Scripture readings: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30

I love listening to stories of how people first heard their call, first understood what their life’s vocation would be. For most of us, I think, it’s less of a moment than a process. Few of us, I assume, ever had a moment like Jeremiah’s, where a word came from heaven to lay our life’s path before us. The Gospel of Luke offers lots of opportunities for us to guess when Jesus first realized his vocation—first understood that he had an atypical calling. Was it as a twelve year old in the temple at Passover, dialoguing with the religious teachers? Was it when he was baptized by John and the Holy Spirit descended on him in a way that could be both felt and heard? Was it during the forty days that he had just spent fasting in the desert, being tempted by the devil? Or maybe it was here in his hometown of Nazareth where Jesus, having delivered a moving sermon in the synagogue, takes a seat amid a cloud of murmured praise, and suddenly realizes he still has something to say…

There are a few things I find unsettling and downright confusing about this passage, foremost of which is how angry the crowd gets. One minute they’re awed and impressed by their own homegrown preaching prodigy, saying Isn’t it nice that one of our own is so good at reading the Bible and That’s Joseph’s boy; I’ve known him since he was this high. And the next minute they’re trying to throw him off a cliff. I mean, can you imagine? On Youth Liturgy Sunday, if one of our youth got a little carried away and decided to provide some interpretation of the passage they were reading, and all of us responded by dragging them out of church and trying to roll them down one of the canyons? I mean, what on earth is going on here?

It doesn’t help with the confusion that our Scripture reading for the week starts smack in the middle of the scene, so I want to take a moment to step back and fill us in on the context. If you were here last week, when Pastor Scott preached on the preceding verses, then you might remember that Jesus has just been reading from Isaiah 61, a passage that talks about “the year of the Lord’s favor,” a time when the supreme Reign of God would reorder the law of the land, a time when the poor would hear good news, prisoners would be set free, the blind would see, and the oppressed would be liberated. It’s a beautiful, moving passage: a hopeful, inspiring vision of what it looks like when God’s people come fully under God’s will.

And the people in the synagogue in Nazareth would have known and loved this passage well. Like most Galileans, they were probably intensely devout, fearlessly pious Jews. They knew their Bible. They understood that “the year of the Lord’s favor” meant the future re-enfranchisement of Israel, of their release from the rule of non-Jewish political authorities. It was a beautiful, inspiring, hopeful passage, and to hear it read with such conviction by one of their own young people…well. Perhaps some of them felt tears well up in their eyes.

But Jesus has some commentary he wants to add: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.” I wonder if this went over the heads of some while a few others cocked their heads to the side, perplexed. Hm. That’s a funny thing to say. What could he mean by that?

And if Jesus had left it at that, they probably would have just shrugged it off and things probably would have ended much more calmly, but I guess that he felt that the townspeople shouldn’t be allowed off the hook all that easily, so he begins to explain to them: you think that these promises of release and recovery and liberation are for you. But, in fact, they’re not for you; they’re for people you think have nothing to do with you, for people you might even think of as your enemies! You’re so fixated on what the Reign of God might look like for your own tribe that you haven’t calculated in all these other people. You’re so transfixed on the 60-watt light bulb of a gospel that’s good news for you, that you’re ignoring the rising sun of a gospel that’s good news for the whole world.

And what happens next is an unnerving case study on what it looks like when this whole idea of the Reign of God gets a little too close for comfort. In the encounter with Jesus, God’s Reign gets yanked out of the realm of “wouldn’t it be nice?” It can no longer be treated as a gleaming ideal, but an immediate and exacting reality. And when the pretty, shiny, glimmering candle of peace and justice that we’ve been holding at arm’s length gets thrust in our face, things can start to feel uncomfortably hot. We look around us and see that the poor are still poor, and the prisoners are still in prison, and the world is full of suffering and oppression and darkness, and what are we doing? In the grand scheme of things, are we making it better or worse?

I’m still bewildered by the murderous rage that filled the people in the synagogue in Nazareth that day, but maybe that’s because they understood something that I just don’t get. Something that, from inside the protective bubble of the 21^st century so-called First World, is so hard to see. It’s so easy for me to ignore the darkness, to stare into the artificial sun lamp of the endless advertisements that appear on my laptop or smartphone screen, assuring me that I’m pretty good, but I’d be even better if I had this pair of shoes, or that cup of coffee. Never mind where and how the shoes were made, or what happens to that plastic-lined cup after you throw it in the garbage. It has nothing to do with you.

Though most of us don’t have to see it on a daily basis, we live in a world struggling under the weight of profound darkness. Few in this room could really be described as “poor,” but we live in a world where nearly half of the population gets by on less than $2.50 a day, and where recent studies reveal that half of global wealth is held by only 62 individuals. Few of us have been to prison, but we live in a country with the highest prison population of anywhere in the world, with 25% of the entire world’s inmates, and well over half of those incarcerated are African American or Hispanic. None of us is a slave, but we’re part of a world in which as many as 30 million people live in slavery today, the highest number in human history.

“Today, the scripture has been fulfilled, but with qualifications that make it more manageable for your 2016 Southern California existence.”

No, that’s not quite right.

“Today, the scripture has been fulfilled, just as you heard it.”

And really, if I honestly sit with that, it’s really uncomfortable. And I guess that’s how it’s supposed to make us feel. It’s a sensation that our modern American fix-everything-and-make-it-better mentality stubbornly resists. But the text on this story from Nazareth fights back. I really don’t think any of us is any better than these people who tried to throw Jesus off that cliff, we just have more protective layers of history and theology and money to keep a safe distance from the reality of his message. The darkness is real. And we’re part of the problem.

And if the only purpose of Christ’s announcement of the Real Reality of God’s Reign was to force us to come face to face with the darkness, then the prospects would seem pretty bleak. We might drag ourselves up to the edge of acknowledging our own complicity in the systems of a world that is becoming more polluted, more impoverished, more enslaved every day and, looking out over the precipice, wonder how it’s possible to go anywhere but down. But I think that’s exactly where we need to go. To look into the darkness of our own lives and admit our own helplessness. To say with the voice of Jeremiah, “I want to help but what can I possibly do? I’m only a child?” To which God sternly but lovingly replies, “Good. I can work with that.”

The truth is, there’s too much darkness in the world for any one of us to overcome. There’s too much darkness in the world for this church, no matter how big or how relevant or how inclusive it becomes, to overcome. And if we try to resist the status quo, we might just get pushed over the edge. But the good news in this story is that, while we can’t resist the crowds, Christ can. Jesus passes through them like it’s nothing, inviting us to follow him. There is somewhere to go besides down: out. Out to the poor and diseased. To those who need a loving word. Just as we heard it. Today.