The Symbols of Faith: The Challenging Word of God

Luke 4:21-30

February 3, 2013

            Last week we began to consider scripture as the comforting word of God; a gift; God’s living word that speaks to and guides followers of Jesus when we read it regularly expecting to hear God’s voice. The sermon was based on the first half of a story Luke tells of Jesus returning to his home town of Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry, and preaching to those gathered in the synagogue.  The scripture he chose, from Isaiah sure sounds like good news. “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 Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down to preach.  The opening words of his sermon were, “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 this not Joseph’s son?”  The congregation was filled with people who remembered what he was like as a kid, his neighbors, his teachers, the folks who worked at the market.  They were curious to know how Jesus had turned out.  They had heard news that he had spoken in the synagogues of other towns in Galilee.  They were curious and full of anticipation.

            But things got bad quickly. In the space of six sentences Jesus managed to offend them so badly the congregation chased him out of the synagogue and was about to throw him off a cliff!  What happened?  If Jesus was preaching the good news, sharing the gift of the living word of God with these people why were they insulted?  Was this “preachy” sermon a beginner’s mistake?

            Perhaps Jesus was irritated that their question, “isn’t this Joseph’s son,” had a hint of skepticism. We know him, he’s just Joseph’s son…we don’t need to take this too seriously. In any case he decided to name the skepticism in public.  I know what you’re thinking, Can you heal yourself?  We want to see you do for us what you did in Capernaum.  Then Jesus identified himself as not simply a preacher, but a prophet, asserting that “no prophet is accepted in his home town,” and reminding them of Elijah and Elisha.

            Prophets are strange characters in the Bible.  They are people who love God, talk to God and hear from God regularly so they often have glorious visions of how God wants the world to turn out, the way things are supposed to be.  Prophets give us dreams of the Peaceable kingdom where children play around snakes and lions and lambs sleep together.  They announce that these bad times we are in will get better, by the power of God.  The valleys will be lifted, the rough places made smooth. But their relationships with people are rocky because prophets are not afraid to tell the people the truth – that they have strayed like lost sheep from living according to God’s purposes.  But because they are so blunt prophets are usually loners, many have no established home, and some are quite eccentric like John the Baptist wearing itchy camel hair clothing and eating honey straight from the hive. 

What prophets have to say is offensive to people who think of ourselves as good people, honest people, hard working people who have deservedly earned all we have, because often we have overlooked a multitude of our own sins.  The truth of the prophets is jarring.  The people in Nazareth were probably thinking of themselves when Jesus read Isaiah.  Israel is poor, Jews are poor, they’ve been trounced by empire after empire, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and now Roman. Many of the ancestors of the people in Nazareth had been taken captive, forced to live as slaves in other lands.  They have suffered from oppression, unfair taxes, prejudicial treatment. So they expected a messenger anointed by God to bring them some good news, proclaiming release and freedom.  The congregation identified with the ones who would rightly receive God’s blessings.  

But as Jesus pressed on in his sermon he lifted up Elijah, a prophet who spoke out when Israel’s kings and the people were being unfaithful to the Lord, worshipping gods of other religions, living by a different set of ethics.  Once Elijah declared to Israel that the Lord was about to punish Israel for their unfaithfulness with a drought and famine.   This made the leaders so angry that Elijah had to flee town.  The Lord took care of Elijah and led him to Zarephath where he met a very poor gentile widow who gave him shelter and food. Though she was down to the bottom of her flour bin, and had only a few drops of oil left, she made bread for him, and miraculously there was enough food to last through the famine.  Elijah worked further wonders by bringing the widow’s dead son back to life.  In his sermon Jesus reminded the congregation of Nazareth that God did not send Elijah to the Jews during this famine, but to a gentile woman.  

Jesus then made a similar point as he reminded the people of the prophet Elisha – whom God used to heal a gentile commander of an enemy army.  Naaman had leprosy and one of his Jewish slaves suggested that he find the prophet in Israel who could heal.  And sure enough, the power of the Lord worked through Elisha to heal Naaman. As a result Naaman converted to only worship the Lord of Israel.  

By mentioning both stories Jesus is making it crystal clear that he doesn’t expect his good news to sound like good news to everyone and that by speaking the truth he expects to be rejected.  Taken as a model, Jesus sermon shows that God’s word both comforts and challenges.  It all depends on the context of the listener.  Those who are truly oppressed, struggling with the chains of addiction, or of ethnic prejudice, or a society that keeps wages lower for one gender than another, or that keeps some families from getting the full legal benefits that other families enjoy, then the Word of God is good news.  If you are someone who saw beloved family members tortured and murdered by unjust governments, and escaped and traveled through great hardship to a land of opportunity, only to need to live in secrecy and constant fear of deportation, then the Word of God is good news. If you are the prodigal son who has squandered your blessings until you hit rock bottom and you see that Jesus is waiting and watching for you like a loving father, calling you back home, ready to embrace you with open arms, the Word of God is good news.  But if you are like the people in Israel at the time of Elijah or Elisha, or the people in Nazareth during Jesus’ sermon, or like the older brother of the prodigal, the faithful one who stayed by the Father’s side and worked hard trying to earn his love, then the truth of the Good News will most likely catch you up short.  God’s embrace of outsiders, God’s free and abundant grace for sinners, and the God honest truth that you are not so good as you think you will not sound so good at first.  Especially if we aren’t expecting it, such preaching will take us off guard, make us angry, ready to through the preacher off nearest the cliff.

Bishop Willimon, who taught at Duke with ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas while I was at Duke tells this story. “In a seminar for preachers that I led with Stanley Hauerwas, one pastor said, in a plaintive voice, ‘The bishop sent me to a little town in South Carolina. I preached one Sunday on the challenge of racial justice. In two months my people were so angry that the bishop moved me. At the next church, I was determined for things to go better. Didn't preach about race. But we had an incident in town, and I felt forced to speak. The board met that week and voted unanimously for us to be moved. My wife was insulted at the supermarket. My children were beaten up on the school ground.’” Willimon said, “My pastoral heart went out to this dear, suffering brother. Hauerwas replied, “And your point is what? We work for the living God, not a false, dead god! Did somebody tell you it would be easy?”

In the recent worship survey we took there is a question about whether any sermon has been offensive.  Only one of the 33 respondents admitted that one sermon had.  If I shared this with Professor Hauerwas he would probably suggest that I haven’t been doing my job well enough.  To tell the truth I have a pretty strong prophetic streak, it’s one of my top three spiritual gifts.  I used it more freely in my early years as a preacher.  You might say age has tempered me, but I am also at a stage in my life when I’m more afraid for myself and my family to say something to make folks want to run me off a cliff. 

Yet refusing to speak the prophetic truth, the truth that makes people uncomfortable and challenges people to take a good look at themselves has its own danger. In the height of the Civil Rights movement and all the conflict about the Vietnam War a book came out called To Comfort and to Challenge presenting results of a survey of church goers. They discovered that parishioners, particularly those most deeply involved, primarily seek comfort from the church. The findings suggested that the preachers who stressed the church’s role in challenging injustice would likely lose the support of the staunchest members. The preachers who were better able to keep their jobs didn’t address the challenging parts of God’s Word so much. They focused on comfort. In the long run, however this has harmed our congregations. In a recent poll of unchristian people between 16 and 29 years old the Barna Group discovered that 85% think of us a hypocritical. Hypocrisy comes from saying we follow Jesus in a way of life, without making the effort at self reflection, seeing how we each have fallen short of the glory of God, failed to be obedient, and have even turned away from God and failed in loving even though we sit in the pews week after week. The only antidote to self reflection is to be challenged with the whole Truth of the gospel which leads us to truly and humbly acknowledge our own sin.

This leads me to ask whether we can do something as members of the church, followers of Jesus, to be better able to hear the challenging truth. Is there some way we can shift our expectations to be ready for times when God’s word feels offensive, pricks our consciousness, challenges some of our deepest assumptions, and most beloved ways of life and not act on our urges to do harm to the messenger? Perhaps it will help to remember the way of Salvation; a way that starts with us in an unawakened state, unaware of God, unaware that we are living sinful lives. The word of God often comes to people in this state as a challenge, a prick to the soul. In religious terms we don’t call it offended, we call it being convicted. Coming to terms with the realization of our sins, and the seriousness of them is tough and can be emotionally wrenching, involving feelings of guilt, and tears of repentance. Yet in receiving this convicting word we are once again awakened to God at work in the world and our relationship to God and neighbor. We become aware that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But this time of conviction is but a stage on the way to salvation. A necessary stage, but not one we are meant to stay in. Rather as we seek the guidance and prayers of fellow travelers on the journey we learn that all true Christians have been convicted of their sin from time to time, and wrestled with God until they got to a time of peace, a time of feeling forgiven, embraced, welcomed home again. As long as we don’t stay stuck in conviction – or try to hold others there – but all keep pressing forward to forgiveness we can start to see conviction as a good thing, an important part of our journey toward becoming the saints of God and living in perfect love with God and our neighbors.

When I was in high school our church youth group took over the entire Sunday School building, turning it into a haunted house, where guest could wander from room to room decorated with cob webs, and strobe lights. In one room they would meet Dr. Frankenstein and touch cold spaghetti brains, and peeled grape eyes, another room was filled with tombstones and skeletons, a warewolf would jump out from a corner. We had great fun putting it together. One year I was part of a small group who decided to create the “ungabunga room.” We dressed in shorts and bikini tops, gathered tall swamp grass for decoration and built a large cauldron with a fake fire underneath. Then we would take turns going to other areas to capture victims and put them into the pot. I thought this was great fun indeed. But if anyone looked at this and said my church was being hypocritical, they would be right.

Now I look back at my deeds, actions taken as part of a church, with the blessing of the other members of my church with shame. Since that time the Word of God has been proclaimed to me over and over in a way that pricked my conscience, and convicted me of my sin. Now I can see that what I was doing was stereotyping human beings, people created in the image of God, who live in different cultures, have different languages, and wear different clothing. I was presenting peoples of the two thirds world to my church and the community around us as if they were monsters, less than fully human, objects of ridicule and scorn. I was participating in the great sin of racism and the memory of my actions is grievous indeed.

But I am thankful for the convicting word of God, a word presented to me over and over again to help me understand racism, and to challenge me to carefully examine my heart, my words and my actions so that through the grace of God I can change. It hasn’t always been pleasant. I have sometimes been angry at the assertion that my words and actions were racist. But the function of conviction is to motivate us to open ourselves up to the Spirit of God so that we can be remolded and fashioned once again in God’s holy image.
When we can hear the challenging word of God, trusting that it is part of God’s grace to restore us and save us from the bonds of sin, then even the prick of conviction can become good news. For conviction of sin, combined with a true love of Jesus and faith in his forgiving love of us is what we all need to be saved. And when the preachers are humble enough to fully include ourselves among the sinful alongside the congregation, then we won’t be in danger of hypocrisy. And perhaps we will be less likely to be run out of town. God can’t use any of us to break someone else’s hearts of stone, until our own stony hearts have been softened by conviction, true confession and God’s gracious forgiving love.

This is why our worship always includes a confession of sin. And on communion Sundays, if we let our words be true, and we offer our own specific convictions in the silence, then the grace imparted through the bread and the cup can be all that more significant of God’s saving grace in our lives.