Killing The Messenger

"Killing The Messenger"

Luke 4:16-30
December 3, 2006

Title: Killing The Messenger

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue
on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the
prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it
was written:

‘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 favour.’

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. Then he began to say to them, ‘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 not this Joseph’s son?’ He
said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And
you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at
Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s
home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when
the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine
over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in
Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and
none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the
synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to
the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

It is amazing, how things have happened to this Jesus of Nazareth since he left home.
He had left town months earlier and something happened, something had changed this
boy, now this man, from Nazareth. For some reason, he had left the village he had
grown up in, and no one really quite knew where he went during that time—he just left
town and I suspect there was no going away party, no big hurrah. This young man
from Nazareth was driven out of town, but not by the townspeople, not by the people he
had grown up with, but by the Holy Spirit, so says the text from the Gospel of Luke.
The whole idea is that what set him out on this journey towards God, and towards his
destiny was something he couldn’t resist—and if the scene near the end of his life at
the Garden of Gethsemane is any indication, it took something as powerful as the
breath of God to move him out of his place of safety, his home, and onto the cross, and
into our imagination, and into our lives.   That Spirit drove him out to the desert, where
the Adversary, where Satan takes him to his limits, and tempts him to go the way that
so many talented and gifted men and women have gone, which is to use those talents
and gifts for themselves, for their own personal power and their own aggrandizement.
But he resists that temptation, he does what so few of us can do, and says “no” no, that
will not be the road he walks. And tattered and worn-out, and surely a little skinnier
from the experience, Jesus makes his way back to Galilee—and he is different, of
course, very different, because of what has happened to him, and I suspect they notice
something when he finally arrives back in Nazareth, these friends and family, they
notice something different about him.

And I suspect that what they saw was a man who had made peace with that very Spirit
that drove him out into that wilderness. I think there was something even more unusual
about him now, that something had changed in him, and that he seemed less troubled
now than he had been growing up amongst them. I mean, these people, the people of
Nazareth, who had seen this young son of Mary and Joseph grow up in their midst, they
knew this boy, perhaps as well as they knew their own children. We all know what its
like to live in small towns, where people know each other and know each other’s
children, and we know how kids in neighborhoods travel in packs like kids do, and so
they were quite familiar with who Jesus was. The acne years, the teenage years, the
awkwardness that comes with becoming an adult—I suspect that even those painful
times in a young person’s life didn’t diminish how different Jesus was from their own
children, that there was something special about him. And yet, that difference probably
didn’t seem to make him any less popular with their children, which made his
homecoming in our text this morning, especially sweet.

But before he stepped back into town, something else had happened between the time
Jesus left the desert and the time he arrives back home to Nazareth. You see, he had
begun his ministry, and the writer of Luke says that he went out teaching in the
synagogues throughout Galilee, full of that Spirit that had driven him out of Nazareth in
the first place. He had come to acquire some fame, and that difference that folks in
Nazareth had always noticed in him, that charisma no one quite knew what to do with, it
has attracted a following and what he said and taught became the hottest ticket going
in the region of Galilee. When he comes back home, he is the hometown boy made
good—the guy who goes off and makes a million somewhere else, or becomes the
starting quarterback at Michigan or State and then he’s off to the NFL, but eventually
comes home to visit and the town is in a titer. He has already made a name for himself,
and so those kids that he grew up with are now his age, and some of them have their
own children, and so they’ve come to see him in the synagogue again—I suspect they
had seen him there many, many times before, but this time, this time is special—Jesus,
their friend, has made a name for himself.

As he enters the synagogue, Jesus’ eyes catch the eyes of the people he knows and
loves, and the crow’s feet around his eyes, made more visible by years of living in Israel’
s hot climate, become more apparent because he is smiling now, and so the joy he
feels in seeing them all again moves from his eyes to his mouth/ He loves them and he
knows that they love him as well. But I also suspect that he knows that what he is about
to say, and the passage that he is going to quote to them and which he is going to own
for himself is going to put that love to the test. After crowd settles in, the words of
greeting begin, and then the Shema is prayed, which is a Jewish prayer asking for God’
s blessing at the beginning and ending of every day. He then stands up and accepts
the scroll that has been handed to him, and he un-scrolls it and finds the place he is
looking for, and, amidst a growing tension in the room, he says these words:

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.

And then he rolls up the scroll, as would be the tradition in Jewish worship, and now he
is expected to do what we preacher types do every Sunday, which is explain the
meaning of text to the worshippers, and to draw some lesson for the larger community
of faith. All eyes on the room are on him, and what he says is brief and to the point,
something you probably wish you got from me, but, hey, I’m no Jesus. He says: Today
this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. That’s it. That all he says! Nothing
more, at least for the moment, and the crowd, oddly enough, the crowd is fine with what
he has said—perhaps they thought he was talking about the coming reign of some
soon-to-come Messiah, or that the Romans were soon to be overtaken by the divine
forces led by this newly emerging Messiah. What they didn’t get was that Jesus was
referring to himself as the one who has been anointed to bring good news to the poor,
sight to the blind, release from captivity, and who was breaking forth a word of
liberation to the people, to those people, right there in that room, right at that moment.
They liked what he said, they were amazed at how he had said it—in preacher talk, his
delivery captivated them. But more to the point, everyone in that room hoped that
Jesus was right, that the Messiah would come soon and a new reign of peace without
the heavy hand of Roman rule would happen.

But Jesus got that his friends and family didn’t get it, that they couldn’t or wouldn’t
believe that he was talking about himself. “I mean, this is Jesus—we know this boy, and
no matter how gifted and how different he is, he is not a Messiah or even a great
prophet—shoot, he’s one of us!” Messiahs don’t come out of Nazareth—in fact,
nothing much good comes out of Nazareth, which is something that had been said in
Israel about Jesus’ hometown for decades, and it’s something that they’ve come to
believe as well—they had come to believe their own bad press!   And so when Jesus
confronts them on their misunderstanding, they react—well, they over-react to him.
What they want is a show from their hometown hero, they want him to do what he has
been doing elsewhere in Galilee—they don’t necessarily want a Messiah THEY KNOW
PERSONALLY—great things happen elsewhere, and Messiahs come from places that
matter, not from places like Nazareth. And he’s not willing to be a showman for them,
he’s not willing to pull out the bag of healing tricks to satisfy them, because he knows
they need to know something they don’t quite believe yet—and I’ll get to that in a
second—but I want you to notice how he goes back to the history of the Jewish people
to remind them that every prophet in Israel’s history has never been recognized as
such in the place he, and sometimes she, grew up in. The lack of confidence is really
bad in Nazareth, and when he puts that mantle upon his shoulders, that mantle of
prophet and Messiah, it shoots through that hometown crowd in ways that even puts
the experience of Israel’s prophets with their own particular hometowns to shame! It so
angers the people that Jesus claims to be someone who sets people free, to be the
one who God has anointed to give sight to the blind—it so outrages the people that
Jesus grew up with and loved and was loved by, that a mob forms and they push him
and pull him out of that synagogue and towards the cliffs outside the Nazareth, and
they seem more than ready to push him right off that mountain.

But something happened, something changed on that cliff, and in the heat of the
moment, Jesus’ friends, his families, people he grown up with and loved, they let him
live. The crowd broke, and he passed through them, a little worse for wear physically
and maybe even emotionally, but he was alive, at least he was alive. It wasn’t his time—
that end would come later. But it was the end of something else, something perhaps as
painful for him. It disconnected him from the people he loved and cared about, and
nothing would ever be the same with them and him. And that is sad, for him and for
them, because they were family, both literally and figuratively, and yet, what Jesus does
after this moment is to build a new family, where we’re connected not by blood, or by
living in the same hometown, but by our choices to follow him, and that is something
that we in this room continue to try to live out, even in our own awkward and imperfect
way.

This year is the United Church of Christ’s 50th year, and we’ve decided to call it our
Jubilee year. In the Jewish tradition, Jubilee happens every 50 years and is the time
when the scales get balanced again—the slaves are set free on the 50th year, and the
original owners of pieces of land that were sold off get that property back again. It was
a way of making sure that people didn’t get too wealthy, or that slavery, which Israel did
sadly enough, practice, even though they had once been slaves themselves, Jubilee
made sure that slavery wouldn’t be a forever reality for slave families. In our fiftieth
year as a journeying people, we are being asked again to do the particular and unique
work that this denomination is called to do, which is to bring together Christians and to
work together with God to help set free a world in need of spiritual, economic, and
social freedom. That’s what we do as the UCC, and that is what we are called to do,
and God knows a lot of people don’t like us for it and that really is just fine.   But more
than whether or not we believe that truth on a large scale, on a denominational basis, I
think the important thing is that we believe that truth personally, that we believe it here,
in this congregation, and in our own lives. I said I would go back to something I was
hinting at earlier in this sermon, and that something had to do with what I think Jesus
wanted to make clear to people of Nazareth—and that was this: great prophets, and
even Messiahs come from nothing towns like Nazareth. Boys and girls who grew up in
this forgotten, made-fun of town in Israel, can set people free, can shout the good news
from the low rooftops of Nazareth, and give sight to the blind in its dusty streets. I think
that one of the reasons they wanted to kill him was that if it was true what he had just
said, that he was a Messiah, that he was greater than they could have ever imagined,
their hometown boy, than maybe they too could be greater, then maybe they too could
change the world. If it can happen with Jesus, then maybe I too can be a great man,
and maybe you too can be a great woman, someone who has been anointed to change
the world.

I think they hated him in that moment because he wanted them to expect more of
themselves, that if this boy from Nazareth could change their lives, they too could do
that, they too could change their little corner of the world. They couldn’t and wouldn’t
believe that, and they were willing to kill the messenger of this good news, despite the
fact that he was their hometown boy. He looked into their eyes, and he saw they didn’t
believe they could change the world, and I would hate, hate, for Christ to look in our
eyes, and us not believe that we too can transform this world, or at least our corner of
this world, in Coloma, Michigan. This is an extraordinary church, in so many ways—you
amaze me, constantly, and even though we’re not the Baptists in terms of size, or the
Lutherans, or the Pentecostals, we have a very special and unique mission, a mission
that God has given to us in particular, and part of our job is to be believe the One who
gave us that mission, to believe that we too can change the world, that we too change
our lives, and help to change the lives of others. Jesus believed in the people he grew
up with, but they didn’t believe in themselves, and so after this incident he went out and
gathered a larger family around him, people from different towns, who did believe that
they could transform the world with God’s help. In this season of waiting, of waiting for
the Christ to be born, I hope we attend to what we are capable of, that we not wait too
long to believe this truth about ourselves, that we too can set people free, that we too
can give sight to the blind, and that we too are more than capable of proclaiming that
this moment, this very moment, is the year of the Lord’s favor. Amen.