Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany Year C sermon

4th Sunday after the Epiphany Year C
January 31, 2010
The Christian writer, Ann Lamott, has a line in one of her writings that beautifully captures the spirit of today’s readings which are actually a series of confrontations. She writes, “God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.[1]”
First, in Jeremiah, we hear the story of God’s call to the prophet. It is a call that God made when Jeremiah was in his mother’s womb, and even when Jeremiah resists the call, protesting that he does not have the gifts needed to fulfill God’s call, God confronts Jeremiah and explodes his understanding of his own limitations. God promises to be with him and to give him the words that he will need.
In the epistle reading, Paul is confronting the people in the church in Corinth. It’s especially important to remember the context of this most familiar part of this letter (which is often associated with the love between husband and wife because of its frequent reading at weddings), so that its true meaning does not become hidden or over-sentimentalized. The church in Corinth to which Paul is writing is a church in conflict. They are doing real and potentially destructive harm to one another in their in-fighting. Out of this specific context comes Paul’s famous hymn to love. One critic has even suggested that Paul is deliberately attacking as worthless the gifts that the church in Corinth prides themselves on: speaking in tongues, prophetic powers, strong faith, knowledge and the giving away of possessions, and he is confronting their unloving behavior to each other by offering them his definition of what love really is (in contrast to their own actions).
In Luke’s gospel, we see Jesus confronting the people from his own hometown. Our story goes back to the reading from last week, where Jesus has come straight from his baptism and temptation in the wilderness and returned to his home town of Nazareth in Galilee. He began to teach in their synagogues and is spoken well of, and then he returns to Galilee and things seem to be proceeding along the same path. Jesus gets up in synagogue and reads from the scroll that is given to him from Isaiah, “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. Then he rolls up the scroll, gives it back and says to them, “ Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Where our reading for today picks up.)
Even then, the people were amazed and spoke well of him. They were proud of him and ready to claim him as their own, home-town hero. It is Jesus who deliberately changes the tone and offers a challenge and a confrontation to the crowd in Galilee, in what must have seemed to them like a tongue lashing out of left-field. He confronts and challenges the people’s most basic understanding of who they are and what their relationship is with God. To the people who have survived so much—exile in a foreign land, oppression under foreign rulers, persecution—a people whose only resource has been the security of their status as God’s chosen people and the promise that their relationship with God is unique and special, to those people, Jesus points out that God respects no boundaries among people. God respects no nationality, and he points to scriptural examples of when God has acted through God’s representative and has interceded for and saved a non-Israelite. Jesus fully embraces his role as prophet and is pointing to the radical inclusivity of God, and the people seem to feel that somehow devalues their national and cultural identity and their own special relationship with God. Or, as theologian Peter Gomes writes, “The people take offense not so much with what Jesus claims about himself, as with the claims that he makes about a God who is more than their own tribal identity.” The congregation has certain reasonable expectations of God that have been learned over generations, and in one instant, Jesus takes those expectations and turns them on their head.
Even our collect today has the potential to issue a confrontation. The words seem simple: Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace…” Much has happened to people in this parish and in our greater community these last few weeks. Many people are dealing with the reality of aging parents, debilitating infirmity and end of life issues. People have experienced the sudden and unexpected deaths of friends and prominent members of the greater community. People are dealing with their own personal illnesses and difficulties. In the midst of all of this, do we really believe that God is “Almighty”. What does that mean for us, when we are in the midst of suffering and loss? One of my dearest friends suffered a miscarriage this week. That is not the way that she hoped her life would turn out, and it is not the way I would have hoped her life would turn out. Why do all sorts of horrible things happen if God is, as we say in this prayer, almighty?
In times of difficulty, our faith and our understanding of God are confronted, and we are invited to enter into dialogue with God, our sacred texts, and our tradition. We are invited to dwell with the God who gives his Son up to death in the last chapters of all our gospels, and even if we are not given answers there, at least, the mystery of suffering will be named. In all different events of our lives, God confronts us…life confronts us, and we realize that we are called to question and to mourn the loss of our expectations; we are called to self-examination and to search for meaning beyond our own lives and our selves. It is especially in times of conflict and distress that our beliefs and understanding and faith are challenged and confronted and it is often when we grow the most.
So, how are you being confronted by God this morning? Are you, like Jeremiah, being confronted by God and challenged to take up God’s call to you, even though God’s call does not seem to fit into your vision of how your life should turn out and what your gifts are? Are you being challenged by God to do more than you think you can do? Our Deacon Scott issued this challenge for us last week, to do more than we think we can do to help feed the hungry in our community.
Are we, like the Church in Corinth, being challenged and confronted about those areas of ministry that we cherish in our congregation, being challenged to investigate whether those ministries are really being offered in the true spirit of love? Are we being challenged and confronted to further discern our purpose and identity? I believe we are. Are you being challenged to examine which areas of your life that you pride yourself on may or may not be rooted in the love that is from God?
Are we, like the people in Galilee, being challenged by God to expand our understanding of who God is beyond an idea of our own tribal God and to not limit God and God’s radical abundance and inclusivity by our own expectations and understandings of God?
Are we, along with all who suffer, being challenged and confronted this morning about our expectations of God and of how our lives and the lives of those we love are supposed to end up?
In his book, In the Name of Jesus, RC priest Henri Nouwen writes about the challenged that Jesus issues to Peter in John 2:18: “When you were young you put on your belt and walked where you liked, but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and somebody else will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” This is Christian maturity, says Nouwen, the ability to relinquish power and control and even expectations and to be led where we’d rather not go—to “the unknown, the undesirable, the painful places.”
“God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”
How are you being challenged and confronted this morning? Where are you being called to go?
[1] As quoted in the article Critical and Faithful in The Christian Century January 9, 2007 p.5.