard and Marie’s boy,” I could still hear them say in the gathered silence of the sanctuary of St. Paul’s Evangelical and Reformed Church in Oakville, Missouri. It’s been a long time since I’ve said those words just like that.
In most instances it’s a mark of pride for parents when a son or daughter comes home to preach in the church where they have diligently fulfilled the baptismal promises they would have made some years before. In our questions we ask parents to bring their children into the faith through “worship, study, service, and experience.” That had certainly been true in my life, for there was nowhere else we ever were on Sunday morning but in Sunday school and church. And, yes, I thought the sermon was boring. Some probably were then, too.
It’s not only a mark of pride for parents and family, of course, when a child of the church comes home. It’s a mark of humble and grateful pride for those others who through hope-filled years have dreamed that what they have been about in the church – teaching church school, advising youth groups, befriending and working with young people – might amount to something. Last year when one of my mentors – he would never have used such a high-sounding word as mentor – died in his nineties, I wrote his wife Thelma to tell her how grateful I remain to her husband Melvin for all he did for me as I was growing up in the church. That in looking back I count him as one of the chief spiritual influences of my early life. I hope that gave her some comfort in her loss, the fact that her husband had been so appreciated more or less silently over the decades of his faithful life.
Come to think of it, I have a wonderful example in our life here as well. It came as a gift this week. Perhaps the name Gary Groff means something to some of you who have been here for a long time. Gary e-mails me that he was born, baptized, and nurtured in this church. He’s a middle-aged adult living in Germany now, but wants to come back to this church to be married. In one of his messages to me he asked about Bettejo and Wes Wagner, whom he remembers fondly from his childhood. I informed him that Wes had died a few months ago, but that Bettejo was currently in the hospital and that, coincidentally, I would be visiting her later that day and would take her his greetings. Instantly he e-mailed back to tell me he still has the wood flute he got from Bettejo in seventh grade – and still plays it!
You see how these things go. I’m amazed and awed. And you ought to be too. For that’s the work which collectively and individually we all share, and to which several of you will be ordained and installed for specific ministries this morning. I couldn’t have picked better texts for today’s service of ordination and installation of new officers. Our lectionary planners always seem to know what we’re doing.
But to get back to Nazareth and what went wrong that morning Jesus came home to preach. “That’s Mary and Joseph’s son,” the people must have said with pride when Jesus stepped up on the bema and unrolled the scroll of Isaiah. From his brothers and sisters sitting up close to him, to proud aunts and uncles, to impressed friends from childhood, the people of Nazareth first “spoke well of him” and were amazed at his “gracious words.” He could have stopped there and left everyone feeling good about his inaugural sermon in Nazareth. We can hear the comments now: “That was a nice sermon, Rabbi.” Or, “I enjoyed that, Jesus.” Or, in a more familiar vein, “You were preaching right to me, Reverend.”
But Jesus then seems deliberately to provoke the synagogue folk. He apparently doesn’t want to leave them thinking that the Gospel is only a warm vat of sweet-tasting figs; it is also a double-edged sword, cutting through time-worn attitudes and traditions. In response to the Nazarenes’ wanting him to do the wonder-working for them that he had done earlier in Galilee and Capernaum, Jesus challenges them by citing two examples of God’s turning from Israelites to pagans to express divine favor: two stories from the prophets Elijah and Elisha.
Those two stories are sermons in themselves, but for our purposes today we need to know at least this much: that the stories were well known to the worshipers in the synagogue in Nazareth and that the stories would remind them that in their great prophetic tradition God sometimes went out of bounds to save and heal foreigners, as God did through Elijah for a poor starving widow and her son, and as God did through Elisha by healing a Syrian general – an enemy of Israel – of his leprosy.
You see, what went wrong in Nazareth the morning Jesus came home to preach is that he got a bit too prophetic, as we say. That is, he stirred the pot a little too vigorously, reminding people not only of where they’d been, but also suggesting where God might be calling them. The God that Jesus preached about was just too free, too wide and expansive, too inclusive and unboundaried for the folks back home who wanted him to tell them only that they were as special to God as they were to him. They were, of course, but they also bore – as we bear – the responsibility of a special mission in the world and to the world.
That’s one reason why some of us in this congregation are concerned about the cut made in general mission giving in the budget for 2010, even though there might seem no other viable choice at this time. That’s why we are reminding ourselves of our mission as the Body of Christ in the world not to neglect that world and why we will seek ways to rectify the current problem.
That’s one reason why we will hear from Jack Rogers in a couple of weeks when he continues his book tour with us, chronicling his own change of heart and mind as a self-acknowledged practicing evangelical Christian around the church’s response to human sexuality. In his book Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality, he writes: The book tour has shown me firsthand the enormous pain caused by the church’s unjust polices. All of this suffering is completely unnecessary and preventable. As I show in this book (and as countless other scholars have shown in their work), the Bible, properly understood, does not condemn people who are LGBT [that is, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender] and it does not prohibit faithful same-sex relationships. The church’s historical prohibitions against marriage and ordination for people who are LGBT are an anachronism – much like the church’s previous policies that prohibited interracial marriage or ordaining people of African descent, women, or people who are divorced and remarried. Indeed our faith calls us to do justice, provide hospitality, and embrace equality for all God’s people.
Part of the reason Jack Rogers is coming is to help you and me to be better able to articulate to ourselves and to others who hold either like or opposing views an interpretation of Scripture which I have believed for many years and spoken to from this pulpit on any number of occasions because I understand the church’s response to sexual orientation to be a defining issue for the church in our time. So far you haven’t run me out of town for expressing these views. In some churches I might have been.
Just as Jesus was run out of the town he loved but which could not quite love him back that morning he riled them up with the suggestion that God may act not only within their holy walls but also out there on the fringe, among edgy people on the edges of conventional society. Hearing such an interpretation of Scripture, as the Nazarenes did that morning long ago, we have a choice. We can run Jesus out of town, too, or we can stop, consider, and step in faith into this old story told in a new way, and in so doing come to know fullness of life, the depth of God’s promise spoken through Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jesus, and all those who have had the audacity to believe that God is indeed creating a new story of hope and justice. Stepping into the new story is to know the breadth of the love of God and the overwhelming power of God’s story even in our own time.
In his important 1989 sociological study, Harvard Diary: Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular, Robert Coles wrote about the six-year-old girl, Ruby Bridges, who became a symbol of heroism during the civil rights movement simply by trying to go to school. Coles reports that Martin Luther King, Jr., first told him the story of the little girl – how, day after day, she had walked past menacing mobs in New Orleans as she made her way to William Franz Elementary School.
Coles then investigated the story himself. He discovered that by the time Ruby arrived at school the white children had already been withdrawn by their parents. Ruby would sit alone in the classroom with her teacher who later told Coles that she had been “reluctant” to be working under what she had called an “awful federal deregulation order,” but stayed anyway. The teacher went on to say, “I don’t know where little Ruby got the courage to do what she did. . . . I would watch her walk with those federal marshals, and you couldn’t help but hear what the people said to her. They called her the worst imaginable names. They were ready to kill her. . . . I never wanted integration, but I couldn’t have said those things to a child – no matter what race.
“Ruby, she would just smile at them, even as they said that they were going to kill her. . . . there must have been 40 or 50 grown men and woman out there on the streets every morning and every afternoon, sometimes more.” The teacher went on to tell Coles, “There was a time there at the beginning that I thought she must not have been too bright, you know, and that was why she could be so brave on the street. But she was a bright child, and she learned well . . . she knew what was happening to her, and that she could be killed. . . . And then one day she came in here and told me that she felt sorry for all of them, and that she was praying for them . . . could you imagine that?”
When Coles talked with Ruby, trying to understand what had been going on inside her, the little girl kept telling him, “I’m just trying to go to school.” When asked by Coles if she might ever be afraid, Ruby told him matter-of-factly: “I do what my Granny says; I just keep praying.”
I think Ruby must have heard the same call from God that Jeremiah heard. He was just a little boy, she just a little girl, but both heard and trusted that God would equip them for the special work that lay ahead of them. And for Ruby, as for Jeremiah, God would make the way clear. God made the way clear for Ruby in New Orleans, just as God made the way clear for Jesus as he made his way out of town that Sabbath morning turned sour in Nazareth. They wanted to throw their hometown boy over the side of a cliff, that mad they were at him for challenging them, but, Luke tells us, “he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” If you’re listening closely to the story, you might hear echoes of another story – the story of the Red Sea parting to allow all the oppressed in Egypt to go free.
And that’s where Jesus is calling us this morning: to follow in his way out of oppression into freedom, out of darkness into light. Without vanity or self-importance, but in the humble reality that we are simply instruments of God, we – following the example of the ancient prophets, of Jesus, of prophetic voices of our own time – are called to take our stand, and by the Spirit’s power to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed – and boldly to proclaim the joy of God’s Jubilee in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.