WHAT'S OUR PLACE?

31st January 2010 : Epiphany 4 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
Jeremiah 1:4-10 : 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 : Luke 4:21-30

Few of us enjoy being insulted. Sometimes it’s plain rude; at other times an insult wounds our pride because it may contain more grains of truth than we feel comfortable admitting to. On occasion, an insult may fly wide over our heads.

But when it comes to people insulting others – anyone but us – insults, in the mouths of the adept and witty, can elicit anything from a titter to an uproarious guffaw. Consider these, for instance:

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. -- Oscar Wilde.
• Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you, he really is an idiot. – Groucho Marx.
• Abraham Lincoln was invited to look over a painting recently hung in a Washington gallery. The President spent some time looking at the work from various angles and finally passed judgement on it.
“The painter is a very good painter, and observes the Lord's Commandments,” he said.
“Whatever do you mean?” asked one of his friends.
“Well, as I see it,” Lincoln replied, “he hasn't made unto himself the likeness of anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth.”
• President Coolidge was known for his terse speech and reticence. A woman bet her friend that she could get Coolidge to speak to her, which was something he was reluctant to do. She went up to him and said: "Hello, Mr. President, I bet my friend that I could get you to say three words to me." "You lose," Coolidge replied dryly, and walked away.

It’s possible to find thousands of these on the internet. And many of them are at least amusing, moments in which we quickly, sometimes instantly recognise the revelation of some flaw or other.

But no one is laughing in the synagogue at Nazareth when Jesus issues a couple of very cutting insults at the expense of a congregation who clearly practise self-congratulation and exercise the assumption that God is on their side because they do the “right thing”.

We can deduce from their reaction to the two illustrations Jesus gives as he dismisses their accolades that the Nazareth congregation reckon that the Living God is interested only in the salvation and redemption of the Jewish people. God, they seem to believe, focuses only on them, to the exclusion of all others. They are the elite, the chosen.

Jesus pointedly observes that salvation history contains its fair share of redemptive moments when the Living God apparently ignored Israel in favour of Gentiles. Those are his examples: a widow from Sidon and a leper from Syria – both non-Jews.

What is insulting to the congregation in the synagogue is the revelation that they cannot claim a unique relationship with God and the implication that, although they think they are doing the right thing, they are actually way off target.

Few of us, convinced of our rightness or superiority, like to be told that we have it wrong. Few of us would fail to feel our hackles rise, increase our blood pressure and boil into anger if we were told calmly, convincingly and inarguably that despite our very best efforts we had it all wrong – especially if our efforts were sincere.

And make no mistake. Jesus is talking to US as well as the Jewish congregation at Nazareth – to 21st century Camillo Anglicans as well as 1st century Nazareth Jews.

And we might want to ponder how we might react if Jesus popped up and told us that God sent prophets to the Coffin Cheaters and the pot-smoking, aerosol-sniffing unemployed of Camillo instead of needy Christians…

It’s an instructive thing to consider. To ask ourselves: What is our attitude towards God, Church, Faith? Do we have a sense of entitlement, of superiority, of elitism because we’re “in here” and “they” are “out there”?

I had an experience early one Easter Sunday morning in a parish that always celebrated a dawn service. Noticing the lights and the bustle as we prepared for the celebrations, a couple of very rough-looking, leather-clad gentlemen walked in off the street. I immediately tensed up, expecting trouble in the form of baseball bats or flick-knives.

Instead, the said gentlemen began asking questions. They wanted to know what we were doing, what was going on. They were interested in finding out and learning. And they were suitably impressed, in awe.

I wish I could say that they converted on the spot, received baptism and became faithful and loyal followers of Jesus. I don’t think they even stayed for the Service. They just walked back out into the dark street.

But they had experienced something that is perhaps lost to those who turn up every Sunday. The newness. The presence. Something. Who knows? Something that they connected with; that connected with them.

It’s a similar dynamic that informs the passage from Paul’s letter to the folk in Corinth. We all know it. Anyone who’s ever attended a wedding service that I haven’t conducted will most likely have heard it. I’ve heard it at secular weddings and even, believe it or not, at a civil funeral.

But underneath it all, what is Paul really saying? His point is that form and format don’t matter. They’re not wrong. They have their place and they’re valuable – assets and gifts. But don’t confuse the outward appearance for the Spirit-driven core.

And that Spirit-driven core is this crazy little thing Paul calls love. Like the congregation in Nazareth, we can do all the right things, conduct Services by the book, look and sound like Anglicans, say the right things, stand, sit, kneel and scratch our heads in time to the King’s College, Cambridge, Boys’ Choir.

But it’s all meaningless unless it proceeds from and with love – the process of deciding to consider the needs of someone else first. That’s the usual context of marital love – but it applies to love in every kind of relationship, from the most casual to the most intimate.

And when the Living God sends us out from here today, it’s both a unique act that has never occurred before and one that has a timelessness that comes from God’s eternal loving of all creation, including humankind. And what we are called to do, like Jeremiah, like Paul and the Corinthian folk, like the disciples and the apostles, is to practise this love that considers the needs of others first.

And yes, we are supposed to practise and learn it in our own relationships as well as our ecclesiastical ones… Means here in this congregation as well as at home with our partners and children and relatives.

So unless and until we become adept at loving in this selfless way that Jesus showed is possible for human beings to do, we need not worry – even for one micro-moment – about whether the next person – or ourselves, for that matter – is standing, sitting, kneeling, reading the right version of the bible, doing the right thing, or the wrong thing. As the preacher remarked last week or the week before – we have plenty enough to do getting things sorted in our own little patch of the vineyard to worry about the rightness or wrongness of the person sitting next to us or across the road or in the mosque or synagogue or temple down the road, round the corner, up the hill, over the border…!