Year C
 Jeremiah 1:4-10
 Psalm 71:1-6
 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
 Luke 4:21-30

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

My mother-in-law…  lives with my sister-in-law…  and even though my sister-in-law is a grown woman…  with two college age children…  even though she retired from a career as an Air Traffic Controller…  even though she almost literally held people’s lives in her hand…  she sometimes feels treated by her mother…  more like a child…  than like an adult… .

My mother is 92 years old…  and when she sees on TV that it’s bitterly cold here in Michigan…  or that there’s a snow storm…  she calls me…  to make sure that I’m warm enough…  and dressing appropriately for the weather…  concern which understandably rises up out of a mother’s love…  but which is most often expressed to children… 

Being seen for who we are can be difficult…  others…  for various reasons…  may want to minimize our education…  our experience…  our expertise…  they may have a hard time accepting the women and men we’ve become…  or they may have difficulty with some of the things we say…  some of the things we’ve learned living out our vocations…  because it might mean change…  growth…  for example…  when I go home to visit my Jewish family…  no one asks me about the forces which led to the creation of a new religion out of the one which Jesus followed…

Today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah…  is one of my favorites… because it speaks of being fully known and seen and accepted for who we are…  it reminds me that each and every one of us is called as well…  perhaps not to prophecy…  but to doing what we’re able as members of the body of Christ…  to help usher in our part of God’s kingdom… and it’s a mistake to minimize our gifts…  so much that we drown out God’s calls for us…  and fail to embrace and follow them…

At the beginning of his book…  it’s revealed to the Jeremiah…  that God created him…  selected him…  consecrated and appointed him to be a prophet concerning the nations… but Jeremiah’s response is a two-fold objection…  he doesn’t know how to speak…  and he is too young… one commentator wrote that YHWH reacts to both objections…  but addresses the second more seriously than the first…  he brushes aside Jeremiah’s complaint that he is only a boy…  simply by telling him not to say such a thing…  and in answer to the question of his speaking ability…  God announces that he will command Jeremiah when to speak…  and give him the words to speak…  and YHWH utters a promise of deliverance…  to an objection that Jeremiah hasn’t even expressed…  his fear of opposition…  God says…  Do not be afraid of them…

You see…  Jeremiah ended up prophesying to a nation which failed to follow God’s Word…  and the southern Kingdom of Judah…  watched as the northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians…  and in the south…  Judah feared the Babylonians would overpower them and take them away into exile…  but rather than repent…  and ask God for help…  they continued to hurt others and themselves… and they were eventually taken into captivity…

Today’s passage from 1 Corinthians…  is familiar to many of us who’ve been to a wedding or two… it affirms for us that love is patient and kind…  not envious or boastful…  not arrogant or rude…  and it bears all things…  believes all things…  hopes all things…  endures all things…  rejoices in truth…  and never ends…  and it is beautiful…  it is lofty…  ]  although a commentary I once read…  suggested that this is not human love…  that it cannot be…  that while we may aspire to this degree of unconditional and boundless love…  we will always fall short…  we will hurt each other…  and we will need to ask for forgiveness…  and be forgiven…  No…  the author suggested…  this is divine love…  this is how God loves us…  this is God’s business as usual…  this is God’s 24 / 7 effortless…  seamless…  modus operandi…

Now in the Gospel…  we just heard again…  what we heard last week…  Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing…  remembering that fulfilled does not mean fully accomplished…  yet…  but it does mean that we’ve been given a holy heads up…  that we are to participate in it…  live into it…  Isaiah’s prophetic words prepare Jesus’ hearers to know what’s expected of them…  what they’re responsible for helping to birth into reality…

There’s a fascinating transition though…  the text reads…  All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth… They said…  Is not this Joseph’s son?…   and while we don’t know the tone of voice in which these words were spoken…  the lead in…  the All spoke well of him  part…  would seem to be complementary…  like Hometown Boy Makes Good…  but Luke may also have wanted to point out that it would have been inconceivable for many there…  to believe that the son of Joseph…  born of such humble circumstances…  could speak with such authority…  but Jesus did…

And then there’s that curious proverb…  Doctor, cure yourself…   a saying attested to in both Jewish and Greek writings…  and which Jesus may have said as a way of anticipating…  that the people thought it was arrogant of him to speak with that level of authority…  that he ought to deal with his own shortcomings before he dared to point out the shortcomings of others…

But even still…  Jesus anticipates…  And you will say…  Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum…  the people who knew him as a child…  and who now may have some difficulty fully accepting the adult he’s become…  want him to prove the stories they’ve heard and what he says he’s all about…  after all…  didn’t they contribute to his upbringing…  or put up with his unusual parentage…  “He’s one of us.” they say…  “He’s ours!” they say…  maybe they even think they ought to be able to test him…  to turn him on like a spigot…

And Jesus responds by shattering any notions of ownership…  by recounting that during a famine…  Elijah went to a widow at Zarephath…  and that Elisha cured Naaman the Syrian…  the SYRIAN for pity’s sake…  of leprosy… it was Jesus’ way of saying that God is not a God who lives only in Israel…  in our country…  in the Christian tradition…  the Church…  our denomination…  our parish…  or whatever boundaries we wish to set…  God is not ours…  Jesus is not ours…  though as an expression of divine love…  we are his…

The Rev. Kirk Kubicek writes that Jesus is also saying…  Don’t think that just because you are faithful…  and are in covenant with God…  that you have some kind of lock on God’s power…   you do only in the sense that you give that power to others…  what Jesus is saying with all these stories is…  in effect…  turn water into wine yourselves…  bind up the brokenhearted…  give hope to those without vision…  liberate the oppressed…  release people from their debts…  live that kind of life… 

But Jesus presented such a magnanimous God…  far more generous than they were…  that the people were filled with rage…  and they drove him out to the brow of the hill on which their town was built…  to hurl him off…  interestingly reminiscent of Satan wanting Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple mount just a few verses before…  and in neither circumstance…  would Jesus allow himself to be tested…  and he passed though the midst of them…  a Greek word which can also mean the middle way of them…

I think it was Presbyterian minister William Sloane Coffin who said…  there are those who prefer certainty to truth… .   there are those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love…  and what a distortion it is…  to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties…  when having limited certainties but unlimited sympathies…  is not only more tolerant…   but is far more Christian…

We are called into relationship with a God who transcends all the boundaries and divisions we can create…  and who will be on the other side of any line we draw…  who is more mystery…  than certainty…  who with the Incarnate Word forgives us…  and with the Holy Spirit which invites us…  because for now…  we see in a mirror dimly…  but it will not always be so…