The Greater Truth

This sermon would have been heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday January 31, 2010. Unfortunately, due to the weather only the pastor and his spouse were in church.

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

As we ended last week’s gospel reading with Luke 4:21, so today be begin with this verse. This gives us a wonderful transition from last week to this. In the middle of last week’s sermon I inserted this little teaser:

Then Jesus sits, as is the tradition of the teacher in the synagogue, and he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” He reads one of the prophecies from the book of Isaiah which announces the Messiah, the Anointed. Using the word which comes to us through the Greeks, this is how Isaiah introduces the Christ. Luke, using these very words, formally introduces Jesus and his ministry to the world.

Imagine what’s going to happen next in Luke’s gospel.

Well, we have made it to next week and we see how the people respond to the words of the Lord. At the beginning, they loved him and what he said. We are told “All spoke well of him, amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

They declared him the son of Joseph, this proclamation is also declared in the genealogy of Jesus from the third chapter of Luke. Then again, this genealogy contains the wonderful phrase “as was thought.” Luke writes that Jesus is the son of Joseph with a wink, reminding the reader of this gospel that we know better. We have the knowledge that Jesus is the Son of the Almighty God.

We learned this wondrous, glorious truth in the verse immediately before Luke’s genealogy. We learn it in Luke’s rendition of the Baptism of the Lord when the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

So the good people of Nazareth are placing their claim on the hometown boy made good. They declare him to be one of them, the son of their very own Joseph. They were ready to hold a parade. Jesus had been praised because of the Spirit filled word that had come from his lips. He had been lifted up by many on the west side of the Jordan. But in their synagogue, this graduate of Nazareth Tech’s carpentry program had claimed the prophecy of Isaiah, declaring himself the anointed.

Sure, they were right, they just had no idea what it meant.

That’s one of the fuzzy things about the gospel. We know the truth, but sometimes what we know has nothing to do with the truth of God’s word.

Our reading from Jeremiah shows one such misunderstanding. The Lord God has appointed the young Jeremiah a prophet to all the nations. Jeremiah tells the Lord, “Not me, I have no idea what to say or how to say it. I’m just a boy; I don’t have the lips of the prophet.”

The Lord tells the boy not to say no. The Lord tells the boy “you will do as I command.” The Lord tells the boy not to be afraid, because in the words of the Lord God, “I am with you to deliver you.” The Lord promises to keep, rescue, and protect Jeremiah during his life in service.

But in a way, near the end of the reading the Lord affirms that Jeremiah doesn’t have the tools to be a prophet. The boy does not know what to say, or how to say it. The Lord knows Jeremiah is only a child. He knows he’s only human. So the Lord puts forth his hand and touches his mouth declaring “Behold, I have put my words into thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to overthrow; to build and to plant.”

As obvious as this seems when saying this, of course the Lord knew Jeremiah didn’t have the tools to be a prophet to the nations. Of course he knew Jeremiah needed the words that he did not have. This is what the Lord supplied Jeremiah. The Lord ordained and anointed Jeremiah a prophet. With a touch to the lips, Jeremiah is given God’s word in his mouth.

This is one of those truths that may seem a little fuzzy. God doesn’t choose the equipped, God equips the chosen. Jeremiah was a boy. He was truly nobody special. As we have said before, the young boys were the ones who had some of the most dangerous jobs in the household, including tending the sheep through the dead of night.

He had no skills, he had no status. Yet, he was chosen, he was anointed, and he was charged. These were all actions of the Lord God. As the Lord lead; Jeremiah followed. He did as he was told to do. He shared what he was told to share.

Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians takes the principle of equipping the saints a step further. Where 1Corinthians 12 and 14 teach us about the spiritual gifts, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, 1Corinthians 13 teaches us how we are to use these gifts. He teaches we must use these gifts in love. Again, this is where we apply the principle of what we think we know having nothing to do with the truth of the gospel.

We know this scripture from nearly every wedding we have ever attended. Because of that we often think of this as how wedded love is shared with a partner. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that my wife is a gift from God, but describing wedded love was not Paul’s intent.

Paul was teaching a quarrelsome, bawdy, self-serving group of Christians, yes Christians, they were mistreating the Good News that they were so graciously given. As the old camp song goes, “They’ll Know We Are Christians by our Love,” well the church at Corinth was doing a poor job of showing the world the true meaning of Christian love.

So Paul taught them the elements of Christian love, things like patience, kindness, protection, trust, hope and perseverance. By the way, do you notice how these elements mirror the way the Lord promised to keep, rescue, and protect, Jeremiah? This is no coincidence. Then he also taught them what Christian love is not; things like envious, boastful, arrogant, rude, irritable, or resentful. Even more, he taught them that without love, there is nothing. Paul teaches that if he gives everything, every talent, every tongue, every prophecy; and does not do it in God’s love, there is nothing.

Bible headings often give us an idea of where a passage is going to go. The bible I use most often calls our gospel reading “Preaching in Nazareth”[1] but others call it “Rejected in Nazareth.” As we know, the Lord’s first preaching in his hometown synagogue wasn’t all peaches and cream. But there’s one other thing these headings do, they show what the publisher was focusing on when editing.

Well, surely this piece could be called “Rejected in Nazareth.” After all, when the people who want to throw you a parade want to throw you off a cliff about 125 words later, rejection might even be a mild description of what’s happening in Nazareth. And what words they were.

Jesus had a different message for the people of his hometown than he had for those he had known so far in his ministry. While Luke’s gospel is silent on the particulars of what happened in Capernaum, he told the people of Nazareth that by the time he was finished with them, they would be most likely finished with him.

He told them that they would consider him not only a great healer, but a sick man as well. This is why they will scream “Physician, cure yourself!” Jesus reminds them a prophet is not accepted in their own hometown, and he was about to show them why this is true in his case too.

Jesus refers to the widow at Zarephath in Sidon. In 1Kings 17, Elijah shares the word of God declaring a drought that will not end until the Lord says so. There will be neither rain nor dew until such a time as when the Lord is satisfied. This continues for 42 months.

During that time, Elijah is called to find a widow who will feed him at Zarephath. There he finds the widow and asks for bread and water. Water is doable for the widow, but as for the bread, she has very little meal and even less oil. Elijah promises her God’s bounty if she trusts and serves him bread. As surely as God lives, the oil and the meal never run out in her home during the drought according to the word of the Lord that was spoken by Elijah.

The woman’s life is then devastated by the death of her son. This death was not only the end of her son’s life, but it was culturally the end of her and her household as well. A devastated Elijah made intercession to the Lord on behalf of the widow and her son and he was revived. There was great joy in the household as they could taste and see that the Lord is good.

What makes this interesting is that this little burg is on the coast between Tyre and Sidon in modern day Lebanon about 85 miles north of the modern Israeli border. Elijah is in gentile territory serving the Lord God by serving and being served by the unclean and the unsaved. Jesus reminds the people that there were many widows in Israel, but Elijah was sent to the other, the unclean, the gentile. Why did Elijah do this? Because according to the book of Kings, Omri the King of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord. Citing this example in the synagogue wouldn’t make Jesus popular with the people.

Jesus also referred the crowd to Naaman the Syrian. Naaman was a great warrior and also a leper. He was just as unclean as all of the Israelite lepers. But Naaman sought the prophet Elisha to cure his ailment. To make a long story short, Naaman was cured when all of the Israelite lepers remained afflicted. Again, the Israelites did not bring themselves to the prophet and the doubly unclean Naaman, the gentile leper, is healed. Let me say again, citing this example in the synagogue wouldn’t make Jesus popular with the people.

Where so many of us might focus on the nearly mystical way Jesus passed through the crowd and went on his way, this is not what is revealed about God’s self in this passage. The comedienne Sarah Silverman has a comedy special called “Jesus Is Magic,” and when we focus on this part of the passage, we focus on what makes David Copperfield special, not the Jesus.

What we need to take from this passage as the children of God is that we cannot claim God as our own. As Jesus is claimed by the people of Nazareth as their own, as people, pastors, and prophets all over the world claim God as their own, the holy and Triune God belongs to no one. It is the Lord who gives us what we have, just as Jeremiah received an anointing of power and vocation with a touch to the lips. It is in the love of God that we take the gifts we are given not for our own pride and joy, but for the love of God by which we live today.

It is in the Lord’s righteousness that we are delivered and rescued. This is what we are called to seek. Just as the widow at Zarephath received the Lord’s blessing, just as Naaman the Syrian received the Lord’s healing; we are to call on the Lord our God by God’s righteousness not our own. It is easy for us to focus on the miraculous. Worship of God who does great acts is glorious. But we are called to seek the greater gifts, the greater truth of how the Lord Jesus reveals himself, not how we reveal him.

[1] The New Interpreter’s Study Bible