Don't Throw Jesus Off a Cliff

 Luke 4: 21-30 January 30, 2022

 

Jesus preaching in his home congregation, part 2.

If you missed part one,

Jesus has been baptized, and the first thing

he does in his ministry is embark on a

preaching tour in his home county.

People love him. Then he goes to his home congregation.

He’s in front of his childhood friends, aunts, uncles,

cousins, mother, father, sisters, and brothers.

 

And Jesus read the scripture from Isaiah:

“God has anointed me to

bring good news to the poor.

release to the captives

recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to proclaim the Year of the Lord’s Favor.”

 

Then Jesus gives his very brief sermon:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In other words, just because Jesus read it, and

people heard it come out of Jesus mouth,

it has basically happened.

Mic drop. Leave the stage. Pretty bold of him.

If he wasn’t the son of God, you might think

he was egotistical.

 

Still, at this point, everyone is pretty impressed

with the “gracious words” that have come out

of his mouth. (I think they mean he seems pretty confident

not considerate and thoughtful.)
They’re proud at this point.

They all say, “My, isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
In other words, we knew him when, he’s ours, he’s one of us.

 

Oh, if he had just stopped there.

If he had just let them ooh and ahh over him and buy him lunch,

he could have healed a couple of people.

Got a good, healthy sponsorship for his ministry,

done his laundry at his mother’s house and

then just moved on to Cana or wherever he was headed next.

But no.

 

But Jesus doesn’t want to leave it at that.

Like a lot of young people who come home for the first time

after being away, Jesus wants to start something.

He tells them “Prophets are not accepted in their home town.”

In other words, he tells them they will not be accepting him.

They will not be his followers, he knows this.

 

He tells them this because he knows that

they will expect him to just come and serve his own people.

He knows the people in his hometown will expect him

to help his own family and friends before he goes out

and helps other people. “Physician heal yourself.”

He says what they’re already thinking:

“Do for your family what you’ve done in Capernaum.”

 

Family relations were everything in Jesus time.

You owed everything to your family, immediate and extended:

gifts, favors, special attention.

You stayed with them, you didn’t leave for the most part.

Family was first and second and last

and not always in a good way.

People were restrained by their family obligations

as much as they were protected by them.

People were obligated to serve their  own

and build up walls for other people.

There was a lot of talk of “us” and “them.”

 

I’m sure Jesus coming home to preach

was a sign to his people that he was finally

coming home to share the gifts he had with them:

The prestige, the healing, the favor, the salvation,

with his own people. If not exclusively, at least first.

Right? we need to serve our own first.

We’ve heard this over and over again in our politics and other places.

 

But Jesus comes to the next part of the sermon

which is what makes his friends and family loose their minds:

He says, “There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah,

when there was a severe famine yet Elijah, the prophet

was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.

And there were also many lepers in Israel in the time Elisha,

and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

Oh, they knew what that meant.

 

Elijah and Elisha were of course well known prophets.

But the widow at Zarephath in Sidon was a gentile.

And Naaman the Syrian was a gentile.

They were not family at all.

Neither of them were Jewish.

Neither one of them even believed in Yahweh.

 

What Jesus was saying was that

Elijah and Elisha could have gone out and helped

their own people first, they could have helped only

friends and relatives or at least only their own people.

But God sent them outside. To strangers

The God of Israel was working with and through

people of other faiths and no faith at all.

 

Elijah and Elisha were not sent first to the people inside

they reached the people inside through the people outside.

  

This is what got Jesus chased

out of the synagogue and almost thrown off a cliff.

And it could be argued,

this is what eventually got Jesus hung on a cross too.

 

I like to think that this kind of talk wouldn’t elicit that response

today, but this still runs contrary to main stream Christianity today.

In our consumer-based society, we fall into the trap

of thinking about our religion in the same way.

“What’s in it for me?” We want to feel comfortable,

We don’t want our Jesus to challenge us or tell us we’re wrong

or we’re not first or best.

We want Jesus to affirm everything

we’re about and everything we feel.

We want cuddly, good-pal Jesus.

Not the Jesus who we want to run off a cliff

at the end of a sermon Jesus.

 

We want a God that doesn’t challenge any of our beliefs at all.

We want that God wants us to stay just the way we are.

 

There’s a lively group of  ELCA pastors on Facebook.

We don’t always see eye to eye or get along.

But there’s usually a good discussion and we can bounce

things off one another and get good resources from one another.

We’re all usually preaching on the same things too.

This week a male preacher got a letter after preaching a sermon

about last week that had some content

about sexism and patriarchy in our churches

(seems like a topic a lot of us are talking about)

and a visitor to the church wrote a letter to the pastor

complaining about the political content of the sermon and said:

“have you thought that maybe the well-dressed, capitalist,

white, male, might feel uncomfortable coming into church hearing

a sermon like the one you preached this Sunday?”

 
The pastor was just kind of asking us how to respond to this.

He was flummoxed and had no idea what to say.

He said he was just trying to be true to last week’s Gospel reading.

People rightfully pointed out that he was being

ushered to the end of the cliff kind of like Jesus was.

 
You think Christians today would all see the irony in that.

But I guess not.

 

The people in Nazareth, Jesus home town

and many Christians today, I guess

had one main misunderstanding,

 they identified Jesus as Joseph’s son.

They identified Jesus as theirs.

 

But Jesus knew, and we know that Jesus

is the son of the living God,

the God of all, not just some.

 

Christ is the bridge between people all people.

 

Jesus is making this dramatic point in this story

and Luke includes it in there to make

a dramatic point to the people then

and to us today about Jesus life and ministry.

God will reach you and me and all of us.

That is a promise.

But if we are to trust Jesus’ gospel,

God isn’t just going to do it directly.

You, go to heaven.

That would be boring.

  

You will be saved, through the poor, through the prisoner,

through the blind, and the oppressed.

Through the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on,

through the meth addicts, and the career prisoners,

and the prostitutes, and the petty thieves,

the angry protesters that get a little out of hand,

and the tattooed, and the transgendered,

and the welfare queens,

and the unemployed Dollar Store Cashiers . . .

whoever the lost souls are of our generation.

 

This whole project of our salvation

is not going to happen independent of “them”.

So whoever you’ve been referring to

as “them” in that derogatory tone,

that’s who God is going to start with,

so we might as well start looking there

for our salvation.

 

Maybe not every person you’ve wanted

to hurl off a cliff is Jesus.

But some of them might be.

The Scripture Is Fulfilled In Our Hearing

 Luke 4:14-21 January 23, 2022 Epiphany 3

 

Christ Pantocrator
6th century
the oldest icon of Jesus

This is the beginning of Jesus ministry,

the first thing he does after his baptism.

He goes into his hometown, to his friends and family,

and he reads this scripture.

Basically his inaugural address of sorts.

It’s kind Jesus mission statement for his ministry.

 

If we were going to choose

one thing from the Old Testament to read

to epitomize Jesus’ ministry what would it be?

 

Some might say the story of

Adam and Eve and the serpent,

maybe the 10 commandments,

the story of Moses and the Exodus,

Abraham and Sarah, a psalm,

 

Maybe we would want to hear

about forgiveness of our sins

or our union with God in the after-life.

 

But Luke, the writer of one of only four gospels

chooses to highlight this one reading

that we heard today from Isaiah 61

 

The one that Jesus reads

he “has been anointed to

bring good news to the poor.

release to the captives

recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to proclaim the Year of the Lord’s Favor.”

  

That was the scripture reading.

That was the mission statement for the gospel.

Maybe not what the people were expecting.

Maybe not what we would expect.

 
Good news to the poor.

Sight to the blind.

 Release to the captives.

Help the oppressed go free.

 

That sounds like something real is going to happen.

That sounds like some of the status quo will be disrupted.

That sounds like some people are not going

 to be left feeling very comfortable.

This is exactly what Jesus friends and family are thinking.

 But we’ll hear more about them next week.

 

By the way, the last thing Isaiah and Jesus

the Year of the Lord’s Favor,

isn’t as sweet and easy as it sounds.

 

The Year of the Lord’s Favor is not just a year

when God proclaims God's love and favor for us,

 It was the year of Jubilee proscribed in Leviticus,

at the foot of Mount Sinai, and in Deuteronomy.

 

This Year of the Lord’s favor was something that was supposed to happen every 50 years,   
On the 50^th year, all debts were to be forgiven, Those people who had to work as slaves

for other people to pay off their debts,

were released and those debts forgiven.

 

Land was to be returned to its original owners.

So if some people had accumulated property

or land because someone else had to sell it to pay off a debt,

the land was to be returned to the original owner --

either given back outright or sold at a greatly

 reduced price from its actual worth.

 

This was done to prevent a great accumulation

of wealth and land by one portion of the world

and a great accumulation of debt on the other.

Every 50 years, money and land from the more well off,

were in essence, given away to the poor.

So that each person started off the same, with a clean slate.

 

But the most striking thing about the Year of the Lord's Favor,

is that although it was told to personally to Moses

by God at the foot of Mount Sinai is,

there is no evidence that it was ever actually done.

People generally believe that it was pretty much ignored,

 

The religious people paid attention other Levitical codes

they took them very literally:

They did the sacrifices,  they washed their hands at the prescribed time,  

they stoned women for committing adultery

but relieving debt and giving things back to the poor,

that was pretty much ignored .

 

We can understand that, right?

Christianity has often forgotten about Jesus inaugural

statement and the many commands in the bible to

care for the poor, release the prisoners

care for the disabled, and let the oppressed go free.

We would rather focus our time on

our personal salvation, our worship styles,

forgiveness of our sins (and judgment for others)

and Jesus guaranteeing our eternal life.

We don’t actually want God to get involved here,

in our finances, our wealth, or our comfort.

 

How would following that practice have changed our world?

How would it have changed the life of the oppressed,

or the poor, or this island?

 

At Christmas time,

when we look at that little baby Jesus

in his manger, lying there all peaceful,

we think of things like the preciousness of life,

the wonder of children, Jesus is cute and cuddly,

he fills us with pleasant thoughts.

But the epiphany realization is that

God's incarnation into humanity is not all skittles and beer,

incarnation is not all comforts and coziness.

Incarnation is God coming to this earth and making changes.

Jesus is God's word come to earth and bringing

those passages from Isaiah to life.

As well as being a comfort in our trials and struggle,

God means to get involved in this world in some really specific ways.

We understand that God loves us,

We like to say that God so loved the world.

We like to say that God loves us just as we are.

And I believe that is all true.

 

But God doesn’t want to keep us just as we are .

God doesn’t want the world just as it is.

That is why God gave us Jesus.

To challenge us. To challenge our systems.

Jesus needs us to be uncomfortable with the way things are.

and insist that they change for the sake of the poor,

the captives, the oppressed, God wants us

to WANT to see the year of the Lord.

 

Sometimes, maybe, it might be nice if God

would just stay up in the sky

sitting on a heavenly throne somewhere far off,

quietly working out my salvation.

It would be decidedly easier for many of us if

God wasn't involved in my here and now

But that’s not the God we know in Jesus.

 

Jesus is God's word come to earth.

Jesus is God's word put into action here.

Jesus is the scripture put into the world and lived out

Absolutely incarnate, and absolutely a thorn in our side.

Today still the poor are in need of some good news,

the captives are still imprisoned, the blind still can't see.

The Year of the Lord's Favor still has not happened 2,000 years later.

Now how could Jesus preach that

the scripture had been fulfilled in our hearing?

 

He can, because Jesus is the living Word

when we hear Jesus read about the poor,

and the captives, and the oppressed,

these words come alive for every new generation.

We know that he’s talking about the poor today.

the captives today, the blind today.

And Jesus talking about it, makes us talk about it too.

 

- Jesus wants us to talk about the fact that one in five children in the US

are living with food insecurity.

- He wants us to know that people with disabilities are

twice as likely to be living in poverty.

- He wants us to realize that in the US, we have only 5%

of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated people.

-He wants us to know that the richest 8% controls

2/3 of all of America’s wealth.

- He wants us to be aware that debt lines the pockets of

the wealthiest corporations, makes poor people even poorer

and cripples most of the small countries all over the world

- He wants us to talk about the fact that after eight years, and after three of the world’s wealthiest

 people have taken 10 minute joy rides into space at billions of dollars a minute,

 Flint Michigan is still drinking water out of lead pipes. 

Jesus wants us to notices these things.

 
Jesus word is real and present with us today.

Jesus words live in us and bug us and take up our time.

Jesus is still a thorn in our side.

 

And more than that,

Jesus first words of his public ministry

challenge that and tell us that he hasn’t come

to save us individually, privately, apart from another.

 

But for Jesus, our salvation is wrapped up

in the lives of others,

the poor, the prisoner, the disabled, the oppressed.

By the power of our baptism,

we are one with those in most need all over the world.

 

Let us hear the word of God new every day,

Let the word of God be alive in our world.

Let us be good news to the poor.

Let us give release to the captives.

Today, let God's word be fulfilled in our hearing.

Wedding Feast

 John 2: 1-11

Epiphany 2 January 16, 2022

 

Bob, Soupy, Pr. June, 2002

I do not mean to brag, but my wedding was fun.

Soupy Sales was there

(if you don’t know who he is, look him up

he had a children’s show in the 50’s and 60’s)

We had raffles and prizes, and a talent show,

we were encased in a giant bubble, and my

father-in-law yodeled

and played the harmonica.

People still tell us 20 years later how fun it was.

If we had any problem, it was that we

over-estimated the amount of beer people would drink

and we had to return an almost full keg of it.

But our wedding only lasted a few hours.

 

I bet that never happened at a wedding in Jesus time.

The weddings in Jesus time were supposed to last days.

And apparently there was a lot of drinking,

you were expected to drink at a wedding.

That’s apparently what held the guests there, not yodeling.

They would put out the good wine at the beginning,

like the fine French wine, then

when people got good and drunk,

they would bring out the grocery store boxed wine.

 

But at this wedding at Cana in Galilee

that Jesus, his mother, and his disciples

have been invited to, they have run out of wine all together.

Apparently, this would have been social disaster for

the couple and it would have started their marriage in shame.

But don’t worry, because Jesus is there.

Or more specifically Jesus’s mother is there.

 

Jesus is not too keen on helping out in this situation.

He says it’s not his time yet. But apparently,

his mother thinks it is his time, so he’s gonna

start flexing that divine muscle right now.

 

After Jesus’ mother coaxes her son to start doing something –

I’m guessing she used the kind of icy stare that mothers use --

he asks the waiters to fill the giant jars that were there with water.

The jars weren’t drinking jars, they were jars that were used

for water for the purity ritual – John specifically tells us this.

 

So Jesus has the servants fill those jars up with water.

And from that water, he makes this fine wine.

Wine so good that the chief wine steward was amazed with it.

And wondered why the host had held it back

and didn’t serve it at the beginning of the wedding.

 

So  in John’s gospel, this is Jesus first miracle of his ministry.

Helping keep a wedding going is not necessarily

high on the list of what people asking the savior to do.

But for John, the only place that this story appears, everything is a sign.

Not just the miracle but a sign of who Jesus was

and what he came to earth to do.

 

Jesus hasn’t just saved the reputation of a newly married couple,

and allowed a wedding to go on.

This miracle was a sign of his ministry and purpose.

So what was that sign?

 

To know what that sign was, we have to know more about those jars.

John tells us specifically that these jars are for the purity ritual.

Jesus doesn’t tell them to use wineskins, or bowls, or buckets,

but specifically these jars for ritual purity.

Meaning, the water in them was meant to be used so that

anyone who was in a state of uncleanliness,

could wash themselves in it, and they could be clean again

and approach God for meals or worship.

 

Now you would find yourself in a state of uncleanliness

for a variety of reasons: unusual bodily discharges, having a disease,

handing the ashes of a red heifer used in the water of cleansing

(which I’m not sure I really understand) or the biggest category:

having contact with anyone else who was unclean.

 

That included the diseased, like those with leprosy,

women who were menstruating, people who were sick,

people who had bad jobs like tax collectors and prostitutes

and funeral directors, and anyone else who was not ritually clean.

 

If you came into contact with any of these people

or situations, you needed to be made clean again.

 Cleanliness wasn’t primarily about germs and viruses,

it was about sinfulness or worthiness.

And it was believed that some people were just

separated from God  by things they could control,

or things they couldn’t control, and that

separation was apparently contagious to others.

 

It may have started out as a protection against illness,

but it turned into a casting of people into categories

and levels of holiness and unholiness.

 

And the cleansing ritual itself also put people

into different categories too. You had to had to be of certain means

to be able to get yourself clean again.

 

The wedding that Jesus was at had six 20 gallon jars for this ritual.

And you can imagine the house that would be required to hold

six jars that size, and they would have to have

the servants to handle them and fill them up,

and they would have to have access to water in an arid region,

That person would have to be pretty well off.

 

People without these resources would have to pay someone to have

a ritual bath, and very poor people would often never

be able to get ritually clean.

 

So only the richest people can be the very cleanest and the closest to God.

Those who are poor or just getting by would not have the resources

or the time to do the ritual, and if you were one of those

sick people, or a woman, or a funeral worker,

or a tax collector or sinner or prostitute, then forget it,

being acceptable before God was an uphill battle.

So this ritual was divisive.

It ended up creating a division of people: Clean and unclean.

And those who could get clean again.

 

Now, lest you think this is repudiation of Judaism,

many cultures and religions have similar ritual cleaning practices,

It is a human tendency to bring religion down

to these opposing factors :

Clean and unclean, holy and unholy,

Worthy of God and unworthy of God.

Saved and unsaved. Them and us.

As if there was not enough of God to go around,

so we have to compete for God’s favor and love.

 

Now as modern day Christians, we might not

be familiar with the practice of ritual cleansing or jars.

Be we are familiar with the division that religion can cause.

 

We’ve been told that if we didn’t believe in the right way

that we can’t share communion or prayer with some people.

We have been told that we have to be baptized to be saved.

or we have to be baptized in a certain way.

Or we have to belong to the right denomination

or sect of a denomination or believe certain doctrine.

 

People who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender

have been told repeatedly that they are an abomination and worse

for no other reason than their sexuality

They have been told that they could not possibly

be faithful people worthy of God’s love.

 

I have been told by more than one Christian that I

am doomed because I’m a female pastor.

And by the way, you’re all doomed too for listening to me.

  

And even outside of religious contexts,

we still like our humanity divided into camps.

We still like to blame the poor and idolize the rich.

Sometimes it’s the other way around.

We draw lines between people because of race, culture,

economics, demographics, neighborhoods, habits and

 

More than ever, we define people by

the labels of Republican, Democrat, liberal and conservative.

Vaccinated and unvaccinated. Them and us.

 

We want absolute purity in every belief and action,

and crossing those lines is a betrayal.

Clean and unclean.

 

Even today, we still like our religion and our society,

divided into comfortable groups,

by counting beans and rating sins we want to

be able to tell who is in and who was out.

And the side we’re on is always in, isn’t it.

 

This is our problem now.

And two thousand years ago, it was the problem

that Jesus was faced with at that wedding in Cana.

Them and Us.

 

So this is what Jesus does for his first sign:

He takes those giant clay jars, that religious divider,

and turns it into the finest wine, more wine than anyone can drink.

And Jesus participates in a celebration of God’s abundance.

He turns religion into an endless party for everyone.

 

The sign is this:

There is no Them and Us.

There is only us. That is the only way to approach God.

That is the only way for us to be clean before God.

This Monday we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

We remember him as a champion of civil rights and a person 

who was dedicated to realizing the kingdom of God on earth.

At a commencement speech at Oberlin College in 1965, he said this:

“What we are facing today is the fact that through our scientific

and technological genius we’ve made this world a neighborhood.

But now through our moral and ethical commitment,

we must make it a brotherhood.

We must all learn to live together as brothers and sisters–

or we will all perish together as fools.

This is the great issue facing us today.

No individual can live alone;

no nation can live alone. We are tied together.”

 

And I think after more than 50 years,

this might be even more relevant today

And Martin Luther King was only echoing

what he learned from Jesus,

what Jesus was doing with his whole ministry:

 

Showing people that we are tied together to one another.

Every life is tied to our own, and our life is tied to every other.

The more we try to separate ourselves from one another,

the more mess we find ourselves in.

 

It may seems like a good solution

to weed those “bad” people out in whatever way we want,

to stay with our own, to avoid certain neighborhoods,

only send our kids to the right schools,

to lock our doors, to stay within our gated communities,

put more of “them” in jail, to build more walls to keep “them” out.

 

But that has never kept anyone safe for long.

Jesus wants to teach us to learn how to live together

as brothers and sisters. No them and us. only Us.

We are all invited to this endless party together.

Everyone of us. No one is clean or unclean.

We are all worthy to celebrate with God.

And there is more than enough for everyone

to have and to have more.

 

We’ve tried war, dominance, segregation, tough love,

genocide, apathy, and disinterest.

Why not try Jesus way?

The great wedding feast will save us.

God’s grace will save us.

 

And grace is when God takes the divisive rules of human

institutions and transforms them into the finest wine of love.

Grace is when God takes “Them and Us”

and turns it into a party for everyone.

Grace is how we will learn to live together as one.