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2/2/2025 0 Comments Feb. 2, 2025: God’s Wider View![]() Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 1: 4-10 The Gospel: Luke 4: 21-30 Isn’t it interesting when you run into your children’s friends or kids you once knew who are now adults? I look at adult Jeff and still see 9-year old Jeff managing to drop the majority of his clothes on the way to the showers at Cub Scout Camp, despite the fact that adult Jeff is a college graduate, has been a Nordic coach at Harvard and Colby College, and currently runs an outdoor recreation area in Maine. I see Graham, a very successful college-educated stone mason, and picture the teenager who was always building campfires in the woods and didn’t try very hard on the AP English exam for my course. Sometimes it is hard for me to adjust my lens to see these kids as the fully formed and fully functioning adults that they now are. My view of them in the past sometimes clouds my ability to see their present. This is probably what the people of Nazareth felt like when Jesus preached to them in the synagogue. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they ask themselves remembering him running around town with the other kids, and even learning a trade from his father. Who was he to be saying, “Today this scripture (about being anointed by God to bring good news to the poor, release those who were captive or oppressed and give sight to the blind) has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And yet they try to see him as an adult version of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, they had heard the stories of the miracles that he had performed in Capernaum and they had heard how well he spoke in the synagogue just then. But Jesus knew they would want to tie him down: celebrate the hometown hero and reap the benefits. Nazareth had plenty of people in need of release and healing, now that he had proven himself, it was time for him to take care of his own, they were likely thinking, but Jesus heads them off knowing that he has a wider view, a mission much bigger than Nazareth. So he tells it like it is, “Truly I tell you no prophet is accepted in his hometown” he says, going on to explain that both the prophets Elijah and Elisha healed and helped foreigners rather than just sticking close to home in their work. This was not well-received, then, when a rampant version of localism, or what we would call nationalism, was popular, and the sentiment was to take care of your own and let everyone else fend for themselves. However, that wider mission was God’s task for them in the old times, and it was still God’s task for Jesus as it is for us today. The unpopularity of God’s wider mission was instantly clear as the Nazarenes went from celebrating Jesus to wanting to hurl him off a cliff. Jesus was indeed right: no prophet is accepted in his or her hometown. They just could not change their view of Joseph’s son or, if they could, they could not accept that the role of a prophet is telling truth to power and it is bigger than one’s own hometown or state or country. No wonder Jeremiah was so intimidated when God called him. “I am only a boy,” he says, feeling unworthy of this role, but God tells him, “You will go to whom I send you and you will speak whatever I command you.” God gave Jeremiah the words and the mission to go out to other nations and kingdoms “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” And God did indeed protect Jeremiah so he could do that just ,as he protected Jesus when his own townspeople wanted to throw him off the cliff. We have a choice, just as the people of Nazareth did. God did not force them to change, God merely showed them the model of change and love in Jesus Christ. When they were not yet ready for that, God protected Jesus, just as he had protected the prophets before him. Just like God gave Jeremiah the words to speak to God’s people, so does God continue to give words to and protect prophets today, like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who put God’s wider mission first in calling for unity in her address at the National Cathedral on January 21. She did not call for the kind of unity that says we all have to agree on everything, but instead cited three foundations for unity: 1. To honor the dignity of every human being just as God created them. 2. To seek out the truth and be honest in public and in private and 3. To be humble, because none of us knows everything, none of us is perfect; we all make mistakes and we should all have the ability to learn more, admit our mistakes, to be forgiven and to forgive others. Bishop Budde went on to say “unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree. “ She went on to say that striving for unity is not always easy, “Unity, at times, is sacrificial, in the way that love is sacrificial, a giving of ourselves for the sake of another. Jesus of Nazareth, in his Sermon on the Mount, exhorts us to love not only our neighbors, but to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us; to be merciful, as our God is merciful, and to forgive others, as God forgives us. Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts,” Bishop Budde emphasized. And some have condemned Bishop Budde for calling for unity and seeking mercy for the marginalized, even though she was doing exactly what Jesus did. Prophets indeed are not accepted in their hometowns. Jesus was trying to show the people of Nazareth and us that community extends to all of God’s creation and life is not a binary. People are not all good or all bad; they are not just citizens of their community but not their world; they are not only an x - whatever x is and not also sometimes y, whatever that is. Jesus was indeed Joseph’s boy from Nazareth and also God’s son. Jesus could care for the people in Capernaum And the people in Nazareth, even when they could not always care for him. Jesus could help upstanding citizens and those just trying to stand up. But Jesus especially knew that the ones who needed him most, were the ones who others had marginalized because they were poor, foreign, sick, alone, or different. Like Jeremiah, we too are called to pluck up our courage, to tear down barriers, to destroy discrimination, to overthrow injustices and to build up love, planting seeds of hope for all of God’s creation. In fact, it is even easier for us than it was for Jeremiah because we, unlike him, have Jesus’ model to follow. If we seek to create inclusiveness or unity for all of God’s creation, then we are truly continuing Jesus’ work on earth. To be united does not mean that we are always going to agree but it does mean that we will always seek to respect and care for all of God’s creation, especially the parts that others might try to exclude. And if others try to throw us off of a metaphorical or actual cliff due to our actions of mercy, love, and justice, well, Jesus gave us the model for that as well: just pass through the midst of them and get back to God’s work. Amen Pastor Michelle Fountain
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