Hometown Jesus is rejected

Here is a brief recap of the sermon from yesterday on the scripture of Luke 4:21-30.

We have a habit of defining ourselves by who or what we are not. It is easy to do. For instance, we might not want to be the one who chooses what you want to eat for lunch but we are much more comfortable being the one who says what we don't want for lunch. The same is true for defining our own selves. We would rather define who we are not rather than who we are. 

Defining who you are by who you are not sounds something like: "I would not ever take a home loan I could not pay back." or "I would never do what those soldiers did in Abu Ghraib" or "I would never protest a funeral." We define who we are by who we are not all the time. 

The thing about defining who we are by who we are not is that we always have someone to blame for the tension or problems in the world. It is always the "other" person who is the cause of the problem, and as we all know, "I would never do what they did." 

Luke tells us a story in which Jesus gets himself into trouble. 

Jesus reads a scroll and everyone is very proud that Jesus is their "homegrown boy". If they had water towers in Jesus' day the town of Nazareth might have been one step away from inscribing "Home of Jesus" on their water tower.  Jesus is "their guy" and the group is unified in it's understanding of who they are - they are not the fools who will not be a part of the year of the Lord's favor.

Jesus sees they are united as a group, believing they will ask him to do what he did in other areas, Jesus reminds the crowds of two other prophets who were also were "on their side" but these two prophets went to the gentiles. That is to say, the Jesus tells them that Elijah, Elisha and even Jesus are defining the people of God not as different from other groups but as all equal in the sight of God. 

As soon as Jesus tells his hometown that even the gentiles (the other) will be a part of the "Lord's favor", the group (mob) is filled with rage.

Prior to Jesus talking, this mob knew who to blame for their problems and the tension in the world - "those people". But Jesus is saying that "those people" are also beloved by God... just like them. Jesus is saying that those people are like you and you are like them. Jesus is saying that there is no "us" and "them" there is only a "we". 

In the absence of a "them" the "us" do not know who to blame for the tension in the culture. This is true today. Part of the fear to give citizenship to "illegals" is because we then would be without a "them" to blame any number of problems on. The words of Jesus removed the "them" for the Jews in his hometown and they were filled with rage. But they do not know how to resolve tension in the culture without a "them" to blame it on. So, right there in the temple, without a "them" to blame the mob blames him - Jesus.  

Jesus is the problem for the tension now. All was well, everyone knew who was the "them" was but Jesus just said the "them" is just like us. Without a "them" to blame for tension the mob turns on Jesus and blame him. They then treat him as they have always treated the "them" - they treat Jesus as their new scapegoat. 

What happens next is they lead Jesus to the edge of town to kill him, just as one would with a traditional scapegoat found in Leviticus 16. 

Jesus walks through the mob, I imagine, with the prayer "Forgive them for they know not what they are doing."

God in Jesus exposes the fact that humanity is caught up in cycles of violence and always looking for the next scapegoat to resolve tension. And this cycle is so powerful that we would even kill a home town boy. We would even kill God.

Email and Blogging Sabbath

Just posting to say that I will be taking a Sabbath from email and blogging until Tuesday February 5th. So to the 5 new email subscribers over the past week, I am sorry things are a bit at a trickle over the next week. 

Thank you all for reading and I look forward to being back in the saddle in a few days.

Love is the goal

Recently I have been throwing around a thought in my head about love. 

While reading To Love as God Loves the author, Roberta Bondi, says that the desert mothers and fathers of the Christian faith "believed, in spite of society's pressures, that love is the goal of the Christian life and humility is what it takes to bring us toward it."

This is a bit different to me than to think that love is something that we do upon being a Christian. To make love the goal is to take a different posture. Which leads me to the thought.

Love is like a soccer game. Everyone on the team knows the goal is to kick the ball in the back of the net. However, not every player at every moment can achieve this goal. Some people are too far away from the net to do this. Some people have too many opponents in the way. Some people just do not have the ball. And so everyone on the team moves to support the rest of the team to reach the goal. You may have the ball but cannot kick it into the net and achieve the goal, but the next best thing you can do is pass the ball to the right. And you know what, no one is angry with you that you did not score, because everyone on the team knows what the goal is, not everyone can achieve it all of the time.

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Likewise with love. You and I cannot achieve loving as God loves all of the time. But we can position ourselves to help move toward the goal. We can work toward reaching the goal of loving as God loves even if we cannot reach it all the time. (We might call this the Way of Salvation or moving on toward perfection). 

Why does this matter? For those of us who cannot love the shooters of New Town - we are not in a position to reach the goal of loving as God loves. And so instead of writing off these shooters or saying, "I cannot ever forgive or love them" I reach toward the goal to love as God loves.

Christians do not magically learn how to love as God loves when we become Christian, rather we understand that loving as God loves is a goal that we are working toward our whole lives.