Not Your Typical Sunday Morning
Pastor Mathew Magera – 1/24/16 – Sermon 140
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you ever wondered what
would happen to Jesus if he ever preached at his home church now you know that
he would drive the congregation into a violent rage resulting in a march to
throw Jesus off the nearest cliff. Not your typical Sunday morning. Oh, this
just makes Jesus that much more appealing to our churches today, doesn't it? We
already struggle enough with making new disciples, so let's just talk about how
Jesus when in the company of those he grew up with just rally against him and
try to kill him? That's our Jesus, making people mad since the first century.
Yay, Christianity!
I mean, come on, Jesus. Why
do you have to make these people mad? If anyone is going to be talking about
you it is going to be these people. If news of your identity gets out, it is
through these people that it will spread the fastest and now the only thing we
know about Jesus preaching in his hometown is that they wanted to throw him off
a cliff. You see, people knew this guy. This was Jesus, he was Joseph's little
boy. He was the one playing under his workbench and the one who was conceived
before Mary and Joseph were married. These people know him. They know him. They
probably knew he was baptized. They might have known about his 40 days in the
desert. If anyone knew anything about this guy, it was these folk from his
hometown. If there was anyone who would spread anything about him being God's
only Son, it was these people. And in fact, the closest people to him were
actually the ones who knew him the least. It was just so that when he came back
to town, their conception of him was so different they couldn't believe it was
really him. In fact, the probably thought he was the polar opposite.
This is what happens to a
community of faith that pushes away the Word of God. This is what happens to a
church that forgets about Jesus. Jesus is in the presence of those who should
know him the best and they don't. They don't know what he is really about and
when he didn't do what they expected him to do they wanted to throw him out
completely. This is how a church crumbles to the ground. You don't just go from
yay Jesus to kill Jesus. For a church to crumble to the ground it must leave
Jesus behind, it must not pursue daily devotion in the Word of God, it must not
seek to more deeply understand how God's love pours over the world. Now, when
Jesus comes back and tries to come in the door our view of him has skewed so
much that we assume he is in fact the outsider and not the object of our
worship.
If we as individuals, if we
as a church want to drive Jesus away then we need to stray from the Word of
God. If we want to drive Jesus away then we need to stop attending Bible
studies. If we want to drive Jesus away then we need to stop daily devotions.
You see, it's easy to be like people in Jesus' hometown, people who claim to
know so much about him but can barely recognize him when he is right in front
of them. That means we are not immune to reacting like this community and
throwing Jesus off a grain elevator. We are not immune to the ability to stray
away from Jesus. We could easily be in the mob of people taking Jesus to his
death.
You see, the people in
Nazareth were expecting Jesus to do miracles, flashy things to usher in the
Kingdom of God. They expected him to do healings but he didn't. They expected
him to put on a show for them. How often do we find ourselves in that
situation? Expecting Jesus to put on a show for us? We have so many people on
our prayer list, some who have been on it for a long time, why doesn't he do
anything about it? We have such trouble bringing in new disciples, why can't
Jesus just do a miracle in order to gain more followers? Why do we keep coming
back? That's an honest question that I don't want you to answer out loud. Why
do you come back? Week after week? Why? Aren't there are so many better things
we could be doing with our Sunday mornings than coming to church to try to sing
hymns we may or may not know, to use words that don't ever come out in our
everyday conversations, kneeling and folding our hands while the pastor says
some words written in a book and then listen to him talk on and on for 15-20
minutes? Why do we keep coming back for that?
Aren't we expecting
something spectacular too? Aren't we expecting miraculous healings and
exorcisms and world peace? And what do we get? We get funeral preparations,
sinful behaviors and terrorism. Aren't we expecting Jesus to do something
amazing? But instead, what do we see? We see a world that is still broken. A
world that is still hungry. A world that is still sinful. A world that is still
reluctant to live on the true Word of God. What's the point of continuing down
this road? What's the point of coming to worship week after week if we aren't
seeing anything happening?
Well, I'll tell you what the
point is. You see, when Jesus got up to read in his hometown of Nazareth,
something happened. What the people needed to do is to look a little deeper
into what Jesus was saying. Everything Jesus talked about, freedom for the
prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed,
everything that Jesus was talking about He proclaimed it as a promise to come.
The prisoners will be set free, the blind will receive sight and the oppressed
will be released. But the people thought he meant it was going to happen right
then and there. Of course they were happy to hear him say these things, they were
ready for a show. Jesus, Jesus, you're so cool, walk across my swimming pool.
He was, in a way, proclaiming a miracle, but that miracle would not be a flashy
instantaneous magical miracle but it would be slowly transformed over time. The
people were not expecting that. He was telling them that God had seen them. God
could see them. God could see the ones who were sick. God could see the ones
who were poor. God could see the ones who had little hope left. Even those who
were then going to throw Jesus off a cliff, God could see them too. And God was
doing something about it. He was sending an answer to the problem. And that
answer was Jesus himself. And for that reason, we don't want to lose sight of
who Jesus really is, the answer. If we do, we might start to expect something
from him that he might not give. If the people of Nazareth can be driven to
take Jesus and throw him over a cliff, imagine what we have the capability of
doing if we don't believe.
Let me try to explain it
another way. One of the things I had to learn when I was learning to fly planes
was how the instruments in the plane worked. Clearly, the airspeed indicator
tells me how fast I'm going, the altimeter shows how I'm going but these
instruments work a little differently than they do in a car. In a car, you hit
the gas pedal, you start moving and you immediately see your speedometer
moving. It's instantaneous. Well, in an airplane, speed and altitude
instruments are not. So, when learning to fly, one of the things you have to
learn is that when you pull back on the yoke to start climbing while you may
actually be climbing your instruments might not show it for a few seconds. It
seems kind of strange since two of things you really want to keep track of on
an airplane are speed and altitude, but that is how they work. So, while you
have no initial evidence that you are going up or down or speeding up or
slowing down, you have faith that those changes are being made. This is what is
going on with Jesus proclaiming the kingdom of God to his home congregation.
The kingdom he is proclaiming to be bringing, freedom, healing, and restoration
is here, he did bring it, but the evidence of that kingdom that we can see with
our eyes has not yet been realized.
You see, when we come to
worship on Sunday and we sing and we pray and we say things and do things, as
we leave we may not notice any changes. There may not be miracles that take
place during this hour but something is happening. Once again that promise is
proclaimed again and we are one hour closer to the fulfillment of that promise.
You see, we serve a hidden God. A God that operates behinds the scenes as he
has done since his call to Abraham in Genesis 12. It takes faith to believe
that the kingdom of God is within us long before we can see it with our eyes.
It takes faith to believe Jesus when he says something like he does in front of
his home congregation. And if you think that congregation had it difficult, we
have it much worse. We've seen way too many wars, way too much persecution, way
to much corruption to easily believe that the kingdom of God has already come
or that the world is, even now, being ruled by Christ already. Because as it
stands, it appears the world around us is going to knock the socks out of our
hopes for the kingdom of God.
And the more that we stray
from the Word and looking deeper into it, the more we fall away from
understanding exactly how this kingdom works and the more we might misplace our
faith. Jesus wants us to put our trust in His words that the words he spoke
have been fulfilled in their hearing. Jesus wants us to put our trust in His
ability to save. Because while the world around us appears broken, it is being
renewed, it is being changed, we are being renewed, we are being changed. The
kingdom is now, it is here. That is why we keep coming back. That is why we
sing, that is why we pray, this is why we hear the Word each week and why we
should hear it every day, because each time we do we are reminded that the
kingdom is here and that very soon the evidence of it will be made known to us.
Until that time, we sojourn on proclaiming that kingdom just as Jesus did. In
the meantime, though, let's just try to stay away from the cliffs. Okay? To God
be the glory now and always. Amen.