A More Excellent Way
Epiphany 4C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
They were filled with rage and drove him out of town so that they might hurl him off the cliff (Luke 4:28-29.
What made the hometown hero a hated villain? What made old friends and family switch from adulation to hate in the span of a few minutes or hours? Within the space of seven verses, their curiosity turned to contempt. Delight gave way to violence. How did Jesus go from being the admired insider to the ultimate outsider?
Everything goes wrong when Jesus says, “I am not yours. I don’t belong to you. I am not yours to claim or contain. I don’t play for your team.
Jesus recounts God’s long history of prioritizing the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger, even our enemies. The Spirit of God plays among edge-people called to bear witness in edge-places, and occasionally, in the temple. Elijah was sent to care for the widow at Zarephath, Jesus reminds them. He wasn’t sent to the widows of Israel. Elisha was instructed to heal Naaman the Syrian, not the numerous lepers in Israel. In other words, God has always been in the business of working on the margins. Of crossing borders. Of doing new and exciting things in remote and unlikely places. Far from home. Far from the familiar and the comfortable. Far from the centers of power and piety. (Debie Thomas)
Old- time Lutherans ask, ‘Vas ist das?’, or ‘what does this mean? One lesson might be that if the Jesus we worship never offends us, is it really Jesus whom we worship? When was the last time Jesus made you that angry? Let alone filled you with rage?
Bible interpreters sometimes ask which character in this story we most identify with? One possibility seems rather obvious and uncomfortable. We, the established Church, are the modern-day equivalent of Jesus’s ancient townspeople. After all, we’re the ones who think we know Jesus best. We’re the ones most in danger of domesticating him. We’re the ones most likely to miss him when he shows up in faces we don’t recognize or revere. What will it take to follow him into new and awkward territory? To see him where we least desire to look? How can we be sure our religion gives life—that our worship actually makes disciples?
The answer? You all know the answer. The answer, of course, is love. Our second reading today from, 1 Corinthians 13, is Paul’s great anthem to love. “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (vs. 1). Love is the yard stick we use to measure the true depth of our faith. Love is the plum bob that instantly reveals when our religion is out of whack. Love is the color swatch from the paint store. Whatever has the tinge of love bears truth and the gospel. If your religion doesn’t match the color of love, it’s time to ask God to change your heart and renew your mind. Following the path of love teaches us a more excellent way. Love must be our message and our mission.
With love in our hearts joy is our fuel for renewal and resistance. Take a lesson from faithful people of color who have endured and overcome centuries of arbitrary violence and senseless hatred. Remember first to give praise to God who is our rock-solid and loving ally. Gratitude is not just good manners it is a source of wisdom. Giving thanks daily is a well-spring of living water from which to drink. Gratitude begets joy. Joy creates unity.
The Pentagon and the U.S. State Department announced this week that neither will recognize Black History Month this year as part of the government-wide purge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DEI programs. In a related post, Ahren Martinez, DEI Coordinator at Fuller Youth Institute writes about the importance of one of her favorite concerts, the Long Beach Jazz Festival, as an example of how the power of celebration goes beyond the energy they create. Martinez writes, “No matter what recent violence or display of anti-Blackness was all around us, we knew that we would make our way to this festival for the weekend with other Black and Brown people to sing, dance, eat good food, and spread love through fellowship together.” What if the church could be a place where joy could live?” What if the church could be a place where Black, and Brown, and White, and Mixed people could be renewed and fueled with joy? (Ahren Martinez, Black Joy as Resistance, Fuller Institute, 4/21/22).
“A wise man built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock,” said Jesus. “A foolish man built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell — and great was its fall!” (Matthew 7:24-27).
This house, founded upon God’s love and fueled by joy, was built for this for such a time as this. Through song, through dancing, through fellowship, through art, through prose, through poetry, we do prevail, and God’s kingdom shall come on earth as it is in heaven. This is the way. This is the path of resistance. It is the way of the cross.
We have two examples of the more excellent way that is against the grain. Both Jeremiah and Jesus are grossly unwelcome, and their lives are at risk. “The more excellent way of the gospel is a way of generous forgiveness that hopes all things and forgives all things. It is a way that is against the grain of the world, so that the church is called to a daring, subversive life in the world. The performance of that way in the world is demanding and costly.” (Walter Brueggemann, “The Song of the Ex-Leper,” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 331, 332, 333.)
“This faith of … Jesus and the church is not a moral code or an ideology or a quarrel. It is rather a performance of transformation, of old made new, of lost found, of dead made alive. And the whole cosmos is filled with the singing of ex-lepers, the saints of God who attest that gifts from the holy God are given that make for life (Brueggemann).
Jesus’ enraging message in Nazareth invites us to consider that God loves enemies because God has loved us. We friends of Jesus come to realize that we have behaved as enemies and are need the same grace as those we demonize. Love is the light that illumines this path of self-discovery, repentance, and renewal.
Love must be our message and our mission. The love of God must be in our hearts and minds. The joy of fellowship and creativity must be our fuel. In a time when our leaders are hell-bent on breaking the values of pluralistic community and smashing rules-based constitutional norms, the house of Jesus withstands the storm. The church was built for this. The church stands ready to fashion servant-leaders who will know how to pick up the pieces and help create the way forward again after the smashers are done smashing.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now, we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (I Corinthians 13:11-13)
