All Saints Lutheran Church
Pastor Raita Neely
Epiphany 4C, Feb. 1, 20004
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30

C.S. Lewis, in his book " The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", tells us  a wonderful story and gives us insight into the life of faith.  In the passage I will share with you, Lewis gives us a picture of who Jesus is.  Here Aslan the lion , who is the Christ figure in the story is described.

One of the children has just asked "Who is Aslan?"  for the children have been assured he is the only one who can save them from the evil white witch who is out to catch them.  Mr. Beaver speaks of Aslan in this way:
"He'll put all to rights as it says in an old rhyme in these parts:-
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

"Is he a man?" asks Lucy.

"Aslan a man!" said Mr. Beaver sternly. "Certainly not.  I tell you he is the king of the woods and the son of the great Emperor -Beyond-the Sea.  Don't you know who is the King of Beasts?  Aslan is a lion-the Lion, the great Lion."

"Ooh!" said Susan, "I'd thought he was a man.  Is he-quite safe?  I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."

"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver, "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?"  said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver.  "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you?  Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe.  But he's good.  He's the King, I tell you." *  C.S. Lewis, "The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe." ( New York , Scholastic, 1950) 74-76

Lewis describes Jesus as a lion, one who roars, bares his teeth at evil, and is not safe.  It is a helpful portrayal as we look at our Gospel reading from Luke this morning.

Although Jesus came from the rural conservative hill country, he had radical views.  He held that not only did God care about those who were not Jews, sometimes God even had a preferential option for outsiders.  Jesus surprises us as he interacts with many different people.  Much of the time He turns things upside down.  Of all the gospels, Luke most clearly makes this point.  According to Jesus, there are no limits to God's love.  The hero of one of  Jesus' most famous stories is a Samaritan, one who was despised by the Jewish people. Women, who had no importance in society played an important role in Jesus' stories.  He ate with outsiders and sinners and he healed the daughter of a Roman soldier.  Every time you come to the borders of love, Jesus crosses over and claims that God does too.  This was tough to swallow for those who were certain that they knew whom God would bless and who was outside God's providence.  And it cautions us to be more  eager to tell God's story and help bring people to Jesus, instead of turning our backs on those we feel are outside God's care.

Jesus addresses  the question of God's  inclusive love very early in his ministry.  In the verses just before those we heard this morning Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah a passage which laid out  the compassionate nature of God's love.  Jesus, as God's servant, proposes to take up the mission that Isaiah envisions: to preach to the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed.  Up to then his neighbors gave Jesus a good hearing .  It is seldom dangerous to read Bible verses.  The trouble came when he set out to define just who those poor captive people happened to be.  It was not the scripture lesson but the sermon that got him in hot water - specifically the illustrations. Jesus used OT stories to make his point, but the stories he chose were not the popular ones, the ones the people loved to hear.  We all want to hear how much God loves us.  We are not quite as quick to want to hear about how much God loves our enemies.

Luke wants us to know that the most scandalous thing we can ever do is to really hear the Bible.  The most outrageous thing we can do is to take the Bible seriously, not only as a word that brings us comfort, but also as a deeply disturbing and  challenging word.  It is so disturbing in that it reminds us that God does not play by our rules or stick to our boundaries. It is so challenging in that we resist being self critical and love of neighbor is not so easy for us.

So Jesus looked at the  congregation in his home town Nazareth and said, "Let me tell you a Bible story.  Remember Elijah?  He was a great prophet.  And there was a famine in the land of Israel for three years and six months.  Crops withered.  The soil cracked.  Not a drop of rain for years.  There were a lot of widows in the land of Israel in the time of Elijah.  They were suffering.  But remember where God sent him?  To the hated land of Sidon . To Zarephath where he met a widow gathering sticks.  The sticks were to build a fire so she could cook her last meal-she had a little oil and a little flour left, and then she and her child faced starvation.  Elijah ended up not only seeing that she had food for the rest of her life, but also brought her son back from the edge of death. Jesus makes  the point that God's love and compassion has no national or ethnic borders.

His second illustration irritates the people even more.  It is an account of how another prophet Elisha healed a man named Naaman, who happened to be an officer in the Syrian guard.  Not only did the prophet help a foreigner, this particular foreigner was a member of  the  enemy's army!

You can see where this is leading.  The next thing Jesus might tell them was that God loves Samaritans and Romans, those most hated in their time.  Jesus claims that God's love is alive and active despite the prejudices of the people.  Things have not changed much have they?   Fool with the bigotry of bigots and you have a fight on your hands.

Jesus' stories are  like someone at the height of the cold war preaching that God had  great love for the Soviets.  It would be like a white preacher in the old south proclaiming that God has particular love for black activists, even as other whites are releasing dogs and venomous words on them and beating them with whatever they find close at hand.  Insert your own prejudice, whatever it may be, and you will feel the sting of Jesus words.  Jesus is not safe.  But He is good.

Luke tells us, "They were filled with rage  and drove him out of  town."  That sounds like a lynch mob to me!  What's the problem?  It is always dangerous to talk about love to those whose lives feed on fear.  It is risky business to describe how God's love extends toward those whom we despise.  We get upset when we are told that our enemies are God's friends.  We get mad when someone suggests that God loves the people we won't sit next to, the people who disturb and offend us, and who despite us belong to God just as surely as we do.  God simply does not accept our boundaries.  God steps right over them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way.  The problem is not that we are loved any less. The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of who belongs in God's  family. God called the people of Israel to be a light to the nations, a beacon of God's mercy for all people everywhere.  When God's light began to shine in Jesus of Nazareth , it exposed dark crevasses everywhere, even in Jesus' home town, even in Israel .  When this happens, some people want to slither out of the darkness and snuff out the light.  That's what happened in Nazareth .  It still happens today.  But Jesus calls you and me  to something very different, to point to the light, to be a light.

Luke's Gospel shows us that, like Aslan the lion, no one is safe with Jesus.  By this I mean that Jesus is out to change us into what God wants us to be.  In the synagogue that day Jesus could have smoothed things over by performing a few quick miracles and downplaying God's plan to bring good news to all people. This would have made his listeners feel safe.  Their lives would not have to change much.  Jesus would then have been fairly easy to understand and accept. The people would have felt safe, but they would have still been trapped in their weak faith and their selfish goals.  But Jesus was true to God's mission and spoke out against their parochial views.

People want their prejudices affirmed, but God won't have anything to do with that, instead, God calls all to repentance - none are righteous, no, not one. Just one more bit of evidence that you and I can't capture and dole out God's grace.  None of us can capture God in our little box and give out little bits and pieces to others, we must never presume that we are the only ones who have a right to God, or that we know God's heart completely. God's love is always more pervasive, complete and powerful than our hatred or even the ways we define grace.  By the very nature of our humanity, we tend to put limits on love.  God does not.  And that is a miracle of grace. 

Last week we heard some powerful testimonies from the people of Teen Challenge. I particularly remember the young man who described himself in his days of using drugs as "a menace to society."  I wonder how many of us if we had  read about him in the paper at that time in his life, would have said to ourselves, "Here is someone deeply loved by God!"  Yet God did find this young man, turned around his life and made him into a powerful witness for God's love and care.

How far will God's love go?  To the cross, my friends, to the cross.  As we too stand at the foot of the cross, we come face-to-face with what our human fear, pride, greed and hate can do.  We too want the good news only for ourselves, we are reluctant to make justice, mercy, love and freedom universal.  We don't want to be changed.  We want others to change.  Thanks be to God that "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."  For it is only in Christ and with Christ  as we stand at the foot of  the cross that we risk self-critique, we realize how self-absorbed, self-sufficient and selfish we are.  Then can come a deep realization of our complicity in the ways of the world,  acknowledgment of how short we fall of God's plan and finally- repentance.  May God working in us help us be powerful witnesses to God's  love, even for sinners like us. Amen.