response to the word

from my sermon on 1/31/10 from Luke 4:21-30

Little towns want to be proud of our native sons and dughters. If you travel on HWy 84 around Littlefield, Tx, where I grew up, you will see a big billboard that says, "Home of Waylon Jennings." I remember the 4th of July when he and Willie Nelson played a free outdoor concert at the fair grounds. People would say, "He's from here, you know."

Can you see a billboard outside of Nazareth? "Home of Jesus: Preacher, Teacher, Healer." When he got up to read in the synagogue, "the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to see the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord," can you hear the people say, "He reads well." When he says, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," they say, "He preaches mighty fine too." They probably go on to say, "He did some healings among those fishermen in Capernahum. I bet he does something really special here among his hometown folks."

What did Jesus say? He is not going to do any miracles here? How dare he! I remember him as a 12 year old little boy, staying behind in the Temple. He always was a smarty-pants! And his parents, Mary and Joseph, were they even married when he was born?

You see how quickly the crowd can turn against one like Jesus. It didn't help that he pointed out their faults to them. Don't you just love it when your children come home and show you how far you have fallen from the straight and narrow? "Daddy, you told us to obey the law, so how come you have a radar detectory on the dashboard? Mommy, you said you want us to be religious, so how come we don't go to church like my friends do?"

It doesn't help if you use scripture to back up our barbs. I can hear Jesus say, "Look it up in your Bibles, I Kings 17 where Elijah stayed with a foreign widow and her son during the famine, not one from the Hebrew faith. And look it up in II Kings 5 where Elisha healed the foreign military leader Naaman from his leprosy and not one of the Jews." The hometown crowd really doesn't like this. "Is he saying that God loves outsiders as much as insiders, Gentiles as much as Jews?" "Don't quote the Bible at us Jesus; we already know what we believe!"

In today's terms we might sing with the Austin Lounge Lizards:
I know you smoke, I know you drink that brew,
I just can't abide a sinner like you.
You know God can't either, I know it's true,
That Jesus loves me, but he can't stand you.

But Jesus is totally free of his family's demands or his little town's expectations. He doesn't try to please them. He lives to please his heavenly Father. I wonder if we do.

MMPI stands for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It is the gold standard of diagnostics in psychology. In laymen's terms there are scales like nurturing, need for approval, conflict avoidance. On a scale of 1-100, where do you think pastors fall? We are in the high 90's in all of these categories. We are infected with terminal niceness. How hard it is for us to preach the hard truth.

One of my faith heroes is Thomas Merton, a contemplative monk who lived most of his life in silence and prayer. He did preach some out of his deep relationship with Christ. Once during the Civil Rights days he was preaching in the deep South, on one of these passages like that before today, about preaching good news to the poor and release to the captives. A man got up in the Catholic service and shouted, "I didn't come here to listen to this s..." You will have to supply the final word. No one has ever done that to me.

Have you had a response to the Word that strong? One of my ladies in San Saba said that from time to time she needed to have her toes stepped on. Do you remember a sermon like that? I don't remember many sermons, but I do one from seminary chapel. It didn't come from one of the professors of preaching, one of those with thundering theology and oratory gifts. It came from one of the history professors. It was pretty dry and in a monotone. The passage was one of those challenging ones where Jesus asks us to count the cost as we go out to spread the gospel, not to take extra food or clothes and to depend upon God. This professor said, "We really don't practice this. We fall short of what Jesus asks." You could have heard a pin drop. The truth had been spoken in our midst.

We didn't take him outside and throw him off a cliff. You know you can have death by stoning by throwing stones at someone or by throwing someone onto stones. How did Jesus get out of the angry crowd? He had more work to do. He wanted to keep spreading the word that God's love was for everybody, especially the one we think is most unlikely. He is still walking into our midst with the same challenge.

I really don't wake up on Sunday mornings with the intent of alienating a lot of people. You like it when I close the sermon, "this is the good news I have to share with you today." The good news may at first be bad news of confrontation to us before it is good news again. The good news is that Jesus won't stop until we understand all are loved by Him. Who might we be excluding? What will be our response? This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.