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Sermon - January 28th, 2007
Going Home
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Luke 4:21-32
Prayer: Gracious and holy One, help my word and my actions carry healing and truth into my heart and into the hearts of other. Help me to speak in such a way that all listeners will remain whole and self-directed. Help my words speak to each of us in the way we most need to hear them. Amen.
Let me tell you about my home town, Heppner. It’s small, it’s isolated, and it’s full of fiercely independent and loyal people. They are very suspicious of outsiders, such as people from Portland or California. They are proud of their little town. And it’s a beautiful little town nestled in the foothills near the Blue Mountains where three canyons merge which is why there was a dam built there several years back for flood control. The dam is ugly, in my opinion. It’s also quite controversial. But you don’t tell the people in Heppner that. The Willow Creek dam made the national news once because it leaks. That generated some concern in Heppner. But not the kind you would expect. They told the media to leave their dam alone. We love our damn dam, they said and had t-shirts and buttons and caps made that stated that. The dam still leaks, by the way, but according to the Corp of Engineers who built it, it is supposed to leak.
Now, I am a typical middle child. I like peace and harmony, almost at all costs. I would never do what Jesus did when he went back home. And what did Jesus do that I wouldn’t do? He told the truth so clearly that the home town folks wanted to throw him off a cliff.
He started out nice enough. They were amazed at first. His talents and intelligence and giftedness were obvious. Then the feeling in the synagogue shifted dramatically. What Jesus was saying became threatening. He began walking on their sacred ground. He began stepping over boundaries of appropriateness. You see, Jesus was one of them. He belonged to them. They had a special claim on him which they expected him to honor by doing his best for them. But he didn’t do anything they expected him to do. Instead, he reminded them that he didn’t belong to just them and he wasn’t going to do for them what they wanted him to do. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t who they wanted him to be. And that offended them.
I thought about Jesus being in his hometown a lot the last couple of days. One reason was because I didn’t get my sermon done until last night. And the other was I went to Heppner to attend my brother’s father-in-law’s memorial service. My younger brother sang at the service that was held in a country Lutheran church--Valby Lutheran Church near Gooseberry where the man who died farmed for 50 years.
I was on my best behavior. It was a big service full of local people I didn’t recognize. My brothers would tell me, that’s Hal Bergstrom. I’d say, oh, yeah, he was in the class ahead of me. Remember Pat Sweeney? He’s the Mortician now, took over his father’s business. And that’s one of the McGilliguts. There were two families of McGilliguts in Ione and the local legend about them was they had a race to see who could have 12 kids first. I don’t know which family won, if that was true. But there were 24 of them who graduated from Ione High School.
I love going home. But I wouldn’t want to live there. And there are some people in Heppner who would never understand that—so I don’t tell them. But Jesus would. He would tell them that the world is bigger than Heppner. He would tell them that what they do in Heppner does affect the whole world no matter how small it is. And he would probably offend them with the truth so much they would want to run him out of town.
That’s what he did in his hometown, Nazareth, by telling them two stories--stories that they knew well—stories from their Scriptures.
The first story was about the widow from the wrong side of the tracks in Zaraphath. The second story was about Namaan, an officer in the army of Israel’s enemies. The prophet Elijah had ministered to the widow. The prophet Elisha told Namaan that if he washed himself seven times in the muddy Jordan River, his leprosy would be healed. Jesus used these two stories to tell them that God had passed over God’s own chosen people in order to minister to the stranger, the foreigner, the outcast, the godless. It was like telling them that God had become a personal chaplain to their worst enemy. It was like Jimmy Carter saying God is on the side of the Palestinians in the Middle East. It was like saying God has passed over a Sunday School teacher in order to take care of an ailing Shiite Moslem or a member of the Taliban.
What angered them even more was that this was not anything they did not already know. Jesus was reminding them of things that were right there in their own scriptures, except, that was not how they used their scriptures. They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up. So what did they do? They slammed the door on Jesus. The minute he denied their special status, he went from favorite son to degenerate stranger. He offended them so badly they decided to kill him.
That is how sensitive we are to being told that our enemies are God’s friends. That is how angry we get when someone suggests that God loves the people we won’t sit next to—people who disturb and offend us. (Darn it, God, anyway. I have a whole list of people I would love to watch squirm before you on the Judgment Day. People who have done me or someone I care about wrong.) However, Jesus is telling me, just as he told his own folks, that they belong to God just as surely as I do. No matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries. God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way. The problem is not that we are loved any less. The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.
The Gospel of Luke puts this story at the beginning of Jesus ministry, even before the call of the disciples, not necessarily because it happened first, but because Luke is showing us the Jesus’ ministry is all about opening doors, widening the community, going beyond the walls, extending the boundaries. This is Jesus’ mission all the way through Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. And I’m here to tell you that God still hasn’t closed the door.
This is such a difficult message to hear, I know. Our world is growing scarier every day. Many have retreated to well-defended private lives. But in the church we are supposed to know better. We know, or we are suppose to know, the story of Naaman and the widow and Ruth and the story of Jonah, just to mention some in the Old Testament. If we don’t know those stories very well, we do know the story of Jesus, who preferred the company of misfits to that of religious people.
My Mom gave me a set of CD’s to listen to about boundaries because of a conversation we were having about clergy and congregations. I started listening to them on the way home yesterday. The speaker is Karla McLaren who has been trained as a spiritual healer. She began her talk by saying something about organized religion that we need to hear. It is very disturbing and offensive. Before I quote her, let me remind you that this is exactly what disturbed and offended the people Jesus was talking to in his own worshiping community he grew up in. Karla McLaren, said, “I have a serious problem with most organized religions which, in my opinion, are sexist, racist, homophobic, greedy, destructive of native cultures, or destructive to the lives of women and children. So, personally I can’t belong to any of those corporate religious structures.” Now, when I heard her say that, let me tell you I wanted to jump to the defense of our church. We are the church with open hearts, open minds, and open doors! She would like our church if she would just try us. However, she speaks the truth—just look at our history. I am grateful for our open hearts, minds, and doors; but I want it to be true, really true.
Because we believe in a Lord who cares for the stranger and who comes to us as a stranger, reminding us over and over again that while he is with us, he does not belong to us. In the church, we are dared to believe that it is God who makes us a community and not we ourselves, and that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to the truth that is bigger than we are.
Margaret Wheatley says, “Oppression never occurs between equals. Tyranny starts with the belief that some people are more human than others.” She also believes in a hopeful future and says, “We can’t get there alone, we can’t get there without each other, and we can’t create it without relying as never before on our fundamental and precious human goodness.” Margaret Wheatley has worked for thirty years in organizations and communities of all types, on most continents.
It’s going to take all of us because the truth is always more than any one of us can grasp all by ourselves. It takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell us the parts we cannot see, and sometimes we want to kill them for it. Jesus’ own people tried to kill him, more than once. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. How did he do that, when they were all ganged up against him? I do not know, but that is how it still works. If we will not listen, he won’t try to change our minds. He will pass right through our midst and go away.
Amen.