What Went Wrong?

Luke 4: 21 - 30

January 28, 2007, The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Anthony Robinson

Well, it’s great to be here with you at Saint Mark Presbyterian. I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday with your Elders, Deacons, pastoral staff, and members of the Long Range Planning Team at their Leadership Retreat. A wonderful group. You are a church that has done extraordinarily well with the transition following a long pastorate. You are a church of significant strengths and vitality. And you are in a position to build on those strengths and approach the future with a sense of God’s promise.

Occasionally when I preach at congregations where I have been doing this kind of work I preach on related themes related to it: leadership, church renewal and the like. But I really prefer to preach on the given passages for the day from the Common Ecumenical Lectionary, and that is what I am doing today. Our text is the gospel lesson for this Sunday. It is the second half of Luke’s story of the sermon of Jesus in his hometown of Nazareth.

Last Sunday I happened to be at an Episcopal Church in Seattle, where I live. I had taught at their adult forum. The worship service following was led by the youth of that church. The sermon was given by a very articulate and appealing young man, Danny Kim. It was almost a re-enactment of the text itself. In the original, the young man Jesus returned to his hometown and home synagogue after being out on a mission trip of sorts; now, Danny returned to his hometown and church after a youth group mission trip. He was so well-spoken, and all the folks in the congregation spoke well of him. They were so clearly proud of that young man, as well as the other young people who played roles in the service. As Denny spoke on the first half of this story of Jesus in Nazareth, it was uncannily like I imagine that day in the synagogue to have been so long ago. And yet only to a point.

Because, after starting so well in Nazareth, things went sovery wrong. For a brief moment, I tried to imagine what Danny Kim might have had to say or to do to provoke that congregation in Seattle to turn on him the way the congregation in Nazareth turned against Jesus. But it was not the kind of thing to think about for long.

Still, in Nazareth, in the rest of today’s scripture, what went wrong? How did it happen that at verse 22 the congregation’s members were pointing to Jesus with pride, nudging the neighbor next to them to say, “I remember when he was just a little guy, look at him now!” And yet by verse 29 they had risen up against Jesus. They led him out of the city to be thrown off a cliff. What went wrong?

We may find a clue when we look back at the text Jesus read before he preached. He read from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind . . .” You know those words. But if we look back to Isaiah we see that Jesus left something out, he stopped short. The omitted words may be a clue to what went wrong. And what were the missing words? “To proclaim the day of vengeance of our God.”

There was no “day of vengeance,” no “sock-it-to-’em,” no retribution for our enemies, no day of the Lord when the good guys are rewarded and the bad guys blown away.

And when Jesus got around to the sermon, he made explicit what until then was only implicit. He spoke of God’s works of mercy for a widow in the foreign land of Sidon, and God’s healing of a Syrian military general, of all people. Jesus noted that the prophet’s Elijah and Elisha had not done their healing work in Israel but among despised outsiders and foreigners. Thus was hometown pride hurt, then did admiration sour with offense and curdle into indignation.

Yesterday during his opening remarks at the leadership retreat your pastor noted the story in the morning paper about the Amish who were rebuilding a school that had been destroyed after five children were shot to death in it last fall by a madman. Roy reminded us of what we also knew, of how the Amish responded to that terrible deed: with mercy, with forgiveness. They forgave the murderer; they reached out to his widowed wife and three children. Moreover, the Amish shared with the murderer’s family a substantial portion of the money that came from all over the country as a sign of sympathy and concern.

Roy said how moved he had been by this remarkable demonstration of faith. He also said that at the time it happened he had been with a group of people and that some in the group were bothered by what the Amish had done, disturbed by forgiveness. Like Roy I admired what the Amish had done. But I have a confession. I too was bothered. A voice, a little voice within me said, partly in amazement but partly in offense, how could they do that?

Jesus told the people at Nazareth that God had reached out in mercy to people that they did not think deserved it. That God had been gracious to the people of Sidon and to Syrians, even passing over Israelites. In this way Jesus framed and interpreted his own ministry, for he too had been doing his own works of healing and mercy in the largely non-Jewish areas of Capernaum and Galilee.

“Wait a minute,” thought the people in the Nazareth synagogue, “what’s up with that? We are the ones who have been going dutifully to synagogue, keeping the law all these years, and you--you of all people, our own flesh and blood, kin--you are telling us that God is merciful to outsiders, to known sinners, to those who have done terrible things to us? No way, that just isn’t going down here!”

What went wrong? Here’s the answer. “Grace.” Grace is what went wrong. Grace to the undeserving. Grace to sinners.

The people in the synagogue in Nazareth knew they deserved God’s blessing and favor. They were good people, the good people--at least they thought so. Initially, the presence of this well-spoken, gracious young rabbi Jesus, a local boy making good, only seemed to confirm that self-image. “There, look at that boy Jesus, one of ours, chip off the old block.”

And then Jesus said, God is gracious to sinners, to outsiders, to our enemies. And then the Amish forgave a murderer and welcomed his family, and I was, well, I was a little uncomfortable with that. I wasn’t sure that was right. I wasn’t sure.

Two years after 9/11 one of our senators from Washington State set off a storm of anger and outrage. What went wrong? Senator Patty Murray said that while Osama bin Laden had done terrible and evil things, and that he was responsible for murder, we also if we were going to understand things needed to understand that bin Laden had done some good things at least in the eyes of people in his part of the world. He had bluntly criticized the corruption of the Saudi royal family, he had created a number of small businesses. He had provided employment for many desperately poor people. Bin Laden had done some good things once. “How dare she?” thundered outraged talk radio hosts, politicians, citizens. The outcry against Senator Murray was a blazing forest fire of self-righteous fury and hatred. “How dare she say something like that about this evil man, our enemy?” “Recall her! Impeach her! Kill her!”

What went wrong? Grace went wrong. God pours out God’s mercy in unexpected places, among people we think undeserving, among people who are undeserving.

A couple years back the congregation I was serving started a mid-week jazz service. We were a downtown church, quarter a million office people working within a six block radius of our church. We started a noon hour, Wednesday jazz service for people working downtown. We even hired a public relations person to help us get the word out.

Our PR person called me up one day to say that she had arranged for me to be interviewed on a radio show about the service. “Great,” I said. “Yes,” she continued, “on KCRN on the campus of Christa.” “Oh no,” I thought, “that’s one of those Christian evangelical stations, people with big hair talking about how Jesus made them successful in their business! Not that, not there, anyplace but there. I’d be embarrassed to be heard on that station. What will people think? Besides the KCRN people will probably bring up the fact that we’re a church that welcomes gay and lesbian people and tell me how evil and wrong we are! O Lord, not KCRN!”

When the day came I went, like some modern day Jonah heading for Nineveh, dragging my feet, muttering to myself, protesting to God. I slunk into the station where I was greeted warmly by a person with one head and no visible horns. She expressed such genuine appreciation that I had come. In the studio the interviewer was enthusiastic about our new jazz service. He told his listeners what a wonderful, innovative step it was. He asked about our church and praised our outreach. He prayed, on air, for the success of the service. I staggered out of the station thinking, “It’s true, isn’t it God, that your thoughts aren’t my thoughts, your ways not my ways. I’m not sure I like that!”

What went wrong? Grace went wrong.

When we leap up in righteous indignation, offended by grace, when we welcome grace for ourselves but insist on justice for others, and just desserts for our enemies, have we forgotten who we are? Have we somehow come to think that we are the righteous ones, the enlightened ones who deserve God’s favor and society’s applause?

Perhaps we have forgotten that we too are recipients of amazing grace, of undeserved mercy. Rather than earning or deserving everything I’ve received, I have received more than I deserve. I have been the beneficiary of second chances, of opportunities, of love that I can never claim as my due or deserving.

“Maybe, just maybe, from where God sits,” writes one author, “we are all a mess. Some of us clean up better than others and some of us have figured out how to manage our fears by doing good works, but when you get right down to it, we are all prodigals and neer-do-wells. Only I do not think God would put it like that, because those are human labels full of human judgments. From where God sits, I expect we look more like hurt, sick, lost children, all of us in deep need of mercy.”

Your vision purpose statement here at Saint Mark is a wonderful one. It says, “We seek to be a community where Spirit and service come together.” Let me suggest, that this text in which Jesus reminded those who thought themselves righteous while imagining others to be undeserving jerks or worse, is the faith nexus that forges an enduring link between Spirit and service.

Sometimes we try to break that link. We come to think of service as evidence of our virtue, of our enlightenment. We have imagined that Christianity itself is a religion of virtue. But no, Desmond Tutu, reminded us “Christianity is not a religion of virtue; it is a religion of grace.” And there’s a difference.

A religion of virtue says, “If you are good, then God will love you.” A religion of grace says, “God loves you.” God loves you despite your foibles and failures, not because you’re so good but as a sinner in need of mercy.

God loves you, live then as one who are beloved, who has been forgiven.

That is the nexus between spirit and service. Having known mercy, we are to be merciful. The final work of grace is to make us gracious. When this spirituality ceases to shape our service and witness for justice, we become a short-term militia, energized by the cause of the moment but not funded for a lifetime or the long haul. Without Spirit there is no truly honest service. Without service to the broken and the lost, our claims to Spirit have no reality. They are without substance.

Last week I happened to meet up with a pastor whose congregation I had worked with several years ago. At that time they were just completing a large capital fund drive and long overdue renovation of their church building. It had been somewhat controversial. Some had said, “It’s spending money on ourselves.” So, in 2000, when they began that project they decided that 10% of the money raised would go to social services in the community. It reflected what I have come to believe an outmoded understanding of the church. The church is “for us,“ mission is “for others.“

Now in 2007 they need to have another capital drive. The last one was large, but it wasn’t large enough to cover all the work that was uncovered when they opened up a building 150 years old.

This time when some got up to protest spending this money “on ourselves,” another member of the congregation rose to respond. He said, “we are not spending this on ourselves. The church is not ours, its not for us. It’s for all people. There’s a world of folks out there who need God, who need to know about God’s grace for sinners, about second-chances, and about lives of service and discipleship. That’s what this church is for.”

Then he made a motion. He moved they add 10% to the new fund drive, the money to be used to grow people of faith, to grow people’s faith, even though they didn‘t know exactly how that would happen.

“If we can do that,” said the man who made this motion, “if we can change lives and grow people’s faith, and help people to truly be disciples of Jesus we will do so much for the world than just sending 10% to agencies in town.” And the congregation, said this astonished pastor, voted for the new motion and idea. In doing so they said that our job, as the church of Jesus Christ is to change lives, to make disciples of Jesus Christ, to grow people who understand that they have been blessed to be a blessing. That’s why we’re here.

That’s the job you have given to yourselves, to be a people where Spirit and service come together. I can think of no more important work in which to be engaged today.

May God bless you in this ministry, and lead you to places and to people far beyond your present thoughts and imaginations. Thanks be to God, who is merciful to sinners. Amen