Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany: January 28, 2007.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Psalm 71:1-6

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

First Reading

While our second reading continues the sequence from 1 Corinthians, the first reading for today covers Jeremiah's call vision, and the Gospel text is the second half of Jesus' sermon in his hometown of Nazareth.

Jeremiah's call vision follows most of the familiar call vision pattern with origins in Moses' call before the burning bush (Exodus 3). This pattern is repeated with Isaiah, Ezekiel, and to a degree even in the story of Elijah. Classic elements usually include a vision of God, sometimes in the heavenly court (missing in this text, where only "the Word of the Lord" comes to Jeremiah), the call to speak the word of the Lord, the objection by the one who is called, the objection overruled by God, the call restated and accepted. Some elements of this process even show up in the call of some of the disciples, notably Peter (Luke 5).

For Jeremiah, the call is simple: to be a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah's objection is that he is too young and does not know how to speak. God promises to give him the words and symbolically places words into Jeremiah's mouth by touching it with a hand. Then Jeremiah is commissioned "to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant." This does not bode well for the boy prophet, who will have difficult words of destruction to speak to a comfortable Jerusalem and equally difficult words of comfort and return to a nation marched into exile. The prophet's life is not easy, to say the least.

The Gospel lesson continues the story of Jesus' sermon in Nazareth from Luke 4. In last week's text Jesus preaches a sermon that ignites the passions of all who hear. It is full of messianic import and hope, especially with the quote from Isaiah 61. When Jesus declares that the reading is fulfilled in the hearing, the listeners are amazed beyond belief. They wonder aloud about Jesus' identity and parentage (as we recall the puzzling words of the twelve-year-old Jesus at the Temple). In fact, the identity of Jesus is a question throughout the start of the Epiphany season. We have been given clues and signs but nothing more. Here, the people read the signs correctly: Jesus is the Messiah, and his words proclaim an end to Israel's long estrangement from God. So far, so good.

Then Jesus dashes their hopes in one bold move. In today's reading he refuses to repeat his signs and wonders for them. This snubbing of the hometown crowd leads people to such rage that they try to throw him off the town's precipice. In a culture where identity is tied to group, this would be the expected reaction of the crowd. But Jesus' refusal to heal is more than a snub. It is symbolic of much more. He is saying that, though the messianic age is indeed come, the people of Nazareth will not participate. He quotes from the Old Testament prophets who include Gentiles in the miracles of God, notably two stories of Elijah/Elisha. This double snub, not only that the people of Nazareth are not included but the allusion that Gentile others will be, is too much for them to handle. The prophet business is no easier for Jesus than it is for Jeremiah.

We are left to puzzle through what Jesus is trying to accomplish here. Why raise the hopes of the people only to dash them? Why antagonize your own clan? It is one thing for a prophet not to be welcome in his own hometown, but why does Jesus purposely wear out his welcome? Who is included and who is on the outside of this messianic movement that God is initiating? How does the rest of Luke's Gospel go about explaining the extraordinary answer to that simple question? Certainly the answer is up for grabs even as Jesus is hanging on the cross between two insurgents. In fact, the answer may not be clear until the end of the book of Acts. But here, at what is for Luke the start of Jesus' public ministry, the seeds of that answer are sewn for all to see.

Pastoral Reflection

As with last week, where I chose to take two weeks of readings from 1 Corinthians together, I think that the story of Jesus' sermon in Nazareth may better be treated as one rather than two preaching opportunities. The premise is simple enough. Jesus declares the messianic age open, but he goes out of his way to question the conventional wisdom about who is in and who is out.

The first century was full of rabbinic debates about the answer to that question. Various groups within first-century Judaism had answers. Some thought only the righteous of the Jewish nation would participate, the Gentiles perishing. Others thought the Gentiles might be included as servants, while still others argued for the restoration of Israel's vocation as a light to the Gentiles, proclaiming that those Gentile peoples who were brought into the Jewish fold would be included in the messianic age.

We have no way of knowing which camp the folks at Nazareth belonged to. What we can do is discover how we break ourselves into similar camps as we consider who participates in the messianic age today.

First, I will be clear that I don't think of the messianic age as something just in the future. I take Jesus seriously when he states that the messianic age has begun with his ministry nearly 2,000 years ago. In some sense the future has broken into the present, and Jesus himself is that future. Even though the future has not fully arrived, it is present and changes how we live in the present. My late father used to talk about this in terms of the way that he read mystery novels, reading the last chapter first. It changed how he read the story and how he paid attention to what was happening throughout the novel, when he knew the outcome. The same can be said of those who see in Jesus the very future of God. It changes how we participate in the unfolding story in the here and now. Thus, while the messianic age is still not fully here, it breaks into the present with news of the outcome that is indeed transforming.

That begins to shape how we proclaim the gospel--less as hope for the future and more as hope for a future that transforms us in the present. It also shapes how we proclaim who is included. The answer is no longer about our group or clan. (Even my Lutheran clan may have trouble hearing that.) The answer is no longer about a particular set of cultural values and mores. For Jesus it means liberation from the things that bind us in a false way of being human in the present. Thus, this episode is followed, among other things, by stories of casting out demons and healing. Those routinely excluded have the objections to their inclusion overruled by Jesus. They immediately take up the task of proclaiming God's presence and servanthood.

The question then returns: Whom do we normally place outside of God's love and concern and thus outside of the messianic age? How can we so confidently place ourselves inside and others outside? What would Jesus say to us? The difficulty in answering all of these questions is that even asking them requires a prophetic stance, not only to the congregation but even with ourselves. Too often we feel that the prophetic requires that we, who have the right answer from God, give it to the mistaken masses. The Old Testament prophets were not that naive. They stood with Israel under the prophetic condemnations and lived through the consequences of their message. Was Israel estranged from God? The prophets also experienced that estrangement. The prophetic word is hard to preach because it will get us in trouble with our congregations, as it did Jesus. But it is harder to preach when it gets us in trouble with ourselves. It is finally only when we find that prophetic word that locates us on the "outside" that God's word of the new messianic age finally has the power to invite us in again. The good news here is that God is the one who ends humanity's estrangement with God. God does it in Jesus. God is still doing it in Jesus. The words that Jesus speaks are not just for Israel, not just for Nazareth, but for us all. LLB