Homeward Bound

Last night we had a big winter storm across New England, including Worcester. While I was supposed to be at St. Luke's today, we landed on Zoom for Morning Prayer instead. I still shared my sermon in that virtual context, however. The manuscript follows. The readings and collect for the day can be found here. 

There is a lot going on in this Gospel Reading today. Over almost three decades now of ordained ministry, I’ve preached on it before. Here’s the “Cliff Notes” version of the standard Rich Simpson sermon on this portion of Luke 4:

Hometowns are tricky. People knew you way back when. In my own case, growing up in Hawley, Pennsylvania, no one could have predicted that Little Richie Simpson would grow up to be a canon. Trust me. No one. And they remember every embarrassing thing I ever did. I grew up in the United Methodist Church but even if there was an Episcopal parish there, I’d never consider serving it.

Now I’m not Jesus – you all know this very well, of course. I’m just trying to be Rich Simpson. But Jesus faces the same challenge, right? They know who he is – he’s the carpenter’s kid. He’s Joseph and Mary’s boy. They are proud of him, of course, hometown boy made good. But hometowns also want to be sure you don’t forget where you came from.

So that’s it. I could go on a bit longer but that’s the gist of my standard Luke 4 sermon and perhaps some of you can identify, especially if you come from small towns. It isn’t just messiahs or clergy who face this, I’m sure. A therapist or a professor or a doctor might face similar challenges. Prophets generally aren’t listened to in their hometowns, because you need a bit more “mystique” to be a prophet.

But something else really struck me this time, this year, with the help of some friends I study the lectionary readings with each week. We noticed that Jesus kind of picks this fight. He sets the terms.

Now, I’ll grant you that underneath the surface it  might have been there the whole time. Underneath the polite smiles, when “all spoke well of him” even then when they said “isn’t this Joseph’s son?” perhaps it was in the same way a Southerner might say, “bless your heart!”  Who does he think he is now? Better than us? 

Jesus could have ignored that. But instead he goes right after it: doubtless you are about to say to me “doctor heal yourself” but let me tell you about the widow of Zarapheth and Naaman the Syrian!

And then: notice how quickly polite turns to rage. The neighbors turn into a mob. This is where I want to offer sermon 2.0, a pandemic 2020 update. Because isn’t that where we’ve come as a society? We all seem to be kind of brittle and on edge. Hi, nice to meet you. Wait – you don’t agree with me? Get out of here – forget about being Facebook friends – forget about being friends – you are what’s wrong with this country. 

It can turn on a dime and the anger – the rage – is not limited to one side in my experience. The comments in the newspapers – even comments on religious news – turn vicious so fast. We are all engraged, it seems, all of the time or at least too much of the time.  

And I’m aware that this may be me just getting older: my own little nostalgic self remembering a simpler time when I was a kid growing up in my own little town and everyone was polite. Maybe they were or maybe I was unaware. But this text suggests it’s not all that new, really. Polite can turn to rage – and seems to – very quickly in this old text from a couple of thousand years ago. They drive Jesus out of town and try to push him off a cliff.

Where does that rage come from? I have an idea. I think it is born out of unresolved grief, and unfulfilled expectations. It’s about what we do with disappointment, I think, or more accurately what we do when we don’t deal with disappointment in healthier ways. We behave badly.  

Stay with me for a moment, will you? Most of my work, especially in the last decade, is with congregations. And a big chunk of that work is dealing with clergy transitions. We are in the midst of one here, now. No one size fits all but we plan to take some time to pray and think and reflect and we are glad that Bishop Marty is coming here as your interim to help you with that work as we look toward the future.

You’ve been through a lot, St. Luke’s. COVID has affected us all but before COVID you all were sorting through a whole lot of stuff with Tim as he tried to sort through a whole lot of stuff in his life which was private until it wasn't, and then it became very public.

The stakes are high for all of you. And Marty will disappoint you. How do I know this? Because he’s human. And because you are human. He will make some mistakes; even bishops do, trust me. 

And also, you have some expectations, each of you. Some are realistic and some are not even close to reality. And sorting through all of that is always about sifting through disappointment. You may want to drive him out of town if he gets too close to painful truth. Please don’t push him over a cliff.

Over the time I served in Holden I experienced this more than once, and it was always exhausting. I did make some mistakes. And sometimes people hoped I’d be someone I could never be. Often it was my predecessor they wanted me to be but sometimes it wasn’t so clear, even to them. Mostly we got through it, although not without some scars.

But what I notice now – in this time of pandemic – is that the stakes feel higher and our filters are, less filtery. Disappointment and grief can quickly turn to anger and even rage. I see it happening all across our diocese. Sometimes it’s on a vestry. Sometimes it’s with a staff member. Sometimes it’s the clergy. Underneath the rage is disappointment and fear and grief. Almost always.  

I think by reminding the hometown folks of the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, during the days of Queen Jezebel, what Jesus is saying is something like what I say to congregations from time to time: look, it’s always been hard. There never were good old easy days in ministry. It’s always been hard because…people. Jesus goes back to Elijah and Elisha but he could just as easily have gone back to Jeremiah – whose call we heard today. It’s not a call that evokes singing, “Here I am, Lord, is it I Lord…I have heard you calling in the night.” It’s a call that evokes this response: why me? Are you sure there isn’t someone else you can send? I kind of had other plans for my life, actually…

So Jesus has a terrible day in today’s gospel reading. I mean really awful, after I’m sure he had hoped he’d be welcomed back as hometown hero with a ticker-tape parade. Instead they want to kill him. He needs to get used to that because eventually on a Friday afternoon it’ll happen.

I don’t know if you saw any of the communications from Dr. King’s family this month but they said something similar. We’ve sanitized MLK day and now act like everybody loved him and cheered him on. But that’s just not true. Even if it takes some critical race theory to uncover the truth, the truth is that the FBI was trying to get him, and the politicians were angry with him, and even the liberal white clergy were telling him he needed to be patient. And eventually an assassin’s bullet caught up to him in Memphis on April 4, 1968, not an easy year in American history.

The moral arc of the universe may indeed bend toward justice. But God, it’s an awfully long arc. 

So what do we do with our anger, our hurt, our disappointment, our fear, our exhaustion, our confusion? Direct it outward in rage? Heaven help us, but history has lots of examples of just that, and so does our present day.

But there is another way. There is a better way. Can we agree today, here, among this baptized community about to embark on a new chapter: can we agree that we are called to that alternative way? To the only way that ever moves us forward, the way that Jesus of Nazareth called us to, and St. Paul reminded the Church in Corinth about, and Dr. King reminded Americans in the middle of the last century about. To the Way of Love that our Presiding Bishop can't stop talking about. 

I invite you to read, mark, and learn, and inwardly digest these words, as followers of Jesus Christ, as you begin again:

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. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 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.