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ISSN 2195-3171

4. Sunday after Ephipany, 01/31/2010

Sermon on Luke 4:21-30, by David Hoster

The word of the LORD came to me saying,

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations."

Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." But the LORD said to me,

"Do not say, 'I am only a boy';

for you shall go to all to whom I send you,

and you shall speak whatever I command you,

Do not be afraid of them,

for I am with you to deliver you,

says the LORD."

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me,

"Now I have put my words in your mouth.

See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,

to pluck up and to pull down,

to destroy and to overthrow,

to build and to plant." [NRSV]

___________________________________

In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus read from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and began to say, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

He went down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching them on the Sabbath. They were astounded at his teaching, because he spoke with authority. [NRSV]

At the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus painfully discovers some people who don't like what he has to say. His rejection and near-assassination at the hands of his own hometown friends and relatives foreshadows crucifixion to come. When God puts himself into the grubby hands of ordinary mortals, he gets into trouble in a hurry

So Jesus reads the scroll of Isaiah, and naturally claims the prophecies of the messiah for himself. His hometown folks respond, "Isn't he a nice boy? Aren't we all so proud of him, why the messiah of Israel and all? Everybody knew he was special."

They're ready to open the Messiah's Childhood Home Museum and sell T-shirts.

Jesus knows his mission is compromised by sentiments like these. He faces people who want to snare him in the mold of their own narrow world, and trap him in his past by patronizing him. Jesus, however, is not about the past, but the future-God's future. If he caters to voices that cling to the past, God's future will never come, and so he refuses, telling them, "No prophet is accepted in the prophet's home town."

That's it in a nutshell. The conservative peasants of Jesus' hometown, no less than the Chief Priests and Pharisees in God's hometown of Jerusalem, want God to conform to their mental map of reality. The only future they want is the continuation of a past they think they've figured out.

When God refuses to conform to expectation, people's reaction is ferocious. We should be shocked into disbelief as we read this story and discover that Jesus' own hometown people tried to murder him over his refusal to conform. What could account for such a reaction?

It tells me that mental maps are serious business. Immanuel Kant's whole thesis in the Critique of Pure Reason says that there may be "reality" out there in the world, but what we know is the map of reality in our own heads. That map is life itself to us, because without it we would be paralyzed in the face of chaos. We don't like people or things or ideas that mess with our mental maps.

My favorite map is the Munich Syndrome. I think it's arguably true that this country got into Vietnam because we feared repeating the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. Neville Chamberlain's craven capitulation to the Nazis created such a powerful mental map that Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos looked for all the world like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. When Lyndon Johnson looked at a picture of Ho Chi Minh, he saw Hitler. He believed that world war with the Soviet Union would follow our failure to draw a line at the DMZ in Vietnam.

Now, a generation later, "No More Munichs!" has become "No More Vietnams!" We have a new map of reality in which our future foes look like the Vietnam tarbaby just the way Vietnam once looked like Czechoslovakia. That's going to get us in terrible trouble someday, and then our map will change again.

We live by similar maps in our personal lives. "No more [fill in the blank]!" or "[Such and so] has always worked before," or "What else did you expect out of [so and so]?" Maps tell us about our spouses, families and friends-what to expect from them, how to handle them, which pigeonholes they fit into in our lives. We can catch a snapshot of our personal map by taking tests like the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory, or by asking Aunt Tillie what she really thinks of us.

Our maps were made by our reaction to our vindicators and our abusers, our failures and successes, things that worked and things that didn't. We even have a map of God-what to expect from God, what to do to keep God happy, what God's church is all about. Maps make the world rational and give us a feeling of security grounded in the faith that the past will repeat itself in the future. So compelling are our maps that we get squirmy when they're described as maps at all.

We prefer to call them "reality," and we stone the prophets who, like Jesus, tell us they're not reality at all but transient figments of our imagination.

When Jesus comes to create God's future, it's often at the expense of maps rooted in the past. God's future usually disturbs us because God's imagination is a lot bigger than ours. God's future won't be limited by our past.

The problem is that God isn't the only major power creating our future. Other forces sweep through our lives, and plain, ungodly chaos is one of them. So the question for today is how we tell the difference between God's future and ungodly chaos.

How do we typically figure out the lay of the land when an unfamiliar future lies before us? We try to guess what the future mental map will be five or ten years down the line. We value successful prognosticators and sometimes even call them "prophets." They make us feel safe and reassure us that it is possible to tell the difference between God and chaos.

The problem is that we close our eyes to the failed prognostications littering the ground all around us. The truth is that there is no security in predicting future maps-just good and bad guesses, and many more of the latter.

So here's the bad news: when it comes to something as outlandish as God's future, it looks like we're going to have to let go of our mental maps entirely. No insider information on the hotline to heaven. That's really disturbing. We're going to need a really good reason to take a risk like that.

What is God's alternative to mental maps? We catch a glimpse in the call of Jeremiah, a prophet who will see and speak of God's future (which-no surprise here-looks like total, ungodly chaos to Israel). In commissioning Jeremiah, God puts the basis for Jeremiah's deep knowledge of God's future into very simple words. Jeremiah's foundation has nothing to do with his own the past or future or even that of Israel.

It is given in one simple, thunderously significant sentence: "Before you were formed in the womb," God says, "I knew you."

Before Jeremiah had any past or future, any mental map of the world, any sense of being a self at all, God knew him. The basis for our being God's person, open to God's future and protected against sheer chaos, is the fact that God knows us outside of any experience we have ever had within time and the world. God knows who you really are, not how you've been shaped and mapped by your experience in the world.

The basis for living God's future, then, must be faith. Faith in a God we cannot see. Faith in a true self we have never fully seen. Faith that the God we cannot see knows the self we can't readily discern. The two of them link up out there, off the edge of all our mental maps of reality.

It sounds confusing, and so it seemed to another pilgrim at the beginning of his epic trek to true self and to God. "Midway in our life's journey," Dante Alighieri writes, "I went astray...and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood." So begins the Inferno.

The poet, facing what we would today call a mid-life crisis, strays away from the lighted, familiar map of the world and wanders into deep darkness where there are no maps and nothing makes sense. He is face to face with chaos, lacking any way to see God's future in it. It feels like death to him...it feels like Hell.

He journeys downward through nine trackless descending circles of Hell. Along the way he meets everyone who was anyone. He gets a good hard look at all the failed maps of life. He sees how exactly how people managed to get it wrong in life and exactly where and why each one's particular failure landed them in Hell.

Then, at the very bottom of the pit (at the center of the earth, it turns out), he scoots covertly past Satan himself and begins a long upward climb through Purgatory. This is the Catholic land of painful redemption where all the inadequate (but not fatally flawed) maps are peeled away.

Then, he moves on to Heaven where souls are finally free to turn from all maps and see God face to face. This is the place where Dante knows God as God knows Dante in his soul's true identity. This is the state of attention from God that Jeremiah describes with the words, "before you were formed in the womb, I knew you."

The journey of Dante is one well known to addicts in recovery, committed artists, and serious spiritual seekers. It is the "dark night of the soul" described by St. John of the Cross.

It is a journey known to any of us when fear of death captures our minds, or when we question our maps of the world with the immortal words, "What the hell's this all about?!!"

The journey begins when our maps fail us, as they do for an addict bottoming out, or like that moment in All in the Family when Gloria rolled over in bed one morning, looked at her husband Michael, and saw him as a total stranger. It's like the moment poor Neville Chamberlain must have experienced when Hitler invaded Poland and he realized his map for avoiding world war had been wrong, wrong, wrong.

The question God's future asks is what will we do when we have no map? We could do as the non-recovered addict does and get another fix. We could do as the Chief Priests and Pharisees and get a bigger hammer to hold the old, failed map together. We can go deeper into denial and pretend everything is OK when in our heart we know it isn't. We can be broken as a human being, living half a life, never able to smile again with a full heart.

Or we can stay the course with Dante, take a deep breath, and let the chaos be. We can register the inadequacy of our maps. We can let them be peeled away in an increasing act of faith. We can say soul-deep prayers with the voice of our hearts. We can call on God who lives off the edge of maps in the places labeled "Terra Incognita," and "Here be Monsters."

Our journey is steadiness, followed by honesty, followed by faith. It leads to the place where, in the words of Paul, we will know as we are known.HereHere

"Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you," Jeremiah says. That's your real past. It's beyond memory, off the early edge of the map of your life.

So trust your maps for your practical day to day navigating. But do not trust them for the meaning of life itself.

Be steady and honest and full of faith in what you cannot see or remember, and God will be your future.