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January 31, 2010 Sermon

A Faithful Pilgrim or Ministry Misadventure (Jeremiah 1: 4-10; Luke 4: 21-30)

Rev. Sally Harris

If Intuition is the prudent angel who carefully directs your spirit, Impulse is its mischief-making twin, the ‘imp’ in ‘impulse.’ Impulse scoffs at the notion of second thoughts. Before you can apply a smidgen of rationale to your actions, Impulse has dragged you to the launch pad of adventure, where you find yourself staring bug-eyed at the bungee cord around your waist and asking, “How did I get here?”

These are the opening words to a book that Linda (Trinity’s secretary) lent me this week: What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim – the story of a midlife misadventure on Spain’s Camino pilgrimage. As I read the opening words I wondered if this is what Jesus might have asked after his inaugural sermon. “How did I get here?”

Today we read the second half of a story that we began last week, when Jesus gave his first sermon at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth. What started well, ends badly as the hometown crowd tries to toss Jesus over a cliff. The perplexing question is, "How did I get here?" Perhaps it is the question asked by the people of the mob, once Jesus walked away – "What went so badly, and quickly, amiss?" “What triggered such a chain reaction?” “How did I get here?”

Someone, after returning from an audience with His Holiness the Dali Lama, said: "When his Holiness speaks everyone in the room becomes quiet, serene and peaceful." Not so with Jesus. Things were fine in Nazareth until Jesus opened his mouth and all hell broke lose. And this was only his first sermon! One might have thought that Jesus would have used a more effective rhetorical strategy, would have saved inflammatory speech until he had taken the time to build trust, to win people’s affection, to contextualize his message. No, instead he threw the book at them, hit them right between the eyes with Isaiah, and knocked them over with First Kings. Startled, the crowd struggled to its feet, regrouped and swiftly moved from pleasantries to pushing the prophet off a cliff – almost - Jesus walked among them and "went on his way preaching the good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, bringing sight to the blind.

The impulse to switch from adulation to assault isn’t reserved to any particular group; instead, it’s frighteningly pervasive. I suspect we each carry this tendency within us in some measure. There’s something in our human psychology—more pronounced in some folks, to be sure, but present to a degree in us all—that tempts us to either idolize or demonize others. In particular, those who are in the public eye become lightning rods for this kind of experience. Seeing bits and pieces of the life of another—a politician, a movie star, a prophet - we gather those fragments and put them together in a picture of who we think that person is, often magnifying certain traits (real or imagined) and ignoring others. In the process, we create a misrepresentation that becomes easy to praise or to slander. Such responses are rooted in our illusions, in our projections, in our failure to see another for who they are. And because these perceptions are rooted in such shaky ground, it can become stunningly easy to flip from one pole of emotion to the other. So what sparked this impulse to murder?

Well Jesus was not exactly politically wise – his words threaten the whole prickly matter of community – whose in and whose out. Jesus offended the hometown sense of community. The words of our reading this morning are provoking words to a community that is smug in their righteousness. Jesus tells his kin and clan that God’s sense of community is larger than theirs. Yes Jesus made it clear right from the beginning that God is big on grace -- grace for a Syrian army officer and a poor pagan woman. He offends the hometown folks by telling them two stories about how God passed them over in order to love foreigners and strangers – a pagan widow from the wrong side of the tracks and an officer in an enemy army. They weren’t new stories. They were stories that came from their own scripture. They just didn’t use scripture like that. They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up. They used scripture as a tool of power and judgment not as a tool for transformation and truth. And when Jesus dared to shift their thinking – he went from favorite son to dangerous stranger. From meek and mild to radical prophet. A faithful pilgrim running head long into ministry misadventure!

No wonder Jeremiah hesitated when God’s call came to him. “Hey not me, I’m too young for this kind of business. I don’t know what to say and if I did know – well don’t ask me to stand in the wind.” I think this might be intuition at work. Jeremiah had second thoughts about this whole prophet thing. And for good reason – Jeremiah's ministry will, in time, involve great public struggle and drama but before the public struggle, there is this private one, before the outer drama the inner one.

Certainly our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures describes a personal experience of Jeremiah and then a bestowing of authority upon this prophetic ministry, almost like an ordination service. But there is also an interpretation of this passage that moves beyond the personal call to the wider expanse of God’s purpose in the world. According to the book of Jeremiah, God’s Word has the power to change the historical process.

…and God said to me, "Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."

This understanding shifts the emphasis away from the personal to the prophetic power that God instills within faithful pilgrims who dare to imagine a power greater than political policy or military might. Can we believe enough to be faithful pilgrims beyond our ministry misadventures? Can we follow the footsteps of Jesus who recognized the freedom to which he was called – a freedom beyond the usual way of looking at things?

Can we dare to believe that God, however we imagine this creative power to be, works in freedom, moving beyond the enduring structures so evident, or the powerless despair when structures are gone? Can we believe God has the capacity to create new beginnings for our world, for our church, for our lives?

Or do we only see the despair in Haiti, the destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, the pollution of our planet? Can we believe that on the edge of this global cliff – God is walking among us bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives and restoring sight to the blind? Do you believe?

[resources J. Richardson, W. Brueggeman and A. Robinson]

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