AN OUTRAGEOUS SERMON ABOUT LOVE

A Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany

 Corinthians 13:1-13 • Luke 4:21-30

Our Epistle reading for today from I Corinthians 13 is America’s most popular wedding verse. I’m sure you’ve heard it at many a wedding. And because it is so popular, you might kind of think of it as cliche and tune out when it’s read, assuming it to be the feel-good Hallmark card of the New Testament. 

But here’s the thing: this text is not about romantic love. Sorry, happy couples, this letter wasn’t written for you. No, it was sent to the early church in Corinth, a community in conflict. What’s love about? Paul says love is actually most important when people can’t stand each other. If we want to be followers of Christ, we need to learn how to love even though it’s not the fun or easy thing to do.

Just before this passage about love begins, in verse 12:31, it says the love is “a still more excellent way.” In the Greek, this phrase has even more punch. It could be translated something like “love is beyond measuring.” In this troublesome congregation, people were busy measuring their worth against each another. It was all competition and backbiting. They wanted to one-up one another with their great spiritual gifts but Paul wants them to see that they need to move past this way of relating and into a different way, a way that is not about such measurement but instead, is a steeped in love beyond measuring. 

That’s the kind of love that ought to shape our lives together as the church. If we do great things but don’t have love, Paul proclaims, we are like a clanging gong. It’s empty. We’ve missed the point. Today’s our annual meeting. We will be looking at our church business, our budget, our various ministries. Let’s keep these words in mind as we conduct our meeting. What do our building and our budget and our missional strategies matter if we don’t have love? First and foremost, we are called to be a community that lives out the love of Christ.

Okay, okay, so we’re supposed to love but what does that look like? According to this letter, it is active. Love is the subject of 16 verbs in a row here. In English it kind of sounds passive: “Love is patient. Love is kind.” Don’t start yawning yet, though, because in the original Greek it is more like: “Love shows patience. Love acts with kindness.” See the active tense of the verbs? Throughout these phrases, love is an action-filled thing, not a warm gushy feeling that we have for people who are like us. So you see, this passage isn’t so Hallmarkish after all! It’s a very difficult teaching. Love requires a lot of us.

Then, at the end of this reading, it makes the boldest claim of all: “Love never ends.” Paul names three most important values to the church: faith, hope and love. These summarize the life of the church, which is why we chose them to be in the Our Savior's Lutheran Church mission statement: “Making Christ known by inviting all to grow in faith, hope and love.” Yet, Paul reminds us that even among these three great things, love is the greatest. Love is what will remain. We are drawn into that love which is offered by God and we are reformed into people who work together despite our difference to share that love.

It is too bad that we as a society assume love feels good because the love to which we are called rarely feels good. It’s a demanding task that is set before us. And it is not a request, it’s a mandate that we love. 

I think this talk of love is still too abstract. So let’s turn to Jesus to see more clearly what it means to love. Did you check him out in today’s Gospel lesson? There he is chilling with his own peeps in his home synagogue. This is his community, the place he was raised. He’s come back now as an adult, as a rabbi, and he’s teaching the scriptures. Jesus opens the scroll and reads to the congregation from Isaiah. They are poetical words the people would have known well. They speak of God’s promise to release, redeem and heal those who have been cast off by society. And then Jesus declares that this scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing. Wonderful! They all rejoice and think highly of their hometown boy because they think it means they are the ones who are going to get released, redeemed and healed. After all, they have been living under the oppressive Roman occupation for so long and now their time of political liberation has finally come. No wonder they are excited.

Jesus, however, doesn’t mean it this way. He goes on to clarify. No, he basically tells them, when I talk about God coming to free the oppressed and bless the poor, I’m not talking about you! I’m talking about God blessing the people you don’t like, the people you don’t want to be near, the people you are afraid of, the ones you call enemies.

Just to drive the point home, Jesus recalls a couple of familiar stories from the scripture where God gave a blessing not to Israel, but to Israel’s enemies. Then suddenly the hometown crowd is no longer happy with him. In the same way they were all initially excited about Jesus’ teaching, they are now all upset with him. Upset doesn’t capture their outrage, you see, because they turn into a lynch mob and try to kill him. This is Mary and Joseph’s boy—the village kid they’ve watched grow up—but he’s made them so mad they want him dead.

Their sudden violence is hard to understand. Why do they get so furious so fast? It’s because Jesus is redefining God’s love. It’s not just for you, he reminds them. It is for everybody. Everybody. Now Jesus brought up Israel’s enemies in the stories he told, but what if he were here today in our context and he talked about our enemies? What if he said something like: 

“American People, I know you are afraid, but your persistent desire to keep people who aren’t like you away, your disdain for the poor, the addicts, those in prison, those with a different sexual orientation, your discrimination against people of color, your attempts to keep Syrian refugees and Latin American immigrants out of your country, your hatred of Muslims, your desire to build walls instead of bridges—well that’s just wrong! That’s not God’s way. That will never be God’s way. God loves all people—even dangerous people. There are no exemptions. Listen to me: God loves all people and you have to deal with that!”

This is an offensive message, right? Can you hear the offense? It is truly outrageous! That's why it sends Jesus’ congregation into a rage and they try to throw him over the cliff of Narareth. See? Love is not a sentimental thing in the way Jesus lived it. There’s no Hallmark about it. It’s actually—dare I say it—a political thing. It calls us to take a stand, to move beyond our fear and to love in word and deed without discrimination. Do they deserve love? Doesn’t matter. Love them anyway. “Love,” as Mother Theresa used to say, “until it hurts.”

Now I have been your pastor for almost 15 years and I have been preaching this message of God’s radically inclusive love but I am going to apologize to you today. I’m afraid I haven’t preached it forcefully enough. If I had preached it like Jesus did, I bet you’d have thrown me into the river by now. That's how outrageous Jesus' message is. I’m afraid you think I’m nice. Well I’ve got news for you: I am trying to un-nice myself! As your pastor, I am called to a prophetical role. I’m bound by Christ to preach his message. When I took the vow of ordination that’s what I promised to do. So I’m standing with Christ and telling you that you’re all wrong. I am too. We do not love as we ought. We are so so discriminatory and afraid and so we only love the people we already like. That’s not love. That’s not the more excellent way. That’s just a clanging gong.

But love never fails. And that’s good news, since we’ve apparently gotten an F on the love exam. God’s love overrides our failure to love. In verse 12 of this chapter of I Corinthians, it asserts that we have already been fully known. God sees right through us and knows how much we have fallen short of our calling to love all people. The Lord knows and yet loves us anyway. That means you and I, despite our earnest attempts, are saved not by our works but by grace. We must always come back to that self-understanding that we are saved by grace. That is the only hope we have of widening our hearts. If God can love me, I can love others, I must love others.

Let us pray: O come, Holy Spirit, and fill our church anew, that we may stand together and we may courageously and actively love all people with your radical, all-inclusive, never-failing, beyond-measuring love. Amen.

© 2016 Laura Gentry

SHATTERING OUR VIEWS

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
January 28, 2007
by Pastor Laura Gentry

Luke 4:21-30
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 hometown 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 hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up 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. (New Revised Standard Version)

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Today, we move into our fourth week in Epiphany, and as we do, we continue to experience the light of God’s glory being revealed to us. Today’s gospel, is a continuation of last week’s—kind of like a soap opera that gets continued in the next episode. In the first installment, Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth where he reads the scriptures to the people which caused some eyebrow raising. But today, Jesus goes much further than simply telling them that the scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing, implicitly claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah. He goes on to tell them some stories that enrage the crowd. They are very short, one-sentence stories and so it is quite easy for us to miss how upsetting they are to the crowd. This audience is so offended, in fact, that they run Jesus out of town—his own townspeople, relatives and family friends drive him to the outskirts of the city in an attempt to hurl him off the cliff. I’ve been to Nazareth and believe me, the city has quite an elevation. You would not want to get hurled off the cliff there. This is a serious situation. Jesus' prophetic words have caused this major explosion!

What in the world is going on here? How could Jesus upset the people so quickly? Well, the first upset is the Epiphany that Jesus fulfills the prophet’s foretelling of a Messiah. But the even more disarming upset is that mini sermon which causes the congregation to react by dragging Jesus out to kill him. Why do these good, faithful churchgoers of Nazareth—his own hometown folks—turn instantly from respectable citizens into a lynching mob? What is it that gets them so riled up? What’s wrong with this Epiphany?

The problem with Jesus, for many people, was that he always told it like it was. Here, Jesus is not acting like the sweet little boy-next-door they were expecting. Instead, he leaves tact at the door in order to assume the greater role, that of Messiah and Prophet—he must speak out the word of God. And prophets, as you know, are not popular. As R. C. Collingwood said of the artist, the prophet "tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts…As spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs... for no community altogether knows its own heart." The prophet must, in the light of God's final truth, reveal the misguided notions of his own community.

You see, it's easy to read this scripture and automatically commiserate with Jesus. "Poor guy—he gives a lovely little impromptu sermon at his own synagogue and almost gets killed for it. Those wicked Nazarenes! Why can't they be more civil like us? We sit through all kinds of sermons and never try to stone our pastor." And while I am personally very glad you do not stone the pastor here, I would like to suggest that to think this way, means we don't get it. I've heard it said that whenever our reading of a biblical passage makes us feel self-righteous, we can be confident we have misread it.

To understand what was really going on that day in Nazareth, we need to put ourselves in the position of the congregation. What were those people feeling when Jesus went into prophet-mode? Well, we now know because of a recent discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls that this passage from Isaiah was a crucial one for many Palestinians of the first century because it was a key to unlocking the mystery of the final judgment. Some Jewish sects apparently called themselves the Poor, with a capital P, because they were convinced that this passage applied to them, and described how God would bless them in the final judgment. The Essenes, for example, always understood that the blessings of the Old Testament applied to them and the judgments would befall their enemies, those "others" outside their community. Nowhere in the scores of documents we now have from the eleven Qumran caves do the Essenes interpret Scripture as a judgment on themselves or as a challenge to their ways of thinking about themselves. In this regard they were a normal denomination.

So what does this say about the folks in Jesus' synagogue? You must understand that it had been a century since the Romans had taken over Palestine, demanding taxes and depriving the people of their freedoms. They felt very much like the poor and the dispossessed of which Isaiah spoke. So when Jesus reads from this passage in Isaiah and immediately thereafter proclaims, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears," it thrills the congregation at first. "This is it. The herald is here! This is the year God finally stamps out these awful Romans and blesses us." Yes, they like the words about God's grace from Isaiah very much because, like the Essenes, they assume the words apply to them and them alone.

But Jesus bursts their bubble when he brings up two biblical stories in which people outside the faith are included in God's mercy. By doing so, Jesus, is directly challenging their narrow views of God. And Luke reports that everybody in the synagogue who hears the sermon is filled with wrath. They are furious! Jesus had, in effect, said that in the final analysis God would not honor them as the sole possessors of truth. This is a prophetic challenge to their limited view of God—he was asking them to recognize that God is bigger and more loving than they'd figured it—big enough to love and even save people outside their faith. God is the God of all people, not just a partisan god who only cares about us.

Therefore, if we really read this passage as it ought to be read, it should hit us with great force as well. As Jesus prophetically unmasks the piety of his congregation who thought they were really the only ones God loved, it unmasks us too. It exposes our narrow and self-centered views of God. Just because we come to church doesn't mean that God loves us more than those who sleep in or go out to coffee or go out ice fishing instead (I hate to admit this to you!). Just because we remain faithful doesn't mean that God will treat us any better than those who don't in the final judgment. And this seems absolutely unfair! We really don’t know just how things will turn out that last day, but Jesus drops some pretty serious hints here, that the "in" crowd won't be the only ones to make the final cut. There’s reason for us to believe that Lutherans won’t be the only ones in heaven. What will cause us to be saved, after all, is God's mercy and not our human merit (which we humans love to rely upon). So we have no room to boast that we are more worthy of this mercy than anyone else—in fact, we come to church precisely because we are not worthy, because we come to beg God’s mercy, mercy which we do not deserve. No wonder those faithful members of Jesus' church got upset at him.

So this story truly challenges us to admit that our understanding of God's truth is too exclusive, too limited. We are called to recognize how much we are like the Nazarenes who's limited view of truth was shattered to pieces. May it shatter our view too. And in having it shattered, may our eyes be opened up, may our view be expanded so that we have a much bigger concept of God, whose all-expansive and inclusive love is so unfathomable that it's offensive! Amen.

Now may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

© Laura E. Gentry 2007