4 Epiphany , February 3, 2013
This Sunday begins to wean us away from Epiphany and towards Lent. Jesus is beginning to get in trouble – this week with the hometown crowd.
After some mild days the cold returned though the ground hog this week predicted an early spring. We may not see 40 degrees today and it snowed during the service though by the end of coffee hour it was all gone. Coldness may be an appropriate beginning for Lent starting Feb. 13.
There were three projects going on simultaneously in church today:
1. The children’s boxtop project described here . They are deposited in the colorful cands in the back. Box Tops for Education has helped America’s schools earn over $475 million since 1996. You can earn cash for your child’s school by clipping Box Tops coupons from hundreds of participating products.
2. Souper Bowl Sunday to collect food for Caroline Social Services described here. The money is yet to be counted but we collected 70 pieces of food compared to 50 last year. It began over 20 years ago with a simple prayer : “Lord as we enjoy the Super Bowl, help us to be mindful of those without a bowl of soup to eat.” During "Souper Bowl of Caring 2012", schools, faith-based organizations and service clubs throughout the United States raised over $9.9 million that was donated to local charities.
3. Blessing of a stole for a chaplain in Afghanistan described here. We also signed a card for the priest to get the stole.
Not mentioned this week – Tools for the Sudan project.
We had 39 in church for Eucharist and coffee hour. The bulletin is here. We celebrated Millie’s birthday both during the service and with an impromptu "happy birthday" afterwards.
The readings for the week are here and the sermon is here
In the Gospel reading from Luke, we see Jesus’ reputation has proceeded him. The hometown boy is home. However, he doesn’t say what is expected and doesn’t do the miracles that are expected. The people are let down. Last week he read from Isaiah – the scriptures are fulfilled. Now is the rest of the story
If any city needed some good preaching, it was Nazareth. If anyone could turn the city around, it was Jesus. He knew of all the troubles in the city. There were heathens all around. Phoenicians lived to the west and north, Samaritans to the south, Greeks to the west. They were far away from the good influence of Jerusalem. They were surrounded by these pagan influences. It is hard to be a good, pious Jew in the city of Nazareth. It’s no wonder that Nathaniel said to Philip, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth." Nazareth was not a good place for a Jew to grow up.
But now Jesus is coming back. Jesus will set the Hebrews on fire. Jesus will help run out the ungodly people and things in our town. Maybe Jesus can turn Nazareth around. Maybe he can make it a decent place to live. Maybe he can turn it into a godly city again.
The day arrives and Jesus comes. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath. He reads from Isaiah. He speaks a few words. The crowd whispers to each other how good he is, "Mary and Joseph certainly raised a good son."
Then Jesus says something about miracles. The crowd has heard all about the wonders that he performed in Capernaum. Many of the people had gathered to see some great event – a little razzle-dazzle to get this crowd going. If Jesus would just do some healings or some other miracle, we would know that God’s power was here and we could drive out these pagan Gentiles and their ungodly influences in the city. Jesus does no miracles in Nazareth.
Moreover he tells two stories that puts the crowd in an uproar. Jesus defends his ministry to outsiders by offering two Old Testament stories. Both Elijah (1 Kings 17:8-14) and Elisha (2 Kings 5:1-17), prophets in Israel, took God’s favor to non-Jews. That those two stories were in their own Scriptures and quite familiar perhaps accounts in part for the intensity of their hostility.
In essence, the people declared Jesus a false prophet. He was blaspheming the faithful, pious Jew. He was praising the sinful, pagan Gentiles. The punishment for false prophecy is death. They try to destroy Jesus. He just wasn’t what they expected. He didn’t do the miracles they expected. He didn’t say the words that they expected. He had to be a false prophet, because he didn’t act like they wanted him to act. They want to take him to the brow of the hill and cast him off
So how do we measure ministry. Paul’s lesson to the Corinthians. The secret is love and engaging in the day-to-day grunge work of ministry. The passage was written to address how we engage in discernment around the exercise of spiritual gifts in community, not as a guide to romance or marriage. Paul tells us that the measure of all things is love but that we have to practice what we preach. Certainly, Jesus did.
Fitting this Gospel with the other texts leads us to see God as we really are. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God says to Jeremiah, “and before you were born I consecrated you….” “Upon you I have leaned from my birth,” sings the psalmist; “it was you who took me from my mother’s womb.” “For now we see in a mirror, dimly,” Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
We have to strip away our illusions. And it is, in part, this experience of seeing themselves in Jesus’ mirror that infuriates the crowd in Luke’s story, flips them from amazement to agony, and prompts them to drive Jesus to the nearest cliff, intending to fling him over the side. Spiritual practices help to do that – get away from our illusions and false perceptions.
Jan Richardson writes " Yet when we allow ourselves to truly see and be seen—when the Christ in me meets and knows and is known by the Christ in you—there is nothing in the world that compares with that. When we can move past our assumptions, our projections, our impulse to build perceptions on paltry fragments and partial sight; when we can open ourselves to the ways that God comes to us both in the stranger and in the one we think we know so well; when we can recognize and respond to the presence of God in another and, in that reflection, recognize the presence of God in our own selves: well, that’s enough to change the world."
The characters of this week – Jeremiah, Paul and Jesus – lead the people to better places but it takes struggle. Like Jeremiah, Jesus is understood as a prophet (Jeremiah 1:5; Luke 4:24). Like Jeremiah, he is questioned and rejected by his own people, who attempt to kill him, though he survives to continue preaching (Luke 4:29-30). Like Jeremiah, Jesus gets into trouble over foreigners (Luke 4:25-27). In Jeremiah’s time God will use the Babylonians as tools in a conflict with the Israelites themselves.
As the sermon mentions, it also takes recognition and working with diversity as part of that struggle – "And in many church communities—peace is lacking because people can’t agree to disagree and to realize that, as we heard Paul point out last week in the reading from the letter to the Corinthians, that diversity is essential for a strong and working body, not only for our physical bodies but also, and especially for the body of Christ, the church…We are constantly tempted to fall into the same traps the people in the church at Corinth did and to feel that one particular agenda (usually our own) is more important than any other, to the exclusion of any other. And before you know it, the church who claims the Prince of Peace as its Savior is a church at war within itself. "
Paul in Corinthians speaks of transition – infancy will be exchanged for full maturity (13:11); imperfect or shadowy vision will be exchanged for the full knowledge. He gives a lofty vision of love helping us realize what is available in creating our world putting it into action. However, that better place is only partially fulfilled in today’s world. A Christian community should be a perfect reflection of the love which God has first shown us in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The sermon concludes "For Paul, love is active. Love is patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things..Our job as Christians is to make every effort to try to make love active in our lives. Lent is the season in which we grow closer to God and to one another by examining ourselves and working on those things that separate us from God and from one another."