Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71; 1 Corinthians 14:12b-20; Luke 4:21-32

As some of you know, Pam and I were living in New York City in the fall of 2001. On the morning of September 11^th, we were both at work: Pam in her office, 2 miles north of the World Trade Centers; and I at a hospital about 30 miles away.  That morning was for my generation what John F. Kennedy’s assassination was for the generation before us: a moment that we’ll never forget what we were doing when we heard the news, and how we responded to it. I, for one, will always remember the sensation of flashing my doctor ID badge to the guards at the bridge to Manhattan and driving down the West Side Highway in utter silence, the only car on the road, feeling like the last person left on earth.

In the days that followed, New Yorkers reached out to one another, and we looked for answers. And two famous spiritual leaders came to speak in the same week. One, Thich Nhat Hanh, is a Buddhist monk who done a great deal to foster Christian-Buddhist dialogue.  He was to speak on a Tuesday night at the huge Riverside Church, which seats over 2,000 people. We arrived early, waited over an hour in line, and eventually were some of the last people allowed in.  The only seats we could find were high in the balcony, where we could barely hear Hanh speak, even as we were getting elbowed and jostled by pacifists intent on getting a better view.

The following Sunday afternoon, Daniel Berrigan also spoke at a church in Manhattan. Berrigan is a Roman Catholic priest who has been actively involved in peace movements and nonviolent civil disobedience for decades. He’s spent several years in prison for his beliefs, and some Roman Catholic leaders would just as soon see him go back there. We arrived late because church ran long, but it wasn’t a problem, because there only about 50 people there, sitting around the parish hall of a small Episcopal church. 

Hanh and Berrigan both talked about peace, and simplicity, and contemplation.  They spoke of the assault of a violent and busy culture upon our fragile spirits. They spoke of finding God in a world that has little use for even the idea of God. And yet in a supposedly Christian nation, the Buddhist monk drew a standing-room-only crowd of thousands, while the Catholic priest had an intimate conversation in a parish hall with room to spare.

There are a few explanations for that. First, Buddhism is more chic, and in vogue.  Celebrities openly espouse Buddhism, and their fame grows as a result. But when famous people speak of Christianity, they are ignored, looked down upon, even judged, and forgotten. After all, how many of you are aware that none other than Jane Fonda converted to Christianity a few years ago, which was one of the reasons Ted Turner divorced her? And how often does she appear in the headlines nowadays? Not very often.

It’s human nature to want to learn about foreign lands and other cultures. We long to hear something new, because it’s more comfortable to believe that we’ve tried all the home-grown solutions to our problems, when in fact the truth is that we’ve just ignored the hardest ones.  Jesus certainly realized this, because in His first public visit to Nazareth, He said for all to hear, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”  We tend to reject people who claim authority when we knew them back when they were kids running up and down the aisles of the church when they should have been listening.  We like to think of our gurus as born old and wise, so different from ourselves.

Another reason for the difference between those two nights is that Berrigan’s message was the harder of the two, at least for our culture to hear. Hanh spoke of inner simplicity and meditation.  He spoke of changing who we are as individuals, and at the same time accepting others as they were. Noble messages these, but in comparison to Berrigan’s, fairly simple and straightforward.

Berrigan, on the other hand, laid out a stark and life-altering plan.  It’s not enough to change ourselves, he said, although, of course, we must start there.  We have to change who we are as a nation, as a people.  It’s not enough to pray; we also have to sacrifice. It’s not enough to say we’re sorry; we have to repent – literally turn back – and change the way we live.  We have to beat our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning hooks, in the famous words of Isaiah, even if in the process we are criticized and reviled and condemned. 

And that’s exactly what happened to Jesus that day in Nazareth.  For after He miraculously won the people’s respect as they were amazed that Joseph’s son could speak with such authority, they turned on Him when things got hard.  What set them off was when Jesus told them that there were many widows in the time of Elijah, but God sent Elijah to only one, at Zarephath in Sidon.  There were many lepers in the time of Elisha, but God sent Elisha to only one, Naaman. 

And then the synagogue was filled with rage. Why? Because the two people Jesus mentioned – the widow in Sidon, and Naaman the leper – were both Gentiles. Here Jesus was, a Jew among Jews, reading from the scroll of Isaiah: “[The Lord] has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”   The people there thought that was meant for the Jews alone, but then Jesus not only includes the Gentiles – which was bad enough – He emphasizes the Gentiles.  And it’s not as if Jesus quietly added a couple of Gentiles to the long list of Jews whom God had saved: He mentioned two people, neither Jewish. 

Jesus was basically following up on what He’s said in the previous chapter of Luke: “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”  In other words, don’t take anything for granted. You might think that you’ve got it made in the shade because of your race, or your nationality, or your job, or your bank account. Don’t count on it. God isn’t bound by human limits or human reason; God saves who God wants to save, and if you’re relying on the fact that you’re supposedly one of God’s chosen people, you might be in for quite a surprise.

But surprises aren’t all bad, if we’re willing to adapt to change and trust God all the way. Jesus, after all, didn’t tell the folks in Nazareth that they weren’t loved. He didn’t say that God was going to leave them behind.  He just said that God was reaching out to everyone, including the folks who were most different from them. Jesus wasn’t taking away the salvation of His listeners; He was taking away their free pass, their guarantee. 

Ultimately, He was telling people who thought they knew what their religion was all about that they were wrong.  And I think Daniel Berrigan has been doing the same thing for pretty much his whole life, including that day in New York City two years ago.  He’s been telling people who think Christianity is about what you do on Sunday that it’s actually more about what you do the other six days of the week.  He’s been telling people that Christianity has more to do with standing up to conventional wisdom and the status quo, than embracing them.  That wealth not only isn’t a sign of God’s favor; it’s actually an obstacle in the spiritual life.  That if everybody loves and admires you, you’re probably doing something wrong.  That you have to be willing to pay a heavy price – like going to prison – for what you believe.

That can be a little confusing to people outside the church, but it can be downright enraging to people inside it. They come expecting one thing, but they get something very different.  They walk into God’s holy place like the folks from Nazareth did on that day two thousand years ago, and they expect to hear the same old stuff: God loves you all more than those other folks; God’s going to bless you because you do the right things or believe the right stuff.

But instead the guy reading the scroll or the guy in the clerical collar goes off in some crazy direction. He talks about how God reaches out to people you would never dream He’d reach out to: the Gentiles of Jesus’s time; the mentally ill and the poor and the war-torn and the forgotten of our day.  He talks about how being descended from Abraham or showing up at church on Sunday isn’t enough. He talks about how we have to change; we have to give up our preconceptions of chosenness and safety; we have to transform not only ourselves but our society, our nation, our world; and we have to be willing to suffer for it – through ridicule, poverty, abandonment – the very things that Jesus Himself experienced.

“Take up your Cross and follow me,” Jesus said.  Walk in my footsteps. Follow me on the path to salvation, even if it’s going in a direction you never dreamed it would. Especially if it’s going off on what looks like a wild goose chase, a pipe dream, a lark.  Because that’s exactly why Jesus came here – to save the unsavable; to say the unspeakable; to turn the world on its ear long enough so that we could all see how pointless and self-serving the world is, and to give us a chance to find our way to the truth.

And that’s what people are looking for, after all. That’s what all those folks were waiting in line outside Riverside Church for and shoving each other out of the way to see: they were hoping that a frail, little, immensely brave man from the other side of the globe would speak the truth. The same goes for the handful of folks who showed up to hear Daniel Berrigan.  We got what we came for: truth, with all its challenge and humility and resolve. But few of us were there, because most Christians didn’t want to hear what Berrigan had to say, and most non-Christians never thought a Christian would say such things. Keeping things comfortable, then, is easiest for everyone: the people in church don’t get the kind of unpleasant surprise the folks in the Nazareth synagogue got; and the folks outside get to pigeonhole Christianity as same-old/same-old, been-there/done-that, no need to go back.

That’s what Jesus was preaching against. He was telling the insiders not to count their chickens before they hatched; and He was telling the outsiders not to write Christianity off, because true Christianity doesn’t bear much resemblance to the bland, predictable, saccharine religion they were thinking of. And that’s the message for today, not just in terms of the reading from Luke, but also in terms of where we, as a parish, are going. In Lent we’re going to look at who we are, and who Christ is calling us to be. We’re going to start from the beginning, and reflect on what it means to be Christian, to be Anglican, to be a member of this community.  And we’re going to make a concerted effort to invite people to join us, even if it means we have to change, and adapt, and become disciples all over again. It may not be comfortable; but, after all, Jesus never said following Him would be.  He promised us eternal life, not a walk in the park.

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