“Stick To Your Story”

“Stick To Your Story”

Text: Luke 4:21-30

© January 28, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen

Back in the early 1800s, a church in Connecticut was having a real controversy. On the one side of the controversy were some of the younger men and women in the congregation who said that they were sick and tired of freezing every time they came for worship during the winter. So they said they wanted the church to install a wood-burning stove in the sanctuary to help keep everyone warm. But on the other side of the controversy were many of the older members of the congregation who were outraged at the idea of doing that. They said that the church had gotten along just fine for years without heat and they certainly didn’t need to have heat now.

Well, after that argument went on, back and forth for quite some time, one winter some of the young adults got together and with their own money they went out and bought a wood-burning stove and installed it in the church. But of all things, the first Sunday the stove appeared in church, it was an unusually warm day outside. Well, as people began to arrive for worship that morning, the anti-stove people let their displeasure be known. One man walked down the center aisle, glaring at the stove and doing everything he could to keep his distance from it, treating it like it was some pagan idol that had suddenly been set up in the midst of a Christian sanctuary. Another anti-stove person scowled and frowned and muttered something about how uncomfortable the heat was. Finally, another anti-stove person, a woman by the name of Mrs. Peck, cried out that the heat was too much and proceeded to pass out, causing quite a scene. But she recovered rather quickly when some of the young men in the church started laughing and announced to the congregation that since it was a warm day outside, they hadn’t even lit the stove. After that, the great stove controversy gradually came to an end.[1]

In Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, they weren’t fighting about wood-burning stoves, but there was another sort of controversy that erupted one day. You see, when Jesus began his public ministry, when he started healing people and teaching people and bringing about miracles, he didn’t start out in his hometown. Instead, for some reason, Jesus started out in another town, a town called Capernaum. And Capernaum was a place where a lot of Gentiles lived. It was a place where a lot of non-Jews, where a lot of Them, lived.

And so when the people in Nazareth said to Jesus, “Physician, heal yourself,” they were quoting an ancient saying that meant, “Before you help other people, you help yourself, you help your own people, you help your own kind first.” In other words, “Jesus, why are you spending your time and energy on those outsiders when you should be concentrating your attention on us?”

Well, how did Jesus respond to that controversy? He responded by sticking to his story. He responded by sticking to the story of the Bible. Jesus basically said, “You don’t like the fact that I’m trying to show some of God’s love to outsiders? Well, let’s take a look and see what the stories in the Bible have to say about that. Let’s see – do you remember the story about the prophet Elijah? He went off to another country, to the land of Sidon, and he helped a starving widow there. There were starving widows in Israel, among our people, at that time. But God sent Elijah to an outsider to help her. That’s our story.

“Or do you remember the story about that other prophet, the one named Elisha? Elisha cured a man named Naaman who had leprosy, and Naaman was from another country – he was from Syria. There were people in Israel, among our people, at that time who had leprosy. But God sent Elisha to help that outsider. You might not like it, but that’s our story. And I’m sticking to it.”

But there’s something about that story that often rubs us the wrong way. It’s like an experiment they did a few years ago. A group of volunteers were asked if they would be willing to take an electrical shock in place of someone else. But the catch was that those volunteers were not able to see who they were being asked to help. Instead, the people running the experiment just described what the other person was like. And what they found was that if the other person was described as being similar to the volunteer, if the other person was described as being one of Us, more often than not, the volunteer agreed to take the shock in their place. But the more unlike the volunteer the other person was described as being – the more that the other person sounded like they were one of Them and not one of Us – the less likely the volunteer was to agree to take the shock for them.[2]

But if we do that, Jesus says, if we turn away from other people because they’re different, because they’re outsiders, then we’re not sticking to our story. If we do that, we’re not sticking to the story of the Bible. After all, most of the Old Testament is about the story of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people. And as you might recall, that story all began when God met up with a man named Abraham one day and said, “I’m going to bless you and make you the father of a great nation of people so that you can be a blessing to all the families of the earth.” In other words, right from the start God made it clear that God wasn’t blessing Abraham and his descendants just so they could get a warm, fuzzy feeling for themselves from knowing that God loved them. No, right from the start God made it clear that God was blessing them so that they in turn could be a blessing to others, so that they could be a blessing to all the world around them. That’s our story.

Or in the same way, toward the end of the Gospel of John, after Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter, he appeared to his disciples and said to them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (20:21). With those words Jesus was basically saying, “God the Father sent me to you to show you what God’s love is all about. But don’t just keep that love to yourselves. No, just as God the Father sent me to you, so I am now sending you into the world, to all those who are on the outside right now, so that you can share God’s love with them.” That’s our story. Are you sticking to it?

A couple years ago a family down in Georgia came home from vacation and found quite a surprise. When they returned and walked through their front door, they found that the walls in some of the rooms had been repainted a different color, some of the carpet had been pulled up and changed to something different, and many of the pictures hanging on the wall had been changed. It turned out that while they were away on vacation, a woman had broken into their house. But instead of stealing their stuff and running off with it, that woman had apparently decided to settle in and change that family’s house to the way that she wanted it to be.[3]

Is that what we sometimes do with the Christian faith? Through the Bible, God gives us a story about what God hopes our lives will be like. But instead of allowing that story to change us, we often move into the church and do what we can to change God’s story around in an attempt to make it more like the way that we want it to be.

After all, one of the main stories that God sets before us in the Bible is that God loves the world. That means that God’s love isn’t just for me, God’s love isn’t just for us, but God’s love is for all people. In other words, God shows love to you and me so that we in turn might carry that love into the world to those who are currently outside the church. That’s where our focus is supposed to be. As far as God is concerned, that’s one of the key stories that we should be basing our lives on. Are you sticking to that story?

In a little while we’re going to be celebrating communion this morning. But today we’re going to share in communion in a somewhat different way, a way that maybe some people will say is controversial – but that’s OK.

You see, when it comes to communion, what we’re pretty much used to is sitting in our pews and having the bread and the cup be brought to us. And as the elements are being distributed, many people use that time for quiet meditation, as an occasion to reflect on the relationship they have with God. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not a bad thing to do. But by celebrating communion in that way, the temptation is for us to not stick to our story.

You see, tt might come as a surprise to some people, but even though we’re used to sitting in our pews and having the bread and the grape juice brought to us on trays, the truth is that for most of church history, from the first century up until the nineteenth century, such a way of celebrating communion was unheard of. No, throughout almost all of church history, Christians came forward to the communion table. And one of the reasons for doing that is to help wake us up to the fact that the love of God that we experience in communion isn’t just for me – communion isn’t just some private spiritual thing between me and God – it’s also about the love that God has for all the other people that are standing with me around the table. And even more than that, the love of God that we experience as we stand around the communion table isn’t meant just for our own personal spiritual gratification, it’s a love that God gives us to us so that we in turn might carry it out into the world to share with others.

God loves not only us, but God loves all the people of the world. That’s the story that God speaks to us through the Bible. But it’s not a story that everyone wants to hear. After all, when Jesus spoke that story to the people in his hometown of Nazareth, the result was that they wanted to tar and feather him and run him out of town on a rail. But even so, Jesus stuck to his story. What about us? Because that’s the very same story that God offers to us. Are we willing to stick to our story?