“Simple.
Free.”
Luke
4:16-30
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
January
31, 2010
Evensong
Meditation on the Musical Theme - “’Tis the Gift to Be Simple, ‘Tis the
Gift to Be Free”
The gospel writers
were not historians or biographers. They
were storytellers and Luke is perhaps the best storyteller of them all.
I want us to think
about it again, the issue of truth. When
truth is defined as what is factually true, then truth is small and limited.
To understand the gospels as biographies of Jesus and as purely
historical documents limits them to a particular time and place.
They still may be very interesting, as history and biography are, but
they draw our focus to the past. The
Jesus of history may be fascinating, but what is the connection to now?
Where is the good news for the twenty-first century if the gospels are
intended to be histories of the first part of the first century or biographies
of a great life?
Stories, however,
factually true or not, have been used since language was invented to share the
truth. It is why Jesus used parables
to teach. The parable of the
prodigal son is not a true story in the sense that it actually happened, in the
sense that Jesus was a Walter Cronkite reporting from the scene, but a story
that Jesus made up in order to convey the deep truth about how life works in the
At the presbytery
clergy retreat that Cindy and I attended this week, a pastoral colleague of mine
told a story about his own prodigal son and how hard the recent Christmas season
had been for his family. He
said that he prays constantly that his son “comes to himself” and how he has
been amazed at the grace God has supplied to him so that he can be a patient,
waiting, hoping, forgiving, loving father. So
my friend draws tremendous strength from the truth of that gospel story that was
not factually true.
We get intimations in
our scripture reading today that Luke was not overly interested in facticity.
That is not the kind of truth Luke was getting at.
For instance, Luke says that after hearing the fine points of what Jesus
had to say to the congregation in Nazareth, the people in the synagogue were so
enraged, so upset, so angry, so beside themselves, so threatened, that they
wanted to throw him off a nearby cliff. The
problem is that
The truth is that the
gospel oftentimes is hard to hear, particularly for those who consider
themselves “insiders,” because “status” counts for almost nothing in the
divine economy of things. The truth
is that the gospel oftentimes is hard to hear, especially when we are certain
that our ways of thinking about things are God’s ways.
The gospel that Jesus commended has a maddening way of extending God’s
love and care to outsiders, outcasts, immigrants, exiles, and to people on the
wrong side of the tracks. The gospel
of Jesus declares that God’s love is all-inclusive, all-embracing, and
universal.
Some commentators say
that we are experiencing a “politics of anger” these days, that peoples’
fatigue with all the tumult, all the terror, all the turning aside of the way
things used to be is causing us to retire into ourselves, to retrench, to re-tribalize
into an “us against them” mentality with “them” representing anyone or
anything we think might cost us something more than we want to give.
But Jesus says to
those who would live in the world as God’s children – “It
shall not be so among you.”
What strikes me about
Jesus is the simple – though not simplistic – the simple nature of his
message – “God loves everyone.”
“The benefits of God’s love are for everyone.”
“If you love God, then love one another with God’s love.”
There are examples in
other places in Luke’s gospel of people who try to make it complicated, who
try to obfuscate (I really wanted to use that word) the truth, who try to be
parsimonious with it:
“Well,
Lord, how many times do we have to forgive somebody who offends us?”
parsimonious
“Well,
Lord, okay, you say I am supposed to love my neighbor, but who exactly counts as
my neighbor?”
“Well,
Lord, just what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?”
The answer each time
is, well, simple. “If you love
God, then love one another with God’s love… the love that is big and
encompassing and…”
Freeing.
That is what God’s love does when it works its way into our lives.
It frees. Storyteller Luke
says that the people were so mad at Jesus that they wanted to hurl him off a
cliff. They were in bondage to their
hubris that told them God’s favor was reserved exclusively for them and were
livid at any contrary suggestion. Meanwhile,
Luke says, “Jesus, free passed through the midst of them who were tangled in
knots and went on his way.”
Jesus told and lived
the simple truth. He needed neither
acclaim nor applause nor fawning over. He
meant well for his hometown hearers, which is why he told them the truth, but
they would have to grapple with what it meant in their own lives as Jesus
already had grappled with what the truth meant in his.
I am speaking
personally now when I say I know I am not yet free.
For freedom has Christ set me free, but I continue to submit to a hundred
yokes of slavery. I am not yet free
because I do not yet yield to the simple truth of God’s love.
I make it complicated and claim with some pride that I
am complicated (as if perhaps to squeeze some exemptions from its demands).
I do not fully and finally trust it and so I sometimes defend myself
against it with self-justifying excuses when I think it asks too much of me.
I protect my own interests at others’ expense.
I am too invested in what others think of me and so I bend and shade
God’s truth and mine.
Anybody else know what
I mean?
All of that does not
condemn me, or you, in any ultimate sense. It
does not make me, or you, a bad person or bad people.
It just means that we are not yet free.
So, hear again tonight
the invitation that Jesus, through Luke the storyteller, offers to you and me,
the one that says,
‘Tis
a gift to be simple. ‘Tis a gift
to be free.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2009 First Presbyterian Church