University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time        January 31, 2010

The most difficult task a preacher faces is the task of standing in a pulpit and proclaiming God’s Word to a congregation the preacher loves when he or she knows that that Word runs counter to prevailing assumptions, convictions and practices.  Well, actually, that is the second most difficult task.  The most difficult task is hearing that Word for oneself and taking it to heart, knowing that the congregation’s assumptions and mores and convictions are often similar to one’s own.

It may be a truism that the preacher’s task is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, but any preacher will tell you that it is always more satisfying to do the former than the latter. The reasons for our reticence to speak prophetically in the pulpit are simple enough.[1]  First, there is a matter of discernment; how does one know that one is speaking God’s truth and not just one’s own opinion?  A good friend who is a pastor describes himself as “not always right, but seldom in doubt.”  My own particular take on myself is that I am always wrestling with doubts, or at least concerns, about whether I have it right.  Such humility before the Word is a good thing, but it can at times lead to faithless cowardice and hesitancy in the pulpit.

Second, most preachers, like most people, want to be liked by their friends.  That poses an especially crucial temptation to a preacher if it leads her to hedge a bit rather than to speak boldly a needed corrective word of truth. The church needs backbone in matters of faith and practice, but backbone is hard to find sometimes in the church.

Before Reinhold Niebuhr became such an eminent American theologian in the 1940s and 1950s, he served as pastor of a congregation in Detroit. Niebuhr kept a diary of those years, subsequently published, and it is one I make it a habit to reread every couple of years. In that diary Niebuhr said this about his preaching:

I catch myself weighing my words and gauging their possible effect upon this and that person. I think the real clue to the tameness of the preacher is the difficulty one finds in telling unpleasant truths to people whom one has learned to love.

I nod my head every time I read those words.  Elsewhere in that same diary Niebuhr says,

Courage is a rare human achievement.  It seems to me that preachers are more cowardly than other groups; that may be because I know myself.  But I must confess that I haven’t discovered much courage in the ministry.  The average [preacher] is characterized by suavity and circumspection rather than by any robust fortitude.  I do not intend to be mean in my criticism, because I am a coward myself and find it tremendously difficult to run counter to general opinion… But it does seem that the unique resource of [faith] ought to give at least a touch of daring to the religious community and the religious leader.[2]

At least a touch of daring, he said. At least a touch… that is, if we pay attention to Scripture.  Indeed, we need look no further than the two lessons we have read here this morning to find our inspiration for such daring. 

Consider the call of Jeremiah, and his powerful description of how it came to him: “Now the Word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you to be a prophet to the nations.’” (Jer. 1:4-5)   Jeremiah protests, “I am only a boy, I can’t be a prophet,” but the words are barely out of his mouth when he hears the Lord admonish him, “Do not say, I am only a boy, for I am sending you, and you will speak my words, and I will be with you.” Then, says Jeremiah, the Lord said, “I have put my words in your mouth.”

Now, if that were all we knew about Jeremiah, we might find that description heart-warming… might see these words as another example of an encounter with God’s supportive and empowering Word. But we know where that Word drove Jeremiah.  We know of his confrontation with his own nation over their disobedience, know the way God’s Word forced him to confront the nation’s political and religious leaders and challenge their assumption that they were in an irrevocable alliance with God.  Before it was over Jeremiah was charged and tried for sedition and was despised by those whom he loved the most.  Jeremiah had swallowed the words God placed in his mouth.  Later, in the wake of all the anger he had stirred up, in the midst of deep personal anguish and distress, Jeremiah would say,

If I say, “I will not mention the Lord or speak any more in his name,” then there is within me something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. (20:9)

In a time of turmoil, when all the people had turned against him, and he alone was left to speak a word from God, he cried out that he wanted to relinquish his calling, to step away from the role of the prophet. Every time he spoke, those words he had consumed kept coming back as a bad case of prophetic indigestion, what a friend once called a case of “holy heartburn.”[3] And all the Zantac in the world wouldn’t touch it. 

Or consider Jesus in today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel. He didn’t fare much better with his own people in Nazareth than Jeremiah did with his people in Jerusalem.  True, when he first started speaking in his hometown synagogue, the locals were so proud. Everyone spoke well of him, says Luke.  “That’s Joe’s boy,” they said.  If we’re honest, that’s the feeling all preachers want to have in our home church pulpits.  Every preacher, perhaps, except Jesus.  After things got off to such a great start, he then practically spit in the faces of these people who were so proud of him.

Like the people of Jerusalem in the time of Jeremiah the prophet, the folks in the Nazareth synagogue seemed to have the idea that God was their God and theirs alone – that “God loved them first, loved them best, loved them alone.” Jesus knew too well “the small compass of his own people’s understanding,” and how they assumed that their own little lives were “at the center of the wide world.”[4] So, to these familiar and eager faces Jesus simply preached the Scripture; that’s what he did.  That’s all he did.  He read the Scripture and then interpreted it by reminding the congregation of two other Scripture stories in which it was clear that God’s mercy had been extended to others beyond the margins of acceptable Jewish culture.  As Clarence Jordan translated it in his Cotton Patch Gospel, “When they heard this, the whole congregation blew a gasket.”  They got so riled up that they grabbed Jesus and took him out to a cliff where they tried to throw him off.  I guess you might say he afflicted the comfortable that day.[5]

Now, over the years I’ve known people to get excited and upset about sermons for lots of different reasons.  Some of the upset has been justified, and some of it has been just plain mystifying to me.  But one true and tested way to create conflict from the pulpit is to suggest to people that their God is too small… that the God of creation, the God we know in Jesus Christ, is always bigger and more expansive than they may think, that God is the God of other people, too, and that God’s ways and God’s plans are always more inclusive than ours…indeed, that they are not necessarily linked with our ways and our plans at all.

That’s what Jeremiah did, and that’s what Jesus did.  Jeremiah said to a people who trusted God’s promises and who believed God was their God that God was the God of other people, too. If you think the Bible is dull and you want some intrigue, then turn to and reread the story of the conflict between Hananiah and Jeremiah in Jeremiah 27 and 28.  What you will find there in Jeremiah’s words is a strong warning against any people’s proprietary claim on God’s favor.  Then, re-read this morning’s encounter in the synagogue at Nazareth.  What you will find there in Jesus’ sermon is a strong warning against any people’s proprietary claim on God’s favor.

Any time… any time we read the Scriptures and think we have an exclusive claim on the love, mercy and protection of God, we have misread the Scriptures. Any time we read the Scriptures and believe that the Scriptures only confirm what we already think, only comfort us, reassure us that we are right and others are wrong, only pat us on the back and say we are doing just fine, then we can be certain we have misread the Scriptures.[6]  God is our God, but God is also the God of the whole earth and of all people who on earth do dwell…even those we would rather exclude from such providence if it were up to us.  It’s not up to us, thank God.  It’s not up to us.  But that doesn’t keep folks from thinking it is so. Says Barbara Brown Taylor,

All of us have a secret list of people we would rather not sit next to, here or anywhere else. They may be specific people you can name or they may be certain kinds of people. Some of them are on the list because they are snobs, but others are there because we believe they are sinners.  That might not be the word [we] would use, but it captures the feeling well enough – that there are some people who offend us because we believe they have offended God (who probably would not want to sit next to them either).

It is this whole prickly matter of community that Jesus threatens in his first sermon in Nazareth, and it almost gets him killed. All speak well of him and are amazed at the gracious words that come from his mouth until he begins to attack their sense of community….

So far as we know, he did nothing… but remind them that God’s sense of community was bigger than theirs was.  He offended them by telling them not one but two stories about how God had passed over them and their kind in order to minister to strangers – first the widow from the wrong side of the tracks in Zarephath and then Naaman the Syrian, who was an officer in the army of Israel’s enemies…. He was not telling them anything new. He was telling them things that were right there in their own scriptures, only that was not how they used scripture.  They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up, and they snapped shut on Jesus.  The minute he denied their special status he went from favorite son to degenerate stranger, who offended them so badly they decided to kill him.

That is how sensitive we are to being told that our enemies are God’s friends.  That is how mad we get when someone suggests that God loves the people we won’t sit next to – the people who disturb and offend us, [yet] who belong to God just as surely as we do.  No matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries.  God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or to get out of the way.  The problem is not that we are loved any less.  The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community [and a much wider view of the world].[7]

            That friends, is the Gospel truth.  It is a hard truth to hear.  It is an even harder truth to proclaim, especially to people who disagree, who happen to be people whom we love.  For Jeremiah that truth led to isolation and rejection; for Jesus it almost got him killed that day….and did get him killed later. Even today, for all our progress, it is a truth that still offends us. 

Or if it does not, then maybe… maybe we misheard it.