Sunday, February 2, 2025 - 10am Worship

Audio of Pastor Darren's message on 2/2/25, "A Better Life: Getting Inside and Outside."

Transcript

A Better Life: Getting Inside and Outside

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Jesus, in his hometown, we learn, has it a little bit rough, and if there is a message that's sort of right there in front of us, it's that the, the Christian life can be difficult. So So today we're in this space of we've been doing this series called a better life, right? The end of our vision statement, setting a course for a better life.

Well, what is this better life? And we started this journey with this series talking about how we need to prep ourselves inside for what that better life is going to be. We need to train ourselves to, to be attentive to the needs. Just like Jesus's mother Mary did at, uh, uh, the wedding banquet. We've also got to do the work to discern what it is that brings us here.

We got to figure out what we want to share with the rest of the world, what we want to live out, what's going to bring us meaning and purpose. And today, we're talking about what do we do once we've done all that work? What happens after that? So here we are with Jesus. A quick summary of what happens in the scripture.

He's back in his hometown. And if you remember from last week, cause we're doing scriptures back to back here last week, he goes and he starts preaching in synagogue and he, he. He reads, basically, Isaiah's prophecy about helping the poor, about justice in this world, that God was coming to do all of that.

Then he goes and he sits down and he says, that prophecy has come to pass today. So I don't know if you're doing the math there, but Isaiah does a prophecy. And then Jesus said, and here he is, you can see might get a little bit fussy there in his hometown. And now we're getting the aftermath. From all of that, our passage for today, the people start, they're trying to figure out what's he doing?

Isn't this Joseph's son over here? And Jesus starts talking about, well, you might be telling me, physician, heal thyself. You might be getting on me, calling me too arrogant or prideful. I tell you a prophet can't go to his hometown. Can you hear the arguments kind of in play there a little bit? How it's, the conversations are going, how they're playing out.

Then, he goes as far as to reference the prophet Elijah. Right, Elijah, uh, maybe with Moses, one of the highest held. Prophets, and he reminds this family of faith, this community of faith, that actually God worked with Elijah to go bless people who weren't even Jews, right? The widow of Zarephath, Naaman the Syrian.

He's kind of saying to them, you know, you know, it's not about you necessarily, right? And then he goes the next step. And he says, you know, this is a Jewish people for whom the life of faith was a lot about living out certain rules and regulations and behaviors. That's what faith meant, was to do these things that God told us to do.

And so when Jesus gets in there and says, you know, God's helping those folks over there. He's basically saying that. That life that you think's getting you in with God, God might not even care about that. He's helping Naaman. He's helping the widow. Is it becoming clear quite, uh, you know, why Jesus is in a little hot water?

Why they're a little bit fussy with him? They get enraged. They start driving him out. They actually get him to a cliff. And they're thinking about doing the worst. Right then and there. Throwing him off the cliff. Luckily or fortunately, whatever word we'll use. He is able to walk through them. Back to safety.

Back to the ministry that he was going to carry out. So there's an obvious message here about sometimes The life of a Christian can be tough. Sometimes you gotta say the tough things. Sometimes people are gonna get fussy with you. Uh, I'm reminded of a story I read this week. It's a story that actually, uh, Pastor Will Willimon told.

He actually ended up a, a United Methodist bishop, even. Very well respected. Uh, not only in his conference, but in United Methodism. Uh, and, um, He's talking about a conference he was doing with a theologian named Stanley Hauerwas. Anybody reading their Hauerwas? Steve. Okay. Steve, we're gonna have to get you teaching.

Nobody here is reading their Hauerwas. We gotta catch them up. So, before I tell you the story of it, you need to get a sense of who this theologian is, Stanley Hauerwas. Not a very big guy, but he is in your face, and he tells it like he sees it, but he's also very well respected. He was, in fact, named by Time Magazine back when, there's a Time Magazine still, I guess, but back when everybody was reading Time Magazine, named him the nation's best theologian.

All right, so he has some stuff. Right? Some credibility, some equity, uh, uh, and so usually in the field of Christianity and ethics, particularly, he likes to talk about the dalliance Christianity likes to do with governmental power and the marriage. That they tend to invite, and the problems with that kind of marriage.

But in this particular case, they are talking to a community that included this young pastor, who had a wife, and he had a family. And, uh, as the conversation goes for a while, this pastor says to him, You know, I got sent to, uh, uh, This one parish and I went to do the work of God and I started preaching about racial issues and about a month and a half in, the bishop called.

I got moved. And then I went to my new place, took the family, took my wife and I said, okay, I'm not talking about racial issues here. And then an incident happened. That kind of forced him to have to start talking about racial issues again. And sure enough, the bishop called. And he got moved again. This is the story he brings to Stanley Horowitz, the theologian around ethics.

Who surely was talking about doing racial justice and living that out. But again, Stanley Harawas, being the direct soul that he is, replies, and forgive my impression, but you have to hear it, because you have to know how he sounds. He says, And your point is what? We work for the living God, not a false dead God.

Did somebody tell you it would be easy? Oh, all the pastor's hearts just go. Right? We knew there would be hard things, but we didn't think we were going to get moved every month. We didn't think we were dragging our families around, and we didn't think a theologian was going to call us out onto the carpet like that.

And yet, isn't he kind of right? That there are times when living out the life of a Christian, there are times living out the life of a pastor, We got our 20 minutes each week. We're gonna say some things to stir it up, and sometimes we're supposed to. And it's not always going to be easy. So I think that's the initial thing we take from this passage, but I feel like there's one more thing going on.

There's one more thing at work in this passage that's worthy of our looking at and breaking down. And we can tell this a little bit by how Luke is setting this whole story up. I mentioned last week, this is the first thing that Jesus does in Luke's depiction of Jesus's life. Right, so we have our four Gospels.

They're all unique. They all tell the story in different ways. Right, and two weeks ago we learned that for John the first thing Jesus did in his ministry was that wedding and the miracle of water to wine. For Luke, this is what he lists as the first thing that Jesus does as he initiates his ministry.

Right, so So, the English major in me is thinking, Okay, if this is the first thing he has Jesus doing, the first story that Luke wants to tell, it's probably pretty important. It's probably pretty meaningful. It's a big part of what Luke is trying to get across when he's telling his version of Jesus story.

And what happens in this story, the first thing that Jesus does to initiate all ministry, as he gets outside the doors of the church. He gets outside of the community that had been established as the community of faith. Have you heard the phrase, in the world, but not of the world? You can get a bumper sticker, it's out there, looks really cool, you know.

It's hard to read a little bit though. If I didn't know what it was supposed to be saying, I'm not sure I would get it. But, it's out there. And the idea is we're in the world as Christians, but we're not supposed to be conformed by it. We're not supposed to be affected by it. We're rising above all of the world's challenges, temptations, etc.

We're in it, but not of it. Yeah, so, So, the phrase itself, not fully, is it scriptural? John kind of hints at it a bit, but he doesn't outwardly say it. In fact, for me, Martin Luther's the one I understand as being the first to really emphasize that phrase. You're going to be in the world, but not of the world.

I bring this up. What is interesting to me is in reading this passage, I'm not sure that Luke would agree. I don't think Luke would be yelling out, Be in the world, but not of the world. Because Jesus is pretty much, in this gospel, saying, You gotta get out there. Maybe you're not of the world, but you better be in it.

You better be deep in it. For some of you, your deepest connection with God is gonna come because you are outside. of the church's doors. That you're out in the world, wrestling with the world wrestles with. Thinking through the challenges that the world around us is thinking through. If you're not sure that Luke may have been trying to get this across, think of it this way.

Jesus goes to Nazareth, his hometown, where he knows everybody, and then he makes a point of getting kicked out. You read it through again. He's picking fights. He didn't go in there and say, you know, maybe God wants a, you know. Nah. He said, it's happening here, and it's happening now, and I'm gonna do it. And he said, it might not even include all y'all.

God might be working outside of this thing, even more than God is working inside. He's picking fights. It's enough to make you wonder if maybe part of our calling, a bigger part than we like to understand, is that getting out. That moving outside of our doors. We talk about a better life. This better life that we want to head towards, that we're going to set course towards.

What if that time, that better life. Is supposed to be spent largely outside the church. Working with the people in the outside world. Offering the love of God that you've come to know to others. So that they might know it too. Modeling a life of meaning and purpose and justice and peace. So that others might see it too.

What if all the time we spend here on an inward journey of spirituality is actually designed for us to go out into the world and use it? This isn't a home. It's a fueling station to pump up ourselves, to strengthen our souls and our spirits so that we can go out into a world that wrestles with a lot of big things.

But because we've nourished ourselves, we're able to weather it in a way that maybe somebody else can look and go, how are you doing that? Why are you so grounded? I might even add an extra piece, you know, if canonizing Bible, who knows, maybe I'd get in it. No, you don't have to do that, believe me. But if you did, I would, I'm just teasing.

But what if the things that we are listing as part of a better life, right? If I ask you, what is it about a better life that we're searching for? That list is probably going to have, we could guess, you know, it's going to have meaning. It's going to have purpose, healthy, loving relationship, justice. Around what I'm doing and what I see and what I do.

Peace, love, we're going to have all of those. Aren't they mostly found or engaged when we go out into the world? We can do our work here to prepare our souls, to get our focus. But isn't it in the world outside of these walls that we actually enact? A lot of what God has asked us to enact. And we find purpose when we use the gifts God gives to us to, to enhance the world.

That's a lot of our purpose. That enhancement gets lived out when we go into the world itself. We find healthy relationships. And learn about healthy relationships when we get out of our own selves and start engaging other people. Often people who aren't in these church walls. Isn't it true that we usually find love when we're giving love?

I think we need to look at the world around us as a gift. A gift that God gives us. It's a gift because it's this place, this field, this area where we can go out and sharpen what we come to learn here, where we can throw it around a little bit, learn a little bit more about what God's trying to do, a little bit more of the needs that people have.

We go out there working those uh, uh, ministries and isn't that how we grow in our own? faith And our own understanding of who God is. Our own understanding of what God wants from us. I think if Luke were here, he might even, uh, say that Jesus says that, you know, your faith, when it kind of stays in here, and it's only in here, it kind of curdles a little bit.

It gets a little insular. It gets a little irrelevant. Because it's no longer engaged with the world outside of it. We can sit in our own kind of spiritual echo chamber in here. Maybe we don't all agree, but if we're all the same people we know what we disagree about and we avoid those conversations. Am I right?

With purpose. You can see how that is going to be a place that could get a little stale. Become a place where we aren't getting challenged, we aren't growing. So friends, we're going to take communion today, it's the first Sunday of the month. My invitation to you is as we take this, uh, this thing we metaphorically and physically understand as nourishment, as bringing in the body of Christ into our bodies, into our lives.

That we might with some renewed purpose consider how God is encouraging us to take that nourishment and go do something good. To go bring some justice, to go bring some comfort, to go bring some peace. Amen. Amen.