"Rejected Love" Jan. 28, 2001
Jeremiah 1: 4-10, 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13, Luke 4: 14-30

Those are wonderful words from St. Paul, the words about love, and I’ve preached about them many times, but today my focus is on a story from the otehr end of the spectrum, today’s lesson from Luke, a story about rejected love.

It should have been a red letter day in the history of that little synagogue in
Nazareth. It could have been one of those special days that people never forget, the sort of day that gets mentioned again and again as old folks tell their stories. I can imagine a gray bearded man, in the year AD 50 or 60 saying to his children "Did I ever tell you the story of how Jesus came and preached in our synagogue? That was such a happy day......" And the kids might say "Yes, we've heard you tell that one before," but the old guy would go forward anyway - the way we do when we've got a story we love. And he might begin to say "Of course we couldn't know then what we now, but even then Jesus was a mighty famous preacher. Even then he was making a name for himself, and when he came back
to preach in his own hometown - why that was the most joyful, exciting, spirit-filled time we've ever had........"
But as you know, from today's scripture reading, that's not the way things worked out in Nazareth. Jesus' debut in his hometown synagogue was anything but successful. It was the sort of event people remember - if at all - with anger, or perhaps with shame, one that they probably would prefer to just forget about. We read this story from the Bible and see the people’s failure, but its message isn’t just about those people in Nazareth, and it’s certainly not to be interpreted as a condemnation of the entire Jewish race (though there have been people who have tried to use this as an excuse for anti-Semitism.)

In our confirmation class we say that the Bible is sometimes like a window through which we can look to see God, God's truths, God's teaching. But the Bible also can function as a mirror - causing us to look at ourselves, enabling us to look at parts of our life that need attention. This story can function in both ways - as the window revealing something of God, but primarily as the mirror that helps us to look at ourselves with special care. For this is a story, not just about those Nazarenes’ failure, or about Jewish failure, but about human failure, a story that should make us look within our own hearts, and at the groups of which we're a part, and ask some searching questions.

That day in Nazareth had a positive beginning. It happened towards the beginning of Jesus' active ministry, after his baptism and temptation in the wilderness, and Luke reports that Jesus had been teaching in various synagogues in Galilee. He was filled with the Spirit, and news about him was spreading all over the countryside. He came to Nazareth, and Luke says that on the Sabbath day he went to the synagogue "as was his custom." Here's a quick tangential note for anyone who thinks they don't really need a regular worshipping life: Some people will say that a walk in the woods, or a good conversation with friends, or a sleepy Sunday morning at home is all the spiritual support they need. “Who needs church?” they’ll say, but Jesus evidently thought that going to worship on a steady basis was important. He went on the Sabbath "as was his custom," and if he needed it, don't you think that we probably do too?
Jesus read from scripture, from the book of Isaiah, these words that we can find at chapter 61:

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 favor.

When he was finished reading Jesus gave the scroll back to the attendant and sat down. That was the custom in synagogue worship - to stand for reading scripture and to sit down while preaching. Luke says that "the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him," and Jesus said "Today these words are fulfilled in your hearing......." He said, in effect, "The spirit of God is on me; this is the task which God has set before me - this work of bringing good news, setting people free, enabling the blind to see........"
Luke doesn't give us the full text of what Jesus said, but it must have been a
powerful talk. Everyone was amazed at Jesus’ gracious words, and they said "Isn't this Joseph's son?......." The feeling, so far, is warm and happy, as if the folks are saying, "Can you believe it? This little boy we saw in Joseph’s carpenter shop is turning into an amazing man of God...... Who would have thought that anyone so special could come from our little town of Nazareth?"
But then something happened, something that turned this warm, fuzzy atmosphere into a lynch mob mentality so that by the end of the passage, as you heard, the people want to kill Jesus. Why? What could make things turn so sour so rapidly?

Once again we don’t have a “transcript” of the entire talk, but from what Luke tells us, it appears that those folks in Nazareth wanted Jesus to support and bless them in a very narrow, selfish, parochial understanding of God’s love. We don’t know, but maybe they were hoping that Nazareth would receive special favor and prestige and become known as a center for spiritual study - rather than the backwoods place sometimes mentioned in the derisive comment “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” With the hottest young rabbi around maybe things could change for Nazareth - if they could just get him to stay home instead of wandering off to Capernaum and all over Galilee........ Or maybe these folks wanted Jesus to preach a strong sermon on God’s exclusive love for Israel, and his hatred for Gentiles. In that era of Roman occupation it was pretty common for the Jewish faithful to emphasize their priority in God’s eyes. They might not be a nation any more; they might have to pay taxes to god-forsaken Rome, but at least they could be proud of their identity as God’s one and only chosen people. Maybe those Nazarenes wanted Jesus to underscore and encourage this spiritual pride.

We don’t know the people’s comments, but we do know that Jesus began to speak about God’s wide-spread love, his compassion for people outside Judaism as well as within, and that’s when all the trouble started. What Jesus told them wasn't anything particularly new or radical. He just told them some stories from their Hebrew scriptures - about how Elijah went to help a starving Gentile widow during the time of a terrible famine, and about how Elisha cured the leprosy of a Syrian army officer named Naaman - but it was like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Jesus’ comments remind me, in one sense, of the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King in the early ‘60’s. When he was challenging America to treat all its citizens with equality he didn’t have to make up some original, revolutionary ideas. He would just quote the Declaration of Independence, or the US Constitution, saying in effect, “This nation has already said that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.....’ That’s been decided, but together we need to live by the creed our ancestors laid down.” It was pretty hard to argue with his logic - but many people answered with hate and at least one man answered with a rifle bullet.

In the same way, Jesus was challenging his hearers in Nazareth with an old, but oft-forgotten dimension of their faith. The idea that God is the God of all nations - Jew and Gentile alike - was not a new one. For centuries the prophets had been saying that Israel’s role as a chosen people was to be a bearer of light for the nations. They had been chosen, yes, but not to keep the light to themselves. Their sacred calling was to proclaim it, live it and share it with the entire human race. “A light to lighten the Gentiles” is a phrase we find time and time again in the Old Testament.

Jesus came, not as an entirely new initiative from God but in fulfillment of this ancient idea. He came to help Israel fulfill its mission of bearing and sharing the light with all the world - which is the point he was trying to make as he quoted Isaiah and said “Today these words are fulfilled in your hearing.” But as he spoke to his townspeople, and illustrated his message with scripture stories they knew so well, they were filled with resentment and anger. As his message sank in they began to see the great gulf - the gulf between what they wanted Jesus to be and the truth about who he was. And after a while they couldn’t take any more, so they drove him out of the synagogue, chased him out of town, and tried to throw him off a cliff.

So much for Jesus’ triumphant return as “hometown boy made good,” and I’ll leave the story at that point, except for a few questions and closing observations.

Do you think Jesus would get a good welcome if he came to worship with us? Would we be pleased and happy to hear him? Or is it possible that Jesus’ sermon would make us so mad that we’d rise up in the middle of the service and chase him out, hoping that he’d get run down in the Route 9 traffic?

It may sound pretty ludicrous when I ask such questions, but the story we read from the gospel today makes it clear that when Jesus comes he comes on his own terms. He comes, not just to bless us as we are, or to give blanket approval as we’ve been, to accept our small definitions of faith as final, or to confirm our understanding of mission as the whole gospel, but to challenge us to be more than we’ve been..... He comes, not to give a holy blessing to the agenda we’ve already set but to tell us his agenda..... He comes, to love us and the community which we are, but also to challenge us to open the community to others, and to follow him in this amazing, audacious, seemingly impossible task of loving the world. Isn’t that what John 3:16 says? Who does Christ come to love? The world!

Jesus might say “I am pleased to be with you good folks of the Hyde Park UMC, and I hope you don’t mind that I’ve brought along a few other people who love me.” I suspect that in Jesus’ company would be a lot of folks of the type who don’t typically appear on Sunday mornings - not because we’ve deliberately said “Don’t come,” but because we haven’t invited them, or perhaps because we’ve silently, perhaps unintentionally, given the message that they aren’t welcome. I suspect that these “others” would include a wide range of colors, augmenting the mostly white group that’s usually here. There would probably be some poor people, and some people whose children don’t know how to behave because no one in the family has ever been to church. There might be some people who have sinned so notoriously that they assume they are no longer “good enough” to be welcomed in church. There might be some people who don’t speak much English (or any at all), and who knows what else? Maybe some of those prisoners that John and Gary are getting to know through the Kairos program would be here..... It would also be pretty crowded, which might mean that you couldn’t sit in your favorite pew, and you might have to share a hymnal with someone! And if we were to say “Jesus, you’re always welcome, but we don’t really care for the friends you’ve brought along,” what do you think would happen? I don’t think we’d have to chase Jesus out. He’d be glad to leave.

This gospel story seems to be telling us that unwillingness to accept those whom Christ loves is the same as rejecting Christ himself. Those Nazarenes who were so unwilling to hear the message that God loves Gentiles? In their unwillingness to share their God, their Jesus, with others, they lost him for themselves.

Would Jesus find a welcome in our church? Let us pray that he would. And let us pray also, in our imperfection, for the grace to be the kind of community where his words ignite not an anger but a desire to conform to his will.