Our sermon text for today is really scene two of one of the key moments in Jesus’ early ministry. We looked at scene one several weeks ago, that was Luke 4:16-22, and Kurt just read it for us again as a refresher.
Scene one is a proud moment. Jesus has been speaking in synagogues in a number of small towns and getting excellent reviews. He is starting to become famous. This morning he is back in his hometown. This morning his mother has brought out her best robe and spent some extra time on her hair. They ask him to say a few words and it is wonderful. The people are beaming over ‘their kid’ who has turned out so well and is giving Nazareth a good name. Jesus picks one of their favorite scriptures. It describes the day when God will move in a mighty way to bring blessings again.
As he reads they fit themselves right into the text. “Yes, I’m poor and I’m ready for some good news. Yes, we are prisoners under Roman occupation and I am oppressed by the occupation and I want to be free. God, look at all my problems. Where are you? You have been letting us down. It’s time to do something.”
And then, Jesus announces that that prophecy isn’t just something hanging out there, waiting to be fulfilled some day in the distant future. It is being fulfilled even as he spoke. And that was exciting. It was great. They loved it!
Now hold that thought for a moment, a very proud and hopeful and exciting moment in Jesus’ home synagogue in Nazareth. Before we go on to scene 2, I need to tell you another story.
This is a story about an old friend of Kathy’s Dr. Marc Erikson. He was a missionary doctor in Somalia maybe 30 years ago. Somalia was a difficult mission field. The people were desperately poor, as they are today. And the missionaries just hadn’t found the key that would open their hearts to the gospel. They loved and served and explained, but nobody was responding. To make matters worse the rumor began to spread that if someone would tell the missionaries they wanted to be a Christian, the missionaries would give them stuff: food, clothing, a good education for their children. And so they started having people come, but only for what they could get. Missionaries call them rice Christians. Rice Christians may look like real seekers for a moment, but their eyes are so fixed on getting stuff that they just don’t hear when the missionaries talked about a savior who died for them, who calls us to turn away from our sins, to sacrifice our desires and serve others and such things.
Anyone who has been a parent should be able to understand. You want to give good things to your kids. But you don’t want to train them to be self-centered, demanding brats. If you start giving in to your kids with everything they ask, they will never learn the importance of working hard to make the good things of life possible. They will never learn to appreciate the love behind the gifts they receive. They will never learn to think about other people. You can understand the danger.
One day there was a knock on Marc’s door. When he opened it the man announced he wanted to become a Christian. Marc started explaining, I’m not going to give you food for saying that. I’m not going to give you clothing for saying that. I’m not going to get your children into school for saying that.
And of course missionaries often feed and clothe and educate people. But a very careful line needs to be drawn that the missionary’s service comes out of God’s love and when we respond to God’s love it is not just to get stuff. If you really want to be a Christian you need to deal with God himself, not just stuff. When we come to God we submit ourselves to God and present ourselves as servants. And if we are just there to use God we haven’t understood the first thing of being a Christian yet.
Well this man was different. He said he didn’t care what he got. He wanted to follow Jesus. And that man found salvation that day, God met him at the point of his deepest needs, a gift much more wonderful than food or clothing.
It was a strange way for a missionary to speak to someone who said he wanted to be a Christian. But can you understand the importance of the line that Marc was drawing?
We serve a loving God who loves to give. But he will not be used. He will not be manipulated. He is God, not us. In his wisdom he knows that if he appeals to our highest instincts we grow and are stretched in good ways. If he indulges our self-centeredness it destroys us.
Now let’s go back to scene two and our scripture text for this morning. Right when Jesus is the center of approval of all his old neighbors and friends and aunts and uncles and cousins. Right when his parents are beaming with pride. He shocks them all by drawing a line that had to be drawn. Now hear the word of God from Luke 4:23-30. It’s printed in your bulletin so that you can follow along as his sermon continues.
Jesus “said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
Can you feel the shock in that room that morning? Jesus had them eating out of his hand. They were all so happy. His parents and brothers and sisters were so proud. And just like that, he infuriated them. We probably only have a summary of his sermon, but it didn’t take very long. They were so mad that they set out to kill him!
What was going on? Isn’t it Jesus’ job to make people feel good? To make them happy? To give them what they want? No, that is not the Jesus in the Bible.
Why did he speak to his own hometown like this? Because he knew their hearts. That probably didn’t take any divine revelation. He had known them all his life. And he knew that a line was going to have to be drawn, that as long as they looked at him as a meal ticket, as entertainment, as the best gimmick they had ever had for promoting local civic pride he could never give them the most important gifts of forgiveness for their sins, reconciliation with God, of finding their place of service in God’s coming kingdom. And so he drew the line. And they didn’t like it.
Just what did Jesus say that caused the moment to explode? He knew they had heard he had done miracles of healing in Capernaum. They figured whatever he did for those folks down in Capernaum, they were entitled to at least the same, and “We’re his home town, we should get more.” They assumed they could control him, use him. And he made it clear that he would not be used. He would not be domesticated. He was going to be a faithful prophet and that means speaking for God and not being a tool of the Nazareth Boosters Association.
They wanted a God who was a tribal deity, a hometown boy, who would take their side in every issue, bless them and keep those outsiders who are different in their place.
And Jesus reminded them that God is not a Jew. He is God of all peoples. He pointed out two stories from the Old Testament where God was not going to bless the people of Israel because they were disobeying. And instead of blessing Israelites, God healed one of their enemies, a soldier from Syria who had leprosy, and while people were starving in Israel, he provided food for a widow woman from Zarephath, a foreigner!
They were shocked! How dare he suggest that God would deny us the privileges we have coming! We are entitled. How dare he suggest that we need to change our thinking! How dare he suggest that God would side with those other folks! We demand the privileges that we’ve got coming! And if you disagree, we’re going to put you to death!
Once you flush it out into the open, it’s not a very pretty way of thinking is it?
And this is one of those points where I am sorely tempted to say that Jesus made a mistake. He should have been gentler with them. He should have gone slower. He shouldn’t have upset the apple cart.
But this issue of coming to God with the expectation of privilege is so destructive, it sneaks into our thinking so easily, it is so poisonous once it gets embedded in our hearts, that the more I think about it, the more I want to thank him for drawing this line so clearly and being willing to pay the price of being rejected even by his friends and neighbors, aunts, uncles and cousins.
Every step of following Jesus is a step of turning away from privileges for myself, a step toward denying myself, a step towards becoming a servant. Jesus went over this again and again with his disciples, but sometimes it is so hard to see. Religion so easily gets turned into a seeking after privilege, and not servanthood.
And let’s try to bring this into our world, here and now.
We just saw it acted out in our drama. You join a church of comfortable, nice, mannerly people where you can escape the chaos and distractions of the world outside. And someone with a mental disability comes in and doesn’t understand about sitting quietly and they are a bit disruptive.
We can demand the privilege of a polite, controlled worship service if we want and push that needy person away. But if we do, we are also pushing Jesus away, because he calls us to serve that person who doesn’t quite fit in, and be flexible with our own needs.
This is an issue that has a big impact on church finances. I think we are making some progress on funding the programs and equipment needs for ourselves. We have had some generous gifts towards the wish list we printed in last month’s newsletter, a very good response, something to celebrate.
But we seem stuck on a plateau in only paying half of our apportionments, a portion that is meant for others. And of course we need to finance our ministries here. I like working in a situation where things are attractive and we have the equipment we need. But if we start to tell God that we will give to him only as long as the money stays here to benefit us and our friends, have we really given it away? Have we really let go? If we look deep inside we may find we have unconsciously absorbed the assumption that we are entitled to a privilege of being first in line to have our needs met and everyone else is behind us. The mission dinners are our shining light for giving to others. But we need to go further.
Here’s another very important place where this issue comes up. You move to a nice, quiet homogenous small town and it’s so comfortable that everyone is mostly the same. What a privilege to live in such a place. But then people move in from Mexico who have never had such an opportunity before. And maybe it tarnishes the privilege for us a bit. They don’t speak English at first. They can’t afford nice homes. Their culture is different. And it gives us a temptation to say that we are entitled to this nice town and they are not because they are different. But in God’s eyes there is no difference. They need jobs to support their families. They want nice homes. Their children need an education. And Jesus calls us to lay down our conceptions of why we should have better than they and welcome them and serve them.
The first time our ancestors met their ancestors was in the settling of this country. And for those of us who are of European ancestry, our ancestors had this incredibly arrogant sense of entitlement and privilege that we killed many thousands of the people who were here before us and caused the death of millions more through the spread of European diseases and the destruction of the buffalo that they needed to survive and through taking all the best land for ourselves and pushing them onto the most hostile and barren places that were left.
Our generation is meeting the natives of this continent again as Mexicans come north, desperate for work. We have another chance to treat them as Christians and welcome them, to help them develop the skills to live side by side in our culture, to give their children the very best education we can, to let them know that God loves them just as much as he loves us.
I keep hearing reports of people voting against our high school referendum because they didn’t want their money to go for the children of “those people” who “don’t pay as much in taxes as I do.” But in God’s eyes there is no such thing as “our children” and “their children.” He is God of all children and calls us to care for all children.
Well, that day Jesus challenged this deeply entrenched sense of privilege in his hometown. They didn’t want to hear that God cared about people who were different. They didn’t want to hear about sacrificing for people who were different. They didn’t want to hear that their attitudes were wrong. And they showed what was really in their hearts, lurking just out of sight all along. They were so threatened by the thought that God was not going to give them special privileges, that they tried to put Jesus to death.
And the scene ends with him walking down the road to another town, I suspect feeling very alone. On Maundy Thursday we talked about sharing with Jesus in the fellowship of his sufferings. Imagine how the hatred in his neighbor’s eyes must have hurt that day.
We never again read of Jesus setting foot in Nazareth, his hometown. As far as we know they remained wrapped up in their fears of those who were different, their determination to get all the best for themselves and their fear that if someone else gets something nice then there will be less left for them.
But I like to think that there may have been some who did walk after him and become his disciples. I like to think that some of them learned from Jesus that there is plenty for all when we share, that we find ourselves by losing ourselves in service to others, that God is also working in people who seem different from us and there are treasures for us to discover when we open our hearts to each other.
In our hymnal there is a prayer that John Wesley often used to call the people called Methodists to lay down any claim on God for any privilege in this world to simply present themselves to God as servants.
I invite you to turn to page 607 and stand and join me in that prayer.
A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt; rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
Exalted for thee or brought low by thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy please and disposal.
And no, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen
