 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
"IN THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS" | Luke 4.14-32 | May 30, 2004 |
It bursts our bubble to be challenged with such a statement, but it calls us back to the reality that Christ not only comforts us and rescues us, but Christ is also the one who challenges and upsets us, telling us the truth so clearly that we want him to shut up. If you don’t have that reaction sometime, then perhaps you have not recognized Christ in some of the offensive people God has sent your way. These are the people who jolt us out of complacency and rock our equilibrium so that we do not confuse our own ideas of God with God.
It is easy to do in our rapidly-changing world. Aurora has become the second largest city in the state. Houses are being built at an unprecedented rate. Many are trying to escape the complications of a diverse community; others are trying to set up islands unto themselves to avoid mixing with those they don’t want to meet. Aurora is home to two Hindu temples, a Muslim Mosque, a Jewish Temple, as well as a plethora of Christian churches of every stripe and color.
Church is where many look for a smaller, homogeneous group of like-minded people in order to insulate themselves from the diverse world outside that challenges us to think in different ways. Several people have asked me over the years how New England Church stays as cohesive as it does with the theologically and economically diverse population that makes up our congregation. It is a good question, and the only good answer I have is a best-guess that we are family, and in a family you care for one another even if you disagree with one another. In a community of faith, we may argue about differences but at least we argue face to face. What is it that keeps us from killing each other?
I think it is because we celebrate what we have in common rather than emphasize our differences. Yes we may have intense discussions that focus on our differences, and we may try to persuade others to see our point of view and we may even campaign here and there to implement what we think to be the only right way, but we ultimately try to appreciate what we share in common, not the least of which is this church and the privilege we have of following our own faith journey and the diversity that results.
Taylor suggests that we all 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. You know who they are. Some of them are on the list because we are snobs, but others are there because we believe they are sinners which is the title we give people who we think offend God because they have offended us.
Community becomes the vital force that holds the ragged edges together. It was certainly at the crux of the story we read today: all speak well of Jesus and are amazed at his gracious words until he begins to attack their sense of community. They want him to do for them what he did in Capernaum. They are his own kin, after all, not a bunch of strangers like the people in Capernaum. He belongs to them. They have a special claim on him which they expect him to honor by doing his best for them.
According to this story as we have it, Jesus didn’t do much for them except anger them. He reminds them that God’s sense of community was bigger than theirs was. He offends 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. It was like telling them that God had become chaplain to the Ku Klux Klan, or that God had passed over a Sunday school teacher who was sick in order to take care of an ailing Hindu.
He wasn’t telling them anything new; it was all right there in their Hebrew scriptures. But that isn’t how they used the scriptures. They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up. Sounds rather contemporary, doesn’t it? The minute Jesus denies their special status, the favored son becomes a degenerate stranger. And they tried to kill him for it. He told the truth and they were ready to throw him down off the cliff.
We don’t like God loving the people we won’t sit next to—the people who disturb and offend us, and who belong to God just as surely as we do. We don’t like it when God doesn’t respect our boundaries. Popular culture teaches us to mistrust those different from ourselves. Our world is becoming more entrenched in the notion that strangers are enemies. But we as a church know better. We believe better. We follow a Jesus who preferred the company of misfits to that of religious people. We dare to believe that it is God who makes us a community and not we ourselves, and that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to the truth that is bigger than we are.
The truth is always more than any one of us can grasp all by ourselves. It takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell us the parts we cannot see, and sometimes we want to kill them for it. So we challenge ourselves to stay with it even when we don’t like it, to embrace the diversity even when it threatens us, to be part of the family even when we are in the minority. We are part of this community of faith because we believe that being in the company of friends and strangers is the best way to know the diversity of God and the world that we live in. Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
(This sermon was based heavily upon, and borrowed significantly from, a sermon entitled ‘Company of Strangers’ by Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Home By Another Way. I have used it, with some variation, because of its pertinence to our situation at NECC.)
LUKE 4.14-32
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues and everyone praised him.
He went up to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue as was his custom. And he stood up to read from the prophet Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
The eyes of everyone were fastened on him and he began by saying to them,
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Surely you will quote to me the proverb “Physician heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.” I tell you the truth, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to the widow of Zaraphath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.
All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
Then he went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath began to teach the people. They were amazed at his teaching because his message had authority.
FROM NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITION
My friend, how desperately do we need to be loved and to love. When Christ said that man does not live by bread alone, he spoke of a hunger. This hunger was not the hunger of the body. It was not the hunger for bread. He spoke of a hunger that begins deep down in the depths of our being. He spoke of a need as vital as breath. He spoke of our hunger for love.
Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love, our self-esteem weakens. Without it, our courage fails. Without love, we can no longer look out confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy ourselves.
With love we are creative. With love we march tirelessly. With love, and with love alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.
Chief Dan George
| Copyright © 2004 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |