Sunday, September 1, 2019 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Jesus the Disrupter

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 81:1, 10–16
Luke 14:1, 7–14

God’s expectations are not in exchange for God’s love, but only so that we might more fully live the lives God so desires for us and envisions for us.

Karoline Lewis
“God’s Pro Quo”
www.workingpreacher.org

When was the last time Jesus disrupted your life? When was it? And I am not talking about an expected kind of disruption, like the one many of us just experienced when we took our first born kiddos to college. That is a normal and appropriate disruption. No, what I am talking about is a Jesus-initiated, usually rather messy, sometimes quite painful but ends up being liberating, disruption? When was the last time that happened to you?

I experienced a small Jesus-disruption just yesterday, nothing major, but enough of one to make me sit up and take notice. I was working on this sermon and procrastinating, as I do, so I was reading some things on our church’s website—the interviews of our Jazz at Four worship leaders to be exact. And with this sermon rambling around in my mind, I came across words from our 4:00 p.m. jazz quartet drummer, Marcus.

As part of his response to the question as to why he is here every Sunday afternoon at 4:00, Marcus said this: “I look forward to when it won’t be necessary to wrestle with how the privileged should be more kind to the underprivileged.” Maybe you don’t feel it in the same way, but that is a beautiful gut punch to us white, progressive, mainline Protestant preachers, and I appreciated it.

“Alright now, Jesus,” I said internally. “I don’t have time for this. I have a sermon to write, and it could easily go in that direction of bland surface inclusion.” But as I spoke those words to myself, I already knew that the way Jesus had just disrupted my sermon through the voice of Marcus was going to ring in my ears for a long time.

But again, that was just a blip on the disruption radar screen. What about you? When was the last time you were going along, living your life, moving through your particular routine, when all the sudden . . . wham, Jesus shows up and messes with you. Have you had a moment like that?

I am willing to bet that you have. Jesus-disruptions happen in the life of a disciple. Yet we might not realize it, because we are not necessarily paying attention. Many of us are not purposefully tuned into the ways that Jesus often acts as our great disrupter. Sometimes we are not tuned in because we don’t really want to notice. We are quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much. Thus we are not all that interested in paying too much attention to Jesus, because if we did, we would have to become dissatisfied with the way things are. And who has the time or energy for that!

Will Willimon, former chaplain at Duke, tells a story about a day in which he had lunch with the school’s quarterback. Willimon asked him, “Well, what do you think of what we do on Sundays at Duke Chapel?” “I don’t think about it,” the young man responded with his mouth full. “Never been in the chapel.” “You’ve been here for three years and have never attended a service at the chapel?” Willimon responded, pushing his chair back from the table. “God give me patience,” he muttered. “Never felt the need,” the quarterback continued. “I went to church some when I was a kid. From what I can remember, Christians are always trying to get people to change, to be better people. I’m happy with my life the way it is right now, so I don’t see the need. Are you going to eat those fries?” the quarterback concluded. “That’s a surprisingly intelligent reason not to come to church,” Willimon marveled. “I shall do that in needlepoint, frame it, and put it over the chapel’s front door . . . ‘God at work. Dare not enter this chapel if you are risk averse to emerging as a different person’” (William Willimon, Accidental Preacher, p. 96).

I would have marveled too, because the quarterback was right. To live as a follower of Jesus Christ is to choose to live a life open to being disrupted by the Holy. Changed. Interrupted. Questioned. Challenged. All in the service of God’s unrelenting stubbornness to make us new. So new, as a matter of fact, that we might actively be at work living that newness out until the past is finished and gone, and everything has become fresh and new, and the day has long passed when we came to church to wrestle rather patronizingly with how the privileged need to be kinder to the underprivileged. Preach it, brother Marcus.

Disruption was and is a primary part of Jesus’ work. Just look at today’s scripture from Luke 14. There he is, once again at the home of a Pharisee. Eating and drinking like usual, making the rounds, getting the lay of the land. And let’s be clear—Jesus could have easily chosen to just fit in and not make any waves. He could have simply made small talk with the other religious leaders, chatted up potential new disciples, been kind to those serving them but not too kind, observing all the socially appropriate boundaries and shoring them up by doing so.

Jesus could have easily arrived and simply followed the rules, ignoring the man who needed healing, sitting where his name, Jesus of Nazareth, was written in calligraphy script and embossed on the ivory nameplate. He could have played it nicely, politely. And yet—you know where this is going—that is not who Jesus was. It is not who Jesus is.

No, instead, Jesus barged into that room, aware that everyone was watching him, especially the other religious leaders. After he healed the man who needed his help, he immediately started openly critiquing all of the not-so-subtle social jockeying that was going on, for in just the few minutes he had been in the room, he had already seen how people seemed to be engaged in conversation with each other and yet simultaneously were also scanning the room with their eyes, trying to see if someone more important had come in, so they could make a quick exit from the conversation they were having and move on up the social food chain. That kind of social climbing drove Jesus crazy.

For if I understand the Gospels correctly, there is little that gets on Jesus’ nerves more than when those who have much are focused only on getting more. From what I see in the Gospels, Jesus has zero patience for greed, for narcissism, and for exploitation. Frankly, Jesus has very little patience for most of us who have power and who find ourselves at the center of things, especially when our expressed or unexpressed desire is simply to keep it and lay low. No, Jesus desires to disrupt the lives of those who are comfortable with the status quo, in order to eventually disrupt the status quo of a world that is comfortable with inequity and injustice.

Yet none of this should surprise us. As Jesus grew within her womb, his mother Mary sang about the great reversal that God would deliver, bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lonely. In his very first sermon, Jesus himself preached that disruption would be a part of his mission. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,” Jesus announced, quoting the prophet Isaiah.

Getting back to Luke 14, it was that same sense of call into the salvific ministry of disruption that led Jesus to tell the parable to all of the well-heeled dinner guests on that evening. He wanted to vividly illustrate how ridiculous their behavior looked from the vantage point of the realm of God. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor,” he began, not so subtly chastising everyone for their focus on status and honor.

Through the contours of the parable, Jesus asked those who had gathered that night, “Do you really think any of this matters to God? Do you really think where you rank in the social strata means anything to the God who brought you out of slavery in the land of Egypt, who provided for you with manna and water from a rock so you might be a blessing to all the nations and not just to yourselves? Do you honestly think your games of climbing the social ladder please the One who created you?” asked the great disrupter, Jesus.

And then, after he took on all those who had come to the party, he focused his disruption on the host himself. “The next time you throw a party,” Jesus announced in full view and voice of all those in the room—the guests and the servants—“don’t invite these people. Don’t invite those who are always invited to everything. Don’t invite those who have made their home in the center of things. Don’t maintain the status quo. You are meant for more than that.”

“No, as my disciples, you are to interrupt it. Disrupt it. Get out into the streets and yell out the invitation to come. Throw open the doors. Let the music spill out down the steps and into the alleyways. As a matter of fact, go out of your way to invite everybody who never got a valentine in their elementary school class. Invite everybody who only had one pair of jeans and one threadbare coat to get through a whole winter season and who prayed no one would notice. Invite everybody whose teeth were awfully messed up but whose parents could never afford braces. Invite everybody whom people avoid because their hygiene isn’t what it used to be. Invite everybody you don’t understand or identify with.”

“How about this,” Jesus continued, “you want to be a part of my work of holy disruption? Then invite everybody whom our country is trying to keep out or throw out. Invite everybody who feels like the world is passing them by. Invite everybody who inhabits the borderlands of power and privilege. Don’t invite these people,” Jesus preached, gesturing all around him. “Invite all of those other people instead. But as you do that, let’s be clear,” the Holy Disrupter continued, “don’t invite them so you, the privileged one, might be seen for being nice to the underprivileged one, feel good about it, and then go on about your merry way. That is not what this is about.”

“No. Invite them because in me they are your family,” Jesus said. “Invite them because in truth I am the host, not you, and they are the ones I am determined to bring in. Invite them because you all need each other to work as partners for the transformation I am determined to unleash. Invite them because, frankly, you are not whole without their witness. Invite them because my table will have empty chairs if all of you are not sitting there together, and the One who created you cannot stand an empty chair when people are still waiting to be seated.”

“Invite them because I told you to do so. Invite them so you might be disrupted, interrupted, challenged, and stretched. Your go-along-to-get-along life is calling out to be disrupted, and you will not fully live as your baptized self until you pay attention to that. Invite them,” Jesus insists, “because it is Gospel work.”

Now, I need to interrupt Jesus for just a minute to bring this home to us. Friends, this holy call to be a part of Jesus’ disruption is why we are intent on doing the hard, complex, messy work of moving towards racial equity and initiating anti-racism efforts here at church. We are committed to the work because Jesus desires to interrupt our white-centered status quo in order for this whole faith community to resemble Christ’s living body more faithfully. We don’t do this work because it is the politically hip thing to do. We have been trying to work on anti-racism efforts for almost thirty years, since our first anti-racism task force back in 1992. We do the work of moving towards racial equity because Jesus tells us to do it. This is one of the ways Jesus is actively disrupting Fourth Presbyterian Church in these days. And if it makes you nervous, that’s OK. I know it can be uncomfortable. And if you secretly feel like the quarterback who is quite happy with your church just the way it is thank you very much, then you might indeed be very uncomfortable with this focus. I get it. But here is the thing: This is not disruption for disruption’s sake, for I believe with all my heart that this kind of messy and beautiful work is a holy disruption that will lead to our salvation, our being made whole.

For that is the whole point of Jesus’ disruptive activity. God did not send Jesus into the world merely to disrupt the world or to condemn it. No, God sent Jesus into the world in order to save it, in order to bring it back into full reconciliation with the purposes of God, and as we see in this text and in so many others, one of the primary ways Jesus saves is through his work of holy disruption.

As Willimon wrote, “It’s odd that some characterize God’s creative work as the making of order and stability. I’ve found the opposite to be true; you’ll know it’s the [triune God] if it’s disruptive. Because of God’s refusal to leave well enough alone, Christians’ lives are always on the verge of being out of control” (Accidental Preacher). May it be so with us as the work of Holy Disruption continues. Amen.