Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
January 28, 2007
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30
It’s not easy being a prophet. Just listen to the stories of Jesus and Jeremiah. In today’s scripture lessons we get a glimpse of what it is like to take up God’s call to be a prophet among people who don’t realize how desperately they need to hear the words a prophet will speak to them. In the case of Jeremiah and so many other the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, God calls people who believe they have little talent and no stomach for the job. They are well aware that being a prophet requires a person to speak on God’s behalf with clarity and authority so that God’s purposes will be served in the world. That is why so many resist God’s invitation. They consider themselves ordinary men—farmers and fishermen, tradesmen and young men who had not gained any status or favor in their community.
You might remember that Moses stutters when he speaks, Amos is, and will always think of himself as a farmer. Hosea comes from a dysfunctional family and Jeremiah claims that he is only a boy and does not have the words to speak. But like so many others, these are the people God calls to be prophets to the people of Israel. And they are a lot like you and me. They are a lot like any one of us who have experienced something of what it is like to be a prophet in our own place of work or in our community—even in our family. That moment you spoke out against injustice, you blew the whistle on wrongdoing, you intervened in a dangerous or chaotic situation. The time you had a plan no one would accept, because you had a vision no one shared.
If you have ever experienced what it was like to be a prophetic voice in any of these ways you will remember that your experience was much like that of Jeremiah and Jesus as they began their own prophetic ministry. Like Jeremiah, you found yourself in a desperate situation which was calling you to speak out. It required the right words to say and courage to say them. And before you knew it you found yourself speaking the very words you thought you could never say. They didn’t even sound like your words, but you felt them to be true and you spoke them with clarity and conviction. That is because like Jeremiah, God had put his words in your mouth. You might have been shaking and trembling in fear, but you were not afraid. You knew there was nothing to fear because God was in this with you. In fact, in that moment and in every moment like it in your life, you felt closer to God and more like the person God created you to be. It was a moment when God appointed you to change something, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow,” but it was also a moment to “build and to plant.” To do what you needed to do to right a wrong, to bring something good out of something bad--even evil, to bring peace to a place of conflict or justice to people too powerless to speak for themselves.
Challenging the way things are in the hope of what they might become is the role of a prophet. And you can find such prophets in every generation. They are the saints of the church—the apostles and martyrs. They are St. Augustine and St. Francis of Assisi. They are the modern day prophets who have changed the course of history—people like Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They are Mother Theresa and they are people like us—people who will not achieve lasting recognition in the annals of history, but people, nevertheless, who will respond to God whenever he calls us to say the words and to do the deeds which serve God’s purposes for his kingdom in this world. Even when those purposes threaten to risk our reputation, our popularity and possibly even our life. And why would we risk anything to answer a compelling call from God to engage in a prophetic moment? Because serving God is more important than serving the needs of our reputation, or our popularity—even our life.
This is where we meet Jesus in our Gospel lesson for today. Jesus has answered the call of prophecy. And he has come to the most difficult place anyone can be to speak a prophetic word. After spending several years away, Jesus has come back to his home town, to his family and to his extended family in his community. He has become something of a legend for all the good reports people have heard about him. You can just picture the headlines in his hometown newspaper: “Hometown boy makes good; honored by family and friends.” In a modern sports metaphor he is the high school football star who has achieved the distinction of being the most valuable player on his college team. But Jesus will soon learn that he has no home field advantage in coming home to play his game.
Jesus comes back to his hometown NOT to proclaim the words people want to hear; he has come back to proclaim the word God has given him to say. And neither Jesus nor his words will be accepted or acceptable. After Jesus proclaims himself to be the One who is to fulfill the promises of scripture, they learn that he is not the One they were expecting to be their Messiah. But Jesus already knows he will not be accepted in his hometown because prophets are never accepted by their own people. Then Jesus adds insult to injury. He indicates that the acceptance is the very message he has come to proclaim. Jesus makes reference to two well known events in Hebrew scripture in which the prophets Elijah and Elisha were sent to minister to people who were not only not Jews, they were not accepted or acceptable to their own communities. Elijah and Elisha are models for Jesus’ own prophetic ministry; Jesus has come not only to Jews but to all people who will receive him. This is nothing short of blasphemy for all who hear Jesus’ message, and the people become furious with him.
They become even more outraged when they remember that Jesus is Joseph’s son. Because in a world where everything you are and do is judged by categories of honor or shame, Jesus has not only brought dishonor to Jews, he has brought shame to his family and his community. He has stepped beyond the acceptable boundaries of family and community expectation. He is not the same person he was when he left Nazareth and it is clear that he has no intention of becoming the person he is expected to be by his birth and by his father’s vocation. The people will not tolerate insult or dishonor, even from one of their own. They are so angry they decide to kill Jesus. They drag him to a hilltop where they plan to throw him off. But Luke tells us he simply “passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
It would have been so easy for Jesus to go back to his family and community, secure in his reputation and in his vocation as the son of a carpenter. But once you have been called to become the person God created you to be, once God gives you the words to speak and the courage to speak them, there is no going back. Jesus knows that. We know it, too. It is difficult to remain the same person people remember you to be when God call you to a new place in your life. It changes you. And no matter how hard you try to fit expectations when you return home, the ways you have changed are noticeable. Long after Jesus told us that no prophet is accepted in his hometown, American author Thomas Wolfe wrote the novel, “Look Homeward, Angel,” around the theme, “You can’t go home again.” The obvious question to ask, then, is why did Jesus go back to his hometown? Why do we? There are undoubtedly more answers for that than I will give for the purposes of this sermon, but I cannot help but think that Jesus goes back for the same reasons we all go back, even knowing that we have changed, that we have become a different person. Even knowing that we might not be accepted for that difference. We go back because we love the town we came from. We love the people who lived there with us. We love the parents who gave us life and made a living for us, and we love the people who challenged us to learn and grow, and nurtured us to become the good persons we had become. It is all about the ways were loved. And the ways we learned to love in return. We go back because we hope we will be accepted for who we are and who we have become. But the fact that we are not reveals the limits of human love and acceptance. What we yearn for—even if we have never stepped inside a church; even if we do not even have a reference for God—what we yearn for is to love and be loved as God loves. That is why I found it so compelling that our lections for this week include Paul’s well-known passage about love to his beloved church at Corinth.
It occurred to me that in the end, the only reason why we garner the strength and courage to change and grow and become the people God created us to be is because of love. The only reason we can accept a call from God to be a prophetic voice in the communities we belong to is because of love. There can be no other reason why nor any other purpose for saying words and acting in ways which seem so risky and uncharacteristic of us, so scary and compelling at the same time. Paul tells us that prophetic powers have no effect without love. Knowledge and understanding, talent and skill, faith and good works are nothing without love. Without love, they are hollow and powerless, or they are so full of themselves that they do not have the effect God intends for them to have. It is love which fuels the prophetic voice. It is love which makes effective use of knowledge and understanding, talent and skill, faith and good works. It is love which challenges us and changes us. It is love which makes us secure in the person we continue to become. And so Paul has his own version of not going home again. Paul knows that it is love which enables us to put away childish things so that we can mature in God’s love. It is love which helps us put away the hollow and puffed up claims of our youth so that we can become vulnerable and open to God’s love and to sharing that love with others. When children of God are willing to take God’s hand and be taken on a journey to the places we are meant to be on in our life, we cannot go back to being the children we were. We put away the self-centered and foolhardy love of our childish ways for a love which reaches beyond ourselves. So we shouldn’t be surprised that we cannot go home again, not as the person we were. Our journey with God is changing us, and people are going to notice.
Paul suggests that you can know if you are growing into the mature love of God by how countercultural your love is. How patient your love is in an impatient world; how kind your love is in a world which is combative and mean spirited; how charitable your love is in an envious and boastful world; how much your love is able to give in a selfish and possessive world; how compassionate and forgiving your love is in a cold and unforgiving world; how truthful your love is in a world where lies and deceptions are necessary for getting what you want. Paul would have us know that love can bear the consequences of living a countercultural life. Love enables us to endure the heat which comes from being a prophet in our own town. Love fuels hope and possibility for the future, and love makes us able to Be the difference which MAKES a difference for that future in every present moment.
It seems to me that Paul has described what it takes to answer the call of God to be and do whatever it is he is asking of us. It takes love. It is clear to me that it was Jeremiah’s love for God and his trusting in that love which prompted him to accept God’s call to become a prophet. And it is a fact that Jesus, himself, IS love. He came to us by love and he came to us for the sake of love. There is nothing Jesus can do or be outside of God’s love. Both Jesus and Jeremiah make it clear that to answer the call of God to speak for him and represent him in this world, it takes love. A deep and passionate love. A love which will not let us go. A love which stirs a fire in your belly, a fire which fuels your resolve to be the person God is calling you to be and to do the work God is calling you to do. But how can we know such love? How can we nurture it? How can we grow in it? How can it make a difference in our life? How can it make a difference in our world?
Well, if you have been fortunate enough to be nurtured in love by your family and community, you might think you have little need of these questions and you undoubtedly believe you are already living into the answers. But I believe all of us are in need of the love God has to give. We are not likely to experience any more love or any better love from this world as we know it. And the love we experience might not much resemble the love Paul describes for us or the love Jesus shows us. We need to know the difference. To know the difference we need to know God. We need God, and we need each other to teach us such love. We need to be in regular conversation with God. That is called prayer. We need to talk to God in formal prayer and in conversational prayer. We need to be in regular conversation with each other. Real conversation. Conversation which is not afraid of truth. Conversation which is honest and candid, giving and forgiving. Because love and truth are the only things which can set us free to live in God’s love and truth. We need to be in regular communion around this table. We need to worship God in the beauty of holiness and in the joy of thanksgiving in the Eucharist. We need to enjoy God and enjoy each other. We need to work together and we need to be together for the fun of it. We need to eat and laugh and sing and play and even dance together. We need to tear things down so that we can build anew; we need to pull things up so that we can plant anew. And when we leave each other’s company, we need to be the body of Christ in the world. Loving and serving those who need us most, and those who think they need us least.
I believe there is much truth in the lyrics of a popular evangelical song, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” But if people are to know us by our love that love will look different from the kinds of love the world has to give. We who live in God’s love will live differently in the world. And like Jesus and Jeremiah we, too, are likely to suffer the consequences of our difference. We will not be accepted for who we are because of who we have become. We will know ridicule and scorn, and we will suffer rejection, even by those we love. Even worse, others will find ways to use us or put up with us for any number of reasons which suit their need of us. And we will find that once we have been called to love and serve God with gladness and singleness of heart we will never be able to go home again, because home is no longer a place for us to go to. Even Jesus knew that he would not be going home to Nazareth that day. Because home for one who answers the call of God is anywhere you are in God’s presence. Home is literally where your heart is. Home is a place inside of you. A place you can feel loved and secure in that love regardless of what is happening around you.
Early Christians understood home not as a place, but a Way. A Path. They believed that once you became a follower of Jesus, your home was with God. They believed that the pathway that led you home to God was a journey, a journey of the heart which would lead you to the places you needed to go in this life, and to the people God meant for you to be with. Yes, they lived in places which sheltered them from the elements. But a place of shelter was different from a home. Home was a place where you were at home with yourself, at home with others and at home with God. It’s a wonderful thing when you can feel at home with yourself. At home in your own body. At home with the people around you, at home with God. You realize that home is where you are and what you make of it. You no longer need to live by the expectations of your past. You no longer have to live in fear or anxiety about your future. All you have to do is trust God and listen. Listen to where God is calling you to go next. And go there.