Nazareth

When I first came to Providence to find a place to live, I had an interview with the landlord for an apartment in a house on the East Side.  It was ironic that I was reading a book entitled "The Origins of Anti-Semitism," for the couple turned out to be Jewish.  They asked me questions -- I can't remember what all about -- that lead to the fact that we had no jobs lined up.  I believe the women called Suann back in Illinois to discuss our finanical stability.  They ended up turning us down.  When we did move into an apartment, we had a few months where food was a little short, we went a while without hot water until we could get the gas turned on.  But we made it.  In spite of the fact that I was so deeply into studying about anti-semitism and Jewish-Christian dialogue, I couldn't help feeling a little animosity towards the couple who wouldn't rent to us.

After a year we left there to move to West Warwick.  Before we moved, I had a conversation with a man across the street.  When he heard that we were leaving and that the house had been bought by someone else, he made the comment that he hoped that they wouldn't be letting any blacks move in there.  I lightly chastised him, but mostly I was surprised by his comment.

From all appearances, we moved in to a neighborhood not unlike those we were used to in the midwest.  I knew that there were Portuegese people that lived in the area, but I didn't realize that it was in fact a Portuegese neighborhood.  It was subtle, but we were outsiders.  Not only that, we were renters among homeowners.  Add to that our obvious lack of much financial means symbolized by our old, oil dripping car and the cluttered yard we often had, and you can get the picture that we were outsiders and to be looked down upon.  It's not a good feeling to be second-class citizens, to know others think they are better than you, and to believe there is no way out.

It must be the way African-Americans have felt for centuries in this country.  To be looked down upon as second-class citizens or even in early days as sub-human.  To be without the priveliges and rights freely exercised by others, to be shunned in society, to be unwelcome in places of worship, to even be victims of abuse.  Martin Luther King tried to explain how they felt when he wrote a letter to the ministers of Birmingham as he sat in a jail cell:

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored"; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"-then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Martin Luther King's "letter from a Birmingham jail" remains a testimony to the early days of freedom and equality for African-Americans.

Alongside of those black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and their predecessors in the abolition of slavery, have been white men and women.  These people, many of them Quakers, stood before people of their own race, and took a stand for the rights and dignity of all people.  Their audiences responded with hatred and violence.  As Martin Luther King pointed out, "History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals."

One Saturday morning -- not 200 hundred years ago, but 2000 -- a man made a speech to his friends and neighbors at a religious gathering.  It wasn't a long speech.  In fact, it was more like a statement.  It was a statement that would characterize the rest of his short-lived career.  He took a stand for the outcasts and downtrodden of society.  He said that he would be the one to usher in a new age in which the oppressed citizens and even the foreigners would be able to share in God's kingdom.

In the Gospel of Luke we find Jesus' inaugural speech to be in his hometown of Nazareth.  We saw in Luke's gospel that he had a different order of events in the temptation story.  The story of Jesus in Nazareth is also placed in a different order than we find in the Gospel of Mark.  There it doesn't appear until chapter six (it appears in Matthew in chapter 13)..  Not only that, in Luke's account, there is a reference to Jesus' doing what he did in Capernaum.  But the next scene has him in Capernaum, events which seemed to have been prior to Jesus going to Nazareth.  Some might say that Luke has mixed things up and therefore the gospel accounts are not reliable; not in details, nor, therefore in doctrine.  A better response is to give the author the benefit of the doubt and ask why he has rearranged the events.  There must be a good reason for doing so.  An analysis of this two-volume work we call Luke-Acts reveals that Jesus' statement in the synagogue of Nazareth is programmatic for the rest of the history of the early church.  The message of the kingdom of God initially is well-received, but then it is rejected and treated with violence.  It will be the experience of Jesus, and it will be the experience of Paul.

Jesus entered the synagogue on the Sabbath as was typical of him.  He stood up to read and was given the scroll of Isaiah.  We might understand from this that Yeshua was a well-respected young man, the son of the reputable artisan, Yoseph.  He rolled the scroll from right to left, scanning the columns of perfectly written Hebrew letters, dark against the bright texture of parchment, the tanned hide whose sections were carefully sewn together.  Yeshua ben Yoseph chanted the familar words pertaining to the Servant of the Lord.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, and set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.

Then he rolls the two sides of the scroll back together, hands it to the attendant, and sits back down on the floor.  Now everyone was waiting for his commentary.  He started off by saying, "Today this scripture you heard has had its fulfillment in me."  Everyone was pleasantly surprised by his eloquence, and they were whispering, "Isn't this Joe's kid?"  Jesus had the crowd in the palm of his hand.  But he was smart enough to know that the preacher's job is not primarily to please his audience.  Rabbi and minister alike are to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

Jesus' conclusion included a quotation and two illustrations.  The quotation was "Physician, heal thyself."  He applied this to himself doing in his home town what he had done in Capernaum.  "This was not possible", he reasoned, "for a prophet is not accepted in his own home town."  To prove this, he gave two illustrations, first using Elijah and then Elisha.

When the famine occured in Israel, there were many widows in Israel who were in need.  But God did not send Elijah to them, but he was sent to a gentile woman in Sidon.  And in the time of Elisha there were many lepers in Israel, but none of them were cleansed, only the gentile Naaman, the Syrian.

This was sacriligious and unpatriotic.  It was bad enough the Jesus hadn't finished the next line from Isaiah, to proclaim "the day of vengeance of our God," meaning judgment against the gentile nations.  But now this kid who grew up in our neighborhood is suggesting that God somehow favors the foreigners.  The people were hopping mad as they grabbed hold of him and began dragging him through the streets where they could carry out his punishment of stoning by throwing him off the cliff onto the rocks below.  But somehow during the melee, Jesus managed to slip through the mob and go on his way.  It wasn't his time to suffer at the hands of his people, to be brought to the top of the hill, to be martyred for the sake of his cause.  Instead, Jesus walks away unscathed, not noted as a miraculous deed, just matter-of-factly, he went on his way.

Jesus was no mouthpiece for the religous establishment.  He was not a protector of the status quo.  He did not serve the cause of chauvinism or even patriotism.  Jesus clearly sided with the common folk.  He announced a time in which the tables would be turned and the downtrodden would be exalted.  Because of the jubilee year in which captives are released, debts are forgiven, and land reverts back to their original owner, those who are afflicted will receive comfort and those who have gained by their misfortune will once again be their equal.  In the same way, those who have been afflicted in body -- the blind, the deaf, the mute, the lepers, the demon possessed -- will be healed.  Those who have been cut off from society, not just the sick, but the widows who have no rights to property or a means of income, and the prostitutes, who have no husband to give them a name and a place and a family, and those tainted by their connection with uncleanness; all of them who exist on the margins of society will be brought back in and made whole.  And the foreigner, the gentiles who have made their home in the territories of Israel, some transplanted by occupying forces, some merchants, some travelers; all of those goyyim who have no place in the temple of God and are not a part of God's people, they will be brought close to God and no longer will be called unclean.

What is the message that Jesus brings us today?  It cannot merely be a history lesson, as important as that is.  But we should be careful when we transplant the ancient text across to the modern horizon, for society today is different than in Jesus' day.  We do not live in a religious state in which ethnicity and religious affiliation are equal.  The closest parallel in the modern world is the orthodox church in Russia.  The Christian message, the message of the church today that we learn from Jesus, is that we should not allow our sphere of influence to be limited to people like us.  The danger is to horde our spirituality and only share it among people who look like us and who live like us.  We resist reaching out to people who might alter the status quo; we find it hard to love the unlovely; we don't have much care for the careless.  Congregations across the country are dying out because they have relied on the Christian form of inbreeding in which only the same families continue to attend the church until finally there are no longer new generations to carry on.

Churches which are healthy and vital have a congregation which represents a cross-section of their community, people of varying levels of education, those who come from different socio-economic strata, people of different cultures and ethnic backgrounds.  Those who are in leadership are not afraid of the fresh infusion of ideas; those who established the church do not fear that the church of the next generation may evolve into something different than it was, as long as it fulfill the basic tenets of Christian faith.  These churches are those who believe that the most important part of Christianity is not the measure of earthly success in budgets and buildings, but it is being the body of Christ, different members, but one body.

If the Church has its house in order, it will be able to transform society from within.  This modern Christianity is the fulfillment of primitive Christianity, that "pure and undefiled religion" of the book of James.  On the Fourth Day of the Second Month, 1685, George Fox wrote a letter to Friends in which he encouraged them to maintain their purity and remain unspotted from the world.   He talked about moral principles which would affect the way they acted in trade and in commerce.  He talked about the fruits of the spirit that lead to the "pure undefiled religion" which is as James says, "to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep unspotted from the world."  He goes on to say,

"this pure undefiled religion keepeth in the purity of life and conversation; and this is above all, and keeps from all the vain religions in the world; and this is the religion that was set up above sixteen hundred years ago, in the church of Christ; and happy had all Christendom been, if they had kept to this pure undefiled religion to this day; then they would not have made so many religions as they have done; but to this pure undefiled religion they must come again, if ever they come to the true religion; for none can make a better, than the pure undefiled religion, which was set up in the church, in the apostles' day, above sixteen hundred years ago; unto which all that profess Christianity should be conformable.  So here is one God, the Creator of all, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made and created, who is the one Mediator betwixt God and man; even the man Christ Jesus.

 We must go forward by going back to the church of the apostles, the church of Christ.  And through that pure and undefiled religion announce the presence of the kingdom of God.  That must be our dream today, our vision of God in our world through Christ with the message, "Be ye reconciled to God."