Getting Thrown off a Cliff

 Luke 4: 21-30 February 2, 2025

 

I got this anonymous letter about 18 years ago,

three years into being a pastor.

I have kept it framed on my book shelf since then.

It says “Pastor June is a heretic and that’s why the people

are leaving Saint Martin’s Lutheran Church in droves.”

Just by the way, people weren’t leaving in droves.

But I was put in charge of cleaning up the membership

rolls which hadn’t been done in over 10 years,

which is a pretty thankless job.

But the letter was sent anonymously, so I

couldn’t have a discussion with them about what they meant.

 

I’ve had 2 separate people come to a whole worships

in two different churches, just so they could tell me

that women shouldn’t be allowed to preach.

I was sent a really irate letter by a postal worker,

because I used the phrase “going postal” in a sermon, 

which I thought was incredibly ironic. 

And which I promised I won’t do again.

The list does go on, but I won’t go on.

I mention these because I’m not immune

to bad reactions to my sermons at all.

I think it goes with the territory.

And these really don’t bother me that much.

 

And I the first time I preached at my home congregation

they took me out to lunch.  I think they also gave me a check

to help me with my seminary expenses.

But if they ran me out of the sanctuary and 

to the edge of a cliff with the intent throw me off, 

I think that would have bothered me.

Actually, I would have thought about it every single day of my

life from then on and I might have left the ministry.

But Jesus doesn’t seem at all concerned about this reaction

He may have even provoked it intentionally.

 

Some people do preach just to be provocative and

 controversial.

I think that most pastors don’t though.

Good pastors try to make a compromise between

what we believe people can hear and accept and

what’s jangling around in our brains wanting to get out.

We’ll call that jangling “the Spirit”, but it could be a lot of things.

 

Believe it or not, I don’t say everything I think,

or even everything that I think God wants me to say.

Preachers have to consider the context, the people

they’re preaching to and where they are.

Not saying everything all at once is not selling out,

like some people think it is.

And it’s not just trying to keep your job which, I won’t lie,

does dictate a lot of what pastors say.

But It’s about knowing how to usher people gently

into a new understanding.

A lot of preachers get into trouble because they

say too much, too bluntly, too fast.

And the offense becomes greater than

the message that was intended and people can’t hear it.

What someone can say at one congregation,

we can’t say to every congregation.

And what I say after a few years, I couldn’t say in the first year.

Trust has to be built over time.

 

Some people are proud when they get a

bad response to their preaching

They say, “well if everyone is angry,

then I must have done something right.”

But to be clear, everything that is controversial

is not the truth or always led by the Spirit.

Everything that makes people angry is not the gospel.

 

I worked with a pastor who said in a sermon 

that if his own son didn’t stop dating the non-Christian woman he was dating,

he was likely to go to hell. Hmmm.

I think he deserved the line of angry people

waiting at his office to talk with him after church.

 

It was not true to the Lutheran theology he promised to preach,

And he shouldn’t have aired his personal family situations

to the whole congregation like that.

People were angry for his son and for their own children too.

 

And then even if it’s a legitimate point to be made,

I often think that if lots of people are angry,

either the message was wrong or the speaker 

didn’t consider the people they were speaking too 

well and didn’t know what people could accept 

and how they could hear and understand best. 

Or it wasn’t said with love.

 

Then other times, you just have to say what needs to be said

regardless of what the reaction might be.

Preaching at those times is like getting thrown off of a cliff.

Once it starts coming out you just have to keep going with it,

and you’re not quite sure what the landing is going to be like.

So anyway, there’s you’re lecture on preaching

 

So what was Jesus doing here in this sermon?

Was he just a young, naïve preacher who

spoke too fast and too soon?

Was Jesus being intentionally provocative?

Was he not reading the room?

Was he trying to rile up the crowd?

Was he trying to make a point?

  

Just to remind you, Jesus is preaching in his

home synagogue. He reads this scripture:

 

“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 gracious means confident

and not gentle and kind. They’re still 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 Jesus 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.

 

Jesus doesn’t want to leave it at that.

He goes on to say, “Prophets are not accepted in their home town.”

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

They will not be his followers, he knows this.

 

He says that they are going to expect him

to just come and serve his own people and he’s not doing that.

They will want Jesus to come and

to help his own family and friends before he helps other people.

That’s what he means when he says “Physician heal yourself.”

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

 

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 his own people:

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

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.

 

But Jesus comes to the next part of the sermon.

That seemed to send everyone over the edge, so to speak.

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. We might need a little explanation.

 

Elijah and Elisha were of course well known Jewish 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 even the right religion.

Neither one of them even believed in Yahweh.

 

What Jesus was saying with his scriptural reference

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.

 

In other words, God was not just for “us”.

God was for “them” too.

Those people that everyone thought were

beneath them and not worthy of their time and attention.

 

This is what got Jesus chased

out of his home church and almost thrown off a cliff.

And it could be argued, this is part of what eventually

got Jesus hung on a cross too.

 

I want to come back to that sermon by

the episcopal bishop that I talked about last week.

The heat has kind of fallen away because there

have been about a hundred other things

that have distracted us from that.

 

When the bishop spoke,

She spoke specifically to the president.

She had a plea for him to be merciful

to those other people to “them”.

That bothered some people.

The president lashed out at her for that.

And other people lashed out at her too.

Like I said, some people said it was ungodly

of her, that her compassion was sinful.

Other people said it was the right thing at the wrong time.

I’m not sure of a better time, but still.

 

Basically, people were angry with her for the 

same reason people get angry with any preacher.

Because her sermon didn’t affirm them or their positions.

It didn’t comfort them or encourage them on their chosen path.

They basically had the same misunderstanding

that the people of Jesus home town had.

They believed that Jesus was theirs.

They all believed that Jesus was working for them.

That Jesus was there to affirm and comfort them.

They were all wrong.

Jesus first objective as outlined in the

scripture from Isaiah he read is always to affirm

and comfort the poor, the marginalized,

the vulnerable, the oppressed.

 

This is the misunderstanding of the people

that were offended by the Bishop’s

sermon at the inaugural worship.

And it’s often our own misunderstanding too.

Jesus is not ours.

Jesus is not here to affirm anyone’s agenda.

Jesus is not here to make everyone or anyone feel comfortable.

You’ve heard it before, “the gospel

comforts the afflicted, and afflicts the comfortable”

 

I genuinely don’t think that the Bishop preaching

last week actually thought that the president

would listen to her and change his ways.

But she knew that other people would be

listening in to her at the same time.

 

She knew that transgender people and people who

cared for them would be listening.

She knew that immigrants and people

who cared for them would be listening.

She knew that she represented the church

and that the church should be speaking up

on their behalf and on the behalf of all the vulnerable

who are scared at this time.

 

I think the best outcome from this sermon

is that my friends who are atheist, agnostic, those who

are the “never step foot in a church again” type people

were sharing this sermon on social media and telling others

about it and also sharing the letter that the Episcopal church

sent out in support of the Bishop.

 

They saw that the church was finally representing Jesus.

and being Jesus in the world.

That the church was not just supporting the

status quo or comforting the most powerful.

 

My non-religious friends could see in

that that the church was for “Them”.

They saw that someone from the church would take

a big, personal risk on behalf of those

people that much of society looks down on.

 

It was kind of like they saw the church being what it should be.

It was like they saw the gospel at work maybe for the first time.

It’s not Jesus they have a problem with,

It’s the way the church has given into

power and wealth so easily.

 

Jesus is here to reconcile the world.

Sometimes that’s comforting.

and that sometimes gets uncomfortable.

Sometimes the same thing is comforting

to some and uncomfortable for others.

  

We don’t know if Jesus came into

his home town knowing he would make them angry,

or if he was surprised by their reaction.

 

But Luke has placed this sermon

right at the beginning of his gospel to tell you

these important things:

Jesus is not here primarily to serve his own.

Jesus is for the poor, afflicted, and oppressed.

And Jesus does not belong to us or to anyone.

 

Luke has liberated the gospel from

anything that would try and keep it captive.

God is for all people, everywhere.

And Jesus, the daring preacher, was willing to be

thrown off that cliff to prove that to us.