January 28, 2007
Luke 4:21-31
“Not So Great Expectations”

Have you ever experienced a conflict, a clash between your understanding of yourself and the expectations of your family, friends, and neighbors? I remember just such a collision. It was the summer of 1984 right after my junior year in college. While also soaking up time with my mother and family, I was enjoying a pretty successful summer internship at my home church, First Christian Church of Roswell, New Mexico.

In addition to working with the youth group and doing hospital visits, I was allowed the privilege of preaching once a month for the three-month period I was there. The Sunday in question was July 1st, the Sunday just prior to July 4th, Independence Day, a day we celebrate freedom, justice, and the American way.

Now, let me back up for a moment. My time at Phillips University was pretty typical for most college students, and one of the defining characteristics was that I had found my voice as a young adult. I had learned that I did not have to share the same opinions on things such as politics and religion as my family, my community back home, nor even my church. You catch that? “Nor even my church.”

Well, you remember the early 1980’s, with Ronald Reagan’s strong America approach, emphasizing military spending and him being caught on tape calling Russia the “Evil Empire.” You remember that? Well, I had become involved in the Disciples Peace Fellowship, which had a chapter at my university, and I had been reading up on classic peace texts of the time: “Making Peace In The Global Village” by Robert McAfee Brown and “The Fate Of The Earth” by Jonathan Schell. Okay, you get the picture. I’d gone from campaigning for Reagan in high school to going on peace marches in college.

So, forward again to July 4th weekend at my hometown church… I preached what I thought was a simple and biblically-accurate sermon on Matthew 5:23 about not leaving your offering at the altar until any grievances with your brother or sister are reconciled. Sounds nice enough, except that I linked “you” with the United States and “your brother or your sister” with Russia, and named the grievance as the nuclear arms race we were in.

Well, the proverbial fan was a mess! Before the week’s end I was hauled before the Board of Elders and reminded in no uncertain terms that members of that congregation had served our country in times of war, and sons of church members had died for our country in war, and who was I to so brashly condemn the United States for its valid need for a strong defense? I was rightfully humbled.

Now, I offer this extended personal story not as a way to make a point on current political circumstances, but because it may begin to get us to the emotional feeling of our scripture text for the day.

Jesus was a Nazareth boy. It is true he was born in Bethlehem and traveled to Egypt early on because of that scary Herod. But Jesus was raised in Nazareth and lived there, we presume, for a great deal of the time until his ministry really began at about the age of 30. Thirty years is quite enough time for the folks at the coffee shop downtown to have you figured out pretty well. They know your basic personality, who you hang out with, what you’re good at and not so good at. Plus, if for some reason they don’t know that stuff about you, they know your parents. And for the crowd that hangs out at ol’ Jedidiah’s Diner: that’s all they need to know! Who yur’ Ma and Pa are!

But now, Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s kid, has come back to preach in the synagogue in which he grew up. I don’t believe they had Bar Mitzvah’s then, but I strongly suspect he had read the Torah there before, maybe even helped with other rituals. In any case, the hometown folks knew what to expect. They knew his family, they knew his upbringing, they knew his personality, they knew Jesus!

What they didn’t know is that something had changed, something was different about this hometown boy. Since the last time they saw him, he had been baptized and, in words that said more than the ink on the page could express, he was “filled with the power of the Spirit.”

When he stepped up to read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, they saw the young Jesus they knew from before. But the person who stepped up was a man with a mission. And it was no accident that he preached the words from Isaiah 61:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he 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.’

As I have preached to you before, this was Jesus’ Mission Statement, and it both gave life to his mission and it described his ministry.

At first, the home town crowd seemed genuinely pleased. They’d probably heard this text read before by other wise folks dozens of times, and it meant probably about the same as it had the first five or ten times they’d heard it. They were even impressed when Jesus stated “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Clearly, the word that had gotten to them, about this hometown boy done good, about his ministry helping the sick and the poor, was enough to make the folks back home proud as punch. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

Perhaps any other preacher would have stopped there. If this had been before his baptism Jesus might have felt enough had been said. But he was different now, and what they expected and what he expected from this moment were very different. So Jesus offered a little more, a couple of pointedly personal illustrations that brought the meaning of scriptures into focus. Kinda like my attempt to illustrate Matthew 5 with the names of the superpowers of the day. Only Jesus’ examples had much more integrity than I ever could hope for.

Now, before we get into the examples Jesus used, let’s talk a little bit about expectations. You see, I think expectations, great and small, drive a whole lot of our lives, either us trying to live up to expectations or us attempting to run like crazy away from them. We all have expectations placed on us, just by being born we have expectations. Actually, many expectations are present before we are born. How many of you have names that are variations on a name of the opposite sex? I mean to say, how many of you had either one or both your parents expecting a boy if you’re a girl, or a girl if you’re a boy? Try living life as a girl named “Charlie” or a boy named “Sue.”

Then, once you are born, living up to your parents’ and society’s expectations of what it means to be male or female will be a lifelong quest for most of us, not to mention for those among us who come to discover their emotional gender is different from their biology or those who understand maleness and femaleness in much broader, more colorful ways! I’m reminded of this each week when I watch the television show “Ugly Betty” as Betty’s young nephew, Justin, is wonderfully at ease with himself, even if his grandfather keeps telling him to act more like a boy. Justin does not let his family nor the world’s expectations decide who God created him to be.

For the rest of us, it’s not always that easy. Living up to or into sex roles is only part of the struggle. Family expectations are the stuff of which legends are made. We have parents who expect us to either be like them, not like them, or some ambiguous mixture in-between. Sometimes it is the expectation that a son or daughter will take over the family business or go into the same profession as one of the parents. When becoming grandparents, oftentimes the parenting skills of the previous generation are either extolled as virtuous or labeled as detrimental.

Beyond family members, we have expectations laid on us by friends, coaches, coworkers, even pastors. I worry quite often that when I use the language of “calling,” as in “What is God calling you to do or be?” I am laying a heavy burden on folks who see that as one more expectation to which to live up to.

But, of course, the most difficult of all expectations to fulfill are not those of our parents, our coaches nor our pastors: they are our own. What we expect of ourselves, and whether or not we have allowed those expectations to grow and change with us, define who we are in the present.

And this gets us back to Jesus, the expectations of his neighbors and childhood friends, and his own expectations. I believe Jesus offers us a new way of looking at expectations, through the way in which he responded to the folks in Nazareth who got upset when he began using specific examples to illustrate the text from Isaiah.

I believe Jesus was clear that he was called by God, but that he avoided setting into stone the expectations that would naturally flow from this calling. Last week’s story of the Wedding Feast at Cana, and Jesus being persuaded by his mother to turn the water into wine, even though he did not think it was his “time,” is a perfect example of this. Early on Jesus’ own expectations are shifted, redirected, loosened up in order for God’s work to be done in the here and now.

And this is what he’s trying to tell the hometown crowd, even though they don’t seem to be getting it. When they respond sweetly and halfheartedly to his reading of this profound and really revolutionary text, about seeing God in the least of those in society, and serving God first and foremost by serving those who are usually last and least, he knows they don’t get it. So, he takes it further, he expounds upon Isaiah’s brilliant and radical proclamation by first confronting the congregation with what he sees as their true expectations: Could Jesus ever really live up to all the expectations about miracles and healings which they’ve heard through the rumor mill because, after all, they know all about him and he’s just an upstart boy-next-door from Nazareth. Wasn’t it Nathaniel who said, “What good can come out of Nazareth?”

You can just hear them say, “Dance, cowboy!” and start shooting off their guns at the ground. “Cure yourself, Doctor!” Do all those fancy things we’ve heard tell of. And Jesus reminds them that hometown expectations are always the worst. It’s not that Jesus couldn’t heal in Nazareth, it was simply that they will always allow their previous knowledge of Jesus to shape, or in this case mis-shape, anything he does. He was trying to free them up to see God at work in new ways in familiar faces.

It reminds me of the joke I’ve told here before about the church that gets a new pastor, and for the first time it’s a woman. The crotchety old chair of the board takes her out fishing one day. After getting out to the middle of the pond, they realize they left the tackle box on the shore. The new pastor promptly steps out of the boat, and walks on the top of the water to get the box on the shore. Meanwhile, another man, member of a neighboring church, has brought his boat up alongside the board chair’s. “How’s the new lady preacher working out?” “Well, I guess okay.” Seeing her walking back to the boat with the box, the neighbor says, “She looks like she’s doing well.” “I suppose,” said the board chair, “but our old pastor would never have been so forgetful.”

So, reminding the hometown crowd that their perceptions are part of the problem, he then draws on tradition. Harkening back to two stories from their Bible, Jesus reminds them that it is a longstanding biblical tradition for God to ignore human expectations, and serve whomever God wants to serve, and to save whomever God wants to save. Even if that means bringing salvation to those outside the family, outside the group, outside the city limits. The widow at Zaraphath: Saved! The leper Naaman, the Syrian: Saved! The Mission Statement Isaiah put forth, which is not simply Jesus’ calling, but all of ours who follow Jesus, means that all expectations, yours, mine, our families, our communities, are subject to God’s divine ability to ignore them completely.

This will be both freeing and frightening, because we tend to define a whole lot of life based on long-held assumptions and closely guarded expectations. Sometimes, we spend a lifetime excusing ourselves from doing the real work God is calling us to do, because we can’t let go of some long dead and decaying expectation we or someone else had for ourselves. Sometimes, we spend a lifetime fooling ourselves that the expectation we hold on to for dear life might actually come true, when, in reality, it’s a fantasy never to be realized.

But this is freeing, also, because it means new life is possible. All those tired old images of ourselves that never seemed to work for us can be flushed away. It’s not that God doesn’t have plans for us, or that we shouldn’t make plans, it’s just that God’s hopes and dreams for us are much bigger and richer and bolder than whether or not you can ever play the violin as good as your sister, or if you can run a business like your father, or if you are as pretty or muscular or smart as you expect yourself to be.

God’s hopes and dreams for you are much too big to get caught up in such concerns. Jeremiah 29 says it so well: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

God expects us to live in hope. That’s a very different thing than God expecting this specific path or that specific identity for you. Like a truly loving and wise parent, the specifics don’t matter: God just wants you to live life fully. Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and have life abundant.”

Abundant life, lived in hope, means endless possibilities. And the possibilities will change from day to day, minute by minute even! They have to, because life changes in an instant. Accidents, illnesses, pregnancy tests, job openings, new loves and just life in general. But as people baptized in the Holy Spirit, with living life in its fullness as our focus, our goal, our desired outcome, whether or not we live up to the expectations of ourselves or others is not the point. Faithfully following God is the point! Now if we can just be kind enough, free enough, to lift the burdensome expectations we’ve placed on our own shoulders and those of others, then God’s Spirit may have a chance to lead us where it will. Then, in confidence, we can live life fully and abundantly.

I’ll end with Martina McBride’s latest hit, Anyway to illustrate this point:

You can spend your whole life building something from nothing
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway
You can chase a dream that seems so out of reach and you know it might not ever come your way
Dream it anyway

Chorus:
God is great, but sometimes life ain’t good
And when I pray it doesn’t always turn out like I think it should
But I do it anyway, I do it anyway

This world’s gone crazy and it’s hard to believe that tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway
You can love someone with all your heart, for all the right reasons, and in a moment they can choose to walk away
Love ‘em anyway

[Repeat Chorus]

You can pour your soul out singing a song you believe in that tomorrow they’ll forget you ever sang
Sing it anyway, sing it anyway

I sing, I dream, I love, anyway,




Rev. Allen V. Harris
Franklin Circle Christian Church
www.FranklinCircleChurch.org


 

Copyright 2007 -- The Rev. Allen V. Harris

Franklin Circle Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

1688 Fulton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113-3096