“Throwing Jesus Out of Our Temples” - Sermon Jan 31, 2016, Year C Epiphany 4

“Throwing Jesus Out of Our Temples”
Sermon, Year C, Epiphany 4, January 31, 2016
Plymouth United Church of Christ, Eau Claire, WI
©2016 Rev. David J. Huber
Focus Scripture: Luke 4:21-40




What. The. Heck.

This is such a crazy story, on the part of everyone involved. What is going on?

Remember, from last week’s reading - which was the first part of this story of Jesus in the synagogue - Jesus has returned to his hometown after going off to be baptized by John and then tempted in the wilderness. Then he comes home. Comes back to his hometown. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath. The one he grew up in, the one in which probably most of the people there knew who he was, and had known him since he was a small child.

He’s surely surrounded by people who had pinched his chubby cheeks, swatted his hand for taking one too many donuts or whatever snacks they had in ancient Palestine, taught him, hugged him when he was crying, celebrated at his bar mitzvah, and bought furniture from him. Or whatever he made as a carpenter.

He’s returned home, back with his own people, after going off to learn from, probably spend some time with - maybe years - John the Baptist. We don’t know about that. Jesus might have been with John for a decade, or maybe just a few days. Or somewhere in between. We don’t know how long Jesus had been away.

And maybe it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he is home. None of the writers of the gospels seemed to care, because though they all mention that Jesus and John had a relationship beyond being cousins, none of them say what it was.

But, anyway, that’s a ramble.

Jesus has returned home. He goes to synagogue on the sabbath, they hand him a scroll to read (which was the part we read last week). It’s the prophet Isaiah. Jesus unrolls to the passages he wants to read, he has some verses in mind, and reads this:

“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.”

He rolls the scroll back up, hands to the scroll guy, and sits down, saying, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

That’s where we left it off last week, and where we started today’s reading.

If you were here, perhaps you remember that I said in the sermon that I hope we feel some movement of the spirit in hearing these words about coming to proclaim the good news to the poor, release to captives, and freedom for the oppressed. I also said that I hope the people gathered around Jesus who heard him also had a heart moment. A sense of a new spiritual/godly thing happening in their world, a touch of divine possibility, I hope they had some wash of hope, or thinking to themselves sitting around listening to Jesus read this, “Might this be the messiah? From our hometown? The messiah amongst us, one of our own?”

Well, it does seem that their hearts were touched, but it’s difficult to tell how their hearts were touched. There is some mixed response here. They seem at first to respond in a rather nice way. They speak gracious words of him, and remember who he is. Maybe they are thinking to themselves, “Isn’t this the kid with the cute cheeks and interesting questions and fondness for donuts? He’s so wonderful! He is so wise.”

Remember, the writer of Luke spends one sentence saying that the people said good things about him and were amazed at his gracious words, and also asked, “Isn’t this Mary and Joseph’s son?”

After they ask that, then things get weird.

Something in that moment sets Jesus off. It’s impossible to know Luke’s intent in recording the people’s question about, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” Was it asked in genuine pride that one of their own was so wise and special? “We know who this is! We know his father!” Or was it asked as an insult - “Hey, wait a minute - ain’t you just a carpenter’s son? Why would he be special, he’s just a carpenter’s son?” Or is this Luke’s way of saying that the people did not understand that Joseph was not Jesus’ father.

I think it was the former. I’d like to think, I hope so. That they did not mean insult by it, but a sense of “Woo hoo! He’s one of our own! Listen to him! This might put us on the map, what he is saying and what we have heard!” The way a community can get excited when one of their own makes it big. To say, “We helped raise him!” “I was her babysitter!” “I worked with his parents!”

Maybe the Rabbi here gets to recount a story, “I remember long ago when Jesus was a child, he came into my office for the first time, and he asked me questions that not only no adult had ever asked of me, but questions which even I had never thought to ask. I knew he was going to be someone special.”

Because good theology starts with good questions. Not about good answers, because we rarely know enough. As Paul said in the Corinthians passage that we see through a mirror dimly. We rarely know enough to offer solid, lock-tight answers in matters of faith. But good questions is the start of good theology. Always questioning.

Which questions also imply a community, because asking yourself questions is kinda strange. One needs the dialogue. Our faith is about community, and in that community we should be asking questions.

Like the question that this passage leaves me with at this point after the people ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”

Because what the heck happened?!

Jesus, who seems to have been polite and gracious, all of a sudden goes on an ugly rage and speaks back at the people.

He delivers this jeremiad (a word formed from the prophet Jeremiah’s name):

“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.’”

Where did that come from? They did not ask him to show them a miracle, or do a sign, or anything. He pre-emptively accuses them of doing so. They’ve asked nothing of him, accused him of nothing. And then he says, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.”

Weird, because it seems they were accepting him just fine. But maybe they were accepting him in the wrong way.

Then Jesus goes on to insult them. He reminds them that in the time of the prophet Elijah, while there was a great famine for many years in Israel and people were dying, the only widow that God sent the prophet to was a foreign, non-Jewish woman, who was given the miraculous jars of food that never went empty for the ensuing years of the famine, and she was saved.

Then he brings up Elijah’s protege, Elisha, who in a time when Israel had many lepers and was at war, the only leper that God cured was Namaan, a warrior in opposing army, a Syrian.

Jesus insults them by reminding them that God has often not treated the chosen people, or the ones who thought they had God’s favor, that God’s favor has often gone to the outsider, to those who are different.

Now I’ve never actually read the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, but I’d bet a pile of shekels that this technique is verboten. I doubt that this in there. This is not the way to win friends and influence people. But a challenge to remind us to remain faithful.

So of course the people now are in a rage, they throw him out of town, they even try to throw him off a cliff, but Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

He remains unscathed.

At some level there is a parallel here with Jesus’ time in the wilderness when the devil takes him up to the top of the spire and looks out saying “All this could be yours” and “If you throw yourself down, God will save you.” Now Jesus is again in a position of someone wanting him to plunge from a high place. Now, if this were anyone else, we could just say, “Well, he had a moment of being a jerk. We all do that once in a while.” But since it was Jesus doing this, it’s worth asking some questions. Worth going into.

Why did he go negative so quickly and so harshly? Why the insults? Why this bromide against the people that comes from nowhere? Was it just a bad day? Or was he making a point? And if he was making a point, what was it? What does it say about who God is and what God is doing?

This is what makes reading scripture so much fun! It raises questions! Interesting faith questions! We can explore. We may not ever get a real concrete answer, but we have the good questions that can come from it.

Perhaps Jesus was annoyed that after he read the scroll and said the words were fulfilled in their hearing. Perhaps they missed the message because they were so enchanted by him being one of their own that they didn’t really listen to him. Maybe it was that after he read the scroll about good news, release to prisoners, freedom for oppressed, and that this scripture was fulfilled in their hearing, maybe Jesus was annoyed that they didn’t ask him what they meant, but only oohed and ahhed over their hometown son. Maybe they weren’t taking him seriously? It appears that could be the case. Go off to learn great new things, to fulfill your destiny as the incarnation of God, come back to your hometown, make your grand divine pronouncement and get met with basically, “Oh, look, it’s Joseph’s son! I remember him running around in diapers!”

I could see where that would be frustrating. If you’ve gone off to college - or seminary - or gone off to the military, especially if you’ve seen combat, or gone off with the Peace Corps, or other life changing event, and come home, you are, to the people who knew you, still the person they knew as a child and watched grow up. It is difficult to take the person the way they want to be taken when one knows them so well. We come back changed, but the people don’t necessarily see it nor are as interested in it as much as they are interested that you are their son or daughter, or student, or friend, or whatever the relationship was. Yeah, you might be a doctor or a pastor or an accountant or lawyer or teacher now, but you’re also the kid we played video games with, teased about dating, caught chewing gum in class, listened to you talk endlessly about whatever your latest fascination was, cleaned up after you smeared peanut butter all over the TV… there is a sense that a prophet is not honored in his or her hometown. Because they know too much about you to take you too seriously.

I get that sometimes when I go my home church in Janesville, and see the elders who I respect greatly and helped raised me, they still remind me that, “Yeah, you might be a minister, but… I remember junior high and high school and some possible shenanigans I may or may not have done…” They have the full story.

And perhaps that’s the point. Or one of the points, anyway, that Luke is making by including this story so early in his gospel. A way to make Jesus stand out as not the person, not the messiah, that was expected. He is come back to his own people changed and offering a message that was not the one they were expecting to come from the messiah. He is coming out of the Jewish tradition, very much, yes. But not to keep things the same. To say that there is also an explosion of Jewish tradition out in to the gentile world as Jesus is thrown out of town and goes into the gentile, non-Jewish world. Luke is writing very much for gentiles who have come into the Jesus movement. People who were not Jewish before they heard about Jesus. And Luke is writing 40 or so years after Jesus’ resurrection when the church has moved into the gentile world.

No, he was offering topsy turvy message - a message that is, in fact, more in-line with the scriptural tradition of justice, compassion, and love, than the staid, comfortable-with-the-status-quo version that it had become. This is a reformation as well that the church needs to do every generation, because we do have a tendency to become complacent, to fall into the status quo, to become stuck. It is good to have a reformation every generation. Jesus has come to a people who had grown quite comfortable with pushing lepers outside the town, or ignoring the widows and the orphans, or setting up artificial ways to separate people based on income, ancestry, nationality, and so on; Jesus comes to change things up. To overthrow the status quo.

Change, unfortunately, can be scary. Especially to change a culture, or a synagogue, or a church. Change can be scary, but change is also a fact of life. It’s what God is constantly calling us to do: to keep changing our direction, to keep re-aiming our compass point to be in line with where Jesus wants us to go. Our default setting, it seems, is whatever is comfortable, which is not always - in fact, is rarely - where Jesus wants us to go. And what is comfortable is most often not of God’s realm: like apathy, accepting poverty and homelessness, ignoring the needs of others… change can be difficult.

We are going through change here at Plymouth. We have made some changes, and have changed. Our worship format has changed.We have changed how we are organized. We are more loosely structured now so we can be leaner, more quick to adapt, so that if someone wants to make something happen, you can do it. Not any hurdles in the way, or committees to deal with. If you see something that you want to have happen, if you have idea, then you can make it happen. We want your creativity. We want to be able to adapt and change.

We have, this past year, been renting and offering our building. As I look back to the last year, we had more people come through our doors in 2015 than have come through in years before then. Partly because of allowing other people to use our space. Hundreds of people who otherwise would never have been on this property have come through our doors. And some of them have come to worship with us, or joined in other activities of the church. By opening our doors, people have come in. We’ve added new members. We have been inviting more visitors. We are doing, I think, what Jesus wants us to do which is to go outside our walls and be faithful beyond this hour on Sunday morning. To outside our walls and be the living presence of God to other people in Eau Claire and the Chippewa Valley. Of being visibly Christian in our neighborhoods. To not be content with not just taking care of ourselves, but of those around us. To meet the needs of those around, as Jesus calls us to do. To reach out to our neighbors by doing good works in our community, and to do them as Jesus’ disciples.

The people in the synagogue that day that Jesus read from the scroll, they pushed Jesus out of the synagogue and into the world because they didn’t like his call to change, or his call things were going to change. But maybe what they should have done if they were appalled at or were afraid of his message, would have been to keep him there. Keep him inside the walls safe and domesticated. That’s what comfortable churches do. Those churches are also dying, but they’re comfortable. Keeping Jesus enclosed, safely domesticated in the church. Keeping God safely domesticated in their doctrine or belief. But we are not a dying church. We don’t want to be that kind of church. We are not a church that keeps Jesus inside, but lets him go out into the world, as we follow. I like to think that we come here for this hour on Sunday morning to have worship time together to be refreshed, renewed, rejuvenated, but then I think of this message that after our hour of worship, that we then push Jesus out the doors. Not to get rid of him, but to push Jesus out on Sunday morning to say, “Hey, we had a great hour of worship together. But, now it is time to push you outside, with us following, so that you can show us where you need us to serve and with the strength of your Holy Spirit we will go there!” And with the strength of the Holy Spirit we can go wherever Jesus is leading us.

Amen.