A More Excellent Way

Grace Church

Epiphany 4, 2010

January 31, 2010

I know that for most of us, our primary exposure to scripture comes on Sunday morning. A few of us might read the text more closely, study the bible either individually or in groups. Some of us are relatively familiar with the texts from Sunday School, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people who attend Episcopal Churches have at best a superficial knowledge of scripture. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing you. If anything, I’m criticizing the church, and its lay clerical leadership, for not taking the education of children and adults seriously enough.

What that superficial knowledge of scripture leads to is a pretty fuzzy, incomplete, and misleading understanding of who Jesus was. Most of us have a picture of him in our minds as a nice guy, good teacher, who didn’t ruffle many feathers, or if he did, it was only because they needed to be. That image of Jesus as a nice guy may be so deeply engrained in us that when we hear stories like the gospel that was just read, we either miss the conflict entirely, or totally misinterpret it.

As I said last week, Luke dramatically alters this story of Jesus’ return to his hometown, moving it to the very beginning of his ministry, telling the reader what Jesus said, and shifting the focus away, at least slightly from the reception he receives there. Perhaps the most striking element in Luke’s story is that it seems as if Jesus goads the crowd into taking action against him. There’s an odd and abrupt shift of sentiment. Luke reports that all spoke well of him and were amazed at his gracious words.. Then the crowd asked, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”

It’s after that question that Jesus seems to provoke them. First he quotes the proverb, “Doctor, heal yourself;” and says that they will want him to do the sort of healings in Nazareth that he has done elsewhere. Instead of answering those objections directly, Jesus cites the two examples from Hebrew Scripture, the great prophets Elijah and Elisha, and their healing of two gentiles.

The meaning of this exchange is obscure. Does Jesus want to incite the crowd’s anger? Or is something else going? Is his challenge to them a response to the question, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” If we think back to what I said last week about the Isaiah text quoted by Jesus. It serves in Luke as what we could Jesus’ mission statement and his identity as Messiah is measured by the extent to which he preached good news to the poor, gave sight to the blind, etc. So, he is basically laying out his future ministry to his listeners, identifying himself as the Messiah, and declaring the year of the Lord’s favor. And the response from the crowd was not recognition that he is the Messiah, but recognition that he is one of their own, Joseph’s son. They are given everything they need to see him as the Messiah, but all they can see is the one who grew up among them.

Sometimes it is hard to see what’s in front of our eyes, and sometimes it’s hard to accept the message coming to us—whether that message is good news or bad. In fact, it’s often the case that the best news is the hardest to hear. Jesus came to Nazareth, proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, proclaiming, in other words, the coming of God’s reign. His listeners didn’t understand what he was talking about, but when he put it into words they could understand, they recoiled and resisted. When he mentioned Hebrew prophets healing gentiles, their ears closed up and they attacked him.

Accepting the new can be dangerous and scary. We don’t know what might happen down the road. We can’t see clearly into the future. For most of us, we’re pretty comfortable with doing things the way we’ve been doing them. They seem to work pretty well, after all.

But closer examination reveals that isn’t the case. I mentioned last Sunday some of the discussion the vestry had on our retreat two weeks ago. We talked about our vision for the future, and we also did some hard work laying out some of Grace’s strengths and weaknesses. Inevitably, as is always the case in such conversations, talk turned to the way things used to be. Long-time members can remember when our congregation was much larger, when we had a youth group of fifty members and a Sunday School that filled the education wing. Often, such reminiscences can turn into discussions of how we might get back to that time.

Well, the reality is that the world, Madison, and the church have changed dramatically. To make the point, I will use a very different example than Grace Church. A few years ago, I did some consulting work with a parish in the county seat of a largely rural county in South Carolina. Their congregation had declined significantly since the sixties, and they were hoping to turn things around. The mantra I heard repeatedly was “We’ve got to attract young families.” The county’s population was declining, because the textile mills that had provided employment had closed and there was around 20% unemployment. I did some demographic research and learned that something like a third of the children under age 18 lived in single-parent households. In other words, the chances of attracting two-parent families with stable employment were pretty low. If they wanted to be the church and grow, they were going to need to do some creative, and hard, thinking.

We at Grace need to do some hard thinking too. It’s easy for many of us to think back to the “good old days” of the fifties through the eighties when the church thrived. But those days are long gone. As I said, the world, Madison, and the church have changed. Many of these changes are gigantic—like the lessening role of religion in America and in Madison, increased ethnic diversity—I could cite dozens of things. Some of them may seem relatively insignificant, like the growing importance of Sunday as the only day when families can spend time together. We can do little or nothing about many of them, but taken together they mean that to expect the church to look like what it did thirty or forty years is not only unrealistic, it would lead to its complete irrelevance, and probably its death.

But still, we hold on to that vision of the past. It collides with the present and impedes our future. That is true for an individual parish like Grace. It’s also true for our denomination as a whole, and indeed for mainline Christianity. So what do we do? How do we capture a vision of the future, that brings what is best of our tradition forward and brings the life-giving message of the gospel into a new world?

Well, that’s the question. It may seem innocuous, but in fact, different answers to that question, different ways of approaching it, can lead to intense conflict. In a very profound way, conflict over that question is what has driven conflict within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican communion for a very long time and it threatens to tear our denomination and our global communion apart. But there can be, and often is, equally intense conflict on the local level. When facing such conflict, it’s important to remember that in spite of our differences, there are deep and lasting bonds that tie us together.

That’s what Paul is talking about in I Corinthians. The past few words we have read his famous analogy of the Christian community as the body of Christ, in which each member is of equal importance. He didn’t write that in a vacuum. In fact, the community of Corinth to which he was writing was embroiled in nasty conflict internally, but also externally, with Paul himself. He writes in order to hold that community together, and in order to preserve his relationship with it. That’s the context for today’s reading, the so-called love chapter.

He has just been saying that there is a variety of gifts, but the same spirit, varieties of services, but the same Lord, varieties of activities, but the same God. He uses the metaphor of the body to stress the organic relationship of all members in the community, the necessity of all, the importance of all. When he comes to the end of that discussion, he transitions from it by saying, “But let me show you a more excellent way.” And with that, he begins “Though I speak with the tongue of mortals and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.” Paul was talking about relationships within the body of Christ. Love is that which binds us together; indeed love creates the body of Christ.

But love is also the path showing our way into the future. We live in a culture in which it seems impossible to disagree and remain in relationship. Our political discourse is impoverished, little more than shrill rhetoric aimed at scoring points, whether that conflict is over healthcare or the Edgewater development. In the Episcopal Church it seems easier to walk away than to remain in conversation with those with whom we disagree. And for many, when there is conflict in a parish, we find it easier to leave than to stay and struggle. Yet, if we are to be the body of Christ, if we are to offer God’s Christ’s reconciling love to the world, there is no more excellent way, than to show that love in all that we do as God’s people in the world, as God’s people in this world.