The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

January 28, 2007

The 4^th Sunday after the Epiphany

Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Jeremiah 1: 4-10¹

⁴Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,

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.”

⁶Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” ⁷But 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. ⁸Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”

⁹Then 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. ¹⁰See, 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.”

Gospel Lesson – Luke 4: 21-30²

²¹[After reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, Jesus] began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” ²³He 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.’” ²⁴And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. ²⁵But 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; ²⁶yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹They 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. ³⁰But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

“There Is Nothing More Powerful than an Idea

Whose Time Has Come.”

Some years ago PBS TV ran a series on the American Revolution entitled, simply, Liberty. It began with this compelling statement: “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”³ When Jesus – inspired by the Holy Spirit as was Isaiah before him – stated that he too had come:

…to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,…⁴

…a truth whose time had come was both announced and embodied. The incarnation of that idea has pervaded every other notion of justice in history. In the American experience, we see it in our 18^th-century revolution, in the 19^th-century abolition of slavery, and in the 20^th-century liberating movements of Civil Rights for African and Native Americans, for women, and now for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons. It has to be constantly renewed, though, as we rediscover the gospel’s preference for the poor, the oppressed, and those who remain on the margins of life. This season before the cycles of Lent and Easter, we need to celebrate the incarnation of an idea whose time has come – the incarnation of every liberation and plea for peace with justice that has emerged anywhere the story of Jesus has been told.

It’s in that same spirit that I’ve introduced your consideration of those points that are at the heart of Progressive Christianity. By calling ourselves “progressive” we mean that we are Christians who have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus; and yet we do recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to know God, and so we acknowledge that their ways are as true for them as our ways are true for us. And far from being a ritual of separation, we understand Holy Communion – the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus’ name – to be a representation of an ancient vision of God’s feast that is meant for all people. To be a progressive Christian, then, means that we invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become just like us in order to be acceptable. This includes (but by no means is limited to) believers and agnostics, conventional traditional Christians as well as questioning skeptics, women and men, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, of all races and cultures, of all classes and abilities, those who still hope for a better world and those who have lost hope. We have come to understand that the way we behave toward each other, and toward others outside of our community, is the fullest expression of what we really believe. To be a progressive Christian is to find more grace in the search for understanding than in any dogmatic certainty – that, finally, there is more value in pursuing our questions than in insisting upon absolute answers. We would choose to form ourselves into a church that’s dedicated to equipping one another for the work that we all feel called upon to do: striving for peace and justice among all people, protecting and restoring the integrity of all God’s creation, and bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his sisters and brothers. Because of what happened to Jesus himself, though, and to all who truly followed in his footsteps, we recognize that being his followers is costly; it calls us to a selfless kind of love, to a conscientious resistance to evil of any kind, and a renunciation of the privileges that we Christians have assumed – for far, far too long – belonged only to us.⁵ I think that this, too, is an idea whose time has come. What do you think?

Last Sunday Jennifer introduced us to the opening parts of Jesus’ sermon in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. The room was filled with friends and family who’d heard great things about this carpenter’s kid turned preacher. They were proud of him, even if they were just a bit surprised by his audacity of claiming to fulfill the statements that he read from Isaiah. That kind of conviction caught them a bit off guard and, at least for awhile, they were just a bit in awe of this young man.

But it didn’t last long. It was at this point that Jesus launched into a diatribe against them – his own people. He reminds his townsfolk, in rapid succession, of two stories from the Bible in which God supposedly performs wonders through two very unique prophets. One is the case of a woman of Sidon on the Mediterranean coast who was saved from famine. The other told of a Syrian military commander – somebody who represents Israel’s oppressor – who was cured of leprosy. Both of these people were not Jews. Jesus was saying to his neighbors, loudly and clearly, that they no longer have the luxury of despising the strangers and aliens in their midst. God is the God of all people, not just of the Jews, and this is proof of that fact.

Something like this happens when young people get a university education. Their horizons are broadened – often tremendously. They shed their prejudices against people who are different from them: people of color (if they are not), people of different sexual orientations, people who speak other languages or who come from foreign countries. They come to doubt, at first, then to deny some of the political and economic dogmas, along with the religious narrowness, that they may have grown up hearing. Then they graduate and come back, often, to their own hometown. The question is, will they have the courage to speak out boldly, like Jesus did, or will they let the old prejudices engulf them all over again?

I think that the greatest danger to the church is its identification with the prosperous and well-established status quo – as if Jesus and our culture had just comfortably settled down to be best of friends. The church needs Christians of independent and original thought, rebels even who come with new solutions and with the capacity to take risks. We ought to feel out of place with the society at large, that way we might be able to understand better the call for compassion and justice and respond to it, instead of attempting to run it out of town and throw it off a cliff as these townspeople from Nazareth tried to do.

Of course you and I are more sophisticated than that. We’re not into killing our preachers – at least not yet! We may sometimes be just as angry with what the preacher says, but we’ve come up with less violent ways of dealing with them. It’s not hard for me to imagine the murmurings of the fellowship-hall-coffee-hour crowd following a sermon of the kind we’ve just heard from Jesus: “He sure didn’t speak any good news, did he?” “I didn’t get anything out of that sermon!” “We came here to be comforted, not insulted!” “She’s slandering our traditions!” “Isn’t that just like a liberal – heart bleeding over every ridiculous and lost cause?” “Who does he think he is?” And after a series of disturbing phone calls from provoked parishioners to the district superintendent, the bishop would dispatch a letter of reprimand urging this preacher to cool it and concentrate on love and grace, comfort and compassion, and leave the controversies out of the church.

Who are the “foreigners” of our time who seem to have been helped by God when we’ve refused to help? The Christian church has come perilously close to identifying Christianity with the aims of the federal government of late, so much so that our faith is in danger of becoming merely a civil religion. We’ve claimed, maybe not in words but certainly in our actions, that God is a capitalist and that our way of life is superior to all others. We’ve assumed that God is on our side in our dealings with the rest of the world – even when those dealings are violent or illegal. We’ve integrated our own personal hang-ups into the church so much that we’ve come to exclude people who are not like us. We’ve been guilty of interpreting the Bible from our own point of view instead of as a message of love to people at the points where they need love the most.

No matter what anybody says, the story of salvation isn’t finished. It’s still being told. Alongside poverty and misery, human misunderstanding and brokenness, salvation is being realized in the committed efforts of those who still labor on behalf of peace with justice – between people and among families, between nations and within the natural environment in which we all live. It’s being realized in the efforts of those who bring healing and comfort to those who are troubled, sick, lonely or victimized. It’s being realized in those who work tirelessly to feed the hungry of our world as much as they do their own children.

The story of salvation is told whenever and wherever the good of people is advanced and evil is confronted with strong actions of nonviolent resistance. The story of salvation is still being told whenever and wherever there are prophets who give voice to the genuine will of God. Our hope, along with our prayers today, should be that you and I will have the ears to hear the voices of those prophets and, like Jesus, will have the courage to make that salvation a reality in our church, in our lives, in our nation, and extend to the very ends of the earth.

May we make it so.

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