January 20, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
Luke 4:22–30

I get the sense sometimes that people get frustrated when reading the Bible because they don’t feel like they know enough about it. This week’s scripture lesson has a lot of potential to make you feel that way, because it’s not that well-known of a story; it starts in the middle of things; and then to make matters worse, in this already obscure story, Jesus references two other obscure stories from the Old Testament in order to make his point.

A kind of reality-check to keep in mind is that this is what most of real life is like. When we meet new people, we meet them in the middle of their story. Can you even imagine it being otherwise? Can you imagine meeting someone new and saying, “OK, first tell me everything that has happened to you up until now.” Of course not. We get to know people a bit at a time.

So with today’s story we are in the middle of things, and I’ll give you a little context. If you were here last week, you’ll remember that the scene is in a synagogue in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth. This is where he grew up—the people remember him—and he’s just returned from a long time away. He arrives at the temple; they ask him to read scripture and preach; and he shares with them the powerful message that he has come to share good news and to help people and that life is about to change for the better. The people are clearly moved. Today’s text tells us what happen next.

Continuing with the idea that we meet people in the middle of life—one of my favorite TV shows ever is the show Lost, which was on a few years ago. The show starts like the story Eric just read: in the middle of things. There’s a plane crash, and the survivors find themselves lost on an island in some unknown place. Over the course of the show, you learn, largely through flashbacks, about the people who crashed on the island. You learn bits and pieces of who they were and what they were doing that led up to their getting on a plane in Sydney headed for Los Angeles. Eventually you learn that they all have a vague but important thing in common—something they have in common with many of us as well. Every one of them has something in their life that has left them feeling broken and incomplete. Each of them, in their own way, is running away from something or running towards something or doing the best they can to ignore whatever is wrong, but they all want desperately for their lives to be fixed and healed and they wish that healing would hurry up and happen because they’re tired of feeling broken. The cruel reality is that the healing and wholeness they want so badly can’t be forced. It will have to arrive on its own time, and there is nothing they can do to make it happen any faster.

Now think about what is going on in the story Eric read. Jesus returns to his hometown. It’s early in his ministry, and the young rabbi is gaining quite the reputation for being a great teacher and healer. They’re excited for his visit home, they ask him to preach, and as I said before, he shares with them a powerful message that he has come to share good news and to help people and that life is about to change for the better. The people are clearly moved. And here’s what happens next: He says to them, “Doubtless you will say to me, ‘Do also here in your hometown the things we heard you did at Capernaum.’” The people in Jesus’ hometown want him to help them. They have problems and challenges in their lives. They have heard the stories about what Jesus has been doing in other parts of the country, and they want him to do at home what he has been doing out on the road in his ministry.

He replies by reminding them of two stories.

First story: Long ago, there was a great famine in and around the land of Israel. There was no rain, so the crops stopped growing and the rivers dried up. A prophet named Elijah was living at that time, and God gave Elijah special instructions about how to survive the famine. God tells Elijah to leave Israel and to live with a widow who lives in a place called Sidon. And there God works a miracle. The widow has one jar of flour and one jar of oil to make bread, and for as long as Elijah stays with her, the flour jar never gets empty and the oil never runs dry. The miracle continues until the rains come back. There are plenty of widows back in Israel struggling through the famine, but over in Sidon, Elijah and the foreign widow survive the famine.

Second story: Naaman is a Syrian general and an enemy of Israel. Naaman has been a successful general; he is rich and powerful and highly regarded. Everything seems to go his way, except one thing: he has a skin disease he’s never been able to get rid of. One day, out on a raid, Naaman captures an Israelite girl, and she becomes his wife’s servant. And she says to him, “If you go to my home, to the land of Israel, and ask, there is a prophet there who can cure your skin disease.” The last thing Naaman wants to do is to ask the enemy for help, but the girl eventually persuades him. And miraculously, Naaman is healed. Plenty of people in Israel had skin diseases too, but the general of the enemy is the one who is healed.

The story says “when [the people] heard [these two stories,] everyone in the synagogue was filled with anger. They rose up and ran [Jesus] out of town. They led him to the crest of the hill on which their town had been built so that they could throw him off the cliff.”

Of course they did, because Jesus, this great teacher and healer who had grown up in their very own town, had been out doing wonderful things for strangers all over the country, but to them, he said, “It’s not your time.” You may not get what you want, you may not get it the way you want it, and you may not get it when you want it.

The message is just like what happens to the people I was describing to you in Lost. They all have a vision about how they want their lives to change, but they don’t get it in their way or on their timetable.

This is a difficult teaching of Jesus, but it is one of the most honest and applicable things the Bible has to teach us about life. Life is often very much like what Jesus is describing. We usually have somewhat limited control over the things in our lives that we would like to see change, the places where we feel broken and incomplete and in need of healing. We can’t control when we get sick and how long it will last or when a loved one dies and how long we will have to grieve. We can’t predict when we might get laid off or when the next job will come along. When we are lonely and long for companionship, we can’t rush or force the process of meeting the right person; we have to be patient and hope that at some point love will happen for us. The same reality happens on a social level. We can’t count on it being the case that Congress will get their act together on a timetable that makes sense to us or that those who disagree with us about gun control or mental health provision will come to their senses so that we can make our country safer. On this weekend in particular, remembering Dr. King, we are mindful that racism and poverty are not disappearing on a scale that is acceptable to any of us, even though we all wish those things were different and better.

Now let me be sure to be clear about something: I am not arguing that there is nothing you can do to change things in your life or the lives of others or to make things better. We can take good care of ourselves and limit the chances that we will get sick. We can learn how to grieve in healthy ways. We can work hard and hope not to lose our jobs. We can cultivate in ourselves the kind of emotional health that will make us good relationship partners when love comes along. We can argue for better and fairer laws. We can give out of our own abundance to help someone else who is poor, and we can confront the tendencies in our own selves that are still racist or prejudiced or unjust. We can and should do all of those things. But in the midst of this, there are many things in life that require tremendous patience, and there are many times when we must witness others getting what they want before we get what we want.

This is not a feel-good story. This is Jesus’ straight talk about faithful living. Because one of the toughest things about being human is the realization that you can’t always expect things to be your way or on your timetable. Mature, faithful living is built around the knowledge that God doesn’t always behave the way we want and we can’t allow that fact to tear down our faith.

This story is about living faithfully in the midst of our human shortcomings, because right now we are in the middle of a story that we know only in part. One theologian who has written about this story, reminds us that the story is about “[seeking to make] sense of God, life, and the important issues before us, even though we usually begin in the middle of things. Rarely do we start at the beginning of any story, even our own, and rarely do we see a story to the end. Seeing things whole is a divine, not a human, perspective; and still we are not absolved of our own responsibility to try to make sense” (Eaton, Feasting on the Word, C1). Some weeks the Bible offers us lessons that are not the easiest to hear but are important particularly because they are hard and because they are honest.

I would love nothing more than to stand up here every week and tell you that life is easy and that everything is going to fine and that things will change for the better as soon as you want them to. But one of the things I value most about this community is that we are honest with each other. So this was the appointed text for today, and I have sought to tell you what I honestly think it means. I do believe that if we are honest with each other, we can be of the most help to one another, as we live together and do our best in a world that does not always run on your schedule or mine.

Because I don’t think this news is all bad, I’ll close with a story that’s kind of cute. I have a minister friend who performed one of the most brilliant acts of parenting I’ve ever seen. When his son was four and going through a period of being fairly demanding about things, my friend taught his son some Rolling Stones lyrics. Every time little Michael demanded something that just wasn’t going to happen, his dad, said, “Michael, what do the Stones say?” And Michael would huff and puff and then would look at his daddy and say, “You can’t always get what you want.” And then he would say, “What else, Michael?” And Michael would answer, “But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.” What a brilliant way to help someone grow. Amen.