Epiphany 4 YearC

Listen to the still, small voice saying, ‘Good on You!’

Some time ago, I found a few of my old high school classmates on Facebook, people I hadn’t seen since graduation in 1970, and we resumed a conversation as if nothing had changed in those years.  Discussion was going along just fine until that proverbial question that is asked by every barber, every dental hygienist, and even by strangers waiting in line at the supermarket was finally asked of me:

What do you do for a living?

Immediately, I thought of that old adage, Familiarity breeds contempt. I figured if I told them I was now a priest in the Episcopal Church that for certain one of them would write a letter to the diocese saying, Dear Bishop, You have got to be kidding! These were people who knew me in early and late adolescence.

Well, in one fleeting moment of electronic messaging, I dared to tell them a bit of my story and who I had become: most notably that I was a priest in the Episcopal Church, and then I waited for a response. It seemed a lot longer, but it was only a matter of an hour or so, when I got the first response:

I am so impressed that you went back to school to do what you really love. . .  What an accomplishment. . .  As they say in Australia, ‘Good On You!’ I guess it’s not a hard and fast rule that familiarity always has to breed contempt.

I wonder if Jesus felt a little bit of that kind of trepidation as he approached his hometown. After reading this week’s Gospel, there is no question that Jesus got a whole lot of contempt thrown at him in Nazareth. But I believe the mistake that we have so often made is to think that it was familiarity that bred that contempt. 

A closer reading of this Gospel will show that Jesus is initially received with great admiration. Luke tells us, All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

They appreciated his accomplishments.  If there had been a Nazarene Gazette, the headline would have read Hometown Hero Returns. Those people wanted to say the Aramaic equivalent of Good on You, Jesus!

It wasn’t that Jesus was familiar to them that caused those Nazarenes to finally reject him. Those people turned ugly because Jesus dared to tell them the truth about God’s unconditional and multilateral love. Let’s go back to that Gospel scene for a moment. Can you feel the hush over the crowd as Jesus picks up the scroll in that synagogue and begins to read from the prophet Isaiah?

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.

Then he rolled up the scroll, and he sat down.

Those present start buzzing among themselves:

Wait a minute . . . Jesus didn’t finish the reading.  What about the ending?  He left out the best part.

You see, if you look up the passage that Jesus quoted from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, it doesn’t stop with to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, it stops with to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, AND the day of vengeance of our God.

That’s the part those people really wanted to hear.  The part about vengeance, but Jesus deliberately closed the book on vengeance. He gave the scroll back to the attendant as if to say there was nothing else that needed to be read or said. This wasn’t what they wanted to hear about God. They wanted a Terminator Messiah. They wanted a God who was tough on national security, a God who would destroy the infidels. You know who the infidels are don’t you? Infidels are people who either don’t look like us or don’t agree with us.

Now, maybe if Jesus had stopped there the whole thing would have just blown over, but no, he went on to remind them about two instances in their history when God showed favor to, of all people, Gentiles. You know who Gentiles are don’t you? They are people, well, who just aren’t like us.

Jesus points out a time when God took care of a widow in Sidon, and another time when God ministered to Naaman, a Syrian leper. Believe me, those people in Nazareth would have had a hard time deciding which was worse, being widowed or being from Sidon. . . being Syrian or being a leper. 

And that was it, they had all they could take, and they could take no more.  They held their convention, and it was decided: This Jesus was going to be thrown off a cliff, and that’s all there was to that. Nothing, it seems, will cause you to go from hero to zero faster than disagreeing with someone’s theology.

Jesus wanted desperately to tell those people that God wasn’t an angry God, that God wasn’t a God of vengeance, but a God of compassion, and not just any old ordinary compassion, but inclusive compassion.  

Gentile or Jew, Servant or Free, Woman or Man. . . no more.

Jesus wanted to tell them with all his heart and all his soul the Good News that no one has alien status when it comes to the love and care of God. Jesus wanted to tell them that God’s invitation to love and peace was universal! Jesus’ message to his own people was that God’s love is always more pervasive and more powerful than our hatred, and that although we might put limits on our love, God never does and never will. And that is the miracle of grace!

But I’m afraid those people were so unilateral in their thinking, so satisfied with their own heritage and their own understanding of scripture and of God, that they were unable to hear that Good News!

I’ve often wondered what the world would be like if, when we heard something we disagreed with, if before we commented on it, we stopped and asked ourselves, Is there anything at all in what I just heard that is true?  Is there any good news in it all?

What was a problem for Jesus in the 1^st Century, it seems, is becoming almost a part our culture in the 21^st Century.  I am beginning to wonder if we aren’t in the new millennium of polarization.

So many in our day seem ready and willing to throw someone over the edge of the cliff because of the opinions they hold, or the beliefs they express, or just because they are different. Far too many people seem to be so concerned with their own understanding of scripture, and of God and of politics that they can never hear any good news from anyone who doesn’t say it or believe it the way they do.

If there is one institution that should rise above this fray, it should be the Episcopal Church. Our Anglican heritage was born out of disagreement, compromise and settlement. We have lived for so many years in the mystery of blurred lines of agreement and uncertain certainty.  We’ve had the training necessary to find our way out of this pernicious cycle of polarization.

All you and I have to do is to actually listen to the message of Jesus in his own hometown:

That God’s love knows no boundaries.

That God’s love isn’t dependent on correct belief or practice. 

That God doesn’t prefer one heritage or one tradition or one geographical region over another. 

John Dear, a Jesuit priest and peace activist once wrote some very practical advice on how to deal with this problem in a book entitled, Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace. He said that when he prays, he imagines himself sitting beside Jesus along with the person that is his greatest enemy. There, in his contemplative prayer, he watches how Jesus looks with compassion upon his enemy. With each meditation, his heart is disarmed anew, and he is better able to do God’s work of disarmament.

I think that course of meditation would be good for all of us in this age of division in which we live. 

Jesus is always calling us to a ministry of disarmament. We need to be Communion for each other; we need to listen to each other, and not with an ear of distrust, but with an ear for Good News. And when we do so, listen for that small, still voice saying, Good on you!