Sermon for Year C, The Fourth Sunday
After the Epiphany
By The Rev. Torey Lightcap
February 3, 2013
St. Thomas Episcopal Church
“Real”
“Surprise! You’re not ready
yet!”
That’s the moment I had
yesterday.
On Tuesday and Wednesday I
wrote what I thought
Was a fair, clear, fun, grounded, and
convincing sermon about this gospel lesson.
It had no fewer than three
jokes in it – good ones, too.
It was ready to go.
But you know, sometimes you
look at something you’ve done
And you realize that for some reason it just
isn’t what you think it’s supposed to be.
It doesn’t quite sing the way
you think it should.
So I threw it all out and
started over again.
Less artifice and more truth – that’s what I want and it’s what
sits well in my own ear,
And I think frankly it’s what we all deserve,
And more than any of that, it’s what God
wants. A holy longing. The truth.
If there is a single value to
be most embraced in this pulpit, it is to tell the truth.
If I made this confession every
time I started over and rewrote a sermon,
You’d get sick of hearing about it. I’d be a
diva.
But it seems to be in the
spirit of things that I might call attention
To this facet of my life this week.
Because getting things down to
the level of truth-telling, and only truth-telling, …
Quite frankly, that’s a tough draw.
Simplicity, sometimes, is the
hardest thing.
Have you ever tried to rake
your yard when the wind was blowing?
Or tried to dig a hole in soil
that was loose and dry?
You can only seem to see what
you’re working at for a few seconds at a time,
And then it sort of slips away unless you
keep at it.
The truth can be a little like
that, if the lies aren’t regularly bulldozed out.
Jesus gave his mission
statement to the crowd in his hometown last week
And they went nuts over him.
Then, in the exact same moment,
in the reading we just heard,
He cut across their adulation
And he let ’em have it. Whammo.
He reminded them that a
significant portion of their own narrative as a people
Was of stories about divine punishment and
retribution – famines and sickness.
He reminded them of stories
about how they had skipped out on God
And had seen other deities on the side, just
like we do.
(Their gods had names like Baal
and Rimmon,
Whereas we’re idolatrous about things that we
know aren’t actual gods,
But perhaps we treat them like they are.
Like our phones, maybe.
This is tricky. For starters,
Maybe ask yourself if you’re addicted to anything, and if so, What?
And you’ll be better than halfway to
locating the name of your deity.)
At any rate, these stories about
people being unfaithful
Have some pretty grim dimensions, and they
draw a bad reaction;
Jesus reminds his hearers that many widows
and lepers died
Because of how misplaced people’s
priorities had been over the years.
That the cause of justice isn’t
served when God isn’t served,
And that by contrast, all he is here to do is
to serve God.
I suppose he may even be saying
that unlike them,
He’s planning to be a better example of
faith.
So that’s why they don’t like him,
And that’s why they want to get rid of him.
Hometown boy or not.
See, the miracle isn’t in the
depth of his teaching:
It’s that he’s able to get through to them at
all,
Or, at the very least, that he’s able to
get away from them
When they decide they want to throw him off
the cliff and be done with him.
Jesus won’t sugar-coat what he
has to say.
For him, it always comes down
to “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
For us it should be the same
value.
And that attitude will cost
you. Cost you a lot.
There’s no such thing as a
convenient gospel …
Grace that comes cheap …
A life that doesn’t involve hanging on a
cross at least once or twice, maybe a lot.
All of us are misunderstood,
reviled, and gossipped about at some time in our lives,
Maybe a lot.
The difference is, Jesus is
willing to go there
And to pay the price for going there
If it means getting the whole story out.
All the dimensions of social
niceties are insignificant.
Think of all the prophets of
the recent age:
Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mother
Theresa.
Were they interested in public
opinion, what people thought about them?
Or did they march forward not
caring what others thought, because they saw the truth?
The truth just drills into us,
through all our layers of superstition and self-deception.
Right through the armor of
social standing and being well-regarded.
The truth exposes the lies we
tell ourselves,
And it dries them up like a sponge so we
can’t get them back as easily.
The only protective mechanism
we have to fight against the truth
Is sinking into the crowd, our anonymity in
the crowd, our hiding ourselves away
And finding a scapegoat upon which to heap
all our sins.
Drive Jesus out of the
synagogue and over a cliff,
Challenge him in the public square with your
best teachers of the law,
Catch him at midnight in a garden when he’s
deep in prayer,
Take him to the highest courts and try him,
Or just hang him on a cross until he dies:
One way or another, human nature will fight
the truth as it emerges.
And yet.
There is the undeniable power
of naming reality – pulling back the covers on the Real.
In his brilliant letter to the
Ephesians,
Paul says that “everything exposed by the
light becomes visible;
“For everything that becomes visible is light.”
Here’s a plain translation of
it:
Whatever the light touches, itself eventually
becomes light.
Truth is like the light.
Whatever it exposes becomes
visible;
And wherever you can see things for what they
really are,
That too becomes a place that has been
touched by the truth.
Of course, if we want to hide,
repress, and deny it,
I suppose the capacity to return to the lie
always exists if we really want to;
Nevertheless, the word of God stands fast;
And when we know the truth, Jesus says,
sooner or later it sets us free.
For Jesus, it’s
two-sides-of-the-same-coin:
He says, Let
me tell you how it really is –
The captive will be set free
and the eyes of the blind will be opened
(Is it any wonder he says this last bit?
I’m sure that’s for you and me!)
But, he says, The price you will pay is your denial, your refusal to see life as it
is,
Your rejection and
renunciation and disavowal and pretending.
All these are gods you must
give up in the bargain.
Now I suppose it just comes
right down to you and me.
What’s not working? …
What are the lies you’ve been
hanging on to that you know are lies?
What are the convenient stories
and clichés you like to quote to yourself?
What are the things you keep
telling yourself to make it all go away one more day?
These things are endless. These
lies.
But so is the liberation and
the love of God.
Jesus didn’t come to fix
everything and soothe every last pain;
There isn’t a box of Band-Aids big enough.
Instead, he came to take what
was dead and to make it alive:
To resurrect: …
His close friend Lazarus and the son of the
widow of Nain
And the daughter of Jairus, who was such a
bigshot at the synagogue.
He raised them all out of
death.
And the kicker, of course, the
ultimate resurrection, the raising of Jesus himself.
God did that.
Jesus rose out of death and
renewed all of life with him,
Bringing the light and spreading the truth.
The truth.
That’s all God wanted then, and
it’s the same today.
May we learn to trust that God
is strong enough
To bear the burden that we can shuck off
When we learn to let go and to trust the Holy
and the Real.
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