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I heard a story once about W. C. Fields, the curmudgeonly comic of the early 20th century, who made a career of poking fun of established institutions and norms, and who was famously non-religious before that was widely fashionable. So, the story goes, friends visiting shortly before his death were surprised to find him sitting in his bed, flipping through the pages of a Bible. “What are you doing with a Bible?” they wondered. Fields replied: “Looking for loopholes.”

That story has stuck in my mind over the years, partly because I find it amusing, but also because it is oddly revealing. My sense is that especially in times of stress, anxiety, or fear; we look to our faith to shore us up, and to confirm our own cherished beliefs. In difficult times, we, like Fields, are attracted to the Bible with a greater passion than we bring in “ordinary” days. In such times, we’re looking for comfort, not growth.

To follow that thought just one step further, the implication is that while we’re deeply interested in preserving the lives we know, we are at the same time deeply resistant to changing the lives we know. In a word, we come to faith to confirm our lives, not transform them. If this is true, maybe the real reason so few of us here in the church today call who ourselves Christians actually spend much time studying the Bible, or in prayer is that we, too, want only comfort, not transformation. We want to be affirmed, not challenged.

Still, we are here. And if we approach our faith cautiously, sitting near the doors or quietly watching from a distance, perhaps we do so because we intuitively know that God is indeed powerful, and to approach God at all is a risk. So, I’m glad that we are here, you and I. We come close to God cautiously, hoping to be affirmed. Okay, God’s love is sure.

Both God’s love and our need for comfort are evident in the scriptures that frame our worship today. We listen in as today’s gospel lesson concludes the story Luke began in our lesson last week. The setting is simple: Jesus comes his hometown synagogue, and reads the scripture for the day, a lesson from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He 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.” (Luke 4:18-19) That’s the context. Jesus and his neighbors together, hearing a word from their ancient, trusted scriptures.

I wouldn’t exactly say that they are all looking for loopholes; but they are comfortable with these verses, and comforted by them. When Jesus says that Isaiah’s words are still relevant to their lives, that their scriptures were fulfilled in that very hearing, the folks seem comforted. At least they are pleased. “All spoke well of him,” says Luke, “and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” (Luke 4:22) They get the grace we all need. They find the affirmation we seek from God and from each other in this holy space and in their common faith.

A little more about the context: First-century Nazareth is a village where craftsmen, builders, and servants live – people whose lives depend on people they don’t entirely love. Roman occupiers, foreign state terrorists, you might say, live in the opulent estates in Sepphoris – Roman McMansions. Jesus’ father, his neighbors, and even Jesus himself depend on these people, even as they despise them. Neither side likes the other, but they each depend on one another. First century Palestine endured a fragile peace in which Roman occupiers, and a few well-paid collaborators, enjoyed a grand life built by the hands and supported by the resources of their poor Jewish neighbors.

It’s an explosive setting. And notice in this setting of injustice, oppression, terror, and death, that faith business is risky business. And it is all the more risky, not less so, when Jesus stands in the center of the day’s worshippers and calls them to a new faith. Jesus says, in effect, “It’s time to live the truth of God’s scriptures. It’s time to love our neighbors, unlovely though they are, and unlovable as well. Today. This word of God is for us, but it’s also for these neighbors whom we exclude. Today, our scriptures not only comfort but transform to see our world and our God in a new way.” Jesus gives not comfort, but an invitation to a new world. Their response is, predictably, explosive.

What Jesus suggests here is nothing less than a larger understanding of God. Jesus invites his neighbors in their synagogue to the transformation of seeing God’s love for their despised neighbors as well as for themselves. But who among us can make the jump from despising our enemies to loving them? Alas, it is too much, so they make to kill him. And though Jesus escapes to teach another day, Luke tells us that the die is cast. No one wants a transforming God, a reconciling God. All are uncomfortable with a God who invites us to love our families, our neighbors. We cannot accept a God who loves even our enemies, and who asks us to do the same. This message is intolerable. Because his message is intolerable, Jesus himself cannot be tolerated. There is death in his future.

Here at the very beginning of his gospel, Luke hints at the inevitability of the cross, and the sad truth that our Lord is crucified by the best within us as much by the worst among us. Luke reminds us that the gospel of Jesus challenges the whole world, including our world; and our gospel itself challenges notion that God loves us alone, and not the whole creation around us, even those different from us. By definition, God is bigger than we imagine or understand God to be. It’s just too much, and folks in the synagogue resist. The synagogue is more like the church, I suppose, than we dare admit.

One author I read, commenting on this passage, noticed the resistance described in the story itself. He said: “At Nazareth, [Jesus] made folks mad when he interpreted scripture in such a way that portrayed the world of God as a wide reach beyond the bounds of their definition of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders.’ Well, they didn’t like it. And they wanted to throw Jesus over a cliff….” (Will Willimon, “Pardon Me While I Offend You With My Sermon,” Pulpit Resource, January, February, March 2010, page 22.)

And Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes notes also that the reaction in the Nazareth synagogue is because Jesus challenges the prevailing notion of God as “our” God alone: “[T]he people,” says Gomes, “take offense not so much with what Jesus claims about himself, as with the claims that he makes about god who is much more than their own tribal deity.” (The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So good about the Good News?, page 39; quoted in Bartlett and Taylor, eds., Feasting on the Word, year C, Volume 1, page 313.)

I realized just how manageable and predictable we want God to be when, yesterday, I heard a reporter asking a pastor in Haiti, in effect, how he could still believe in spite of the devastation he had known. The pastor had lost his wife in the earthquake, and his child. He himself had burned their bodies rather than watch them rot in the sun. “Doesn’t this disaster shake your faith in God? Don’t you feel a bit like Job?” asked the reporter. The pastor, speaking through an interpreter, showed that he had a wider understanding of God. He simply quoted the scripture in his heart; a scripture that had clearly transformed is soul. “The Lord gives,” he answered, “and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition,” Saturday, January 30, 2010.) The reporter just couldn’t understand. We live in a world of death. The power of death looms near us always. Look at Haiti, and it’s poverty that contributed to the death from this natural calamity. But though we live in a world of death, we are called to follow the Lord of Life.

Years ago, Bill Stringfellow invited his fellow Christians to live their faith in a God who was larger, better, more loving and more powerful than we dare imagine. He invited us to be transformed as well as comforted by our faith. I close with his words which you might say are a prayer for our church, and for Christians everywhere in our world: “In the face of death,’ Stringfellow said, “live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst Babel, I repeat, speak the truth. Confront the … falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, preach the Word, defend the Word, incarnate the Word, do the Word, live the Word.” (William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Waco: Texas, Word Books, pages 142-143.)

Friends, Christ did and does all those things in our midst. And Christ our Lord challenges us to find more than comfort in the Word of God; Christ invites and challenges us to be transformed by the Word that we might live the Word in His Holy name. To do less than live in God’s word is to throw our Lord off the cliff of our conscience and surrender ourselves to his death in our hearts.

So how about it? Shall we kill the Word among us; or shall we live the Word in our world? Those are our only options: to fling Christ away by calling him a fool, or to follow him in faith. Which shall we choose?

Mamaroneck United Methodist, January 31, 2010.

Amen.

 

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