Going Home Luke 4:21-30

Transcription

1 Going Home Luke 4:21-30 Then he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. 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? He 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. And he said, Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet s hometown. But 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; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They 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. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. This is what Jesus read to his parents, his Sunday School teachers, the folks that pinched his cheeks and swatted his behind.this is what he read when he went home: 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 favour. And they loved him. But then he continued, telling them, It s not your time And they were filled with rage, drove him out of town, and tried to hurl him off a cliff. Sometimes, it s dangerous to go home. Now I m learning to call Cincinnati home, but for 8 years, a small town in western VA was home for us. And a favorite pastime in small towns is high school football. Now this isn t the Bengals for sure this is tailgating in the high school football parking lot without hot toddies and honking for the football team that includes those boys you knew as babies as they jog up the hill to the stadium; this is not just watching the game but catching up with all those folks you don t have time to sit down with during the week; this is the safety of kids Sarah s age able to test out their freedom by running around for three hours while the adults occasionally make a mental note of where they are. And we loved it. Ben played in the Harrisonburg High School band, and this past fall, I found myself (for some reason or another) unable to make it to the entire game. I slipped into the stadium in the middle of the second quarter just to hear the band do their

2 halftime show (and I love that we have come to a state where you know it s right to skip the snacks and stay put during halftime for the band!). It was packed. The only available seats were in the front row, where there was a sign that said, Reserved for the Jordan family. I didn t see the Jordan family anywhere in sight, so I sat down, right in the middle of this reserved football pew in the stadium sanctuary and figured if the Jordan family came back, well, they could just kick me out; I was only a visitor for a few minutes. And I got to talking to the family sitting behind me. I was quick to tell them I would not stay for the whole game I was just there to see the halftime events. They asked why I wasn t staying, and I told them about Ben, and the band, and how many other children I had. They said they had a boy who once played football at HHS and how great it was to see the team play again. A nice conversation, sweet people and our talk was cut short when they abruptly rose and hurried out onto the field when the announcer boomed, HHS welcomes Philadelphia Eagles starting linebacker Akeem Jordan and family out onto the field to retire jersey #56.. So there they were, those sweet people, out on the field with their boy, the hometown hero, an NFL football player who had come home to glory of sorts. I listened as they recounted his accomplishments. I heard how he spent time with school children and athletes in Harrisonburg, telling about his experiences. I watched as his family beamed. And I was touched at the humility and the almost awkwardness with which Akeem accepted his gifts and hesitantly reentered the stands as he patiently signed programs and cell phones and arms. Now, I don t know if Akeem Jordan is Christian or not, but I know that his family welcomed me, the stranger. I know that I saw on the field qualities that we want in our heroes: humility and grace and a willingness to give back. It seems to me there are a lot of those sorts of folks in the world I don t know if they are Christians or not.they don t wear a cross plastered across their chests or jockey for attention at football games with their John 3:16 signs. They are boy scouts and girl scouts. They are AA members and Shriners. They are our neighbors who blow our walks anonymously in the middle of a snowstorm. They are the ones who have time for others, they welcome the stranger, they give back to their community, they see the needy in their midst and they attend to them quietly. And they know how to come home they are hometown heroes whether they have a reserved pew or they sit quietly in the back never announcing their presence. Jesus did things a little differently. When he went home to Nazareth, it was all about him. He had come from Capernaum and a whole slew of healings. He was the hometown hero, and he came into town with a lot of lofty words and promises. He quoted the familiar words from the prophet Isaiah that sang of miracles and he claimed to be the miracle maker. And they knew it to be true. So they amened with him when he said he was bringing good news to the poor ( we re poor they chorused). They cheered louder when he said he would release the captive ( we re in chains, brother, we re in chains! ). When he said the blind would see and the oppressed would be freed, well, a wave broke out across that smalltown stadium. And when he said he had come to proclaim the year of the Lord s favor, they erupted into a standing ovation they knew they were the favored ones, that finally something good was coming their way. They were ready. They knew his power, they knew his mama, Mary, they had heard the stories of who he was and now they believed it. And he was home. They knew that their day had finally come; never again would anyone say that nothing good can come out of Nazareth, because this was their Jesus,

3 their hometown boy. Can t you just see them sitting on the edge of their seats, with their crutches flailing and their sick children pushed to the front row, itching for just an inch of glory? Nazareth was ripe for miracles. But on this day, there were no miracles. Jesus refused. He reminded them of Elijah, who fed the foreigner, the widow at Zarephath, even though there were thousands of hungry mouths and bloated stomachs at home in Israel. He recalled that Elisha healed not the many lepers of Israel, but the stranger, Naaman, from Syria. He told them that he knew they were sick, and hungry, and poor, and in prison, but it was not their time, he wasn t there for them, but for the folks down the road that attacked and ridiculed them. It was as if Akeem Jordan had done his grip and grin and then skipped all the autographs and photo ops, stepping into a helicopter right there on the field to head over to Turner Ashby, Harrisonburg s rival school, to institute a team wide college scholarship for all football players. It would be like Roy Rogers passing up Cincinnati to give a benefit concert for the Kansas City Welcome Wagon. I might even be like a life long member here leaving their estate to Amelia United Methodist Church, or some other group of strangers among whom they had never walked and about whom we might be a little suspicious and even in competition with. This just wasn t done this was no way to come home. Now I did a little reading and asking around about Akeem Jordan. Turns out he s really not so much an NFL star as just a hometown hero but some say his star is on the rise. He has a great story and he has come a long way. Akeem grew up in a rough part of Harrisonburg the part where when you hear gunshots, you know they come from within a few blocks of Kelly St. It s the part of town where you go to buy drugs or sex a part of town that parents warn their kids away from and police pay attention to. Akeem was a football star at HHS but he also had other things on his plate. While schools and coaches were looking at him in his junior year, he was seeing his daughter born; he became a father at just 16. And when he decided where to play in college, he turned down offers from larger schools than James Madison University so that he could stay in Harrisonburg and be near his daughter and keep in touch with and support her mother. Apparently, his coach, Mickey Matthews wasn t impressed. He told Akeem he didn t want him going home to Kelly St. while he was in school too much trouble and too much temptation. You spend your weekends here, with us it s not your time to be going home. When he left JMU, Akeem tried out along with all the other nobodies and was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Eagles in He made final cuts, but the very next day was bumped down to the practice squad when the team picked up two free agents. Within a year, he was back in the game with his first NFL start. By last year, he was starting regularly in the right outside linebacker position. So these days, Akeem shuttles back and forth between Philly and Harrisonburg, football and family, hard workouts and his hometown, where he still lives offseason. And when you read about Akeem, he seems to be a man of few words, but the ones you see over and over again in interviews are God, family, and football always in that order. God, family, football. Actually, seems like Jesus and Akeem might be closer to the same sentiment than I thought. Jesus tells his family and friends that God comes first. Sometimes that

4 means that home is not where you are called to be, that the ones God loves, the ones God chooses to work miracles in at a particular point in time, the ones who might not be so loveable to us, come before us. The only way to change that is to sit beside those who are strange and foreign to create a new family, with God smack dab in the center. But we have to be careful. It is easy to read scripture and want to do the Jesus cheer. We always need to think about with whom we identify in a particular text, and if we re honest, we usually think that we fall in line a little closer to Jesus than the sinners that surround him. We want to be like Jesus God wants us to be like Jesus. We might be shocked and uncomfortable about it, but we know the Jesus thing to do is to welcome the stranger, to feed the foreigner, to scoot down the pew and make room for the visitor. So we read these words and put on our WWJD bracelets and think, I ll try, Lord, I ll try.it makes it easy for us to look down our noses at the selfish, angry crowds with their me first attitude. But if we don t first find ourselves somewhere in that hometown mob, if we don t confess our own assumption that it is our time way too often, then we re going to miss Jesus, because he has places to go and people to heal. If you hear that voice in your life telling you, It s not your time, you might want to listen. It might be a football coach telling you that you can t go home, It might be the NFL saying, Sorry, it s back to the practice squad for you It might be a job interviewer apologizing, We just don t have a position for you right now. It might be a parent needing care, taking your leisure time away from you and your family. It might be a boy scout knocking at your door, asking for money or food that you need for your own household. It might be another stranger, a dirtier, hungrier one, needing anything that you can give, even if you aren t quite able. We all have our time. That is the good news, that God entered our suffering in the person of Jesus. God entered the world s suffering. But when you hear those words, It s not your time, and see those faces, look for Jesus. Not the Jesus who always comes for us, but the one who sometimes takes us with him to people we don t like and places we don t know. Not the Jesus who works miracles in us on demand or assumption, but the one who works them through us. Not the Jesus who goes home to a nice, comfy, predictable hometown celebration with us, but the one who invites us into the great unknown, beyond our boundaries, into a new family, new miracles, new life. It seems to me we have two choices: 1) We can try to silence that voice, that tells us it s not our time 2) Or we can go with him, stepping into a new journey. Luke tells us..

5 They 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. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Be sure of this one thing: if we choose the first, if we try to silence him or hurl him off a cliff, it won t work. And he s not going to stick around trying to convince us; he is going to move on. He will pass through the midst of us, just like he did in Nazareth. Friends, go with God. Amen.