January 31 Epiphany 4
Have you been to one of those seminars where they say Please break into small groups? You know what’s coming next: the leader will ask you to reveal something personal about yourself to people you don’t know very well, or maybe you know them too well.When I hear break into small groups, please, my stomach muscles knot and I’m reminded of the knights in Monty Python’s “Search for the Grail”, when they say Run away, Run away. I can’t say I haven’t had some good experiences, but uncovering blind spots is almost never painless.
Like someone in a small group is apt to do, Jesus took his fellow Temple worshipers by surprise. Jesus had just returned to Nazareth from nearby Capernaum. He was asked to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah that day and to give the sermon. In today’s gospel reading we only heard Jesus’ sermon and reactions to it. In case you weren’t here last Sunday or have forgotten the Old Testament lesson from the prophet Isaiah let’s hear it now because that is what Jesus’ references:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
So Jesus read this passage and then he sat down and said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” For a moment, they forgot how unpleasant prophets could be. They felt proud of their young man, returned home to them after all they had heard he was doing in other towns. Then Jesus threw the book at them – the scroll in this case. He was harsh, telling them, as prophets will, that the prophecy was not for them because they wouldn’t hear the truth, and sure enough they weren’t willing to hear that people outside the boundaries of their religion were loved by God.
The glory of this moment was lost on them. They were insiders with a tradition and an understanding that was comfortable for them. Until they were willing to open their community to strangers, the glory of Jesus, was for people outside the community – the poor, the oppressed, and the blind — people who didn’t fit in and didn’t know God in the same way they did. This announcement was lost on them, because Jesus knew they weren’t yet prepared to open their tradition and their practices to change.
The glory of this moment was the revelation that God’s vision of community includes all of us, no matter who we are in the eyes of the community. No one is an outsider. We don’t have to be successful, or well educated, or perfect in keeping the faith. Those ways are too narrow, too exclusive. No one, Jesus reminded them, is an outsider.
Jesus also reminded them, God’s prophet Elijah went to a widow outside the community even though there were many starving widows inside the community. She listened and trusted him and gave her last meal to him for a blessing from God. God’s prophet Elisha healed a Syrian – a man who was an officer in the army of Israel’s enemies. Now Jesus would follow in the footsteps of Elijah and Elisha, going to outsiders when insiders would not hear.
In a particular one of those seminars with the small groups, Barbara Brown Taylor recalls a similar thing that happened as happened in the temple that day when Jesus read and preached.[2] The question put to these groups was, “When have you seen Christ in your life?” Whew! that seemed easy enough. As one person after another remembered times when they had been comforted or inspired by a friend or neighbor or sometimes even a stranger, the group members began to realize these were like-minded people they could trust.
Soon everyone relaxed and began to feel the warm presence of Christ, our friend, comforter, Prince of Peace. Then a hometown prophet startled everyone. “Well, the first thing I thought about,” she said, “when I tried to think who has been Christ to me was, ‘Who in my life has told me the truth so clearly that I wanted to kill him for it?’” Hers was hardly a welcome interruption to the warm fuzzies going around. Cold silence, another form of anger, fell on the circle. Nobody was in the mood to be told their thinking was pretty narrow, or to be confronted with Jesus who said hard things like “love your enemy.”
In any setting it is hard to hear God’s vision challenging us to actively seek an end to the suffering and exclusion of people on the outer boundaries of our communities. What can we do? Where do we start? It is overwhelming. It’s easy enough to send what we can to Haiti and there’s little doubt that this poorest country in the western hemisphere is at the top of the list of people who need us. But is it as easy to remember that we need them as much as they need us. The woman who was finally dug out after many days buried in the rubble after the earthquake comes to mind. Before they got to her, they could hear her singing. When they finally got to her, she might have said What took you so long? I’m in terrible pain. My leg! I thought you’d never come. but she didn’t. She kept on singing and saying God is good. Thank you. Thank you. Her patience and trust in that horrible situation brings me up short and inspires me. We need each other.
We need each other in our own country. The poor – that number now includes millions of Americans who have lost their jobs – the poor are legion. We may be headed toward economic recovery, but we can’t rest until all of them have work. What can we do? There are as many answers to that question as there are people in this room.
One thing we must not do is spend our energy simply being angry and frustrated with the mess our country is in, thereby letting God’s healing power turn and walk out on us until we calm down and begin to listen to each other. To do so is to align ourselves with the angry crowd who would throw Jesus off the mountain, rather than hear how his words guide us in our situation.
Right now, anger and frustration are fairly universal responses. Blaming is not new, but it seems to me there is a frightening escalation beyond blaming toward the demonization of anyone with whom we disagree. If we want solutions, we can’t dwell on who and what is wrong. We have to listen to what we don’t want to hear and put our mental energy into our God-given ability to think creatively about solutions. Our differences are God’s best tools for opening us to truths which are bigger that we are.
How can we find our way if we refuse to respectfully disagree, listening without judgment to all ideas and all possible solutions? How can we think at all, if we put all our energy into emotional outbursts of name calling, sarcasm, ridicule, and undermining one another like many news pundits and even some members of congress. The challenges our country faces are beyond the ability of one political party, or one neighborhood, or one church to solve. It is not either Main Street or Wall Street; it is both Main Street and Wall Street working together. Whether we call ourselves Main Street or Wall Street, as Christians, we must work together so that all people have a roof and a job.
Divided we can’t do it. All of us together must find a way to heal our wounds. We have to find out where we can agree. After all this time of anger and disagreement, we haven’t found the way or the will. Our differences can be God’s best tools for opening us to truths which are bigger that we are.
Maybe we can change goals from winning and losing to sharing what we can live without with people who can’t live without what we can share. Sharing does not deplete our resources any more than loving depletes our love. I don’t know how—it’s a loaves and fishes kind of phenomenon. God can turn scarcity into abundance. With God’s help, so can we.
God turns the words we hate to hear into words of transformation – more of God’s abundance for us. Nothing on earth is outside of God’s power to transform for good. Together we can bear to hear words we’d rather not hear. Together we can be God’s transformed people ready to act on behalf of the transformation of our country into a community in which no one is outside our community.