Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Rob Magliula, OHC
Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

Calls from God are scary! They disrupt our lives. It may not exactly be a voice, but a thought you can’t shake, or an idea that seems crazy or irrational. You try to ignore it, but it seems to be there again and again.

Jeremiah’s call shows us that fear, anxiety, resistance, inadequacy, and even resentment are understandable reactions to God’s call. The primal human response to any kind of change is fear. God notices it in Jeremiah and issues the Bible’s most frequent command: “Do not be afraid.” Jeremiah’s call has nothing to do with his capabilities, as Jeremiah himself repeatedly attests. Neither our achievement nor our confidence qualifies us to answer the call. Instead it is God who prepares us to live out the vocation for which we were created. While God sometimes asks us to take up roles and responsibilities for which we may feel ill equipped, often God prepares us for our calling through the interests and abilities we cultivate. Jeremiah’s story reminds us that both the calling to serve and the capacity to fulfill that calling come from God. Our excuses are often reasonable and justifiable, and our acceptance or surrender happens only after struggle. Jeremiah speaks to something many of us know; we do not choose God; God mysteriously, and even against our will, chooses us.

  Empowered by the Spirit, Jesus articulates his call with the words from the prophet Isaiah, which we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel. He came “to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the acceptable year of the Lord’s favor”. All in Nazareth speak well of Jesus and are amazed at his words until Jesus offends them by referring to the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and how God had ministered to strangers and passed over them and their kind. He wasn’t telling them anything that wasn’t right in their own scriptures, only that was not how they used scripture. They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up. The minute Jesus denied their special status; he went from favorite son to stranger. His message threatened to dismantle the status quo and the stereotypes that defined their religious and social boundaries. They were incensed that one of their own had the audacity to intimate that they would not be the vessels for the unfolding of God’s new narrative. They had certain expectations of God learned over generations. Jesus overturned those expectations by asserting that God is more than their tribal deity, and that God’s sense of community was bigger than theirs.  Change is a dynamic that is unsettling and usually resisted in preference for the old, the familiar, and the routine. Jesus’ audience opted for this choice. Not only do religious people resist change, but they also see their resistance to change as a protection of the divine. So much so that they are ready to kill for it.

Christ is the one who calls, challenges, and upsets us. Like the people of Nazareth, we are filled with assumptions. We often confuse our ideas of God with God. It’s hard to swallow that our enemies are God’s friends, who belong to God just as surely as we do.  No matter how hard we try we cannot get God to respect our boundaries.  God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way. The problem is not that we are loved any less. The problem is that these others are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community. Jesus preferred the company of misfits to that of religious people.  He cared for the stranger, and comes to us as the stranger, reminding us over and over again that while he is with us, he does not belong to us. Today our public life has broken down largely because we have begun to regard the stranger as the enemy. We sort ourselves out into tribes that are suspicious of other tribes. The variety of humankind becomes a threat, not a blessing. We forget that it is God who makes us a community and not we ourselves, and that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to our own conversion and the truth that is bigger than we are.

The God, we proclaim and worship, will not be domesticated, confined to our temples, or to our comfortable, well-worn narratives. This is a dynamic God whose call jars us to anger or faithfulness, and who simultaneously provides us the opportunity to partner in the creation of a new narrative. God is at work, even now, unfolding new narratives among people who are viewed as outsiders by the faithful.

Paul gets to the root of our call as Christians. The words of our Epistle come to life when we remember that they arose out of a pastoral crisis in the Corinthian Church, not as we so often use them, to prop up romanticized notions of marriage. Paul had heard that some were engaged in destructive battles with each other. They were abusing their freedom, refusing to share, scorning their neighbor’s spiritual gifts, boasting in their own, seeking recognition and jockeying for power in the church. Paul inserts this passage in his letter not to supply a pious reflection on how things ought to be, but rather to call them to account for their behavior. Everything he says love is not, they are; everything he says love is, they are not.

Paul is speaking of agape, the love embodied most visibly in God’s love for humankind in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a state of being which constitutes our fundamental relationship to God. It is not a feeling but an action. For Paul, our call and capacity to flourish as human beings is realized to the extent that we can live in the love of God. There is nothing sentimental about it. It is active, tough, resilient, and long-suffering. The call to a faithful life is one that gives testimony in word and deed to the primacy of love, the character of love, and the endurance of love. Not unlike the congregation at Nazareth, the Corinthians who heard these words most likely responded with shock and anger as well. Christians seem to have a special gift of cloaking self-interest with self-righteousness. Without love all religious talk, knowledge, and giving add up to nothing.

The love described in the Epistle was the love lived in Jesus’ ministry. The call to belong to God’s Church is to be an agent of God’s love in the world, not seeking one’s own advantage but working on behalf of others. It is the source of our greatest security, and thus our freedom to actually be patient and kind, to bear all things and not insist on our own way. It is the way God calls us to practice all our gifts. None of us reach the heights of love. All of us have room to grow into greater love.

The truth is always bigger than any one of us can grasp by ourselves.  It takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell and show us the parts we cannot see, and sometimes we want to kill them for it.  Jesus’ own tried to kill him, but he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.  That’s how it still works.  If we will not listen, he won’t try to change our minds.  He will pass right through our midst and be gone.         +Amen.