Epiphany 4
January 31, 2010
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30
So. What would you do to me if I stood in front of you today and claimed to be the one who would fulfill the prophetic words of Isaiah? Call the bishop? Bring in the Department of Mental Health? Or would you do what the people did to Jesus? I can’t even imagine what I would do. But today we learn what Jesus does. He utters words we often hear spoken by those who suffer rejection at the hands of the people of this hometown. “No prophet is accepted in [his] hometown.” How true. Perhaps this is because of another familiar phrase we often hear about people we know well: “familiarity breeds contempt.”
We face the threat of rejection whenever we speak or act outside the expectations of those who know us so well. Rejection is the problem Jesus contends with in today’s gospel lesson. Last weeks dramatic proclamation by Jesus is followed in this week’s gospel lesson with a moment of awe and congratulations. Until someone asks that question which provokes the most damning doubt. Wait a minute. Isn’t this Joseph’s son? Then the complaint. Who does he think he is? What gives him the right! Jesus only makes things worse by trying to explain himself. In their minds this mere son of a carpenter is an offense to them and an offense to God. Then comes the most severe form of rejection. The threat of death.
And yet there is good reason why Jesus would choose to inaugurate his ministry in his home town. After all, history shows that inaugurating an important life change amidst family and friends serves to support us and promote our interest, and when we make good, our home town benefits by our good repute.. All you have to do is watch the local news or read the local newspapers to know how much people enjoy headlining a local boy (or girl) who makes good. So, why doesn’t this work for Jesus? Why is Jesus literally driven out of town and into the hills where people threaten to throw him off a cliff? What nerve did Jesus hit in his townspeople that would bring them to such violence and seek his death?
The answer lies in that very response Jesus makes to those who doubt his claim to godly fame. Jesus does not claim to be the local boy who will make his family and hometown proud. Jesus is claiming something much different and more dangerous. Jesus is claiming to be the Messiah, and he makes that claim in the prophetic tradition in the words of Isaiah. And we know what happens to the Old Testament prophets when they make their prophetic proclamations; they are not well-received by the people God sends them to. So we should not be surprised that Jesus’ prophetic claims are not well-received. Especially since his claims goes well beyond being a prophetic voice. Jesus claims to be the One who will fulfill God’s promise of salvation. He will do far more than speak to a sinful world; he will save us from our sin. And no one can believe that God would choose a hometown boy to take on a role like that.
The irony of Jesus’ rejection by his hometown people in the synagogue that day is that Jesus spent his entire life and ministry traveling through hometowns, calling hometown people to be his disciples. And before he left this earth he gave each of them the great commission: to go into all the hometowns of this world to continue making disciples of hometown people. But there is a clear warning to those who answer that call. Luke wants us to know what God requires of us when we witness to the injustices of sin in our world, yes, even in our hometown. We, too, set ourselves up to ridicule and scorn; we even become vulnerable to violence and the threat of death. And there is no better time for us to hear Jesus’ story than in this period of Epiphany. Because our season of Epiphany calls each of us to manifest God to our world. Epiphany reminds us that we are to read the words of the prophets to the people of our own hometown by the very life we live among them. Epiphany invites us to see the injustices of our own communities through God’s eyes and to act as God would have us act to address them.
Easy to say, isn’t it. Especially in this safe environment we call the church. But not so easy to do. Jeremiah is only one of the many patriarchs and prophets in scripture who show us how easy it is to read and pray and talk the talk of God, but how difficult it is to walk the walk, even when we want to. That’s because all we can see is our inadequacies and all we can feel is our resistance. We can’t imagine that God would choose ordinary persons like ourselves to do his extraordinary work. Surely God could find someone who is smarter and stronger, more articulate and more courageous than any one of us. That’s what Jeremiah thought, and Moses and Isaiah and so many others. But God calls us; ordinary people like us. People who have no special gift for prophecy, no special courage for acting against injustice, and no special desire to be hated or to be heroes. We can resist all we want; we can give one excuse after another, and we can choose to say no, because God will always allow us to choose to say no. But in the end, God wants us. We are the only people God has to proclaim his favor on those who suffer the injustices of this world. And God assures us, as he assured all of his prophets, if we choose to be his agent for good in the bad situations we encounter in our world, he will put the words in our mouth, the strength in our arms and the courage in our hearts to do the right thing, the good thing, the just thing that will bring his kingdom closer to our world
God tells Jeremiah, “I will put my words in your mouth…appoint you to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.” Have you ever been surprised to find yourself saying words you never though you would have the courage to say to right a wrong or address and injustice? God put them in your mouth. “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me,” states Martin Luther before a religious tribunal in the early sixteenth century. The words of this meager monk ignited the Protestant Reformation. Have you ever found yourself rooting out an evil which needs to be destroyed, and even destroying it? Just read the stories of ordinary people throughout Europe and Scandinavia who, at the risk of death, harbored Jews and other undesirables from Nazi soldiers under the evil rule of Adolph Hitler during WW II. God helped them pluck up that evil and other common wartime heroes helped to destroy it. Have you ever taken someone down from a wrongful place of power, or overthrown an unjust system to replace it with a more just one? Look at the work of civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, who dismantled racist laws and institutions to make way for civil rights for all people, regardless of color, gender, religion and sexual orientation. Have you ever helped to build up someone who felt less valued because they did not have the same rights, or abilities, or privileges enjoyed by others? It is God who enables teachers and social workers, health care providers and religious communities to give people the resources and confidence they need to claim their value as children of God. Have you ever planted a new idea or a new hope in someone and nurtured its growth for a good purpose? Walk a mile in the shoes of a missionary or relief worker, or people from modest background who become wealthy enough to put vast amounts of their money and resources into improving the living conditions of people who live marginal lives in unstable and underdeveloped countries. Pockets of which you can even find in our own country. Yes, it’s true; God even uses ordinary people like us to build up and to plant.
But there is also a downside we can expect when we answer God’s call to justice. Like the prophets and like the God who came into our world to live and die as one of us we will also suffer the indignities of ridicule, scorn, abuse, rejection and, yes, even death when we become agents of God. We know why Jesus was treated with such hostility by the people of his town. He made a blasphemous claim which had unpopular consequences for the powerful religious and the political elite. He was supporting the biblical imperatives of justice and inclusivity. Jesus tells his Jewish neighbors that they can no longer have an exclusive claim on God. And the world can no longer have an exclusive claim on power and privilege. Jesus has come to establish the year of the Lord’s favor on all of God’s people. For Jews, this is code for the Year of Jubilee established in Jewish Law to restore justice and righteousness to its people every 50 years. In the 50th year lenders forgave the debt of every person who was indebted to them, and personal land and human property was returned to its original or rightful owner. Imagine that. Even more, everyone was given a fair share of resources to meet their basic needs.
Imagine everyone beginning every fiftieth year on equal par with each other. What would it look like if Jesus came to establish a year of the Lord’s favor on the people of these United States. What would it look like if preferential laws and treatment were given to people who are poor and marginalized, or just plain middle class. This is what I imagine. I imagine that financial bailouts would not just go to banks, they would go to working people whose incomes continue to decline while the incomes of the wealthy continue to climb. I imagine that large corporations and their CEO’s would be required to give back to the people a fair percentage of their profits and their bonuses. I imagine that all people who want to work would have a job, and a fair wage to support a moderate lifestyle. I imagine that all people would be guaranteed basic human needs as a human right, like adequate food, clothing, shelter, and, yes, healthcare.
These are just a few of the injustices I believe Jesus would overturn in bringing the year of our Lords’ favor. But there is a good reason why that doesn’t happen very often or very easily in our world. It’s because those who have been favored by our world, or by an accident of birth, already have the power, and the money and the privilege to maintain the status quo. I see how they operate in the halls of congress and in the mega banks and corporations of our world. They plot, and deceive and issue threats to those who seek to right their wrongs and overturn their unjust policies. And when they feel the threat of justice they become as angry as the Jews in that synagogue at the thought that they might have to give up some of their power and privilege for the sake of creating a just and fair world. Because we know for a fact that people who have power, and wealth and privilege will not give them up willingly or easily.
So, who will be the One. Who among us will be bold enough to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Who among us will find the courage to take up the challenge to proclaim the year of our Lord’s favor in our own day, to the people of our own country, no less to the people of our world.
If the words of Jesus and the work of the prophets teach us anything today, they teach us the ways of justice. They teach us that more than senators and congressmen, more than Wall Street traders and CEO’s, more than more than priests and presidents, rulers and kings, we need prophets. And they are us. We need that son of a carpenter. And he is Jesus.