From the Pulpit:

Last week when I preached on the book of Nehemiah it was a conscious choice that I was going to save the Luke passage for this week.
Today we read the second half, the tougher half, of the story we began then, the one where Jesus comes back to his home town and preaches in the synagogue to all the men who knew him when he was a little kid.

I’m going to tackle this story today but I’m going to begin by talking about the passage we just read from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth , the one you’ve probably heard read at at least 99% of the weddings you’ve ever attended whether they were in church or not. I have a beautiful calligraphy painting of it in my office. I love it as much as the next person, all those really lovely things it says about love, but I’m going to stand here and dare to say out loud that Paul was not talking about the kind of love that sparkles in the eyes of the bride and groom, not on the day they stand there all dressed up and swathed in a cloud of sentimentality, which every bride and groom deserve especially after the grueling marathon of wedding planning they have just gone through with invitation lists and feuding relatives, tipsy groomsmen and writing thank you notes for the fifteenth slow cooker. And it is not about personal love either – not the love of parents and children, of teachers and students, of best friends forever or a pastor and the congregation she adores – which she does, incidentally, and cannot tell you often enough.

No. This love which is patient, kind, generous, humble, enduring and eternal is nothing short of tough love. It is a love that we are given despite the fact that we don’t deserve it and a love we are called to embody because Jesus lived, died, and rose for us. The cost of this love was nothing less than the cross, and we sell it short, sell Jesus short, and sell ourselves short when we accompany this passage from Corinthians with the Carpenters sweetly singing We’ve only just begun. I’ll still tingle every time we read it at a wedding, because it promises so much more than happily ever after to two people making deceptively simple promises to each other.

Now on to Luke, as promised. Hold onto the part we just read and let me go back to last week’s passage, the easy part of this story,
the one that was played in a major key, and let me read it to you from The Message, a contemporary rendition of scripture:

Every eye in the place was on him, intent. Then he started in, "You've just heard Scripture make history. It came true just now in this place." This is startling to the gathered men and boys. Not only did he read well, not only did he not preach a sermon. He more or less sat down and said, Well, here I am. God incarnate. You may think you know me and you may think you know God’s story, but I’m telling you that the thing you are hoping for, the thing you are waiting for, the person you are expecting to save you from everything,
well, wait no longer, it is here, not out there, and I am the one, not the shining prince who will ride in on a white stallion. What you’ve imagined would happen is not happening. The messiah you’ve imagined looks just like a kid who grew up down the block and the world you were waiting for is the world you’ve got.

And here’s where it gets worse. I have to tell you I wish he’d bitten his tongue. To me and to a lot of the scholars I read it looks like
he goes out of his way to tick them off. They were trying to be generous, saying wow, that was great when they probably weren’t all
that thrilled, but he jumps in and reads their minds. So you want me to do the magic tricks you’ve heard about? Well, I can’t do them here, and what’s more, Elijah and Elisha performed their miracles of healing for gentiles, not Jews, so your idea that I’ve come just for you is way off base. As I said, that’s not a choice I would have made, but then, as you know only too well, I’m not Jesus.  

There’s an old saying about what the church is meant to do, and it’s not going to draw in the throngs if we put it on our website or
in the expensive little ad in the Onion Creek newsletter. The role of the church, it is said, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. We like the first half, don’t we? And I imagine each and every one of us has an affliction of some sort and we like to
come here to be comforted. It’s the other half that makes us squirm. I’m pretty comfortable myself. Why on earth would I subject
myself to coming to church to get that taken away from me? Why would you?

I read yesterday that Joel Osteen fills that massive basketball stadium every Sunday of the year to capacity by preaching to those eager people that God wants them all to be rich. And if they are rich, to be richer still. We were pretty full in church last week but we’re never bursting at the seams, but I can’t preach that message because I don’t believe that is the gospel of Christ.

The gospel of Christ, the good news of Jesus is not simplistic and it is not just about me and what I want. That is the gospel of the marketplace. No, the gospel of Christ is a challenge to be who God knows me to be, for us as a congregation to be who God knows
us to be, and it is not where we are comfy and cozy because we don’t get to stay there until everybody is comfy and cozy and
everybody includes a lot of people not like us.

I read a wonderful book this week. It is called Jesus Freak and is by Sara Miles who is director of ministries at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco . She could not be more surprised to find herself there. She was trained as a war reporter,
a journalist who lived the ragged-edged life of one who embeds herself with soldiers in combat in the most inhospitable places in the world. Following that she was in the restaurant business, which if you have watched much reality TV you know is just about as gritty
and blasphemous as a war zone. She was well into middle age when she wandered into this most unusual church, was given a piece of bread in her palm with the words, this is the body of Christ, and she knew that it was nothing less and that if she ate it, if she took it into her body her life would be changed forever. And she did and it was. She found her life’s work.

Every Friday the church is opened up and in their sacred space, arranged around the altar itself they have a food distribution program
for anyone who needs food. Literally tons of food is delivered on pallets, potatoes and heads of lettuce, juice and milk and bread. It makes a huge mess. Over the years it has escalated to the point where 900 people come each week. Nobody is screened to see if they are truly poor. Nobody is checked to see that they are not a drug addict or a prostitute or a liar or mentally ill. Everybody comes,
nobody is turned away unless they are drunk, stoned, or violent. And nobody is turned away from serving as well. The community that has been born is the body of Christ and it is not a strong, clean, socially acceptable body, but rather a body where everyone compensates for somebody else’s weakness. Where the only requirement of belonging is not what you believe but is that you are hungry.

I’d like that to be the only requirement of belonging to this church as well. All you need is to be hungry. The thing, though, as she writes
in her book, is that we come hungry, we are fed, and in being fed we are transformed into the body of Christ with all that entails,
and what it entails is defying our expectations of ourselves.

The men and boys at the synagogue had expectations of Jesus and he did not meet them. He did not fit into their box. Not the box
of the kid who went to school with your kid. Not the box of the messiah. They don’t know what to do with him so they try to throw him off a cliff.

If we look at the four gospels, the four life stories we have of Jesus, he did not feed every poor person. He did not heal every sick person. He did not raise every dead person, just as Elijah raised only one widow’s son and Elisha healed only one leper. Jesus did not even try. What he did was call the disciples, teach them, love them, and empower them to feed the hungry, heal the sick, raise the dead, none of which did they believe they could do until they did. He saw them as God saw them and taught them to see themselves as God saw them and even more importantly to see everyone else with God’s eyes, as precious and worthy of all good gifts whether they were like them or not.

Sara Miles tells of Zoe, a sixty year old woman deaf since her abusive childhood and whose coping mechanism as she dealt with her mental illness was to be abrasive and abrupt. She came to St. Gregory’s hungry, a self-confessed tough bird, she was fed, and became
a minister there not only to the street people and others who suffered from mental illness but to Sara herself. She became Christ’s to Sara’s hunger. One day Zoe accosted Sara, made her stop what she was doing and blurted out, “Guess what! Hey, I’m telling you, that Jesus dude is sneaky. He just hides in the bushes and jumps out and says, Hey, it’s me! and then you gotta follow him everywhere.”

That’s what love means, that love that is patient and kind and humble and generous and enduring and eternal. It is love for everyone
God loves, everyone, and if we accept that love for ourselves we can’t do anything but extend it to others. He jumps out of the bushes
at us and yells, Hey, it’s me, and we gotta follow him everywhere.

Everywhere.

Amen.