Luke 4:21-30
Can You Handle the Truth?
02/01/04
Last week was fun wasn’t, for those of you here? We had a good time, and now we get to finish the story we started. For those of you who were not here last week, let me fill you in on what happened in the Scripture. Jesus, fresh from his Baptism, heads home preaching and teaching on the way. When he gets home he goes to his home synagogue and participates in the service. He gets up, reads some scripture and then sits down and tells the congregation, that today the scriptures have been fulfilled in your hearing. That is where we pick it up this week. Here we get the congregation’s response to Jesus’ first sermon.
As we can tell it starts off nice. People are pleased with what he said, but something starts to hit them. They say, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” You see what is underlining this passage is that they were a little disappointed in Jesus’ sermon. I know that everyone here cannot understand why someone would be unhappy with a sermon, but this congregation was. You see they had heard some of the stories that happened in Capernaum before Jesus got all the way back home. They heard about some of the miracles he did up there and they wanted the same show when he got to Nazareth. Instead they got a one-line sermon, so they started to crumble.
We do that a lot don’t we; crumble when God doesn’t give us what we want. We start to complain and doubt God, instead of listening and trusting in what God really is telling us. If we follow the rest of this story, see if any of this rings true for you. The congregation starts to crumble and then Jesus goes into a little speech which really gets them mad. He tells them two stories in the Jewish history where God shows favors to non-Jews. In both stories of Elijah and Elisha, a miracle happens and someone is saved who is a non-Jew. There are tons of Jews around but God helps a gentile. This gets under their nails quite a bit because they want to be in God’s favor yet they learn that God favors all.
All Jesus is doing is telling them the truth. He is being true to his calling to share the grace of God with all and what does his hometown want to do with him, toss him off a cliff. They heard the truth, that God offers grace to all and that Christ was there to make it happen and they resent Jesus for that and want to kill him.
There is a story about a crow who landed on an oak tree one day and noticed a pig eating his fill of acorns under and then started to root around the tree. A crow remarked, "You should not do this. If you lay bare the roots, the tree will wither and die." "Let it die," said the pig. "Who cares as long as there are acorns?"
To contrast the Jews in Jesus’ hometown and a pig I know is not a really good idea but that is what they were doing or I should say wanting. They wanted all the acorns and the roots of the root of Jesse’s Tree, Jesus. They wanted him to give THEM everything, salvation, grace, and love, but to only THEM. Yet that is not what God came to earth to do. That is not what Jesus came to do, Jesus came to give sight to the blind and release the captives, but it was for all the blind and captive, not just Jewish. This offended the people of Nazareth and they wanted to throw Christ off a cliff.
Last week we talked about answering our calls in life. Doing what we are created for and willed to do by God. Jesus came back to his hometown because he answered that call and he knew that it would offend some people but he did it anyway. When we do what God wants us to do we have to be ready to accept the consequences that will happen. We have to be willing to tell the truth whether those listening want to hear it or not. Jesus did just that and on the way to that cliff was able to slip through the crowd and go on his way. We really don’t have that joy, that talent of crowd surfing our way through a angry mob as they want to throw us off the cliff, so our task seem like it can be harder than Christ’s. Yet Christ skipped through that crowd and then headed for his true calling in Jerusalem, his divine task on Calvary. There Christ told the truth and didn’t go on his way, there the mob got there wish.
When we hear the truth from God what happens to us? What happens when we say what we know in our hearts is the truth and people don’t like it? When we are faced with the truth we are scared and nervous. Whoever said “The Truth will set you free” was lying, the truth CAN and sometimes does bring you pain, suffering and doubt. The truth can dig deeper into your soul than anything else. When we come face to face with the truth, sometimes the truth hurts. What we need to do though is learn to trust that truth and although it is painful and could demand a lot from us, we need to accept it, listen to it and then act accordingly.
A woman who visited a circus was sadden when she went to get into her red station wagon and noticed it had been crushed by an elephant. The owners of the animal apologized, explaining that the animal, for some reason, simply liked to sit on red cars. In spite of the damage, the woman’s car was still drivable. But on the way to the garage she was stopped short by an accident involving two other cars just ahead of her. When the ambulance arrived a few minutes later the attendants took one look at her car, then ran over to assist her. "Oh, I wasn’t involved in this accident," she explained. "An elephant sat on my car." The ambulance attendants quickly bundled her off to the hospital for possible shock and head injuries, despite the lady’s vehement protests.
The truth is hard to say and even harder to hear, yet that is what God calls all of us to do. We have to listen when God states that his grace and love are for all. We practice that every time we do communion, because as a United Methodist church we believe all are welcome. That is easy to say when we are here among friends and family, people we know, trust and love. I wonder how that would change if there were some people in the congregation that we didn’t love, trust or know. What would happen if Saddam Hussein came to church this morning or Osama bin Ladin? God’s grace and love goes to them too you know.
One of the most special yet hardest communions I have ever done was at the rehearsal for my wedding. I knew everyone there, personally because they were all my closest friends and family. It was powerful as I handed out the bread that night because I knew that for some they did not know what they were receiving. When I said, “This is the body of Christ broken for you”, I knew that they could care less. I almost didn’t want to say it and was nervous about even doing it, yet that was the truth. It was almost impossible to say and I will never know how it was heard but I feel confident if fell on deaf ears. Yet that was the truth, the same truth that is here today.
We need to be able to listen and at some points speak the truth. When God speaks to our hearts we have to listen for it is the truth. Sometimes it takes a while to be able to say that it is the truth but once we recognize it as such we must act on it. In this scripture Jesus went home spoke the truth and the truth almost got him tossed off a cliff. Today the truth is offered to you once again, in the form of the bread and the cup. That truth will set you free. The truth found in the bread and wine will set you free for eternity. Eternity. Now here on earth it could get you killed for partaking in the truth and there are some places in the world today that would die for the truth we are able to partake in freely.
A lot of truth has been shared today, from our financial situation this year and to what we will join together in doing at the end of this service. The truth is hard to hear but it is the truth. Now we just have to find out how to live with it. But we can when we have faith that the truth came from the God that loves us and from the Son that died for us. That is where we can find our strength and courage to speak and hear the truth.
AMEN
