epiphany 4 31 January 2010
Jeremiah 1. 4-10
1 Corinthian 13. 1-13
Luke 4. 21-30

Are you good enough? Yet? Is it all OK? Content with yourself in spite of that episode from your past; that reputation you once had? That name your family or your school mates labelled you with? Did you shake it off; live it down? Or has its pain just faded with time and it blended back into perspective with the rest of your life? As long as some circumstance doesn’t scratch the old wound.

Many of us carry with us a “not good enough” story; of some kind. A wound which cobbles us; from the inside or the outside. Jeremiah has one in himself: Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy. Isaiah has one: surely I am a man of unclean lips, living amongst a people of unclean lips. Jesus hometown has one about him: Is not this Joseph’s son? Moses, apparently, was a stutterer; some silver-tongued prophet that would make. We know this pattern so well in our country: the land of the tall poppy that gets cut down before it can grow too tall. Don’t get above your station; you can’t shake off your past. A leopard never changes its spots.

The pattern of the prophets of God is that God consistently calls ones who just don’t feel that they are up to the task; who are often not up to the task in other’s eyes. But maybe this woundedness is the gold which enables them to be prophet. A wound that means they carry some inadequacy, some hobble, some pain which gives them eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear something more than our usual ways of measuring our own and each other’s worth. It is often only these ones who have been wounded who can become the wounded healers.

The situation in today’s Gospel reading seems to be transformed in the blink of an eye; from wonderful home-town welcome to catastrophe. If you were here last week you would have heard the first part of this story which the lectionary cycle splits into two. Jesus appears on the Sabbath day in his home-town synagogue and reads from the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me
 to bring good news to the poor.
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 favour.’

The congregation seems to respond very favourably to him. All spoke well of him – we are told - and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. Why would they not be amazed; the bastard child of Mary was saying that he was anointed by God in some profound and powerful way. So they sarcastically ask: ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ We know who you really are.

And so things turn sour. Jesus, the one who has lived with the reputation of illegitimacy, since birth asks provocatively: Doubtless you will say to me “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And so he responds, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town.” What good can someone do in our presence when we have condemned then, or labeled them, or believe that they will never live-down what their parents did or what they may have done.
What good can the son or daughter, the husband or wife or friend, or congregation member do when we have branded them, boxed them in?

This murderous confrontation with the home-town crowd happens much later in the other gospels but Luke sets up at the beginning of his gospel a sense that the words Jesus speaks and the deeds he performs will cause deep offense to many that he meets. Already in this chapter 4 the cross is looming. As Simeon says as he holds the baby Jesus when Jesus is brought to the temple on the eighth day: this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed.

What is becoming apparent here, very early in Jesus’ ministry, is that the message of good news for the poor, of release for the captive, of sight for the blind and freedom for the oppressed – of the year of God’s favour, is that this message and this mission of God is for all people, not just those who belong to the right tribe, or have fulfilled all the requirements, who have kept their noses clean. This is a message for those who feel that they might never be chosen as well as those who believe they are. Always a deeply offensive message to those who believe that God is on their side. Capernaum is in Gentile territory and so as Jesus says to the synagogue crowd: surely you will say to me  “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” he lets them know that he is on to them. He knows that they won’t let him live past the limits of the bastard-child reputation they want to hold him to. But he has a clear sense of God’s anointing of him and his own sense of God’s grace and favour for all people. He will no longer be contained by his small town’s parochialism.

And so provocatively Jesus reminds them of God’s favour to Gentiles in the past – at times of great stress and judgment in the life of Israel: the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for 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 Zarapheth 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. Both these men were gentiles and Jesus reminds the crowd of God’s favour for these loathed people. The crowd is incensed and lead him out to lynch him.

It’s a horrible story really; of religious bigotry and self-satisfaction. The trouble is it is a story which is all-too-familiar in the life of many religions; including the church over time. How firmly did the church hold un-wed mothers in their shame; how utterly the church did, and still does, condemn those who find themselves to be homosexual; how enthusiastically did the church participate in the assimilation policy for aboriginal people destroying their culture and their language in the process.

The trouble is when we humans get into groups we shape identities for ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves. Why we’re special. Whether it be as Australians, or Christians, or Uniting Church members or Templestowe Uniting Church members. There is us and there is them. Sometimes we want to make the other like us. Sometimes we just want to keep whatever it is we have for ourselves. Sometimes we are willing to let what we have even die rather than consider that what we have is in some way wanting.

I’m wondering if there is a prophetic word for us? Do you understand what I mean by the prophetic word? It’s not a word which predicts something which might happen in the future but it is a visionary word; a word which stops us in our tracks; which evokes our imaginations and shatters our sacred cows; that breaks us out of our certainties; which severs us from our petty loyalties; which dissolves the brittle reputations which others hold us to or which we cling to in order that life not get at us – and the prophetic word presses us toward new and dangerous and imaginative and life-giving possibilities. And we know God to be near; and like Jeremiah, and Isaiah and Moses we can protest but we cannot resist – or the possibility of the life of God passes us by.

You know I feel something of the Nazareth, home-town crowd in the Uniting Church. This church was formed with such great hopes in 1977 – we were an unapologetically ecumenical church. A new church which had begun a process of uniting with others; a process begun but not yet finished, striving to cooperate and unite with others who would join the project of leaving behind our sectarian and fragmented past. There was a sense that we had arrived; that we had done that good thing which needed to be done. But we have undergone a more-rapid-than-most decline in numbers and vitality which many put down to all sorts of causes. But our action to unite hasn’t stemmed the bleeding brought about by the tremendous cultural changes of the past decades. But we’ve clung to our achievement.

Sometimes our Uniting, self-congratulation feels a bit to me like the self- satisfaction of the Nazareth home-town crowd. Secure in our view of ourselves; unwilling to change; or consider that possibly we might need to. We’re a welcoming, Australian church; what more do we need? We need the prophetic word to detach us from our Uniting Church belief that the sum of our opinions equals the will of God; we need the prophetic word to blast our bureaucracy out of the water so that we truly trust the spirit, not some moth-balled tradition; we need leadership that’s willing to be leadership not mummies’ boys and daddies’ girls who are not willing to rock the boat.

The trouble is that the prophetic word of God is often very uncomfortable for us; those who deliver it and those for whom it is framed. Jeremiah I ostracised from family and tribe, never marries and has to flee to Egypt for his life as his country is overrun by the Assyrians from the north. Jesus, need we say anymore, is the one utterly rejected; who bears our sorrows and carries our grief.

Jeremiah’s task is twofold: of plucking up and pulling down and of building and planting. I don’t know what you are hoping or expecting of this process that we will engage in as churches this year. There will be for us some plucking up and pulling down. What form that will take I don’t know – it may be different for each of us – personally and as congregations. Change is often stressful and we all handle it in different ways. And there will be for us a building and a planting. Actions of hope. Activity based in a sure hope that there will be a future – hard as that is to imagine the form of sometimes.

The measure of our faithfulness to Jesus’ way will be whether we behave like the home-town crowd or behave like people transformed and living into the vision of God’s renewing grace found in Jesus. We are so familiar with the words of the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. The fact that we hear it so often at weddings distracts us from Paul’s intent that this image of love is the vision in which we must abide as Christian communities seeking to live out that transforming grace of God. May our prayer be that in all things this love is the basis for our action and our being together as we seek to be drawn by the spirit of God.
Andrew Boyle