Ordinary Time Winter 2007
January 28th, 4th
Sunday after Epiphany
Title: The prophets in our past
Worship Leader: Kathy R.
Song leader: Reed
Speaker: Linda
Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm
71:1-6; 1 Corinthians (12: 31b) and 13:1-13; Luke 4: (14-21—last week’s
lection) and 21-30
Jeremiah 1:4 Now the word
of the LORD came to me saying, 1:5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew
you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to
the nations." 1:6 Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how
to speak, for I am only a boy." 1:7 But the LORD said to me, "Do not
say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you
shall speak whatever I command you, 1:8
Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the
LORD." 1:9 Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the
LORD said to me, "Now I have put my words in your mouth. 1:10 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."
Psalm 71:1 In you, O LORD, I
take refuge; let me never be put to shame. 71:2 In your righteousness deliver
me and rescue me; incline your ear to me and save me. 71:3 Be to me a rock of
refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
71:4 Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the
unjust and cruel. 71:5 For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my
youth. 71:6 Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from
my mother's womb. My praise is continually of you.
1 Corinthians
12:31-13:13
Strive
for the greater gifts.
And I will show you a still more excellent
way.
All:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels,
but
do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And
if I have prophetic powers,
and understand all mysteries and all
knowledge,
and
if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away all my possessions,
and
if I hand over my body so that I may boast,
but
do not have love, I gain nothing.
All: Love is patient; love
is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
or rude.
It
does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes
all things, endures all things.
All:
Love never ends.
But
as for prophecies, they will come to an end;
as for tongues, they will cease;
as for knowledge, it will come to an
end.
For we know only in part, and we prophesy
only in part;
but
when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
When
I was a child, I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned
like a child;
when
I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
All:
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.
Now I know only in part; then I will know
fully,
even
as I have been fully known.
All:
And now faith, hope, and love abide,
these
three; and the greatest of these is love.
Luke 4:14 Then Jesus, filled
with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him
spread through all the surrounding country. 4:15 He began to teach in their
synagogues and was praised by everyone. 4:16 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, 4:17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was
given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
4:18 "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, 4:19 to
proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." 4:20 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. 4:21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this
scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." 4:22 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?" 4:23 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.'" 4:24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is
accepted in the prophet's hometown. 4:25 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; 4:26 yet
Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 4:27
There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and
none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." 4:28 When they heard
this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 4:29 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. 4:30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Contemporary quote:
"The
longer I worked the more certain I felt that as improbable as it might seem,
there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep a
world from falling." --Arthur
Miller, while writing "The Crucible."
Introduction: Hometown boy
Does the name Ralph Sampson ring a bell for any one
besides Gary?
Ralph was a native
Harrisonburg, Virginia boy;
he grew up in a house in the black section of town
only a couple blocks from where Gary and I lived in the
80s.
For a while, I worked in a
factory with his mother.
Here’s a clue for those of
you who don’t remember him:
I saw Ralph when he was
still in high school one day wearing a tshirt that said in big letters, “Yes, I
am seven feet tall!”
I guess he got tired of
being asked.
At that point, he was
already a star on Harrisonburg High’s basketball team.
By the time Ralph played
basketball for the University of Virginia, he was 7’4” tall; he went on to be
the # 1 draft pick in the 1983 NBA draft,
was a three-time NBA All star
and the Rookie of the Year for the Houston Rockets.
He made it onto the cover of
Sports Illustrated
six times in less than four years.
Unfortunately, his
professional career was shortened by repeated knee injuries.
He was Harrisonburg’s
favorite son for years,
the hometown boy who made it big.
Even in that race-conscious
town,
Ralph was loved by white and black alike;
he had put our little town on the map!
I
thought about Ralph as I worked with our gospel text this week.
This
story from Luke is quite an enigma.
Why
did the admiring crowd
gathered to hear their returned
hometown boy
flip from praise to murderous rage
so suddenly?
They
had heard of amazing things he’d done elsewhere;
surely he would have saved his very
best,
his most impressive skills,
for his own town, right?
They
couldn’t wait to see him make them proud!
So,
when he turns up at church on Sunday
with confidence and anticipation,
they hand him the lectionary
reading…
And,
he stands up, eloquently reads from Isaiah,
and there is an expectant hush.
But
shockingly, this good ol’ hometown boy
doesn’t
have the good stuff saved for his homefolks;
he goes on to essentially say,
“Get
over yourselves.
God
doesn’t care about your specialness
as much as you think God does….
Look
at our own history:
there
were lots of widows in Israel during the great drought—
but the widow that God sent Elijah
to save was a foreigner,
a
foreigner from one of the very same enemy nations
that drew our ancestors
into idolatry time and again.
And
there were lots of lepers in Israel during the prophet Elisha’s time—
but
the leper who Elisha healed
was
an enemy military commander!
What
does that do to your complacent understanding of your chosen status?”
Ouch,
ouch, ouch.
No
wonder they tried to throw him over a cliff!
It’s
as if Ralph Sampson had turned his back on his own town, his own people….
on all those loving hearts
who had proudly claimed a piece of
his childhood,
his raising, his
identity…
It’s
as if instead of Ralph’s last second tip-in at the buzzer
during the fifth game
of the 1986 NBA Western Conference Finals
which beat the Los Angeles Lakers
and sent the Rockets to
their 2nd NBA
Finals--
it’s as if, instead, Ralph
had deliberately, conspicuously,
tipped the ball to an opponent to lose the
game.
A traitor to Nazareth,
Jesus’ hometown folks must have thought:
How could he have betrayed us—US! like this?
We had such high hopes that
he would put us on the map!
And here he slams us,
says that God cares about
our enemies—
more than our
own people??
Introduction to the next few Sundays:
Reform movements are
painfully difficult.
Reformers and prophets tend
to have difficult and painful lives—often especially in their hometowns,
exactly as Jesus said.
They are often seen as
traitors. Jesus certainly was.
But what a difference they
make in the world
for all those who follow later…
This week and next we’re
going to be looking at pieces of our own history.
And this lection is very
relevant,
for after all, our story
grows out of a reform movement…
at least two reform movements, in fact.
Leadership Team asks me to
talk
about Mennonite history and theology fairly regularly;
a good way to remember who
we are
and grow deeper into who we are becoming
is to remember from where we have come.
So this time around the
subject of Mennonite history and theology
I want to use this idea of reform
as a way to understand the
ebb and flow of our history.
The Jesus Reform:
We’ll begin with the Jesus
reform.
There is nothing that
indicates that Jesus was trying to begin a whole new religion.
He was an observant Jew;
our text today makes a point of saying that
he “went to the synagogue on
the Sabbath day as was his custom.”
But he was passionate about
calling his people to renewal,
to an intimate connection with God,
an expanded understanding of
what God was about in the world…
he claimed Isaiah’s brilliant words as his own mandate,
his movement’s manifesto:
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.
This
“good news” was not a one-sided theoretical notion for Jesus;
it encompassed all of life.
It
was the Way of abundance, release, new vision, freedom….
the
way of the Lord’s favor.
And
it was to this Way that he called his disciples.
Luke
uses Jesus’ reading from Isaiah
to launch his telling of Jesus’
ministry
in
a way similar to how Matthew uses the Sermon on the Mount;
both are statements of what Jesus
goes on to flesh out
in word and deed in his ministry….
true belief in God.
What
does it mean to ‘believe in God’?
Does
it simply mean to give intellectual assent to a list of propositions?
Or
to follow a rigid set of rules?
For
Jesus and his peers,
Jewish religion had by this time
become a ponderous legal structure,
massive
with explicit and minute demands for spiritual practice.
Jesus
cut through the centuries of these enshrined demands to expose the shining
heart of Hebrew thought:
the ancient Hebrew understanding
of belief as knowledge
through experience.
God,
unlike surrounding tribal gods,
could be known, wanted to be known
in real time, in real experience.
Remember
that in Hebrew, the word translated “to know”
is also the word for sexual intercourse:
which--at its best--offers a depth of knowledge of
another
that provides passion and warmth for a lifetime.
And the Hebrews drew on exactly this idea
in
their image of God as lover in their Scriptures;
we had one of those in our Old Testament lection
last week.
So
the idea of discipleship as true belief in God
insists that true belief also means truly loving
God—
and living in
a way that is congruent with
and expresses that love.
[This
equation of believing with loving is not unique to the ancient Hebrews.
Our
English word “believing” comes from an Anglo-Saxon word
similar to the modern German word “belieben”, to hold
dear.
In fact, the word “believing” shares a root
with the German and Latin words for love: “liebe” and “libido.”
It
is not until the 18th century
when
the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke
began a shift to use “belief” in the modern sense
as assent to a set of propositions
divorced from experience
its ancient
relational and affective components.]
Well. Back to Jesus confronting his home town….
what a beginning to a ministry.
It set off a firestorm that
apparently never completely died down;
eventually the Jesus reform resulted in the violent
convulsion
which took his life.
His Jewish followers
continued to worship in synagogues until after the destruction of the Temple;
in time there was a painful sundering of the ways
and both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus
together formed a new religion,
Christianity.
(The pain of that sundering
shows up in the New Testament books written after the Christians were no longer
welcome in the synagogues, it is especially noticeable in the last gospel
written, John, where the Jews are consistently described in hostile terms.)
So why is this so important
to our knowledge of our own far more recent history?
Discipleship:
Well, a primary way
that Mennonites understand
the essence of our
spirituality and our calling
is to be followers
of Christ and Christ’s teachings.
We
understand God’s love as becoming especially clear and visible
in the person of Jesus Christ
and so we start with the words of Christ
and the stories of his life
given to us by the gifted
writers of the four Gospels.
Mennonites
are very practical, actually.
We
haven’t done much in the more theoretical areas of theology; there wasn’t even
a systematic theology written by a Mennonite until recently—and it still
doesn’t claim to be THE systematic theology of the Mennonite Church.
What
has always been important are the practical, ethical demands
of following the teachings of
Christ,
of knowing and loving God
in and by the way we live our lives…
Reminds
me of a joke I first heard from Geoff Anderson, an on-line friend in Britain;
I’ve since seen it make the rounds here in the US, too. It is so bad I hesitate to tell it, but it
does make the point precisely:
A
child psychologist moved into a new neighborhood. He had a particularly irritating habit of correcting parents on
the estate for their bad parenting. When he saw an interaction he didn't like,
he would come out of his house and scold the parent, 'That's not the way,
love's the way, love's the way.'
After
a few months of this, the other residents were getting decidedly annoyed. Then
one day, the psychologist was laying a new concrete sidewalk in front of his
house. A teenager came careening down the street on his mountain bike, lost
control and went ploughing through the wet cement.
The child
psychologist, in a fit of rage at his spoiled work, grabbed the boy by the ear
and screamed at him. The boy's mum,
watching from her window, almost jumped for joy at finally catching him out;
she dashed out of her house, looked the psychologist in the eye and said,
'That's not the way, love's the way, love's the way.'
To
which he replied furiously, 'Ah, yes, but I was talking about love in the
abstract, not in the concrete. '
Movement from the early Christian church into the
medieval period:
Hold
this thought about the contrast between love in the abstract and love “in the
concrete” while we look at some more early church history, particularly those
pieces that are especially relevant to the later reform movement we’ll discuss
next Sunday.
For
the first 300 years of the church,
it focused on practical expressions of love toward
neighbor,
it was steadfastly pacifist,
basing this position
directly on the teachings of Christ.
The
demands of following Christ—
including love of neighbor, including enemies
and
refusal to retaliate—
were seen to be in total opposition
to the demands of military service.
During
this time, nearly two thousand Christians
were
martyred by the Roman government,
and yet the movement flourished,
spreading throughout the Greek and Roman world.
However,
a century later, during the 400’s,
a shocking reversal occurred:
the
Roman Emperor Constantine completely changed the Empire’s response to
Christianity;
in
fact it moved swiftly within decades
from persecution of Christians
to mandating Christianity as the
religion of the realm.
[Longer
story: In the year 312, there were several contenders for the throne of the
Roman Empire. One, Constantine, was
preparing for a battle with his rival, when he had a dream of a cross of light
spread out in the sky with words saying “in this sign, conquer.” He promptly had a banner made with a design
of a spear and a cross, using the first two letters of the word Christ
in Greek—and he won the battle.
A
superstitious sort, he did not immediately claim Christianity for himself,
but began to favor it in many ways,
especially
insisting that his cross-bearing banner
be carried in every division of the Roman army.
The
following year, 313, he, along with his co-regent Licinius,
granted freedom of religion throughout the
empire.
In
315, crucifixion was abolished; in 321 Emperor Constantine instituted Sunday as
a state mandated day of rest.
Eventually
Christianity was made the official state religion.
Armies
were baptized en masse by riding their horses through rivers;
pagan soldiers splashed in on one side;
official state Christians clopped up on the other
bank!]
Paradigm shift:
Christian
scholars during these early years
of the Christianized Roman Empire
such as Ambrose and Augustine
moved
away from the early insistence
on love of neighbor and of enemy,
from the consistent pacifism of the
early church,
teaching
instead that Christians had a responsibility to defend their countries,
especially when the war was a “just” war.”
But
another significant change happened in these years
as the world turned into the early medieval period,
beginning around the year
500.
This was a significant change in
the focus of the church,
from the
expression of God’s love in the concrete
as seen in the life,
teachings, death, and resurrection
of Jesus,
to a much more abstract focus on the
nature and being of God.
Now
that persecution was no longer a living issue in the church,
there was time for endless debates on abstract
issues.
Some
of these debates resulted in schisms and angry excommunications;
eventually
what was considered orthodox belief
was captured in the great church creeds.
A
creed is simply a statement of the essential beliefs of a religious faith;
credo means “I believe”
which is how the Nicene and the Apostles’ Creeds
begin.
(We
have the Apostles’ Creed in our hymnal, #712.
You may want to flip to that now; #712.)
Now,
notice how different this creed is from the descriptions of Jesus’ teachings
and actions in the Gospels…
But what is really striking is
that the Apostles’ Creed is made up
simply of
statements of belief with no ethical content at all,
while the Gospels’ record of
Jesus’ teaching
is
almost nothing but ethical content.
In other words, Jesus’ teaching is
much more how to get along,
how
to treat each other, love each other--
it’s far more about living one’s
faith in the concrete
than it is
about thinking about one’s faith in the abstract.
Conclusion:
Like
the early Christian church, Anabaptists and their heirs, the Mennonites,
have tried to take these tough teachings,
love that is not in the abstract but in the
concrete;
trying
to live this out in the nitty gritty of our real-time lives….
We’ll
talk more about their reform movement next week.
Let’s
pray:
Loving God,
Help us to love like you do.
And
help us to understand what that means
right here, right now.
Give
us the openhearted grace to listen carefully and lovingly
to those who differ from us,
those
whom we may consider enemies,
especially in this time of unrest and confusion
at
home and abroad.
Through
Jesus Christ, our Lord,
AMEN
NOTES:
Ralph Lee Sampson, (born July 7, 1960 in Harrisonburg,
Virginia) is a former college and professional basketball player. He was
arguably the most heavily recruited (for both college and the NBA) basketball
prospect of his generation. Playing for the University
of Virginia, he was one of only two male players in the history of college
basketball to receive the Naismith Award as the National Player of
the Year three times (Bill Walton
of UCLA was the other male, Cheryl Miller of USC won three times, as well). He was the only player to win
the Wooden award twice. Professionally, Sampson was a #1 overall draft pick in
the 1983 NBA Draft, three-time NBA All-Star, and Rookie
of the Year for the Houston Rockets. He was on the
cover of Sports
Illustrated an unprecedented six times in a span of less than
four years (issues of December 17,
1979; December 1,
1980; March 30, 1981; November 29,
1982; December 20,
1982; and October 31, 1983).
Standing 7'4" (2.24 m) but at a lean 220
pounds (100 kg), he could dunk the ball almost without jumping yet was agile
enough to dribble behind his back and often even tried to emulate the role of a
point
guard. For the Houston Rockets, although he was well over 7 feet tall, he
played power forward and often guarded men much
smaller. This was because 7'0" (2.13 m) Hakeem
Olajuwon played center and the versatile Sampson preferred to play forward.
Together, they were called the "Twin Towers" between 1984 and 1988. --Wikipedia