December 3, 2006
Title: Killing The Messenger
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to
the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to
read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled
the scroll and found the place where it was written:
‘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 favour.’
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.
The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to
say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All
spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came
from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them,
‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And
you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have
heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet
is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there were many
widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for
three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the
land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath
in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet
Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’
When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They
got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on
which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he
passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
It is amazing, how things have happened to this Jesus of Nazareth since
he left home. He had left town months earlier and something happened,
something had changed this boy, now this man, from Nazareth. For
some reason, he had left the village he had grown up in, and no one
really quite knew where he went during that time—he just left town and I
suspect there was no going away party, no big hurrah. This young man
from Nazareth was driven out of town, but not by the townspeople, not by
the people he had grown up with, but by the Holy Spirit, so says the text
from the Gospel of Luke. The whole idea is that what set him out on this
journey towards God, and towards his destiny was something he couldn’t
resist—and if the scene near the end of his life at the Garden of
Gethsemane is any indication, it took something as powerful as the
breath of God to move him out of his place of safety, his home, and onto
the cross, and into our imagination, and into our lives. That Spirit drove
him out to the desert, where the Adversary, where Satan takes him to his
limits, and tempts him to go the way that so many talented and gifted
men and women have gone, which is to use those talents and gifts for
themselves, for their own personal power and their own
aggrandizement. But he resists that temptation, he does what so few of
us can do, and says “no” no, that will not be the road he walks. And
tattered and worn-out, and surely a little skinnier from the experience,
Jesus makes his way back to Galilee—and he is different, of course, very
different, because of what has happened to him, and I suspect they
notice something when he finally arrives back in Nazareth, these friends
and family, they notice something different about him.
And I suspect that what they saw was a man who had made peace with
that very Spirit that drove him out into that wilderness. I think there was
something even more unusual about him now, that something had
changed in him, and that he seemed less troubled now than he had
been growing up amongst them. I mean, these people, the people of
Nazareth, who had seen this young son of Mary and Joseph grow up in
their midst, they knew this boy, perhaps as well as they knew their own
children. We all know what its like to live in small towns, where people
know each other and know each other’s children, and we know how kids
in neighborhoods travel in packs like kids do, and so they were quite
familiar with who Jesus was. The acne years, the teenage years, the
awkwardness that comes with becoming an adult—I suspect that even
those painful times in a young person’s life didn’t diminish how different
Jesus was from their own children, that there was something special
about him. And yet, that difference probably didn’t seem to make him
any less popular with their children, which made his homecoming in our
text this morning, especially sweet.
But before he stepped back into town, something else had happened
between the time Jesus left the desert and the time he arrives back
home to Nazareth. You see, he had begun his ministry, and the writer of
Luke says that he went out teaching in the synagogues throughout
Galilee, full of that Spirit that had driven him out of Nazareth in the first
place. He had come to acquire some fame, and that difference that folks
in Nazareth had always noticed in him, that charisma no one quite knew
what to do with, it has attracted a following and what he said and taught
became the hottest ticket going in the region of Galilee. When he comes
back home, he is the hometown boy made good—the guy who goes off
and makes a million somewhere else, or becomes the starting
quarterback at Michigan or State and then he’s off to the NFL, but
eventually comes home to visit and the town is in a titer. He has already
made a name for himself, and so those kids that he grew up with are now
his age, and some of them have their own children, and so they’ve come
to see him in the synagogue again—I suspect they had seen him there
many, many times before, but this time, this time is special—Jesus, their
friend, has made a name for himself.
As he enters the synagogue, Jesus’ eyes catch the eyes of the people
he knows and loves, and the crow’s feet around his eyes, made more
visible by years of living in Israel’s hot climate, become more apparent
because he is smiling now, and so the joy he feels in seeing them all
again moves from his eyes to his mouth/ He loves them and he knows
that they love him as well. But I also suspect that he knows that what he
is about to say, and the passage that he is going to quote to them and
which he is going to own for himself is going to put that love to the test.
After crowd settles in, the words of greeting begin, and then the Shema
is prayed, which is a Jewish prayer asking for God’s blessing at the
beginning and ending of every day. He then stands up and accepts the
scroll that has been handed to him, and he un-scrolls it and finds the
place he is looking for, and, amidst a growing tension in the room, he
says these words:
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.
And then he rolls up the scroll, as would be the tradition in Jewish
worship, and now he is expected to do what we preacher types do every
Sunday, which is explain the meaning of text to the worshippers, and to
draw some lesson for the larger community of faith. All eyes on the room
are on him, and what he says is brief and to the point, something you
probably wish you got from me, but, hey, I’m no Jesus. He says: Today
this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. That’s it. That all he
says! Nothing more, at least for the moment, and the crowd, oddly
enough, the crowd is fine with what he has said—perhaps they thought
he was talking about the coming reign of some soon-to-come Messiah,
or that the Romans were soon to be overtaken by the divine forces led
by this newly emerging Messiah. What they didn’t get was that Jesus
was referring to himself as the one who has been anointed to bring good
news to the poor, sight to the blind, release from captivity, and who was
breaking forth a word of liberation to the people, to those people, right
there in that room, right at that moment. They liked what he said, they
were amazed at how he had said it—in preacher talk, his delivery
captivated them. But more to the point, everyone in that room hoped
that Jesus was right, that the Messiah would come soon and a new reign
of peace without the heavy hand of Roman rule would happen.
But Jesus got that his friends and family didn’t get it, that they couldn’t or
wouldn’t believe that he was talking about himself. “I mean, this is
Jesus—we know this boy, and no matter how gifted and how different he
is, he is not a Messiah or even a great prophet—shoot, he’s one of us!”
Messiahs don’t come out of Nazareth—in fact, nothing much good comes
out of Nazareth, which is something that had been said in Israel about
Jesus’ hometown for decades, and it’s something that they’ve come to
believe as well—they had come to believe their own bad press! And so
when Jesus confronts them on their misunderstanding, they react—well,
they over-react to him. What they want is a show from their hometown
hero, they want him to do what he has been doing elsewhere in Galilee—
they don’t necessarily want a Messiah THEY KNOW PERSONALLY—
great things happen elsewhere, and Messiahs come from places that
matter, not from places like Nazareth. And he’s not willing to be a
showman for them, he’s not willing to pull out the bag of healing tricks to
satisfy them, because he knows they need to know something they don’t
quite believe yet—and I’ll get to that in a second—but I want you to
notice how he goes back to the history of the Jewish people to remind
them that every prophet in Israel’s history has never been recognized as
such in the place he, and sometimes she, grew up in. The lack of
confidence is really bad in Nazareth, and when he puts that mantle upon
his shoulders, that mantle of prophet and Messiah, it shoots through that
hometown crowd in ways that even puts the experience of Israel’s
prophets with their own particular hometowns to shame! It so angers the
people that Jesus claims to be someone who sets people free, to be the
one who God has anointed to give sight to the blind—it so outrages the
people that Jesus grew up with and loved and was loved by, that a mob
forms and they push him and pull him out of that synagogue and towards
the cliffs outside the Nazareth, and they seem more than ready to push
him right off that mountain.
But something happened, something changed on that cliff, and in the
heat of the moment, Jesus’ friends, his families, people he grown up with
and loved, they let him live. The crowd broke, and he passed through
them, a little worse for wear physically and maybe even emotionally, but
he was alive, at least he was alive. It wasn’t his time—that end would
come later. But it was the end of something else, something perhaps as
painful for him. It disconnected him from the people he loved and cared
about, and nothing would ever be the same with them and him. And that
is sad, for him and for them, because they were family, both literally and
figuratively, and yet, what Jesus does after this moment is to build a new
family, where we’re connected not by blood, or by living in the same
hometown, but by our choices to follow him, and that is something that
we in this room continue to try to live out, even in our own awkward and
imperfect way.
This year is the United Church of Christ’s 50th year, and we’ve decided
to call it our Jubilee year. In the Jewish tradition, Jubilee happens every
50 years and is the time when the scales get balanced again—the slaves
are set free on the 50th year, and the original owners of pieces of land
that were sold off get that property back again. It was a way of making
sure that people didn’t get too wealthy, or that slavery, which Israel did
sadly enough, practice, even though they had once been slaves
themselves, Jubilee made sure that slavery wouldn’t be a forever reality
for slave families. In our fiftieth year as a journeying people, we are
being asked again to do the particular and unique work that this
denomination is called to do, which is to bring together Christians and to
work together with God to help set free a world in need of spiritual,
economic, and social freedom. That’s what we do as the UCC, and that
is what we are called to do, and God knows a lot of people don’t like us
for it and that really is just fine. But more than whether or not we believe
that truth on a large scale, on a denominational basis, I think the
important thing is that we believe that truth personally, that we believe it
here, in this congregation, and in our own lives. I said I would go back to
something I was hinting at earlier in this sermon, and that something had
to do with what I think Jesus wanted to make clear to people of
Nazareth—and that was this: great prophets, and even Messiahs come
from nothing towns like Nazareth. Boys and girls who grew up in this
forgotten, made-fun of town in Israel, can set people free, can shout the
good news from the low rooftops of Nazareth, and give sight to the blind
in its dusty streets. I think that one of the reasons they wanted to kill him
was that if it was true what he had just said, that he was a Messiah, that
he was greater than they could have ever imagined, their hometown boy,
than maybe they too could be greater, then maybe they too could
change the world. If it can happen with Jesus, then maybe I too can be a
great man, and maybe you too can be a great woman, someone who has
been anointed to change the world.
I think they hated him in that moment because he wanted them to expect
more of themselves, that if this boy from Nazareth could change their
lives, they too could do that, they too could change their little corner of
the world. They couldn’t and wouldn’t believe that, and they were willing
to kill the messenger of this good news, despite the fact that he was their
hometown boy. He looked into their eyes, and he saw they didn’t believe
they could change the world, and I would hate, hate, for Christ to look in
our eyes, and us not believe that we too can transform this world, or at
least our corner of this world, in Coloma, Michigan. This is an
extraordinary church, in so many ways—you amaze me, constantly, and
even though we’re not the Baptists in terms of size, or the Lutherans, or
the Pentecostals, we have a very special and unique mission, a mission
that God has given to us in particular, and part of our job is to be believe
the One who gave us that mission, to believe that we too can change the
world, that we too change our lives, and help to change the lives of
others. Jesus believed in the people he grew up with, but they didn’t
believe in themselves, and so after this incident he went out and
gathered a larger family around him, people from different towns, who
did believe that they could transform the world with God’s help. In this
season of waiting, of waiting for the Christ to be born, I hope we attend to
what we are capable of, that we not wait too long to believe this truth
about ourselves, that we too can set people free, that we too can give
sight to the blind, and that we too are more than capable of proclaiming
that this moment, this very moment, is the year of the Lord’s favor.
Amen.
