Last week, if you were here, you heard Jesus in his hometown of Nazareth, reading from the scroll of Isaiah these words:
18 “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 set free those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
What you didn’t hear last week was what happened next.
Let’s listen to those words now. The passage is Luke 4: 22-30:
22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.
23 Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy[g] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
At first, the people are amazed. But then, Jesus reminds them that God’s love and justice have never been just for them alone. He speaks of how God worked through outsiders—foreigners, even enemies—showing that divine grace is wider than they imagined. And suddenly, their amazement turns to rage. They drive him out of town and try to throw him off a cliff. (Sermon notes – Worship Design Studio)
As I said at the opening of worship… It’s easy to judge them, but how often do we do the same? How often do we resist a truth that asks us to widen our embrace? How often do we let go of hope because it doesn’t come in the form we expected? Or actively reject it, because it asks something new of us? At the heart of this passage is the fear that if God’s blessings extend to others, there might not be enough left for us.
But the good news is that God’s love is not a scarce resource. There is more than enough—enough healing, enough justice, enough grace—for everyone. When we embrace this truth, we don’t need to push others away or cling tightly to what we think is ours. Instead, we can trust in the abundance of God’s kin-dom and live with open hands and open hearts.
As Christians, we say that our hope is Jesus and I believe that those of us who profess a loving God… one that cares about ALL people, are being called to be much braver than we’ve had to be about our faith. Lent starts in a few more weeks and Stephen Fram and I are going to offer a study group or two based on the book my Bishop Budde: How We Learn to Be Brave. Most of us haven’t been called upon to be brave in our faith, most of us were brought up in a time when Christianity and a mostly loving God was the norm in the culture. What the public mostly sees of Christianity is a very twisted facsimile of what Jesus professed. To the extent that a supposedly democratic government calls for sanctions for a bishop who asked for mercy on marginalized people, who used scripture to entreat one of them most powerful people in the world.
It would be easy to despair… believe me, every time, I open up my phone there seems to be something new that fills me with foreboding. But the other thing I’m noticing is that with each new outrage coming from south of the border there is new resistance, new opposition, new organizing. Some of these organizations have existed for years, working for marginalized people. They are ramping up. And we must be prepared as well.
Back in 2019, I, along with about 15 other people made a pilgrimage to Corrymeela in Northern Ireland. Corrymeela is a peace and reconciliation centre that was born after World War 2. Listen to these comments which David Stevens, Leader of the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, made at the Service of Dedication a number of years ago:
“There is a temptation or a tendency to look with morbid fascination of what has gone wrong, or what is going wrong. It’s part of human life. And we in Corrymeela, which is a group committed to reconciliation and peace, are no exception in this. There is the pleasant schadenfreude, which is a wonderful German word which means enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. There is a certain shadenfreude in watching things go wrong and there is the destructive tendency to encourage them to go wrong. Our personal negativity has a wish for general negativity.”
And Thom Shuman, an on-line colleague, writes this: In other words, if I am pessimistic (and part of a group), rather than letting the group lift my spirits or help change my attitude, I want the rest of the group to be pessimistic.
It’s all too true – group dynamics are often affected more by the negativity of a small percentage of people than all the positive outlooks of the majority. So, what can a person, a group, a church do? Not surprisingly, David Stevens of Corrymeela, turns to Scripture.
“When Peter tries to counteract human weakness with words of hope, he did not encourage people to say what was wrong with the world, the church, or society. He did not ask people to draw up a list of problems or negatives. Instead he asks them simply to give an account of the hope that is in them:” . . . explain the hope you have in you.” (1 Peter 3:15) Hope is not denying the troubles of the world, but it’s maintaining that the troubles don’t have the last word.
So, what is the hope that is in us? Hope is not blind optimism. It is not ignoring the realities of injustice, suffering, or rejection. Hope is the conviction that even in the face of resistance, even when we are pushed to the edges, God is still at work. Hope is the courage to proclaim a love that is wider than expected, to insist on justice that includes those who have been cast aside, and to trust in the abundance of God’s grace when the world tells us to hoard what we have.
Hope is resistance.
Hope is resilience.
Hope is persistence.
In a community of faith, we each don’t have to have those gifts and attributes. Hope is leaning on one another when our hope is weak… and propping up someone else when ours is. Jesus did not waver in his mission, even when his own community turned on him. He walked through the crowd and went on his way, continuing to proclaim the good news. We are called to do the same. When we encounter resistance—whether in our personal lives, in our communities, or in the wider world—we do not give up. We bear witness to a love that will not be confined, a justice that will not be silenced, and a hope that will not be defeated. So let us go forward, not with despair, but with trust in the God who calls us beyond fear and scarcity, into a future where there is more than enough for all.
Thanks be to God for the challenge and the opportunity. Amen.
Luke 4: 22-30
February 2, 2025 – SJUC
Six Stone Jars
© Catherine MacDonald
St. James United Church Dartmouth 