Our Saviour Lutheran Church, Sebeka, MN
February 3, 2013--Epiphany 4
Luke 4:21-30
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Today—February 3, 2013—is a big day. It’s the Lord’s Day, when we gather for
worship trusting that God will show up among us in Word and Sacrament and a gathered
community of sinners who are also saints.
That’s a big thing.
And speaking of sacraments, it’s Baby Brigid’s Baptism
Day. Another little Stout will become a
Christian, and not a moment too soon.
That’s a big thing.
Oh, and I hear that there’s some big football game
later today down in New Orleans, the 49ers vs. the Ravens and all the hoopla that will go with it. That’s a big thing.
And then there’s something else happening “under the
radar” all across the Upper Midwest today.
Pastors are heaving a sigh of relief because (with the exception a few
congregations like yours) today normally marks the end of “annual
meeting season.”
Now that might not
seem like such a big thing to you….but it’s a really big thing to most pastors.
Because, you see, annual meetings make pastors
nervous.
Annual meetings have the reputation for being occasions
when even Minnesota-nice Lutherans don’t
always behave like adults. Annual
meetings are often long, drawn out, pointless and conflicted. A pastor friend once told me he referred to
his congregation’s annual meeting as “The Night of the Long Knives.”
So, many pastors think that the best annual meeting
is a short one in which nothing happens.
Twice within the last week I heard pastors extolling
the brevity of their annual meetings, with 15 minutes being the new record for
the shortest, sweetest annual meeting ever!
But is an annual meeting of a Christian congregation
that’s short and sweet, in which nothing basically happens--is that necessarily
a good thing? Is it a sign of
faithfulness or fruitfulness as God’s people?
Do we gather for worship, do we come together as
church, just to be comforted—never to be unsettled? Is every conflict that bubbles up within the
community of faith a disaster? Did God
the Father send his beloved Son into our world simply to soothe us and lull us
to sleep?
What about Jesus when he lived on earth? Did he always keep things on an even keel? Or did Jesus evoke disagreement? Did Jesus call forth questions and
challenges? Did Jesus even go so far as
to pick fights—in order to agitate, to shake up his hearers?
…..which brings us to our gospel lesson for this
morning.
This is the second half of a “to be continued”
gospel reading from Luke chapter 4. We
heard the first half of the story last Sunday.
Jesus as a young adult, returns to his hometown Nazareth and attends worship
in the Jewish synagogue. He reads from
the Prophet Isaiah, taking the prophet’s vision as his own, Jesus’ own, mission
statement.
Jesus says that proclaiming release to captives,
recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the dawn of the
Lord’s year of favor—Jesus says that all of that is his work, his mission, his
goal.
And at first that sounds just great!
But then, ever so subtly, the synagogue crowd starts
to turn. They move from their first
reaction—“All spoke well of him and were
amazed at [his] gracious words…”—they move from affirming to wondering: “Is not
this Joseph's son?"
And Jesus, reading their faces and discerning their
wonderings, Jesus refuses to leave well enough alone.
So Jesus pokes at the folks in Nazareth’s
synagogue. Jesus prods their questions,
and then he does something really
provocative—he tells them a couple Bible stories from the Old Testament.
And by the time Jesus is finished with all that, the
crowd becomes so ticked off, so incensed that they’re ready to haul Jesus out
of the church building and drag him to a cliff—not a metaphorical cliff, mind
you, not a “fiscal cliff” but a real, PHYSICAL cliff--in order to hurl Jesus
down to his death.
Now that’s a church conflict to beat any church
conflict I have ever seen!
So what are we to make of this? Three things:
1. Let’s not immediately assume that the
worshipers in Nazareth’s synagogue were a dysfunctional congregation that
needed to learn family systems theory or go through group counseling for anger
management—though their response is definitely “over the top.” Let’s assume, not that they were especially “sick,”
but they were human, which means that sin was fully operative there on that Sabbath
day when Jesus came to church.
2. Let’s
also not assume that this is just a story about Jesus being a smarty-pants provocateur—someone
whose chief mission in life was to get under people’s skins and make them
upset. One of my college roommates was
like that. He was always ready to
needle me about something, anything, just to get a rise out of me. Jesus, though, didn’t show up among us to
annoy people.
3. Instead,
let’s assume this: that Jesus came bearing the full Word of God
to the worshipers in Nazareth’s synagogue….and when that full Word of God--a
Word that always both accuses and liberates---when the Word has its way with
us, we will resist it, we will try to keep it at bay, we will realize we’re
under attack and feel the need to lash out at it….before finally that Word
finds a home in our hearts and sets us free.
This
is what was playing out in Nazareth’s synagogue so long ago: the Word of God in all its glory, unleashed
by him who was the embodied Word of God, proclaimed release to captives,
recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, the year of the
Lord’s favor dawning upon us.
“Bring it on!” we say, at least at first….
But when Jesus starts to spell out just for
whom this Word has come, then he encounters the deadly pushback from
his fellow worshipers in Nazareth.
Because release, recovery and freedom sound great if
you
and I are the intended recipients…..but what if God has something
bigger in mind?
So Jesus tells Bible stories about all the wrong
kinds of people also being drawn into the orbit of God’s gracious favor.
Jesus painfully reminds his hearers that when famine
covered the land the Lord’s prophet Elijah went not to the house of a good
Jewish mother….but to the hovel of a despised Gentile—a poor widow and her starving
son.
And Jesus pointedly reminds his hearers that when Elijah’s
successor Elisha healed a leper—in a land filled with deserving Jewish lepers!—it
was a hated Gentile leper, the commander of Israel’s Syrian enemies, who was
healed of leprosy.
Release,
recovery and freedom don’t sound so great when we learn that God’s going to
give such gifts to “those kind of people,” too!
And that’s why the crowd stormed out of the
synagogue, ready to lynch the preacher Jesus.
….which brings me back to a question I asked
earlier: Do we
gather for worship, do we come together as church, just to be comforted—never to
be unsettled?
And because we are regularly unsettled in the
church, maybe we need to ask: are we
unsettled about things that matter—especially, things that matter to God?
So here’s an example. I was just with some folks from one of my
favorite congregations in our synod.
I love these folks because they have a really,
really good fight at every annual meeting of their congregation.
And here’s the question that sets them off: “How can we get behind God’s mission in an
even bigger way this year?” This
congregation “fights” about how they can increase their offerings for mission
beyond their congregation, how they can do even more than what the church council
proposes in the annual budget.
This congregation doesn’t fight about the color of
the carpet or the heating bill or whether the pastor is attending enough high school
basketball games. They don’t fight
about what someone else did wrong. They fight about whether they themselves
are being faithful to their faithful God.
What a great thing to fight about at an annual church
meeting! Why—it might even be worth
investing more than 15 minutes, if we get to talk about things like THAT!
Jesus comforts AND unsettles us always—thank God!
God’s Word is always accusing us in the same breath
that it is setting us free.
And God’s people are forever fighting, if the truth
be told.
The only question really is this: are we fighting about things that matter to
God?
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
