Evangelism | Discipleship | Servanthood | Diversity
Finding Christ Back Home Again..... sermon
Finding Christ in All the Wrong Places:
Back Home Again
Luke 4:14-30 Oct. 18, 2009
Rev. Dr. Keith M. Curran
St. Andrew Presbyterian Church
1885 Bridge Road Suffolk, VA 23433
www.standrewpres.net
The late Mike Yaconelli, in his book Messy Spirituality, writes: “According to his critics, Jesus did it ‘all wrong’. He went to the wrong places, said the wrong things, and worst of all, let just anyone into the kingdom. What made people furious was Jesus’ irresponsible habit of throwing open the doors of his love to the whosoevers, the just-anyones, and the not-a-chancers like you and me. Nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace.”
And Jesus is at it again! Here in Luke’s Gospel we find him in all the wrong places: at the edge of a cliff, at the end of a sharp knife, the target of curses and the brunt of the most unwelcoming homecoming ever. What’s the Christ doing in a place like this? But wait. Isn’t he back home again?
He’s come back to the neighborhood where he grew up, where his brothers and sisters and mother still live. How can being back home again get so screwed up? How can Nazareth, his home town, be the wrong place for the Christ? How could the ‘local boy makes good’ guy be the guy who has to run for his life? Was Tom Wolf right when he said, ‘You can’t go home again”?
When I was on my reading week at the Outer Banks retreat house, I took a break to watch the Green Bay Packers play the Minn. Vikings on Monday Night Football. It was one of those ‘can’t go home again’ moments. Brett Farve, long time record-breaking quarterback for the Packers came out of retirement again and is now playing for the Vikings. Their head to head match up on Monday Night Football made headlines. Farve destroyed his old team making him the only NFL QB to win against every team in the league. In spite of all the hype, though, after the game Brett and his old Packers’ teammates hugged and laughed and slapped each other on the bottoms, as football players are apt to do. What will happen when he plays in Green Bay is yet to be seen. Was Tom Wolf right that you can’t go home again?
Our 200 year-old congregation in western PA was celebrating the 100th anniversary of our beautiful Akron-plan sanctuary back in 1996. All the living pastors were invited back to participate. The most recent pastor declined to attend but sent his wife. The pastor before him did attend after being away for 18 years, saying to me in confidence; “I guess it’s time to come back for a visit. I don’t think I can stay away forever.” It turned out that both previous pastors left under not the most loving circumstances. Sometimes it is hard to ‘come home again’.
Living in Florida, we were coming north to visit my parents and brother’s family in Niagara Falls. It was a big trip for our family of six by car; more than a 24 hour drive. I volunteered to preach at my home church as the pastor was hoping for a vacation Sunday. I thought I had a good sermon, some jokes and reminiscing for laughs and a good story or two. I wanted it to be a good sermon for the folks who welcomed me as a fledging Christian back to church in 1974 and supported me during my Seminary years. But no one laughed at the jokes and the receiving line was cool almost as if they didn’t know me from Adam. I’d been a church school teacher, the youth group leader for 2 years, was married there, was under care of the Session during seminary, ordained in that sanctuary and friends with a good number of members. Debbie’s grandfather was the pastor of the church back in the ‘50’s yet there I was, living out Tom Wolf’s famous line; you can’t go home again. I haven’t been back since.
Hometowns can be a tough crowd. An obituary ran in the newspaper of a small town in northern Maine that reported the death of the town doctor who had grown up there. He was 101 years old and lived in the town since he was a year old. His parents had moved to Maine when he was one and he returned after medical school to serve as a country doctor. He married and raised his family in the small Maine town. But hometowns are a tough crowd, especially in small town New England. The 101 year old doctor’s obituary is quite telling as it began… “Although not a native of Maine, Doctor Jones….” Hometown crowds can be tough.
Have you driven by your childhood home? Walked the halls of your high school? Visited the sports field of your youth? Talked with those you worked with during college or knocked on the door of a neighbor from the old neighborhood? What was it like for you to go home again?
What was it like for Jesus to go back home again, once he became a local celebrity in Galilee for his preaching, teaching and healing ministry? If it’s true that celebrity is as celebrity does , then Jesus should have gotten the star treatment but instead, the Gospel of Luke reports, they attacked him and tried to throw him over a cliff. Tough crowd!
Scholars suggest that his ‘not so welcome’ welcome was due to the expectation that he should have made Nazareth his base of operations and brought fame and notoriety to his hometown. Or that Jesus should have filled the streets of Nazareth with healing stories and visited every home with a miracle. But neither happened nor was it going to happen. They heard of his wonder working power and his fame in the neighboring town of Capernaum, and were amazed at his words of sheer grace when he preached, but where were the miracles? The sick were waiting for a healing. The mentally disturbed needed a cure. Handicapped children were expecting Jesus to stop by. What about the home crowd? How about sending a little miracle power our way? “Show us what you got, Jesus,” we can imagine them saying.
When Jesus got wind of their disappointment, and sensed what they were looking for, it began to sink in that going back home again may not have been such a good idea, after all. Intentionally making a point or maybe just trying to explain how the things of God work didn’t help the matter. It got them even more upset. They ran him out of town on a rail. What was the Christ doing back home again? Even Jesus realized that you can’t go home again if you are a prophet of God.
Yet, like M.L.King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” sermon that propelled him into the national spotlight, Jesus’ Nazareth sermon propelled him into the Galilean spotlight and set the stage for the next 3 dramatic years of preaching and teaching for the Master. What was it about his sermon that, at the same time amazed and offended the hometown folks? Why did it seem like going home again was the wrong place for the Christ?
To answer this intriguing question, we have to go back to Messy Spirituality and the quote that began this sermon.
“Jesus did it ‘all wrong’. He went to the wrong places, said the wrong things, and worst of all, let just anyone into the kingdom. What made people furious was Jesus’ irresponsible habit of throwing open the doors of his love to the whosoevers, the just-anyones, and the not-a-chancers like you and me. Nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace.”
The Isaiah text that Jesus read aloud from the unrolled scroll had come to represent, by this time in the Jewish faith, a promise of the Kingdom of God where the whosoevers, the just-anyones, and the not-a-chancers like you and me would be welcomed into the wide-open and beckoning arms of a loving God. Jesus was talking about sinners and outcasts and even Gentiles. The Torah-keeping, synagogue-attending, kosher-keeping hometown folks weren’t the ones Jesus was talking about. Yet shouldn’t God reward the good church folks, first? Jesus preached “Jubilee” the time when all barriers were dropped and all debts forgiven and all relationships restored to pristine condition. (Our Presbyterian Women studied this last year.) As Mike Yaconelli pointed out, nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace.
But grace is what he offered and although we don’t read about here in Luke, we can easily imagine some in the congregation loved what they heard that day, like the poor widow who stood outside listening at the window of the synagogue. No coin for the offering so in her embarrassment she leaned against the course sandstone wall. “I’m here bringing the good news of God to the poor,” promised Jesus. She remembered him as a boy, chasing his little sister round and round her front yard. Now poverty was chasing her out of her home and onto the streets. How can God love someone who can’t give an offering at church? Yet Jesus seemed to be talking about her situation, about her. “Blessed are the poor for the kingdom of God belongs to them, to her.”
Maybe you’re worried about your finances and you’d love to give more in the offering but you feel bad that you can’t. Maybe your job situation means you can’t fulfill your 2009 pledge. What’s God going to think about that? What’s that mean for your spiritual relationships? Will God still love you the same? You got the stewardship flyer in the mail this week that included a challenge to step up to tithing a percentage of your income. And you said to yourself, ‘not a chance’. But Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth is directed to the ‘not-a-chancers’. Don’t let your financial situation hinder your spirituality, says Jesus.
The 15 year-old teenager remembered Jesus sister babysitting her and her brother, and once in a while Jesus would come to help his sister out when they became a handful for her. Now she stood against the back wall listening to this grown up Jesus. She felt like a ‘just anybody’. The other girls her age were much prettier, shapelier, and the young men were already angling for marriage proposals from some of them. But she was a ‘just anybody’ and no one gave her a second look. Her poor self-image was like a set of Roman manacles that trapped her in the shyness of self-doubt. Yet something seemed to give way when Jesus smiled in her direction and said the prisoners were being set free as I spoke.
If God could love her, then she was lovable, right? she said to herself. “And Jesus was saying that, wasn’t her?”
Maybe you’re feeling unlovable. Maybe you’ve given up looking for love. Some can actually feel trapped in a cycle of self-doubt and low self-esteem. Yet Jesus is saying that even the ‘just anybodies’ are just as important to God as everyone else. And maybe God is trying to let you know that today.
His prestigious front-row seat in the synagogue camouflaged his broken spirituality that hung by a slender thread in his heart. Politics, shady business deals, grumpy neighbors, his arthritis, and his not so happy marriage added up to one big question: Does God really care about me? If he said it once, he said it a hundred times; “I can’t see God in any of this.” Yet it surprised him every time he asked himself that question. Somehow, somewhere in his soul, he wanted to hear a big “Yes; God cares, God loves, God is deeply interested in me.” But he couldn’t see it. Circumstance blinded him. Life just clouded the question with its trouble and heartache.
Yet here was Jesus. He remembered talking with him at the carpenter shop when Jesus as commissioned to make some of the chancel furniture for the synagogue, including the ‘bema’ he was sitting on to preach that day. Could this carpenter’s son really be talking about him? Could this young man read his mind, be answering the question that weighed heavy on his heart? Could he be the blind man whom Jesus said was receiving his sight? Could he be the ‘whosoever’ when Jesus said “that God sent his only Son into the world so that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life”? Could he believe, really believe that this carpenter’s son was the Christ, even if it seems like it’s the wrong place for God’s Son to be talking?
And maybe, like this elder, you’re faith is hanging by a slender thread and you’re questioning whether this sermon could be for you, too. Maybe you can be one of the ‘whosoevers’ that Jesus was talking about then and assures us today that if you just believe, you too will not die but have everlasting life.
Maybe this Nazareth sermon is for you today. Maybe you see yourself as a ‘not-a-chancer’ or a ‘just anybody’ or even a ‘whosoever’? Not everyone that day wanted to kill Jesus. Some actually wanted to believe him, follow him, and love him. What about you?
Back Home Again
Luke 4:14-30 Oct. 18, 2009
Rev. Dr. Keith M. Curran
St. Andrew Presbyterian Church
1885 Bridge Road Suffolk, VA 23433
www.standrewpres.net
The late Mike Yaconelli, in his book Messy Spirituality, writes: “According to his critics, Jesus did it ‘all wrong’. He went to the wrong places, said the wrong things, and worst of all, let just anyone into the kingdom. What made people furious was Jesus’ irresponsible habit of throwing open the doors of his love to the whosoevers, the just-anyones, and the not-a-chancers like you and me. Nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace.”
And Jesus is at it again! Here in Luke’s Gospel we find him in all the wrong places: at the edge of a cliff, at the end of a sharp knife, the target of curses and the brunt of the most unwelcoming homecoming ever. What’s the Christ doing in a place like this? But wait. Isn’t he back home again?
He’s come back to the neighborhood where he grew up, where his brothers and sisters and mother still live. How can being back home again get so screwed up? How can Nazareth, his home town, be the wrong place for the Christ? How could the ‘local boy makes good’ guy be the guy who has to run for his life? Was Tom Wolf right when he said, ‘You can’t go home again”?
When I was on my reading week at the Outer Banks retreat house, I took a break to watch the Green Bay Packers play the Minn. Vikings on Monday Night Football. It was one of those ‘can’t go home again’ moments. Brett Farve, long time record-breaking quarterback for the Packers came out of retirement again and is now playing for the Vikings. Their head to head match up on Monday Night Football made headlines. Farve destroyed his old team making him the only NFL QB to win against every team in the league. In spite of all the hype, though, after the game Brett and his old Packers’ teammates hugged and laughed and slapped each other on the bottoms, as football players are apt to do. What will happen when he plays in Green Bay is yet to be seen. Was Tom Wolf right that you can’t go home again?
Our 200 year-old congregation in western PA was celebrating the 100th anniversary of our beautiful Akron-plan sanctuary back in 1996. All the living pastors were invited back to participate. The most recent pastor declined to attend but sent his wife. The pastor before him did attend after being away for 18 years, saying to me in confidence; “I guess it’s time to come back for a visit. I don’t think I can stay away forever.” It turned out that both previous pastors left under not the most loving circumstances. Sometimes it is hard to ‘come home again’.
Living in Florida, we were coming north to visit my parents and brother’s family in Niagara Falls. It was a big trip for our family of six by car; more than a 24 hour drive. I volunteered to preach at my home church as the pastor was hoping for a vacation Sunday. I thought I had a good sermon, some jokes and reminiscing for laughs and a good story or two. I wanted it to be a good sermon for the folks who welcomed me as a fledging Christian back to church in 1974 and supported me during my Seminary years. But no one laughed at the jokes and the receiving line was cool almost as if they didn’t know me from Adam. I’d been a church school teacher, the youth group leader for 2 years, was married there, was under care of the Session during seminary, ordained in that sanctuary and friends with a good number of members. Debbie’s grandfather was the pastor of the church back in the ‘50’s yet there I was, living out Tom Wolf’s famous line; you can’t go home again. I haven’t been back since.
Hometowns can be a tough crowd. An obituary ran in the newspaper of a small town in northern Maine that reported the death of the town doctor who had grown up there. He was 101 years old and lived in the town since he was a year old. His parents had moved to Maine when he was one and he returned after medical school to serve as a country doctor. He married and raised his family in the small Maine town. But hometowns are a tough crowd, especially in small town New England. The 101 year old doctor’s obituary is quite telling as it began… “Although not a native of Maine, Doctor Jones….” Hometown crowds can be tough.
Have you driven by your childhood home? Walked the halls of your high school? Visited the sports field of your youth? Talked with those you worked with during college or knocked on the door of a neighbor from the old neighborhood? What was it like for you to go home again?
What was it like for Jesus to go back home again, once he became a local celebrity in Galilee for his preaching, teaching and healing ministry? If it’s true that celebrity is as celebrity does , then Jesus should have gotten the star treatment but instead, the Gospel of Luke reports, they attacked him and tried to throw him over a cliff. Tough crowd!
Scholars suggest that his ‘not so welcome’ welcome was due to the expectation that he should have made Nazareth his base of operations and brought fame and notoriety to his hometown. Or that Jesus should have filled the streets of Nazareth with healing stories and visited every home with a miracle. But neither happened nor was it going to happen. They heard of his wonder working power and his fame in the neighboring town of Capernaum, and were amazed at his words of sheer grace when he preached, but where were the miracles? The sick were waiting for a healing. The mentally disturbed needed a cure. Handicapped children were expecting Jesus to stop by. What about the home crowd? How about sending a little miracle power our way? “Show us what you got, Jesus,” we can imagine them saying.
When Jesus got wind of their disappointment, and sensed what they were looking for, it began to sink in that going back home again may not have been such a good idea, after all. Intentionally making a point or maybe just trying to explain how the things of God work didn’t help the matter. It got them even more upset. They ran him out of town on a rail. What was the Christ doing back home again? Even Jesus realized that you can’t go home again if you are a prophet of God.
Yet, like M.L.King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” sermon that propelled him into the national spotlight, Jesus’ Nazareth sermon propelled him into the Galilean spotlight and set the stage for the next 3 dramatic years of preaching and teaching for the Master. What was it about his sermon that, at the same time amazed and offended the hometown folks? Why did it seem like going home again was the wrong place for the Christ?
To answer this intriguing question, we have to go back to Messy Spirituality and the quote that began this sermon.
“Jesus did it ‘all wrong’. He went to the wrong places, said the wrong things, and worst of all, let just anyone into the kingdom. What made people furious was Jesus’ irresponsible habit of throwing open the doors of his love to the whosoevers, the just-anyones, and the not-a-chancers like you and me. Nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace.”
The Isaiah text that Jesus read aloud from the unrolled scroll had come to represent, by this time in the Jewish faith, a promise of the Kingdom of God where the whosoevers, the just-anyones, and the not-a-chancers like you and me would be welcomed into the wide-open and beckoning arms of a loving God. Jesus was talking about sinners and outcasts and even Gentiles. The Torah-keeping, synagogue-attending, kosher-keeping hometown folks weren’t the ones Jesus was talking about. Yet shouldn’t God reward the good church folks, first? Jesus preached “Jubilee” the time when all barriers were dropped and all debts forgiven and all relationships restored to pristine condition. (Our Presbyterian Women studied this last year.) As Mike Yaconelli pointed out, nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace.
But grace is what he offered and although we don’t read about here in Luke, we can easily imagine some in the congregation loved what they heard that day, like the poor widow who stood outside listening at the window of the synagogue. No coin for the offering so in her embarrassment she leaned against the course sandstone wall. “I’m here bringing the good news of God to the poor,” promised Jesus. She remembered him as a boy, chasing his little sister round and round her front yard. Now poverty was chasing her out of her home and onto the streets. How can God love someone who can’t give an offering at church? Yet Jesus seemed to be talking about her situation, about her. “Blessed are the poor for the kingdom of God belongs to them, to her.”
Maybe you’re worried about your finances and you’d love to give more in the offering but you feel bad that you can’t. Maybe your job situation means you can’t fulfill your 2009 pledge. What’s God going to think about that? What’s that mean for your spiritual relationships? Will God still love you the same? You got the stewardship flyer in the mail this week that included a challenge to step up to tithing a percentage of your income. And you said to yourself, ‘not a chance’. But Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth is directed to the ‘not-a-chancers’. Don’t let your financial situation hinder your spirituality, says Jesus.
The 15 year-old teenager remembered Jesus sister babysitting her and her brother, and once in a while Jesus would come to help his sister out when they became a handful for her. Now she stood against the back wall listening to this grown up Jesus. She felt like a ‘just anybody’. The other girls her age were much prettier, shapelier, and the young men were already angling for marriage proposals from some of them. But she was a ‘just anybody’ and no one gave her a second look. Her poor self-image was like a set of Roman manacles that trapped her in the shyness of self-doubt. Yet something seemed to give way when Jesus smiled in her direction and said the prisoners were being set free as I spoke.
If God could love her, then she was lovable, right? she said to herself. “And Jesus was saying that, wasn’t her?”
Maybe you’re feeling unlovable. Maybe you’ve given up looking for love. Some can actually feel trapped in a cycle of self-doubt and low self-esteem. Yet Jesus is saying that even the ‘just anybodies’ are just as important to God as everyone else. And maybe God is trying to let you know that today.
His prestigious front-row seat in the synagogue camouflaged his broken spirituality that hung by a slender thread in his heart. Politics, shady business deals, grumpy neighbors, his arthritis, and his not so happy marriage added up to one big question: Does God really care about me? If he said it once, he said it a hundred times; “I can’t see God in any of this.” Yet it surprised him every time he asked himself that question. Somehow, somewhere in his soul, he wanted to hear a big “Yes; God cares, God loves, God is deeply interested in me.” But he couldn’t see it. Circumstance blinded him. Life just clouded the question with its trouble and heartache.
Yet here was Jesus. He remembered talking with him at the carpenter shop when Jesus as commissioned to make some of the chancel furniture for the synagogue, including the ‘bema’ he was sitting on to preach that day. Could this carpenter’s son really be talking about him? Could this young man read his mind, be answering the question that weighed heavy on his heart? Could he be the blind man whom Jesus said was receiving his sight? Could he be the ‘whosoever’ when Jesus said “that God sent his only Son into the world so that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life”? Could he believe, really believe that this carpenter’s son was the Christ, even if it seems like it’s the wrong place for God’s Son to be talking?
And maybe, like this elder, you’re faith is hanging by a slender thread and you’re questioning whether this sermon could be for you, too. Maybe you can be one of the ‘whosoevers’ that Jesus was talking about then and assures us today that if you just believe, you too will not die but have everlasting life.
Maybe this Nazareth sermon is for you today. Maybe you see yourself as a ‘not-a-chancer’ or a ‘just anybody’ or even a ‘whosoever’? Not everyone that day wanted to kill Jesus. Some actually wanted to believe him, follow him, and love him. What about you?
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