SERMON, EPIPHANY 4C, LUKE 4:21-32

What can you tell me about Jonah? He was a prophet of God. He ran away from God. A fish swallowed him. He went to Nineveh in Babylon to preach repentance. The people listened and God spared them and he was angry. Jonah is a very important character in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

During the three year drought, Elijah was sent to a widow in Zarephath in sidon in Phoenicia. He went there because King Ahab had led Israel astray and no place within Israel was safe.

And Naaman, commander of the Syrian army, enemy of Israel, was sent to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy. In return for being healed, Naaman promised to serve only the Lord God of Israel.

In today’s gospel, Jesus mentions the Elijah and Elisha stories. He probably should have mentioned Jonah as well, because he fits in with what Jesus is talking about. It is these two stories of Elijah and Elisha that get the townsfolk so riled up that they want to stone Jesus.

It starts out well enough – local kid makes good. All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. “Look ma, ol’ Joe’s boy went off and got hisself edjikated, isn’t that great!?” But the honeymoon period with the locals didn’t last long after that.

Jesus immediately turns realistic on them. “Doctor, cure yourself,” is an allusion to his crucifixion.

“Do here what you’ve done in Capernaum,” is the old refrain of “Show us a sign and then we will believe.”

Jesus isn’t a miracle worker drumming up business based on what he can do. That is a trap. “Sure, we heard you changed water to wine, but let’s see it – turn these stones into bread.” From water to wine, stones to bread, illness to health, death to life, the miracle had to continually get bigger and it is all predicated on what "what have you done for me recently?"

No, Jesus isn’t a miracle worker drumming up business based on what he can do. Rather, your faith allows for Jesus to work miracles through you, and it is your faith that drums up business.

But this really isn’t the crux of the problem. The foreshadowing, the demand to see a miracle, the difficulty of a local kid going home, all that is only a gloss of the real problem. Notice that it wasn’t the harsh comments about curing himself or needing to see a miracle that almost got him stoned. Instead, it was the stories of Elijah and Elisha that upset the crowd.

Why is that? One of my commentaries notes that Capernaum had a large non-Jewish population. Apparently Jesus had been working among them earlier, and now the Jews of Nazareth wanted him to do for them what he had been doing among the Gentiles. They want this because Jesus started outside the bounds of Judaism. He went to outsiders. He is saying that God’s grace and favor extends even to the unclean and the unorthodox.

To back up his position he cites Elijah and Elisha. Two great prophets of Israel. Prophets to a nation of God’s chosen people. And who benefits from these two great men? A woman from Phoenicia, an outsider, a Gentile, an unorthodox and unclean female; and a man from Syria, an outsider, a Gentile, and an unclean leper and a general of an enemy. Jesus used the Jewish scriptures themselves to defend the inclusive nature of God’s kingdom. And the people became angry and violent because of it.

We seem to be facing the same situation today in the larger church. People who have been taught and grown up with certain traditions that, to them, seem immutable, are being faced with change. These traditions are seen as the one, true, orthodox faith and they must be defended at all costs to keep the church from being overrun by heretics and sinking into the abyss of hell. And those traditions are being defended angrily and sometimes violently as a last resort.

Traditions such as an all male clergy, or keeping women out of leadership positions, or that homosexuals are so deviant they shouldn’t even be allowed inside a church building. Maintaining these exclusionary traditions, however, means ignoring the very scriptures we proclaim as “containing all things necessary to salvation.” Maintaining these traditions means failing to see God at work outside of our boundaries. It means failing to recognize that God’s grace extends to the outsider, the unclean, the unorthodox.

The people of Nazareth were violently opposed to Jesus because he held up their own scriptures as an indictment against them. After the attempted stoning, Jesus leaves and goes elsewhere. That commentary I referenced also states that Jesus doesn’t go elsewhere because he is rejected; he is rejected because he goes elsewhere. The idea that the outsider, the unclean and the unorthodox can be recipients of God’s grace offends our traditional orthodox sensibilities. And those who are offended fight back angrily and violently.

Getting back to Jonah, he is the poster boy of stubborn orthodoxy. He won’t go to a place outside of Israel unless forced to. He will finally go to Nineveh, but he won’t be happy about it. And when the people respond, are spared death and given a new lease on life, he would rather die than have to see the outsider live.

We have just had our annual meeting and we are looking forward to the coming year. We can choose to fight stubbornly for a tightly defined orthodoxy, passionately defending our traditions; or we can choose to be like Elijah and Elisha and extend God’s grace to the outsider, unclean and unorthodox. We can be like Jonah (A) who bitterly opposed God’s willingness to save the outsider; or we can be like Jonah (B) who preached life to the outsider and saw its results.

Our scriptures are full of stories about God’s grace extending to all people, not just the orthodox. This year, let us not be angry that our sensibilities are being offended, but let us rejoice that outsiders are being welcomed into life. Let's invite them to join us in this life, and let's rejoice when they accept that invitation.