Fourth Sunday after Epiphany - Year C 2010

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany – Year C (RCL) 2010
Jeremiah 1: 4 – 10; Psalm 71: 1 – 6; 1 Corinthians 13: 1 – 13; Luke 4: 21 – 30
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland OR
Sunday, January 31, 2010

PROPHETS AND PREACHERS

Let us Pray: Holy God you speak to us, your people, in many and varied ways. We hear your voice in scripture and song – in still and quiet contemplation and in the thunderous majesty of your work in nature. Often we wish to hear only the comfort and peace your message brings, while ignoring the warnings and judgments of the consequences of our sinful actions. Help us to remember that you came among us as the prince of peace proclaiming forgiveness and as the prophet of fire proclaiming repentance. Help us to live in your Grace and in your prophetic warnings learning to balance between the two, so that we might more fully comprehend your Word in our world. Amen.

(SUNG) SPEAK LORD I’M LISTENING
PLANT YOUR WORD DOWN DEEP IN ME.
SPEAK LORD I’M LISTENING,
PLEASE SHOW ME THE WAY.

I can see my homiletics professor uneasily squirming in the chair at the back of the classroom and furiously scribbling away on the notepad and “Student Preacher Evaluation Form” on the desk in front of him. Comments and feedback were always to be given in a positive and supportive format – yet he was not likely to mince words when it came to shaping the style of budding seminarians who were soon to be set loose into the pulpits of America and beyond. We were encouraged to cultivate our own gifts and talents and bring them with us into our preaching – and we were also challenged when doing so to make sure that we understood the most effective way of communicating the message to the widest possible number of listeners. The primary mistake made by most new preachers – according to Dr. Webb – was to underestimate the audience either by preaching well above their heads or well beneath their capacity to incorporate new ways of visioning familiar stories and helping to shape a response to the challenge of the Gospel message. “Mr. Parker, where’s the good news?” This phrase continues to challenge and stretch me each week as I prepare through prayer and reading – through meditation and musing to explore what God might be saying to us as followers of the Christ.

Now I’m not sure who would have ventured to provide a critique of the sermon delivered at the Synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath, which had the appointed reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, the 61st Chapter. Joseph and Mary’s eldest son – who had been away from town and reportedly teaching and preaching throughout Galilee, had returned and all were set to be wowed in this hometown crowd. Opening with a flare for the gifts of understated subtlety – Jeshua bar Joseph – reads the text, rolls back up the scroll of Isaiah, hands it back to the scribe, sits down in the midst of them; waits for all eyes and ears to be focused and attentive – and says “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Muttering in the crowd, “so far so good….this could be interesting….where do you think he’s going with this? Then every homiletic teacher’s nightmare erupts. The preacher overreaches the boundaries of good rhetorical style and proceeds to make assumptions on behalf of the audience – assumptions that may or may not be true and – the crowd starts to grumble and grow restless, irritable and discontent. The preacher then starts to get defensive, “I know what your thinking…Doctor heal yourself…”, and “why don’t you do for us the fantastic things we’ve been hearing about your doing for everybody else in the area”. The whole situation starts to spiral out of control – the preacher grumbles; “nobody ever gets any recognition in their hometown” and starts to quote stories out of their sacred scriptures of how the majesty and grace of God are going to everybody else in the world before they will be given to this ungrateful people. This preacher is not going to earn anything much better than a C- if not an F; and the feedback will address many of the pitfalls of trying to make connection with an audience for which one might have little to no respect – and hoping to change their hearts and minds by telling them that if they don’t shape up the good news is going to somebody else, and they can just suffer the consequences! Not the best way to win friends and influence people.


(SUNG) SPEAK LORD I’M LISTENING
PLANT YOUR WORD DOWN DEEP IN ME.
SPEAK LORD I’M LISTENING,
PLEASE SHOW ME THE WAY.

The reality is that, in fact, Prophets and Messiah’s don’t necessarily need to conform to homiletical conventions and rarely look to address their remarks in ways that might be suggested by the Dale Carnegie method of how best to win friends and influence people. From the reading of the Hebrew Testament assigned today we hear the story of the call of the Prophet Jeremiah. This “call story” follows pretty much the pattern of the other narrative telling of God’s call to the prophetic voices in the history of our relationship with the Divine. God announces intention that this individual will go forth and speak to the people providing challenge and charge – extending judgment and justice, recalling the wayward and welcoming the disenfranchised to participation in the covenantal relationship. The chosen individual voices objection of ignorance or unworthiness. God then assures that words will be given and strength will be provided to those whom God calls. Having struggled protested and sufficiently whined – then having been assured – the individual is symbolically marked as God’s chosen, and goes on to live out their lives as God’s mouthpiece. Is it any wonder that all of these prophetic voices would have preferred a different lot in life? Consider Jeremiah – verses one through three of the first chapter of this book tell us that God extended call to this young man in the thirteenth year of King Josiah’s reign making it the year 627 BCE. This was a momentous and tumultuous time in the history of God’s chosen people in the southern kingdom of Judah. The northern kingdom of Israel had fallen into the hands of conquering nations about a century previously and things were about to go pretty much downhill for the remaining remnant. In Jeremiah’s lifetime (some 60 to 75 years as can best be determined) the Assyrian empire, which had long dominated the known world, was crumbling. The pulse of the Hebrew people was rapid with fear of the change coming and with a perhaps naïve hope of some sort of political alliance which might allow national freedom in the approaching power of Babylon. It would be Jeremiah’s fate to speak to God’s chosen people of the impending destruction from the north while attempting to encourage them toward a return to the Torah principles, which had governed their lives. Some of this rededication to the rule of God by God’s law began to happen under the leadership of King Josiah, and there was a brief period when the Vassal nation was able to break free of the crumbling Assyrian empire and exert its own national identity. This, however, was not long lived, and when Josiah died in 609, the kingdom of Judah continued its decline and eventually fell into the hands of the ascending world power of the Babylon nation. Jeremiah was able to foresee most of these conditions while preaching and prophesying to a people who were not particularly thrilled with his gloom and doom news. Yet this voice of God for the people of God continued to live out the call “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”

The prophet for a new and renewed covenant with God’s people – manifest in the epiphany appearance of that very Godhead dwelling among us – would also have words to speak, messages to preach and prophesies to declare which would fall upon many times indifferent – and probably more times openly hostile ears. The riled and angry crowd in Nazareth might have been the first – and definitely would not be the last, which would look to silence this hometown rabble-rouser with attempts at violently ending a life. Jesus, like the prophets before, knew clearly what a limited time was available to turn the hearts and minds of a rebellious nation back toward righteousness and salvation. Three years of public ministry – teaching and guiding, preparing and cajoling the followers would end in the facing down of another violent crowd who would reject the difficult message and ultimately succeed in the ending of a life. Any wonder why prophets might be reluctant to answer their call? This prophet, however, would be different. The attempt at silencing this prophet by death would fail because this prophet would have power over death itself.

(SUNG) SPEAK LORD I’M LISTENING
PLANT YOUR WORD DOWN DEEP IN ME.
SPEAK LORD I’M LISTENING,
PLEASE SHOW ME THE WAY.

In the midst of these two difficult stories about the words and work of prophets and preachers the compilers of our lectionary have included the hymn to love written by Paul to the early Christian community at Corinth. I observed many of your faces this morning as you listened to these familiar words, which gloriously tell of the power of Love. It was almost as if the lectionary compilers knew that the words of God to Jeremiah and the Word of God in the author of Luke/Acts account needed to be counterbalanced with the love of God which is evident in all of scripture and often hard to discern in those stories and retellings of the prophets and preachers. That, “Mr. Parker” is the ultimate good news. Love conquers everything, love triumphs even over death and destruction. Much might be asked and expected of us as Children of God and heirs of God’s Kindom – and that is because much is given in Love. And Love never ends.

Amen.