Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

January 28, 2007

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 4:21-30)

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 hometown 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 hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up 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.

The Gospel of the Lord.

The people of Jesus’ hometown took Jesus to the edge of a cliff and were going to throw him off. What would offend you so profoundly, make you so mad, outrage you so completely, that you would want to take the offending party and throw them off a cliff? Well, Jesus has just begun his public ministry, and already people want to kill him. Not just that, but it’s the people of his hometown, his friends, his relatives, and his neighbors. So what’s going on here?

Jesus has been preaching in the countryside around the northern town were he had grown up, called Nazareth. And Luke tells us that word about him was spreading from town to town, and there was a buzz about Jesus. Part of that buzz was that he was performing miracles. Well, we know that Jesus’ reputation as a miracle-worker has preceded him to his small hometown. Now, some of you know about small hometowns.

Jesus was well known to these people. He was the oldest son of Joseph and Mary. Joseph was the carpenter in town, and it’s likely that Jesus was his apprentice when he became an older boy. And so he’s been in these people’s homes. And when he was young, he probably played with the other children in the town. They knew him, and he knew them. So Jesus was returning to town now—having been away for a while—but not returning just as Joseph and Mary’s son, but now as somebody who has become a bit famous.

The only comparison that I can personally make to a hometown celebrity is that Tom Lehman, the professional golfer, is from my hometown. He’s the captain of this year’s Ryder Cup team, you know. Now, you can imagine in a town where the biggest claim to fame has been a thirty-foot tall statue of a Viking called “Big Ole,” that this is quite a big deal. People, including myself, make way too much of it. Yup, I know Tom; knew him back when. He used to date my sister, you know. He’s a nice guy. You know, my wife Andrea caddied for him for a whole summer, before he got famous. No, they weren’t dating. His mom was my seventh-grade English teacher. And I share these important facts about myself with people who know golf, and they’re very impressed. Never mind that it’s a complete accident that we know each other at all, and it’s quite meaningless, really, that we do. So the town, my hometown, happily over-identifies with Tom Lehman. But, on the other hand, there’s been more than a little talk about what he owes the town—that’s right, “owes” the town—for “all the support over the years that got him where he is today.” And there are people ready to criticize him, actually, for not giving back enough to the town, as though he has become “too good for us.”

So Jesus returns to the hometown, to people who consider him one of their own. He goes to the synagogue in the town, and he opens the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to set captives free, to give sight to the blind and liberty to the oppressed, and to announce the acceptable year of the Lord.” Then he closes the book, he looks out at his friends, his family, his neighbors, and he says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Can you imagine the reaction? Talk about a Messiah-complex! How do the people respond? Well, it says they’re polite at first; it says they speak well of him. But it says they’re amazed. A hometown boy claims to be bringing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s messianic prophecies. Finally, somebody in the crowd says, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Well, of course, this is Joseph’s son! They all know that. It’s not a point of information, it’s simply a point, and it’s a point that’s on everybody’s mind: “Who does he think he is?”

Jesus responds quite sternly. “Without doubt, you will quote to me the proverb, ‘Doctor, heal yourself.’ You will say, ‘Do here in your hometown what you supposedly did in other towns.’ I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.”

Now, can you hear the gasps in the crowd? “He calls himself a prophet? And then he accuses us of rejecting him before we even have a chance to?” It gets more interesting than that. He says, “Here’s how it is with prophets. Think about the story of Elijah and the widow, when there was a three-and-a-half-year drought and famine in the land.” Now, since this story may not be fresh in your mind, I’ll read a bit of it.

“The word of the Lord came to Elijah saying, ‘Go now to Sidon and live there, for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’” Now, Sidon was a foreign country, not Israel. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks. And he said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread.” But she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a jug. I am now gathering sticks to build a fire so that I may go and prepare a last meal for my son and I, that we may eat, and die.” Elijah responds, “Don’t be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” And so she does what Elijah said to do. And, indeed, the oil and the meal never ran out all the days that Elijah stayed with them.

Okay. You can imagine a rabbi making a number of different points from this story, but what Jesus does is surprising. He says, “Look, there were lots of widows in Israel during that time, lots and lots of them, and all of them were desperate; many were facing the question of survival for themselves and perhaps for their children. It hadn’t rained for three years and six months. People were dying. Now, here’s Jesus’ point. He says: “Elijah was sent to none of them, except the one widow at Zarephath in Sidon, a foreigner, not even an Israelite or a worshiper of Israel’s God.”

Then, in case they missed the point, he references another story about the prophet Elisha, who famously was sent by God to cure a Syrian army general by the name of Naaman of his leprosy. And Jesus says to them, “Well, what about all the people in Israel with leprosy, why were they not healed?” At this point people become enraged and they drag Jesus to the edge of the cliff, and they’re ready to throw him off. Why? Because Jesus had just told him that his ministry of good news to the poor, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, was not for them; that they were like all those widows who did not get fed and like all those lepers who were not healed.

Now, this might not enrage us like it did the people of Jesus’ hometown, but it might make us nervous, because I think at least one implication of this story for modern-day Christians is this: That those who think they know Jesus the best may be least acquainted with him in truth. Those who think they know Jesus the best may be least acquainted with him in truth.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ ministry is prophetic; and, like the prophets of old, he disturbs and he challenges the established order of things. And here at the beginning he distances himself from the people who would most strongly feel that he is one of them. And as we would see if we looked through the whole book of Luke, he will go instead and bring ministry to—and the very next people that he encounters are these—people tormented by demons, lepers, a paralyzed man, tax collectors, disfigured people, diseased people, and a Roman soldier’s servant. These are the first few examples of the recipients of Jesus’ ministry.

So the encounter in Jesus’ hometown goes foul, it seems to me, because the people presumed a privileged status with Jesus. The hometown crowd was not a worse people than anyone else. They were presumptuous. They assumed, not unreasonably, that they had a special relationship to Jesus, a special claim on him. But their presumption was mistaken.

Presumption is something from which no one is immune. Presumption is the child of privilege. As often as not, it’s by sheer accident that some of us find ourselves in a place of privilege—whether social, economic, political privilege—and others do not. Privilege is often an accident of birth, genetic, upbringing, or access. But then what happens is that we spiritualize it, we call it “God’s blessing,” or providence. And that’s really nifty because then we can justify just about anything to hold on to it. That’s bananas.

And, speaking of bananas, bananas are a good example. The establishment of the banana industry in America is an ugly page in the history of American foreign policy. No one could be proud of what was done in Central American countries in order to secure enormous banana plantations there. But the real issue, the spiritual issue, is that I go into Kowalski’s expecting and demanding ripe, cheap bananas! And if I go into Kowalski’s and they’re all green, I’m irritated. I expect bananas. They are grown in my country, but I still expect them, and I expect them to be yellow, and I expect them to be cheap, so that I can have them in my smoothie in the morning. I am a child of privilege.

It’s to this condition that Jesus later addresses his parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector. The story goes like this: a Pharisee and a tax collector both go up to the temple, and the Pharisee prays, “I thank you Lord that I’m not like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector here. I fast and I tithe.” But then the tax collector stands at a distance, and would not even raise his eyes to heaven, and simply asks God for mercy. And Jesus says, “That man went away justified, instead of the other.”

Presumption can’t receive the grace of God. The best thing that can happen for presumption is to be disturbed, and this is what Jesus does: he disturbs the presumptuous, and he walks away. He goes instead to the non-presumptuous, to those who have been taught that they have no claim on the gifts of God, that they are the objects of God’s wrath—the sick, the hurting, the outcast, the hated—to them Jesus brings good news and signs that restore their dignity.

The grace of God is grace for all, but not everyone can receive it, or will. Some will rather hang on to notions of privilege and what that affords. With God, as Jesus so starkly demonstrates in the Gospel, there is no such thing as privilege. Every being is a sacred being, no matter their place of origin, who they know, what they know, how they look, or what they believe. When privilege becomes for us an expectation and sign of God’s blessing, it’s presumption. There is no divine reason for the privilege of one being or people over another. The universal need for God’s grace is an end to all such nonsense, to all presumption.

I was at a gathering of Christians not so long ago, and I overheard a conversation that went something like this: Person #1: “I am sick and tired of all these people coming to our country and trying to change our way of life. They want to get rid of crosses, and Christmas, and anything Christian in the government and in the schools and in the public places. And I’m sick of it! Look, we have been here a lot longer than they have.” Person #2 quietly responds: “Tell it to a Native American.” I think person #1 wanted to throw person #2 off a cliff.

The grace of God is grace for all; it’s not entitlement for some. And that goes for all God’s graces: forgivingness, yes, but also land, and food, and clean water, and peace, and opportunity, and dignity.

The picture of Jesus’ hometown is a plenty real picture of the human condition. The presumption of privilege is the absence of the grace of God, and that’s precisely what the village ended up with. Jesus, God’s grace incarnate, walked away.