Between the Known and the Known.

Texts: Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10, Luke 4:16-30

What are the events or sounds that trigger your memory, pictures of some wonderful, or terrible, time or place?  Is it death?  Is it the patter of rain­drops on a tin roof, or the crack of gunshot in the woods?  Is it the cooing of a baby, or the uncontrollable sobbing of a person in grief; or a cry of pain, or the sound of a car crash?

Or maybe for you it’s an aroma: the fragrance of a gardenia, or the smell brewing coffee, or of a wood fire.  Memory is a strange, wonderful and occasionally frightening hu­man faculty. 

The Old Testament lesson for today is not well known.  It is the account of a special event that happened in Jerusalem twenty-five hundred years ago, five hundred years before the birth of Jesus.

For seventy years the Jewish people had been in captivity in Babylon, a kingdom centered in what is now Iraq and included most of what is now Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.  All of the edu­cated and trained people had been carried away in defeat; only the unskilled, untaught and unemployable ones were left behind.  The Temple had been destroyed, and the walls around Jerusalem torn down.  Over the decades of neglect and pillage the once magnificent city had been reduced to ruins.

The King, Cyrus the Great, appointed Nehemiah as governor of Judah, and gave him and a priest named Ezra permission to lead the Jews back and rebuild the city.  Details are sketchy and confused, but Ezra somehow had come into possession of what seems to be the only surviv­ing copy of the Torah, the Law of Moses, what has come down to us as the first five books of our Bible.  Whether he brought it with him from Babylon, or whether he discovered it after returning to Israel is unclear.  But word got around that he had the scroll, and the people asked him to read it to them.  The passage we have read today recounts this first reading of the Word of God in Jerusa­lem in more than 70 years.

For most, this was their very first direct exposure to scripture, their first hearing of the commandments of God, and the emotional impact was incredible.  We are told "For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law."

As a result, they set out to restore the Temple, re-institute the worship of God at Jerusalem and change their lives in accord with the laws of God.  Hearing the word of God, they were inspired to reclaim their heritage.  It is an unfamiliar story about an unfamiliar story.

    But our second lesson is just the opposite, Jesus comes to his home town, reads the text of the day and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  It a familiar story about a very familiar story.

    I dare say I have heard more sermons preached on this text than any other in the Bible.  I've heard this text used to attack segregation and apartheid, the criminal justice system and the budget policies of the several administrations.  It's a wonderful text for a progressive, cutting edge church like ours and I have agreed with all its applications.  With all the odd, unfamiliar passages in Scripture, it's good to have one with which we are familiar and we cannot help but wonder how the home town folk got it so wrong.  Jesus is home in Nazareth where he was brought up.  He is in the synagogue, "as his custom was," says Luke.  His chosen text, those words from the prophet Isaiah, were as familiar to them as Luke 4:16-30 is to us.  Here is no outsider or rebel, but one of their own. When the congregation exclaims "Is not this the carpenter's son?" there’re proud.  “Jesus, yes, young Jesus, I know him, Joseph's and Mary's boy.  We've heard of his accomplishments in Capernaum.  It's good to have him back home.”  But then, as they say, “Things went South.”

Why did the reading of the unfamiliar, newly discovered law drive the people to their knees 500 years earlier and Jesus hometown crowd turn so hostile?  Let me suggest why.  They didn't know him because they knew him.

Sunday morning, 8:00am, the church phone rings. I answer.

"Who's preaching this morning?"

"Uh, Rev. Weisenbach," I responded trying to disguise my voice.

Silence, "Oh, I know him, that’s the guy that couldn’t speak Christmas Eve."

You see, you've heard me before (unless, of course, the only time you have been here was Christmas Eve!).  Worse, you've heard this story before.  Now let me see, what new thing can I say?  Oh, yes, I've got a sermon, "The story of the prodigal son from the point of view of the fatted calf." 

You see, when things are new or unfamiliar or strange, we often grant them unearned authority.  For example, I never cease to be amazed at the power of the “outside consultant.”  

Luke wants it well understood: The problem with Jesus is not between the known and the unknown, but between the known and the known.

I preached at First Presbyterian Church in NYC some years ago, preceded by a 40 ­voice choir and a two-minute introduc­tion by their pastor, Dr. Barrie Shepherd, telling everyone how lucky they were to have me.  I couldn't fail.

I stand up on the Third Sunday in Ordinary time in my own congrega­tion and someone thinks, "Oh, it’s the guy who lost his voice.  I wonder if that will happen today."

Jesus, hometown boy, Joe and Mary's son, addressed Israel from its own Scripture, its own past, its own authoritative texts, the familiar prophets, a text they already knew.

"The Day of the Lord is here!"  he announced. "Amen!" they shouted.  All of our waiting for deliverance, is over at last The Lord is coming!  And they think, “At last he is coming to redeem his own!”  The crowd is going wild, then someone yells, “how about you doing one of those miracles we’ve heard so much about?”

So Jesus answered, "When the prophet Elijah was alive there were lots of poor hungry women in Israel, but God chose to help a foreign widow instead.  There was silence.

“And speaking of old, familiar stories,” continued Jesus, “you all remember the one about how Elisha healed an army general, a Syrian rather than all those poor deserving lepers in Israel.”  The congregation grew quieter still.

“When God came to deliver us,” Jesus says, “remember that God came to human need beyond the bounds of the chosen.  It's in the Bible,” Jesus said.  “You know the stories of Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha.”  And then the silence took on a rage filled energy of its own.  It is the silence of judgment, when an exciting, new story suddenly becomes recognized as an old story we already know and wish to God we could forget.

You and I and our church and our nation, like the synagogue in Nazareth and its nation, stand judged by our own familiar stories.  Familiarity with the persons, texts, and ideas of any religion is a privilege that also blinds, dulls and impedes.  Isn't this the carpenter's son?  Oh, we know him.

        When someone in the audience blesses Jesus mother, Jesus coun­tered that blessing belongs only to "those who hear the word of God and obey it!" (Lk 11:28). It doesn't even pay to be a relative.

The church should listen, for like the good synagogue-going folk at Nazareth, we can be sure that privilege continues to be perilous.  We know, and sometimes our knowing is our undoing.  This familiar biblical pattern of going to one's own people, preach­ing, being rejected, and then going elsewhere was repeated many times in Paul's ministry, in Jesus' ministry, and is still repeated in the church today.

"I wish I knew the Bible better," she said. Well, Ok, but be careful.  Having Scripture, knowing it, owning it, may be the most dangerous kind of knowledge you can have.

"Luke 4 - oh yeah, I know that story."   You see, prophets often cut so deep, not because they predict the future or tell us what we don't know, but prophets, like Isaiah, Elisha, and Jesus, dig about in what we already know all too well and turn that on us. 

    The people of Nazareth who first greeted Jesus with "Amen!" finally yelled, "Kill him!" because he painfully reminded them of what they knew, namely that God is free, alive, and gracious beyond the bounds of our willingness to know.  The worshipers at Nazareth knew that God had blessed an undeserving outsider through Elijah's ministry, and they knew that God had cured a Syrian terrorist through Elisha.  But that was a lot more than they wanted to remember.

  What to do?  Kill this young prophet!  They failed in Nazareth, of course, but not many miles and months away, after a few more Jesus sermons like this one, they succeed.  Like Elijah, the prophet Jesus was a troubler of Israel's ignorance, an ignorance rooted in pride and position, in beloved familiar traditions, in the foolish idea that they were somehow special in the world. 

Two stories, one familiar, one not, I encourage us all to pray to God for a new hearing of the law that would do for us what it did for Israel twenty-five hundred years ago when “all the people wept when they heard the words of the law” and changed their lives in obedience to it.  Amen