As I was working on the text for this week and thinking this presidential election year, I realized that the examples I use should be bipartisan. I’m attempting to do that. I’ve often wondered whether the person in the sixth grade who was sitting next to Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan ever said, “If I had only known he was going to be President, I would have been a little nicer to him.”  In both cases these were people who came from very humble beginnings and who became very influential.  This past year I was at Duke University in North Carolina at a John Wesley seminar. One day I was walking down the hall and saw a huge man wearing a baseball cap and sun glasses. I thought, “What is that guy going to do when he gets to this low ceiling.  He's going to have to bend over to keep from bumping his head.”  About that time I realized who he was.  He began to grin, and I saw it was Michael Jordan. For a day or two I was sad that I saw him.  I have always considered him to be a really big man physically who made an art out of basketball. Actually seeing him face to face, he looked like a regular human being.

When we look at today’s text, I want us to peel away what I often refer to as the Sunday school version that we know about Jesus. Remember, those teachers wanted us to be sure that we knew that Jesus was the Son of God. When we read the text, it’s hard for us to grapple with some of its more profound meanings because we already know where the story is going. I’ve always been intrigued by this text from Luke’s gospel because Jesus starts his public ministry in the worst place that he could. He preaches in his home synagogue.

I grew up in an Italian Catholic neighborhood. There were only two Methodist families in that neighborhood, my parents and one of our neighbors. Everyone else was Italian Catholic. When I came back from seminary, the lady who ran the little grocery store had throat cancer. Her name was Mrs. Romeo. Her priest called and said,  “You can be her pastor better than I can be right now.”  She was the only person I ever let call me Father Tim. When you understand that she was the matron of the neighborhood and swatted my backend as much as my mother, you know why I didn’t challenge her on that. But two months before I moved to Arizona, I preached the homily for her funeral.  The whole church was packed with the little Italian ladies who had helped raise me. As I sat there, I thought, “What do I possibly have to say to these people?” It was true. I was in my early twenties and these were people who had lived a long life and who had nurtured me and given me their wisdom.  I must say they were kind to me, even as I preached Mrs. Romeo’s last sermon. It’s hard to preach to people who know who you are because they know all about you.  But I was glad that day that I had an audience that loved me.

 I think often about this text in Luke’s gospel and about Jesus preaching in front of the people who helped raise him.  Jesus’ preaching is not unusual in the synagogue of his time.  After all, it was customary to gather on the Sabbath, to open the word and read it and to have someone explain it. That is how Rabbinical Judaism worked.  We Christians borrowed that from that tradition. What is amazing is the way people reacted to Jesus. At first some of them said Jesus was Joseph’s son and were proud of him. But the problem was that Jesus didn’t stop at the reading of that text.  He began preaching and his preaching was also meddling into their lives.  By the conclusion of this text they are ready to run Him out of town. I told someone one time that I was in my 40’s had not been crucified yet, so I must not be living my life modeled after Jesus. Jesus stirred up passion. People either were drawn to him or they wanted to destroy him. And the reason was that he was not satisfied with a faith that was simply lived by routine and rote. He read that passage from Isaiah, a proclamation that God’s kingdom was breaking into the world. The poor would be blessed and the blind would see. The oppressed would be set free. He did not speak in terms of the distant future. He spoke of change to come that very day.

All of us want to believe that God’s perfect kingdom will come. But there is a human part of us that does just what those people from Jesus’ hometown did.  We resist believing that that day could break into our lives and into our world right now. We like for things to stay the same. We would prefer to live our lives as they are rather than risk change—what we don’t know and what we can’t see.  We have a difficult time believing that if we really lived our lives as if that kingdom were arriving right now, God would see us through some difficult times. Because we know the rest of the story, we know there was a resurrection. We also know there was a crucifixion before that.  We aren’t sure we want to participate in anything that might make us slightly uncomfortable or take our very lives.

Moody Smith, my New Testament professor, used to say,  “Jesus came preaching a kingdom and He got a church.” There is a lot of truth to that. Every movement eventually must have an institution to embrace it if it is going to last more than one generation.  The question for the church, every generation of its existence, is how faithful it is in demonstrating that it is living the Kingdom that Jesus came preaching. The church has no other reason to exist except to be the institution that believes the Spirit of God is moving and acting in this world, bringing healing and God’s mercy to His world and to His people. That is always the yardstick.

We live in a day of celebrity. And we live in a time the media allows us to see extraordinary things. Can you believe that your computer or television set brings you pictures taken on Mars yesterday?   I’ve often said that the true heroes of our lives will never be found on the sports field no matter how good they are. Not even Michael Jordan!  The true heroes of our lives are the people sitting next to us. I want you to notice that Jesus went into the synagogue and no one said, ”There goes the Son of God.”  They were only to discover He was the Son of God when He did that which God had called Him to. And that brought Him to His death and his resurrection. You will not truly discover that you are a child of God until you step into God’s kingdom and take the risk that you must and give your whole life to it.  There may be even pain and death, but in the end that there will be new life and there will be healing in God’s world. Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer.