Don’t Try This At Home

A Sermon based upon Luke 4: 14-30

A Sermon by Charles J. Tomlin

Zion-Flat Rock Baptist Partnership

Third Sunday after Epiphany, Jan. 24, 2010

  

The other day I saw Jay Leno’s spot; “Don’t Try This at Home.”   The first guest stood on a medicine ball and while balancing himself, took a barbell and did several squats.   It hard enough to do squats on level ground, but he did it standing on a medicine ball.   Then, to beat this, the next guest stood flat footed, turned a backward flip and then landed his feet into a swinging rope, suspending himself upside down.   He did all of this while blind-folded.   Both times, Leno reminded the crowd, “Don’t try this at home.”

Today’s Scripture reminds something else we should be careful about at home.   It is the story of how Jesus was rejected even in his home town of Nazareth.  It’s the kind of text that reminds just how dangerous and risky religion can be, especially because we hold faith close to our hearts, because, for the most part, we have been free to practice our religion our own way.  

It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?   Most of the time we preachers are trying to get people to take their faith home with them.   We tell you that just coming to church is not enough---you’ve got to take Jesus home and practice what you preach.   What we mean is that real faith needs to impact your whole life; not just your church life.   This is still true.   In fact, today’s text is still trying to get us to do just that---let faith impact our lives in very life-changing ways.  But that is also where the danger comes in.   The people in Nazareth are willing to practice their faith at home, as long as they decided the faith they were going to practice.   The faith Jesus brings home to them is not the kind of faith they wanted.   They had their own “home grown” faith already and didn't want anyone, including Jesus, showing them any different. By the time we get to end of the story people in Nazareth are ready to kill their own, hometown boy.

But the story didn’t begin this way.   In fact, our story begins when Jesus unrolls the scroll where it says in Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor…”  (4:16).   With this moment of drama, Jesus has announced his own call to preach.   The people are amazed and excited.   “The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him…” (Vs. 20).   It gets better: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came out of his lips” (Vs. 22).   

All this reminds me of my own call into the ministry.   The pastor was pleased.   The people prayed for me.   They were all ready to support me in any way they could.   They let me preach, even when my grammar was bad and my thoughts were scrambled.   I knew I wasn’t polished, but I was the first one in the church to be called into the ministry.   It was an exciting moment, for everyone, except my mom.   When I told her I felt that the “Spirit of the Lord was upon me”, and felt God was calling me into the ministry, my mom’s first words were, “No, you don’t want to do that!   At first I couldn’t believe my mom saying this, then she said, “Don’t you know what people do to preachers?”   

No sooner had the people started showing their support of Jesus, the support turns to rage against him. Jesus doesn’t just read the Scripture, but now preaches the truth; something always dangerous especially at church.  Without warning, Jesus tells them that “no prophet is accepted in his hometown” (Vs. 24).   He will not be able to do miracles here.   He goes on to explain how in Elijah’s day great miracles were not done among his own, but among foreigners and strangers.   A widow in a Gentile town received the miracle, but the Jewish widows didn’t.   A sick man in Syria, Naaman the leper who was Gentile, not Jewish received the healing, and he was even one of the enemy, but no Jewish lepers were healed.  That is the point Jesus is trying to make.  He will do no miracles in his hometown.  He will come to his own, but they will not receive him well, but the sinners will and that made them mad.

After this very short sermon, warm feelings of support and sentiment turn to anger and rage as they force Jesus out of town and to the edge of a cliff.  Right when they were ready to push him over, he turns and walks right through the middle of the crowd and not one person dared lay a finger on him.   Now, you know why I’ve entitled this message, “Don’t try this at home!”   Jesus came home, but the man who has come home is not the boy who left.   He is different.  His message is different than what they expected.   Everyone had their own set of expectations of what he would say, but Jesus doesn’t fulfill these expectations. He’s no longer a just a preacher, but he’s a threat and somebody’s got to stop him.

When I read this story I’m reminded of the statistics say that most people die within 10 miles of their home.    Being at home can be dangerous for other reasons too.  Thomas Wolfe once wrote a book entitled, “You Can’t Go Home Again!”  Wolfe was writing about people leaving the family farm and going to the city to get an education or to find their fortune and then wanting to go back home.   He believed that when you leave home for whatever reason, returning is practically impossible.   It is impossible because you change and the world changes...nothing remains the same.   You can’t go home again because even the home you come back to, is not the same as the home you left.  

Teresa and I experienced this in several ways when we returned from Europe.   We loved the home we had in America, but then we also came to love Europe as well.   We saw good in both of them and that is part of the problem.   When you are in one you miss the other.   For example, when we were in Germany we loved experiencing the differences in cultures, but we also missed our families, peanut butter, free public restrooms, cheap gas, and being able to say anything in our mother tongue.   When we came back home to the US,  loved being home again, but we missed so much about Germany—the youth we ministered to, the cold winter’s with snow, the bicycle trails, the sauerkraut, the cheap but quality health care, and how most everything we owned there, was built to last.   When you have lived in two worlds you can’t help but compare the two and in some ways, you gain two homes and you lose both homes.  You always feel a little lost without the other, and you always feel a little lost in the one, that is not like the other one.  

Jesus had trouble going home to… but it was for a different reason altogether.   Jesus came preaching about another world, God’s new world which was being unveiled--- a world that was now possible but still beyond what most could imagine, because we get so used to the world we're in. Jesus wanted his people see, imagine and grasp, the new possible spiritual dream of God that was coming near to them through the gospel and through the kingdom of God, but Jesus knew, even from the beginning that his own people would be able to see it.  “He came unto his own and his own received him not.”  God’s new world is so radically different that even Nazareth would miss it.  They would miss seeing God at work in him would not fully realize how God is at work in the world right under their own noses.   They would be too comfortable in their world to entertain any dream or hope of a new one.

Making our home in this world can be dangerous to our spiritual health too.   Can’t we get to be so much at home in our own worlds of faith, belief, habits and customs, even so much at home with Jesus that we fail to see the “strangeness” and the “challenge” of what Jesus came reveal to us?     Can even knowing Jesus “too well”  prevent the miracles happening in our lives?   Can we get so comfortable in the truth about Jesus that he is almost too familiar to us, so that we miss the radical, challenging, and life-changing message we need to hear and follow?    For a couple more moments, I want to mention a couple of ways Jesus’ truth still challenges us in ways that can be hard for us to see and very easy for us to stifle the miracles God wants do among us.

First, Jesus challenges his people to see God in the particular and the ordinary, not just the spectacular and the extraordinary.    He wants them to see God in the human flesh who rides a donkey and serves his disciples here and now, not the Lord who will one day judge and rule with iron fist and rides a white horse to kill all of his enemies.

Where do most of us look for God?   It is so easy to get people to look for God in the amazing testimonies and stories of dramatic grace.    Almost every year, I get some invitation from a church that is having a revival with a person who had been an alcohol and set free, been a drug addict, a gang leader or some other struggling soul, but has now  been redeemed.   They try to draw people in to hear the amazing, astounding, arresting testimony of God’s power.   Seldom, do I get an invitation to come hear a preacher who was raised by Christian parents, is faithful to his wife and family, or who always tried to be faithful and do the right thing and who faithfully and courageously leads his people to be faithful to God is some ordinary ways.   People are still more drawn to find God the dramatic and the unusual, the spectacular and the special, but not to look for God in the regular and the ordinary.   We look up in the heavens and strain to see a god who looks down on us from far away, who can’t really interfere or get into our lives, but seldom do we look around us to find God close and present with us in the nearness and familiarity of some very ordinary places and very ordinary people.

I’m reminded of the story told about Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity.  He was working for the poor, doing exactly what Jesus talks about in this text.   He was building one of his first houses  and was hard at work.   While he was working, a child kept coming buy wanting to help.  But Fuller had little time for the child.   But the child would not give up and this frustrated Fuller so much that one day, he told him he ought to go home.   It was then, the child told him, “this was his home.”  He was one of the children in family for whom the house was being built.  “Ok kid,” if you’re going to hang around here and help, I need to know what your name is.   The little Hispanic boy, then tells Fuller that is name is , Jesus.   Fuller, writes, that it suddenly occurred to him.   Here he was building a house for Jesus and “Jesus” was right here in this child he failed to see and tried to push away (My Memory of a story told by Millard Fuller’s in his book Theology of the Hammer,  Smyth and Helwys, 1994).

Where are you looking for Jesus?   Are you looking for Jesus in the special, the supernatural, the extraordinary, or can you see Jesus in the normal, the average, the ordinary, and even in the day to day events of everyday life?   Jesus wanted his people to see God in the flesh, right before their eyes and right under their noses, but they could not.  Is it any different for us?   So many people go looking for God in just the right church, with just the right people, looking for just the right experience, but the truth Jesus came to be is the “word become flesh” right where we live and right under our noses.  

There is another way the people missed and even resist and reject what Jesus can do in our lives.   People can only look for Jesus in the comfort God gives saving us, but not in the challenge Jesus brings to call us to join him in the work of bringing salvation into the world.  

We all want to know the “God of all comfort”, don’t we?   We all want to know the Jesus who quiets our fears, who still our hearts, who speaks promises of love, of life, of faith and of hope.   And of course, this is part of who God is and part of what Jesus came to share.   “Let not your heart be troubled, you believe in God, believe also in me….. in my father’s house are many mansions…. I go to prepare a place for you.”   We all need the comfort that only the gospel of Jesus and his resurrection can give.   We need this hope, for there is no other that speaks so clear and dear to our hearts.

Some of this very hope of “good news” is revealed in this text.   Jesus said the “Spirit is upon him…. to preach good news to the poor… to release the captives… to give the blind sight…. and to let the oppressed go free.” These are all wonderful words of hope to a people who needed to hear it so desperately.   In a bad news world, we are always hungry for some good news.   Right now, all our hearts go out to those Haitians who have been waiting, hurting, and even dying, as they wait for the good news of deliverance that is finally starting to pour into their very desperate situation.   But we too, even far away from those events, have also been encouraged by the stories and miracles of saved lives.   Hearing about hope in their world, even from somewhere else gives us some hope for our own lives and our own world.  It takes our mind off our own problems and pains.  Hope and comfort is the kind of salvation we gladly receive.

But with the hope of salvation also comes a challenge.   In fact, the comfort we all need comes through accepting the challenge of the same gospel which offers us comfort.   Isn’t it true that when Jesus said that the “spirit was upon him to preach good news” he also came with a challenge for his people to see beyond their own need for comfort and to rise up with their hope and start reaching out to the world God has come to save.   In reaching out to save, they would also realize the fullness of God’s salvation in the world.   God’s salvation was not just an action God was doing, but it was an action his people were to become a part of and by becoming a part, they were see God’s salvation realized beyond them and it would even come back to them.  So these words of comfort also came with the words of challenge.   But were they ready for these words of challenge any more than we are?

Neither Nazareth nor Israel was ready for how Jesus challenged them.   Are we any more ready?    They wanted the God, high in the sky who could bring them comfort, but they were not willing nor ready for finding the any comfort in the accepting the challenge.   So, when Jesus spoke about God working more miracles in Sidon and Syria, among the Gentiles, than he could work in Israel, this was not what people wanted to hear.    They wanted to see God confirming who they were, giving them exactly what they wanted, but they did want God challenging them to let go of their “safe place” and encouraging them to share their spiritual home with real pressing needs of the world beyond their own home.

Do you know that in the 1700’s, before the mission moment came to America, the question was asked first asked in England, “What do we need missionaries for?”    When a Baptist Christian, named William Cary first stood up in and suggested that English Christians raise money to send out the first missionaries into the world to India, some answered by saying,   “Sit down Mr. Cary, if God wants the heathen to be saved, let him go and save them himself.”    It might be hard for us to believe that some people still think the gospel is only about comfort, not about challenge.  But there are still people who don’t see the reason to send missionaries; who think the only mission is at home and to protect home, and who have no view or vision for seeking and saving the lost in this world.   They don’t see that reaching out to the world is also part of way we bring God’s salvation not only to the world, but bringing the fullness of salvation back to ourselves.  

Of the challenge is hard.   It was hard for people to see and understand Jesus then, and it is still a challenge today.   The Second Coming of Jesus is one of those difficult teachings to grasp in the Bible.   Let me say to you, right up front, that I believe in the second coming, but I don’t think we see all of what Jesus meant by it.   We might see some of it, especially we like to “gaze into the heaven’s” like a few disciples did when Jesus ascended into heaven, but we don’t see all of what the second coming means hear and now, and I’d say, we still miss the main part.  

If you take the Biblical Recorder, you notice that last week’s issue had a full centerfold piece on differing views of the Second Coming which Baptists have.    When and where I grew up we had one very specific view of what it will look like when Jesus returns.   I learned and memorized all the specifics of what it will look like…tribulation….rapture… wrath… judgment…antichrist… and end of the world.   Then when started to study the issue in college and seminary,  I realized there were other Christian viewpoints about the second coming.    I even discovered that sometimes we try to find comfort in the second coming but see little need to be challenged to do anything for the salvation of the world now.   I also learned in seminary that we live in the ‘already, but not yet’ time, which means we live in between what God is doing and what God will one day complete.   We don’t have much to do with what God will complete, but we can have much to do with what God is doing.   But when I came home suggesting there could be other ways to look at the second coming, it was like I had leprosy.   Especially, when I suggested that Jesus’s promise to return in glory before “this generation” passed away, could mean Jesus coming in promise and power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost when Jesus appeared in a new, spiritual and very challenging way.   When I also took people to Matthew 25 and showed how Jesus himself explained clearly how he is revealed and returns in body when we minister to the least of these, I found it hard for people to accept the challenge that this might be part of what the second coming means.    This is part of the reason my home church doesn’t invite me back to preach.

We want the “comfort” part which says Jesus will bring a brand new world, but we don’t deal enough with the “challenge” part which says we can have part in how this new world breaks into our world here and now.   While I do have hope that Jesus will return to this world in a final, glorious way, and that Jesus will ultimately rule the world in love and grace, I also know that I have a much better understanding of how Jesus can already come here and now, and that this is the is suppose to be the challenge and opportunity of ministry in my life.   Jesus challenged his own people to see more than they saw, and to do more than they were doing.   But they wanted the comfort, but not the challenge.

There is one more way that the gospel of Jesus might get under our skin.  Jesus not only comes to save us in a new spiritual way, he also comes to save us in some very obvious and earthy ways.  He comes to give us life now---as well as, in the age to come.

Let me tell you how seeing the earthly Jesus change how I see the gospel, even how I read Jesus’ own call to ministry.   Back in the late 1980’s Teresa and I went on our first trip to the northeast, and while in New York, we attended a historic Baptist church in a poorer part of New York City.   You might know it as the church Rockefeller built.  When Teresa and I first walked into the Riverside Church, we were amazed at what we saw.   Upon entry into the foyer, we saw table after table of church members advertising and advocating involvement in various social ministries of the community.   It wasn’t exactly like the tables I saw a couple of weeks ago at the Cove Church in Mooresville, which were all laid out inviting people to this Bible study or to this coffee-discussion group.    I don’t remember all the ministries being promoted in that New York Baptist Church, but I do know they were not handing out religious tracts on how to get to heaven and I remember thinking to myself these disparaging words: “social gospel”.   Those words had been drilled into me in church as a child—and meant that some churches had strayed away from the true “spiritual gospel” having compromised themselves by getting involved in the social gospel of  reaching out to the hungry and the poor and by joining together build better neighborhoods.   This they hoped to do to bring more of God’s salvation in this world, and not only by helping and comforting those who are afflicted with poverty and pain, but also by afflicting the comfortable who selfishly build a world that makes and keeps people poor and in pain.   That was a kind of gospel was told to stay away from.  I was told not to try this kind of gospel at home.

In reflecting upon that, I’m somewhat amazed how last week we sent money to Haiti to help these poor people in need and we are taking up money today.  When I think about it, I can’t remember any one of the several Baptist churches of my childhood doing something like that---something has changed or is still changing, but I wonder if we really see it.   It is as if, we too are beginning to understand that the gospel of Jesus does have earthly, social, as well as spiritual dimensions and that you can’t do one without also doing the other---that is, you can’t reach into a person’s heart with good news of Jesus until you first reach out and respond to their hurt, their pain, their poverty and their problems in the name of Jesus.   Where do you think we got an idea like that?    Listen to it again from today’s Bible text in Luke 4:18-21  ¹⁸ "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,  ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."  ²⁰ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.  ²¹ Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

Aren’t Scriptures being fulfilled today as we respond to the social and spiritual needs of people around us?  And isn’t this what challenges us most about the gospel of Jesus---Jesus still challenges us to take the gospel to people we don’t know in particular ways that impact their lives so the truth of God’s love can also reach their souls.  It’s not either or, but it’s both and.  And how did the Jews ever miss this?  How did Christians and a lot of Baptist miss it?  How do Muslims, Buddhist and all kinds of religious and non religious people miss it?  How can we too miss what Jesus is calling us to do today?  Isn’t this what we are about, seeing the truth of Scripture fulfilled, not just when we get to heaven, but also here, today, right where we live in ways that make this world the kind of world it was meant to be---a world filled with faith, hope and love and the greatest is always love.  This hope was at the core of Jesus' ministry, which is both a social and spiritual ministry (not either or but both and) and I hope it is also at the core of ours.  Amen.


© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.