(Guest Homily for Springfield Christian Church's Worship on February 3, 2019, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany)
Overfamiliarity
There is a story that is told
every year in my family around the time of Thanksgiving. It is the story of my father’s cousin,
Sandy, and it has entered into the ranks of family folklore.
Early in Sandy’s marriage, she
assumed the responsibility of cooking the Sunday pot roast. Growing up, she had never cooked the
pot roast herself. But she had
studiously observed her mother’s technique. And her mother’s pot roast had always come out of the oven
succulent and savory. She felt
confident that she could replicate the achievement.
But her first pot roasts were
disasters. They kept coming out
dry, their appearance drab, their flavor dull. Her husband knew better than to say anything, but finally
after a few years he could not hold it in any longer. He had been observing her technique and simply could not
understand why she cut off the ends of the roast before placing it in the
oven. When he questioned why she
did this, she responded: “That’s how Mom always did it!” But the seeds of doubt were planted in
her mind, so she went back to her mother with the same question: why cut off
the ends of the roast before putting it in the oven? Her mother looked at her quizzically and said: “What else
could I have done? The pan wasn’t
big enough! The roast wouldn’t
have fit otherwise.”
Normally we would think that the
familiarity of a routine is a good thing.
When we fly, we want our pilots to be familiar with the process of
landing. When we go to a
restaurant, we want the chefs in the back to be familiar with the process of
cooking. But familiarity can cut
both ways. Sometimes familiarity
can diminish our awareness.
Sometimes we become so fixated on the “what” that we forget the “why.”
I’d imagine that most churches
are no stranger to this danger of familiarity. From my pastor friends, I’ve heard horror stories of board
meetings that drag on for hours and hours, debating the bake of the communion
bread, the color of the carpet, the placement of historical heirlooms, the
display of honorary plaques. There
is a place for such conversation, to be sure, but left unchecked this kind of
conversation risks becoming so insular, so focused on what is familiar and near
and dear to our hearts, that it forgets the “why” of church. The church isn’t just about bread. It’s about hungry hearts finding
nourishment at a Table that breaks down our division. It’s not just about carpet. It’s about
strangers from different walks of life (carpeted and not) gathering in the same
room as part of one body. It’s not
just about our own illustrious history.
It’s about the God who makes history, and not in the shape of our achievement
but in the shape of our surrender and transformation.
Fixating on the What, Forgetting the Why
What we see in today’s scripture
is little different from what we see today in many churches. Jesus has just read from the scroll of
Isaiah at the synagogue. He has
just proclaimed the good news: release to the captives, recovery of sight to
the blind, freedom to the oppressed.
Luke says that after this proclamation, “all spoke well of him” (4:22). So far, so good. Everyone’s on board with the good news,
apparently. They’ve probably heard
that scripture read hundreds of times.
They were probably nodding their heads in approval as Jesus read the
words. If Jesus had just stopped
then while he was ahead, they could have all left the synagogue and gone home
in peace to enjoy their Sunday dinner.
But as you know, he doesn’t stop, and soon his hometown has him on the
edge of a cliff. I guess maybe
it’s a good thing that the lectionary, the church calendar, has scheduled this
scripture for a Sunday when I’m not preaching at my home church. Hopefully as a guest preacher I’ll be
afforded a more favorable reception than Jesus received in his hometown!
I wonder why Jesus doesn’t stop
after his initial warm reception.
Luke doesn’t tell us. But I
have a guess. I imagine that as
Jesus surveys the assembly, he sees that they are all too familiar with the
scripture. They know all about the
story of release from captivity, freedom from oppression. That’s their story! Every
year at Passover, in a national celebration not unlike our Fourth of July, they
would remember how God delivered them from slavery in Egypt. They knew the what. But as Jesus could
see, they had lost track of the why.
So he continues. He tells the stories of two famous
prophets: first how Elijah visited a widow and miraculously her jar of flour
and jug of oil were replenished day after day; and then how Elisha cleansed a
leper. By itself, these two
stories aren’t all that shocking.
I imagine his audience is familiar with them too and in other
circumstances would have appreciated them as tales of God’s power. It’s how Jesus tells these stories that
scandalizes the synagogue. For he
reminds them that the widow and the leper were not Israelites but
foreigners. Not only that, Jesus
goes a step further and suggests that the grace of God had skipped over a host
of eligible widows and lepers in Israel before touching the lives of the
Canaanite widow and Syrian leper.
It’s almost as though Jesus is
saying that the Israelite widows and lepers missed out on God’s grace for the
same reason that the synagogue in front of him might miss out on God’s grace:
because they were too familiar with it.
Because they had confused God with their own rituals and traditions and
history. Because they had
forgotten the “why” that had inspired all those rituals and traditions in the
first place, namely, a God who hears the cry of the captive, a God who lifts up
the lowly, anywhere.
Hasn’t God Always Been a Bit Unfamiliar?
Years ago, I had the opportunity to
mentor a high school student, a refugee orphan from Burma. I met him his first week at Godwin High
School. He had a shaved head and was
still wearing the orange robe that he had worn as a Buddhist novice monk. He spoke a very broken English, and it
took several months for the counselors to locate a dictionary that translated
from his dialect. He had no family
and no friends at the time. That
was about ten years ago.
Today Asein is an elementary
school teacher at Greene Elementary School in Richmond. When he shares his life story, he
remarks on the many helping hands that accompanied him on his journey: foster
parents, teachers, classmates, neighborhood friends. Now, he wants to be a helping hand to others. At Greene Elementary, where the
majority of students are Hispanic, Asein not only teaches. He establishes relationships and gives
students and parents a sense of connection and belonging to the community. He helps them on their journey.
Although Asein is not a Christian,
I cannot help but observe how an amazing grace has changed his life, and how that
same grace now reaches out through him and changes the lives of others. But should I be surprised? Hasn’t God always been a bit
unfamiliar, traveling about in places that are unmarked by the name of God, moving
about where the name “God” isn’t spoken?
Is this not the same unfamiliar God that visited the Canaanite widow and
the Syrian leper? The same
unfamiliar God who cares less for the “what” than for the “why,” who responds
not to names and bells and smells, but to hungry hearts and lonely lives and
cries for help? The same
unfamiliar God that scandalized that Nazarene synagogue so set in its ways?
Looking Beyond the Name of God
Perhaps the good news is also
scandalous news. For the more
comfortable we become with the name of God, the more that we confuse “God” with
our experience and our way of doing things, then the greater chance that God
will scandalize us. Perhaps this
is precisely why it’s good news.
It cannot be tamed. It
cannot be domesticated. It will
always chase after hungry hearts and lift up the lowly from different walks and
resurrect the receptive who say, “Here am I,” whether a Christian or a Canaanite
widow, a Syrian leper or a Burmese Buddhist.
What does this mean for us as the
church? What does this mean for me—someone
who uses the name of “God” so regularly, how can I not become familiar with it? How can I stay on my toes and recognize
more willingly the unfamiliar God across my life? One really simple practice that I’ve taken up is this: sometimes,
I try to say things without the name of God, without all the familiar religious
words that can easily turn the world into Christian and non-Christian, that can
serve as boundaries, as lines in the sand, demarcating what is of God and what
is not. By using other words—by
talking about helping hands and transformed lives, for example, instead of
grace and resurrection—I can sometimes begin to see that God is working far
beyond my little world of the church, in people like Asein, for instance. It is for me a humbling and hopeful
reminder that even as the church might struggle, Christ is alive and well, his helping
hand still reaching out—sometimes incognito—in all the world.
Prayer
Loving God,
Whose love knows no bounds,
Neither death nor difference:
Give us eyes to recognize your helping hand
In unfamiliar places;
Hearts to welcome you
In unfamiliar guise;
And hands to join your ministry
In unfamiliar ways.
Raise us all
To a new, and perhaps unfamiliar, life.
In Christ, whose love is untamable. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment