I’ve lived in a number of small towns. Listen to the following summing up of one man about life in such a place.

When people ask what I like about small town life, I tell them about the time my mother took my truck to the grocery store. I had left a fishing pole in the passenger seat and when she had rounded a curve the poll fell over and the hook got snagged in the back of her collar. Unable to get the hook out, and too modest to take off her blouse, my mother went into the store carrying the fishing poll. Elvin, the elderly store owner, couldn’t get the hook out either so he simply walked behind my mother carrying the fishing pole while she did her shopping. You just can’t get that kind of service in the city. (from Sun Feb 2004)

Imagine that happening at Nordstroms.

I received an e-mail this morning from a student at SOU I’ve worked with for several years. He’s the best student I’ve had the pleasure to teach. His name is Mike and he’ll be going on the graduate school next year.

Mike is from Oroville California, and he likes making gentle fun of his hometown. He’s humbler than you might expect, and I think part of that comes from his feelings about his humble beginnings. I asked him recently about Oroville, and he said “Oro” in Spanish means gold. The town sprang up in the gold rush. It was the largest town in California, once, for about a month. Then it settled down and became a settling in place for Chinese and then dust-bowlers. There’s nothing very golden about it, except for its memory of itself as having been the place to be on earth, for one little month long ago.

No one knows how the little Galilean town of Nazareth became ashamed of its name. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth” was the saying, and the gospel of John repeats it. Maybe Nazareth was easy to dismiss, not because something bad happened there. Maybe it was easy to dismiss because NOTHING ever happened there. Nazareth produced no kings, no generals, no scholars, no prophets – nothing. The actor Robert Michum once said of the tough inner-city school he had attended, “It was actually a finishing school. You go there and you’re finished.”

Well, you come from Nazareth and you’re finished. Poor Nazareth. It suffered so from a shattered self-image. And Poor Jesus; he had to be the focal point for the struggle they were having inside their own souls over this.

The congregation at Nazareth thought they knew Jesus well. After all, this was Joseph the carpenter’s son; they had known him from childhood. Thinking we know someone well can blind us to the unexpected, to the mystery God is working through another.

Theologian Ronald Rolheiser observes, “Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you: ‘You know, I understand you. I’ve watched you grow up, I know your Myers-Briggs results. I know your Enneagram number, and I am familiar with the dysfunction of your family, and your background. Besides that, you are French, and we all know the temperament of the French! And you are so perfectly your mother’s daughter! Oh yes, I do understand you!

Would you feel very understood? Compare that to someone who comes up to you and says, “You know, I don’t understand you at all! You are one rich mystery! I’ve known you for twenty years and you still constantly surprise me! THE SHATTERED LANTERN, Ronald Rolheiser).

The citizens of Nazareth could not deny that Jesus had all the marks of something good finally coming out of Nazareth. He was acknowledged to be a particularly fine preacher. “A report about him spread through all the surrounding country.” Luke reports that he “was praised by everyone.” It was no doubt particularly pleasing for the folks in Nazareth to learn that Jesus had caused a stir in the nearby rival village of Capernaum. The folks from Nazareth may have been made especially proud by the way Jesus turned people’s heads there.

So, when Jesus comes back from there the synagogue in Nazareth is full to over-flowing. They handed him the Isaiah scroll, and the congregation beamed. That was last week’s story. He read the words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . “ and the congregation swelled with pride. But this good feeling would be short-lived.

“Jesus noticed that their woundedness about their crummy hometown was making them hard and clannish, even ugly. He realized that beneath their pride over him there was a misunderstanding of his calling, a desire to see in him only an expression of Nazareth’s vision. They wanted him to be theirs alone, to be all Nazareth and no Capernaum, to be for ”us” and not for “them.” So he challenged them.

And he said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, `Physician, heal yourself; what we have heard you did at Caper'na-um, do here also in your own country.'"
And he said, "Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his own country.
But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Eli'jah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over all the land; and Eli'jah was sent to none of them but only to Zar'ephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. : And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Eli'sha; and none of them was cleansed, but only Na'aman the Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong.

The Dean of Duke University chapel, Wil Willimon, put it this way, “It was a hard word for Nazareth to hear. What Jesus was saying was that in order to be for Nazareth he was going to have to appear to be against Nazareth, against its desire to confine and contain the work of God. In order to be for Nazareth, Jesus would have to leave Nazareth. In order to be for Nazareth, Jesus would have to hit the road out of town, a road that would carry him eventually to a hill outside of Jerusalem.”

It isn’t easy to hear. Jesus is for us, but not just us. Jesus is for all others as well. In fact, sometimes, to be what he needs to be for everyone he needs to turn on those of us with our little small town images of him. As he did in last week’s text, in order to speak good news to the poor he will need to speak a word of judgment against the rich who are holding all the money and have the ear of those who make the tax laws that give the rich preferential treatment. In order to be the savior of the sick and blind he will need to leave the safe streets of the healthy. In order to be a friend of sinners, he will need to speak harshly to the righteous. Only by going to Jerusalem to speak truth to power can he save humble little Nazareth.

In his sermon Jesus was just reminding the synagogue congregation that God’s way has always been this way. God is creator of heaven and earth, not just some local deity enshrined in some grotto down the street. God’s saving power is bigger than any one town can hold. God’s mercy is wider than any one village can imagine.

In fact, Jesus says, for God to show God’s love for Israel God worked wonders in places called Sidon, and Syria. In order to show God’s love for the church, God is busy working outside the church, outside Christianity, outside the city limits of every Nazareth we can imagine. The people of Jesus’ hometown were enraged by this. They weren’t just mad.

I remember one evening at dinner when I was in seminary we had a discussion, we seminarians, about the nature of God. I have not forgotten one young woman piping up and giving us a definition for God I have never ever heard improved upon. She said, “God is the great balloon popper with air for new balloons.” Do you get the image? That certainly explains God as we understand God in Jesus. Jesus was seldom shy about popping other people’s most cherished ideas. He lived out in his person the Hebrew testament adage where through the prophet God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.”

“Can anything good ever come out of Nazareth?” the people said. Well, something very good was driven out of Nazareth that day. The congregation rode Jesus out of town and even had thoughts of throwing him over a precipice. It was a foreshadowing of what the world would eventually do to him on the cross. It’s what the world always does to people who speak up like he does on behalf of outsiders.

Wil Willimon put it this way: “It’s not God’s harshness or aloofness that makes us angry; its God’s mercy.” It’s too big, too wide. It’s easier to spend out lives licking our local wounds and making nasty remarks about Capernaum than it is to try to live as generously, as kindly, and as mercifully as Jesus tried to live.

The Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Now, just think about who said that – Solzhenitsyn had been on the Soviet Gulag. He knew that Stalin had killed some 35 million of his countrymen. How easy it would have been for Solzhenitsyn to call Stalin and his henchmen evil doers and paint himself as a victim, a saint, maybe.

He knew better. He knew his own heart. He knew what hate does to people. And he also knew the prodigal mercies of God. Always brimming over.

God’s way, according to Jesus, is not to wall yourself off from your enemies. If there is to be peace in the world, he said, you have to embrace your enemies – like Naaman the Syrian general.

Funny, that the Iraq study group said the very same thing. Progress in Iraq will hinge, they said, not on military action but on whether we can reach out to the Syrians who have the political power to make a difference with the Shiittes and Sunis.

I don’t pick these Biblical texts. They just come when they are set to come, but it never ceases to amaze me.

The apostle Paul said of Christian love that it never smacks of a crusade against evil – quite the opposite --

13:1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbals.
13:2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
13:3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body as a living sacrifice, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
13:4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
13:5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
13:6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
13:8 Love never ends.

Amen.