- Sermon - Mickey Anders

Text: Luke 4:21-30

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story "Revelation," Ruby Turpin is sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, evaluating each person around her. Ruby judges herself to be superior, by more than a grade or two, to everyone there, especially to a poor, unkempt, teenaged wretch seated across from her who is reading a book. Ruby thinks it sad that the girl’s parents did not groom her more attractively. Perish the thought of having a child as scowling as this one.

As for the "ugly" child, Mary Grace, she listens for a while as Ruby chatters out loud about the superiority of poor blacks over "white trash." Then, without warning, Mary Grace fixes her steely eyes on Ruby and hurls her book across the room. The book hits Ruby in the head and she falls to the floor with Mary Grace on top of her hissing into her ear; "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!"

Flannery O'Connor says this is the violent, shocked beginning of Ruby’s redemption, the catalyst for her repentance and her heavenly vision. Revelation often begins when a large book hits you on the head. What will it take to spark our redemption?

Finley Peter Dunne was perhaps most famous for saying, "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." It's an interesting play on words. Some of my preacher-friends have adopted Dunne's saying for preachers. "The job of the preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." I think it fits better for preachers than for journalists. Don't you think that is what Jesus was doing in our text for today?

We were introduced to this passage last week when we considered the first half of Jesus' first sermon. There he quoted a couple of passages from Isaiah, and ended by saying, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

In today's reading, we find, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story, and it is one of the most surprising in the Bible.

Look at the way this sermon ends! We expect positive reactions from the crowd when the hometown boy returns to preach. They had been hearing about his miraculous work elsewhere. But we are shocked at the concluding statement of this passage:

28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They 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.

They wanted to kill him! What was it that Jesus said that brought about such a violent reaction? We cannot help but be shocked that his own people wanted to kill him after his very first sermon. What happened?

Let's go back to the beginning of this passage which picks up where we left off last week. Jesus has just returned to his seat in the synagogue at Nazareth after having read a selection of Isaiah during the Sabbath worship service. Verse 21 says, "Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'" Jesus is so bold as to suggest that the prophetic words of liberation spoken by Isaiah are fulfilled in his own person.

Then we discover that the crowd initially responded positively to Jesus' words. Verse 22 says, "All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, 'Is not this Joseph’s son?'" So impressive is Jesus, apparently, that some present are led to wonder aloud whether such eloquence could possibly belong to the carpenter’s son whom they watched grow up.

This question, however, seems to rub Jesus the wrong way:

23He 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.’” 24And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.

Jesus seems to anticipate their ultimate rejection. In fact, his words predict the kinds of hateful words that will be hurled at him at his crucifixion.

Next we find the offending paragraph. This paragraph contains the message that made the people want to kill him. Listen to it again, and see if you can spot the offending words:

25But 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; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

In this first example, Jesus alludes to the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath found in 1 Kings 17:1-24. After God ha brought a severe drought upon the whole land of Israel because of its unfaithfulness, Elijah was sent outside Israel to the small town of Zarephath, an area that was also suffering under the drought. There Elijah came to the aid of a poor widow who shared her last bit of food with him. First, Elijah promised that her flour jar and oil jug would miraculously stay filled until the drought ended, and later he resurrected her only son after he died of an illness.

The second example comes from an episode in the life of Elijah’s successor, Elisha. When Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, developed leprosy, he decided to seek out the prophet Elisha, about whom he has learned from a young Israelite slave girl. Naaman found Elisha, and eventually followed Elisha’s advice and was cured of his affliction.

To our modern minds, neither of these stories is shocking. We can't imagine why anyone would get upset at such stories. But when we look deeper we find that Jesus used the stories to tell the people of his own hometown a message they did not want to hear.

The key aspect of both stories is that God's prophets went to someone outside of the Jewish nation. God's grace and miracles were being given to Gentiles! The folks in Nazareth didn't want to hear that.

We can remember from the story of the woman of Samaria how shocked the disciples were that Jesus was talking with a woman of Samaria. In John 4:9, the writer makes clear for us in a later generation, "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans." If the Jews despised their half-kin Samaritans, how much more did they despise the Gentiles.

But Jesus uses the occasion of his very first sermon to foretell that his movement would kick open the door of God's grace to the Gentiles. And the rest of the Gospels tell us how the Jewish people ultimately rejected Jesus and the mission would then turn to the Gentiles.

The people in Nazareth recognized and marveled at Jesus' gracious words; but when illustrations of God's grace to outsiders were given; their feelings turned to rage. Those who praised him at the beginning of the sermon want to kill him by the end of it.

And this was only his first sermon! One might have thought that Jesus would have used a more effective rhetorical strategy. We would think he would save the inflammatory speech until he had taken the time to build trust and to win people’s affection.

But no! Instead he threw the book at them, hit them right between the eyes with Isaiah and jabbed them with First Kings. He told them exactly what they did not want to hear.

Some people say they can worship God on the golf course as well as in church. I must agree that it is theoretically possible. In fact, I have often heard the Lord's name mentioned on the golf course, but usually not in an attitude of worship. But on the golf course, we will never hear a message that we do not want to hear. We will never be confronted about our prejudices, convicted of our sin, or challenged to consider God's demands on our lives. Those things come to us in church, where we are challenged and confronted in our life together. I suspect that God speaks to us most clearly when he tells us something we do not want to hear.

Annie Dillard once wrote, "Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a package tour of the Absolute?.. On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up batches of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

(Annie Dillard (1945-), "Teaching a Stone to Talk", Expedition to the Pole)

I once read a book entitled, "Christ the Tiger." See, Jesus is not just "gentle Jesus meek and mild." He is a tiger that storms into our lives and confronts us with the demands of the Gospel.

Back in the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement brought a message of equality that many of us did not want to hear. We didn't want to hear it because we were wrong.

Just this week James Seale has been charged with the horrible deaths of two 19 year-old black men in 1964. A car picked up Henry Dee and Charles Moore and drove them into the woods, where Ku Klux Klan members tied them to trees and whipped them. Still alive, the two 19-year-olds were bound, tied to an engine block and thrown into the Mississippi River, where their bodies were later found. Civil rights was a message the Klan did not want to hear so they killed somebody! Their character showed in their response to a message they did not want to hear.

One of my mentors was Dr. Don Harbuck. He tells a wonderful story about his mother who lived in Shreveport, Louisiana during the Civil Rights days. She was a liberal-minded woman who thought the Bible teaches that we should love everybody. Her friends often were exasperated with her progressive attitude toward the blacks.

On one occasion, her friend said to her, "Elsie, how did you get to be so old and so liberal at the same time?"

Mrs. Harbuck replied, "Well, I guess it is because I read the Bible every day and only talk to you once a week!" She was a woman of good character!

We are just beginning our life together, but I want to suggest to you that we are about to be tested concerning our character. It is easy to be positive and happy in the beginning of the ministry of a new pastor. We have all been excited and together, but now we are faced with a hard decision.

At their next meeting the Cabinet will vote on a controversial decision about whether we will have one service or two and whether we will worship in the Historic Sanctuary or the Christian Ministry Center.

This decision will demonstrate our character as a church and our character as individuals. No matter what decision is made, it will not be what some people want to hear. The question for us is, "How will we respond?"

In our church we agreed that we will find God's Will together. The pastor doesn't get to announce God's Will. No individual in the church gets to determine what God's Will is for us. We do that together. We instruct the Cabinet to listen to the congregation and then we entrust them to vote on important decisions.

One member told me that she sometimes hears one member announce that they are quite sure what God's Will for our church is. She says, "I always want to stand up and say, 'That's not what God is saying to me!" You see, we determine God's Will together!

How will we respond when the church makes a decision that we do not want to hear? Our response will indicate our character.

I visited with one woman who told me her preferences very clearly concerning where we worship. But then she added, "But I will go along with whatever the church decides. I decided a long time ago that I did not want to be like the Pharisees. I decided to be magnanimous about things at church. So whatever the church decides, I will support." Her character was showing!

I pray that we will respond better than the folks at Nazareth when God tells us something we do not want to hear.