An Inclusive Vision

Now often have you gotten into trouble for doing what you thought was the right thing?

It has happened to me a few times.  As if it was to a be a sign of things to come for me this happened in the first parish I ever worked in.  It was an aging congregation and there was a growing number of young families moving back into the suburb, and we had a kindergarten and a toy library in the church buildings so it seemed natural that a fair bit on my energy would go into gradually including these young families in the church.

I noticed some resistance but pushed on with what I thought was the right thing – I thought they just didn’t like change, but when things came to a crunch and I asked them “Don’t we need to get more people coming from our community to help the church grow?”  Their response was clear cut – “Yes! But we don’t want those kind of people…!”

Some months later I was asked to leave.

I remembered the words that we read from Jeremiah today:

“Now I have put my words in your mouth.

               See, today I appoint you over nations  and over kingdoms,

               to pluck up and to pull down,

               to destroy and to overthrow,

               to build and to plant.”

This text along with a couple of others was for me the voice of God in calling me from my chosen profession of teaching into the ministry – and you can see there that doing the right thing isn’t always going to be what people like. 

Poor old Jeremiah really got into trouble, too.  He ended up being put under a peculiar form of house arrest – he was put down the well, to wallow in the mud at the bottom.  The religious and political leaders didn’t like what he had to say about the best future for Israel.

And so it was for Jesus, again and again.

I remind you again.  Luke tells this story the way he does because he wants us to discover something very important about who Jesus was and is and what he is about.

You may have noticed in this story an amazingly quick turn-around in public opinion by the people:

²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

And …

²⁸When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.

It is like a hint of Holy Week a little way ahead – acclaiming him King one week and demanding his execution the next.

So, what are we to make of these texts today?

I wonder what it was that turned the crowd against Jesus on this occasion.

Jesus said something that clearly provoked them.  He challenged one of their foundational beliefs.  He wanted them to begin to understand that God was much bigger than they had ever thought of before.

In the world of Jesus’ day there was a strong sense of national identity linked to the national God.  That is why so often, when an imperial power over-ran a nation they would take the people away – into exile – because they believed that away from their homeland their God would be of no effect to them.

During the period of the Babylonian Exile, the prophets and others had tried to break down this idea that YHWH was geo-stationary, with the stories of Daniel being the best examples of it.  If the God of Israel could protect Daniel from the lions then no wonder King Darius could write to his whole Kingdom commanding them to worship the God of Daniel as the greatest of all Gods.

Yet, the idea that the Jews were God’s special people, and that God’s favours were for them alone was deeply ingrained in the people – in their DNA as we might say today.

So, in the context of having just said to the people that the Spirit of God was upon him and that he now had a mission to the poor, the prisoners, the disabled and the oppressed, (which they all seemed to think was pretty good), Jesus reminds them of two little episodes from their history in which YHWH’s good favour was withheld from them and offered to gentile neighbours.

The ministry of the two great prophets – Elijah and Elisha – left Jewish widows destitute and lepers dying of that crippling disease, and yet through them God reached out to the Widow of Zarapheth and Naaman.

By putting these two examples into Jesus’ mouth right here at the beginning of his ministry, Luke wants us all to begin to see that Jesus had a much bigger inclusive picture in mind than could be contained within Israel – that God’s love and grace was to be seen as a gift for all.

It is hard for us to imagine how outrageous this proposition was to the good citizens of Nazareth.  These were good people.  They were in their place of worship as they should have been. 

But what they saw in Jesus that day was not a good fellow-citizen of their beloved town – here they saw a man who had gone off the rails; in fact his scandalous suggestion was almost blasphemy, and he deserved to die – ALREADY.  Remember, this is day one of his public ministry, according to Luke.

And they ran him out of town!

You can see this scenario again and again in the lives of the prophets in our sacred texts as well as in the stories of Jesus. 

In fact, the execution of Jesus by the Romans was a very clear declaration that the state found the things he had to say about our life in God was repugnant – scandalous is the actual word used most often.   The involvement of the High Priests and the Pharisees was also a declaration by the Religious Authorities that the things Jesus had to say about our life in God was also scandalous.

And so it is that when I preach “Christ Crucified” as Paul says, I am not drawing on any allusion to the Jewish sacrificial system, I am drawing attention to the scandalous fact that this humble Jewish carpenter who knew his God better than perhaps any other human being we have known, was such a threat to the “principalities and powers” of his day that they could only respond in one way – “Crucify him!”

It is this humble Jewish carpenter and The Way that he showed us to live in God that I preach – he’s my hero.

And he got it in the neck for speaking out of that simple prophetic tradition I spoke of last week by which he declares that God has an inclusive view of the world in which we are all called to:

            Do justice

            Love compassion

            Walk humbly with our God

When we lose sight of these simple things we are in danger of becoming like the Priests and Pharisees who were more concerned about protecting their positions of power and influence and so could not see that gracious hand of God that was extended to them.

I think that the challenge of our day when we consider this message is how do we give expression to this idea of an inclusive church.  Some of us feel really uncomfortable with the stance of some churches that say emphatically they want to be inclusive of gays and lesbians, and some churches that go so far as to want to be inclusive of people regardless of their religion.

Somehow it offends our sensibilities.  We like to be able to say who is in and who is out (and so has to do the right things to come in). 

Those who promote an “inclusive” idea of church are taking seriously the simple prophetic tradition that Jesus proclaimed by challenging the injustice that people who are “different” so often suffer, offering a compassionate welcome to those who are too often marginalised by society, and being humble enough to allow God to be the one who really knows the heart of people who seek him.

I have enjoyed these three Sundays with you here at St Mary Magdalene’s and it is fitting, I think, that I conclude with these remarks because Mary in the tradition of the Church has been identified with the marginalised – if you consider the 7 demons from which Jesus released her as a sign of mental illness then she stands alongside all those with mental illness who have been shunned by the church and Jesus draws them in. 

I am sorry that a pompous Pope in the 6^th Century took it upon himself, without a shred of evidence, to say that she was a fallen woman – a prostitute – but at least her association with these outcasts, even of our day, declares an incredible thing – that they too are welcome in The Way. 

She should be a symbol and a call for us to be inclusive in our thinking about The Way.  None of us is good enough to be counted as “IN”.  We all stand as equals before God, and every day we are like beginners.