a sermon on Luke 4 from @LCMontheHILL
My television is under siege. Flipping through the channel guide Parking Wars, Whale Wars, Storage Wars, and Property Wars all fight for my attention. While it seems that producers have packaged every sort of conflict imaginable for my viewing pleasure, I’d like to pitch just one more…
Introducing...Neighbor Wars! Imagine a young professional couple in their twenties settling into life in an idyllic college town nestled against the mountains in Colorado. For this couple it’s early to bed and early to rise for a walk with their small, docile, and elderly dog. A big night involves dinner at a local restaurant, a stop for froyo, and bed by 10:30pm.
Enter...the college students. Late one August night two students arrive with a pair of monster trucks and a trailer full of trouble from...California. Late night parties, an unleashed pit bull, and the opening of what appears to be a nocturnal auto mechanic shop has led to the worst and most entertaining type of conflict...passive aggressive warfare.
Okay, so, I may be having some neighbor trouble. It’s nothing big, just a growing pile of frustrations that combined with our nonexistent communication has me feeling no small amount of animosity towards our neighbors, whether they know it or not.
The conflict in the gospel has moved from the mild annoyance on par with a roommate’s week old dirty dishes to a full out battle where duck tape on matted carpet clearly divides dorm room territory. Jesus was teaching in the synagogues, reading the scriptures and proclaiming that they had now been fulfilled. The people gathered in the synagogue were like, “Great, we’re tired of these Romans running around ruling everything. It’s about time that we got back to running this place.” They thought that the fulfillment of the scriptures meant the return of a Judean king. But then Jesus explained that he was talking about welcoming the Syrians, the outsiders; that all the people they thought were not God’s chosen people were an essential part of what God was bringing into the world. Jesus explained that these scriptures were being fulfilled in a very full and wide way.
That message was not what the people in the synagogue wanted to hear. And so, they’ve chosen to resolve this conflict in the only practical way they know how...they’ve decided to throw him off a cliff. Filled with rage they drive Jesus out of town to the edge of cliff so that they might hurl him off of it, head first.
On Tuesday night at Pub(lic) Theology I claimed that the idea at the heart of Lutheranism and at the heart of all the stuff that Martin Luther started was that there are no more rules. It’s the idea that our relationship with God, our fate, is ultimately defined and shaped by what God does and not what we do. One of the things that means is that there are no more rules. We don’t have to do anything to earn or justify God’s love of us. On one hand, this is very good news. It frees us to creatively engage in living into the incredible work God is doing. Church doesn’t have to happen on Sunday mornings or Sunday nights or even in churches at all. We get to try to figure out and do whatever we think is the best way of being a part of what God is doing.
But it’s also a pretty scary and it raises a question, ‘When we don’t have to do anything, how do we know what to do?’ Without clear and precise directions, we’ve been given an incredible amount of freedom, so much that it seems quite probable that we could get things massively wrong. I mean, what’s to stop us from thinking that the thing God wants us to do is to drive our California college student neighbors and their monster trucks to the edge of a cliff and throw them off, head first?
Well, today, I admit my fault. My statement that there are no more rules is not completely accurate. You see, there is this one, rather significant rule that I forgot to mention. That rule...is LOVE WINS.
The crowds are offended by this rule. They don’t think this rule is what God wants, and so they do what they think they are supposed to do. They take the rule to the edge of a cliff. But right when it seems that it will be broken, that division and hate will win, this rule passes directly through the crowds and continues on its way. Later the people will again try to put this rule of love to death, and again, miraculously a rule of love for us, will refuse to be broken. The good news tonight is a rule. God’s love for us and even between us will win, regardless of the ways we succeed or fail in living into it. Regardless of how we much we might fight or antagonize it, God’s love will succeed.
Last week, I stopped at a local Starbucks. Pulling in I was surprised to see one of our neighbor’s giant monster trucks. As soon as I saw it Hannah and I looked at each other. Our neighbors appear quite gruff, they don’t seem like the kind of people I’d expect to reading a book in a coffee shop on a Saturday night. As we made our way inside, I prepared to do my best to quickly locate them and then avoid eye contact and interaction at all cost.
I walked in and quickly scanned the coffee shop, but I couldn’t find them. Maybe, I thought, they were in the bathroom. As I made my way through the line up to the counter my head was on a swivel, spinning around, trying to find our neighbor. So much so, that when I ordered my skinny chai, it took me a moment to notice that I had just placed my order with...my neighbor.
Love wins. Even when we want to throw our neighbors off of a cliff. As much as we might have wanted to sever our ties, my neighbor and I were brought together and reconciled. It isn’t the most grand example of God’s rule of love at work in the world, we didn’t have a transformative soul bearing conversation. We had a short, civil dialogue about coffee. It was a brief moment where we bore witness to the reality of that one rule that holds us and will define us...Love wins. Amen.
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