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Unacceptable Prophets
Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle February 1, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 1:4-10 Luke 4:21-30
Christian conferences, especially the kind designed for ministers or educators engaged in the ministry of the church, are not my favorite thing to attend. While often the plenary sessions are lead by articulate and wise preachers and teachers, the small group sessions cause me to break out in a rash rather than rejoicing. Forced gatherings into which conference participants are assigned, they usually, though not always, focus more on warm fuzzies and group building than on the exchange of helpful information that might be applied to life and work in the parish and pulpit. Some years back, when I attended a gathering for Christian educators, it seemed my experience at the conference was heading in a direction consistent with the usual pattern. Thomas Groome, educator extraordinaire who teaches at the University of Boston, was the lecturer. As he was closing his lecture and I was bracing myself for the “break-out session” in my small group, he gave the groups their first topic to discuss, “Tell a story about someone in your life in whom you had seen something of the love and character of Christ, who had taught you about Christ.” After a few minutes, the participants in my group found each other and began to share stories. One told a story of a friend who had stood by him as his marriage crumbled. Another told a story of a neighbor who had cared for her when her mother’s mix of alcohol and perfectionism turned fatal. I stayed quiet, appreciating the sincerity with which they told stories, thinking about what I would share, and half-fearing the group therapy session that had potential to emerge, considering that each of the stories that had been shared had to do with being comforted and cared for and rescued. Each of the stories, that is, until the person to my right spoke up and said something like, “Well, I’m having trouble here, because the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about who had been Christ to me was, ‘Who in my life has told me and shown me the truth so clearly that I wanted to kill him for it.’” As you might imagine, her comment changed the tenor of our group conversation. But she put us on to something vitally important that we would rather not hear. And that was this: Christ is not only the one who rescues and comforts us, Christ is also the one who challenges us and upsets us and makes us angry, who tells us the truth so clearly that we want to kill him for it. The presence of Christ is found, I am sure, in and among those people who care for one another through thick and through thin, who nurture us back to wholeness when our worlds have been broken. The presence of Christ is found in equal measure, I am equally sure, in and among those people who offend us and outrage us and make us wonder how we might shut them up. If we don’t believe that, maybe it is simply because we haven’t recognized Christ in some of the offensive people God has sent out way. Of course, we do a lot to avoid having to listen to those people who would, either by word, act or sheer presence, yank our chains. That is true particularly when it comes to our understandings of what it means to be a community. Geographically, most of us live in communities, in neighborhoods, filled with people like us, safe and insulated from the offensive presence of the less fortunate in our city. Ideologically, most of us spend at least our free time, with people who think like us, at a distance from the ones who would disagree and perhaps teach us something in so doing. And what it comes to the church, we do the same. Most of us want a church where we will feel “at home,” filled with people who look, act, and think, like us. Most of us want ministers whose preaching agrees with our thinking, who don’t push the envelope or tell us what we don’t particularly want to hear, who won’t want to disturb this nice little sense of community we have here in the church by reminding us who is missing from this nice little community we have here in the church. The irony is that it is God’s way to send people to us who will yank our chains and upset our balance. Flip through the Bible. Turns the pages in any book of church history. Over and over again, the Almighty has sent people into the community of faith to shake us up, to challenge the status quo, to push us into confronting the truth, in order that we do not confuse our own ideas with God’s. And, I tell you, these are the most unacceptable prophets. This is, you know, exactly what Jesus did in his first sermon in Nazareth. After emerging from his days in the wilderness, word about Jesus quickly spread through Galilee. His teaching was praised by everyone. He came to Nazareth to preach and all “spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” (This phenomenon is what is known as the “honeymoon period” of ministers in the church. People love us until we challenge them!) Those gathered in Nazareth hung on Jesus’ every word until he began to offend them. They wanted him to do the same things he had done in Capernum. This Nazareth was his hometown, after all, and these people were his kin with special claim on him that he ought to recognize. He ought to do his very best for them. They wanted him to get started with the miracle and the healings, affirming their place in his head and heart. The trouble is, at least as much as Luke tells us, Jesus did nothing for them except to remind them that God’s community was a whole lot larger than they thought. No miracles or healings, but just two stories about how their God and his God had broken through human constructs of race and clan and nation to minister to those on the other side. He reminded them about the widow of Zarepeth, from the wrong side of the tracks, and then Naaman the Syrian, a commander in the wrong army. The widow of Zarepeth was caretaker to the prophet Elijah. With flanks of hungry people in the midst of severe famine in the land, Elijah was sent only to her that his miracle would keep her jar of meal and her jar of oil full. He would keep this outsider, this one from outside the self-defined community of God’s people, from starvation. What’s more is that while he was with the widow, her son grew very ill and Elijah, pleading God’s mercy upon her and her little one, brought him back to life, brought this outsider, this one of different race, clan and probably religion, this one from outside the self- defined community of God’s people, back to life. Naaman the Syrian was an officer in the enemy army in Elisha’s day. Plagued with leprosy like so many others, Naaman sought out this prophet with considerable fortune in hand, ready to trade wealth for healing. Elisha tells this stranger, this enemy, to go wash in the river, that he would be made well. Indeed, a wash in the muddy river made Naaman’s hands like that of a young man, and so Elisha, for no price, had healed only this foreigner, this enemy, this one from outside the self-defined community of God’s people. So many years later, the stories of these two almost got Jesus killed. “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” It is interesting that these stories that so enraged the people weren’t anything new. He was reiterating to them what was right there in their scriptures. They were accustomed to using their scriptures of course, but to using their holy texts, those ones from Leviticus and such, to keep people out and to close the ranks or pure people, rather than to open the doors and invite people in. So it was an unacceptable word from an unacceptable prophet and they wanted him not just gone, but gone. Dead. Having perhaps been the unacceptable prophet myself now and again, as all ministers seem to be now and again, and certainly having witnessed the work and heard the words of other unacceptable prophets (maybe even one who preaches, like Jesus, in a church on a hill, on the top of a hill) who would yank our chains, your chains, push the envelope and the boundaries of what we understand God’s community to be, I think it important to be clear here. Jesus did not try to offend those in Nazareth just for the sake of offending them or for the sake of turning them to a certain position on whatever the issue of the day was. He, in fact, was not trying to offend them at all. Rather he, we, preach the gospel and that, my friends, is always offensive, yea, even unacceptable to those would seek to be God rather than bow down before God. What Jesus had to say in that synagogue in Nazareth was problematic to the people there not because he was telling them that they were loved less. It was problematic because they couldn’t stand the people who were loved just as much as they were. And so it is for us. The truth, offensive and unacceptable though it may be, is that we, each one, are loved by a God who seems to delight in upsetting the little boundary lines we draw to indicate who is in and who is out. Those little, or not so little, boundary lines are everywhere. They the things that divide the black sheep from the white sheep in our families, that put some people on one side of the tracks and some people on the other side of the tracks in our neighborhoods. They are the things that make some people called to ministry in our church and others not. They are those lines drawn by religion and skin color and sexual orientation and income and history. And they are those boundaries that every preacher, worth his or her salt, would stand up on a Sunday morning to challenge, not because we want to make you mad, but because we are called to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news that tells us that we are never alone, that all of us, whether we like it or not, we have been called out of darkness into his marvelous light. God sends us prophets that we would deem unacceptable and that we would reject, you and I. God sends us people who tell us the truth so clearly that we want to kill them because of it. God sends us those who challenge us, who call our self-absorption and self-centeredness into question, who remind us that we are not God and who push us to be as faithful as we can to this One who has been so faithful to us, whatever the cost and however much our closed minds need to be opened. God does that, I do believe, so that we all may experience a community and a faith so much deeper and richer and more authentic that we could ever create or imagine on our own. The best of those unacceptable prophets, I am convinced, do their work not by simply taking a position and bidding us do the same, but by living and acting and speaking in deep faith and then bidding us do the same. And if that lands us on one side of the issue or the other, so be it. To wit, listen in on the words of Episcopal prophet and priest Barbara Brown Taylor as she writes of her denomination, like our own, divided over the issue of homosexuals in church leadership. “ … I do not have a position on homosexuality. What I have, instead, is a life. I have a history, in which many people have played vital parts. When I am presented with the issue of homosexuality, I experience temporary blindness. Something like scales fall over my eyes, because I cannot visualize an issue. Instead, I visualize the homeroom teacher who seemed actually to care whether I showed up at school or not. I see the priest who taught me everything I know about priesthood, and the professor who roasted whole chickens for me when my food money ran out before the end of the month. I see the faces of dozens of young men who died of AIDS, but not before they had shown me how brightly they could burn with nothing left but the love of God to live on.” In our story from Luke, Jesus saw a people divided over issues of who deserved him and why. He saw people who would claim to be faithful and so entitled to him, people who drew lines of race and clan and creed, to define who ought to be in and who ought to be out. I don’t know that Jesus had a position on their issues. What I do know is that Jesus told them the truth so clearly they wanted to kill him for it. What more I know is that Jesus had a life to live and a life to give for all those who were cast out. Deemed unacceptable as preacher and prophet, Jesus, too, would end up cast out. And that is a part of the point: Jesus does not go elsewhere because he is rejected. Jesus is rejected because he goes elsewhere. So as we come to his table, may we give thanks that he did, for in going elsewhere he has come to the likes of us. That might offend some, but that is the truth. That is the truth as clearly as I know how to tell it. Thanks be to God. Amen. |