Reflection from Sunday 31st January
I read a book a while ago that was a strange memoir.
It was the story of a woman’s life, told in 17 chapters, each chapter recounting a close brush with death.
They range from a near fatal illness in childhood to getting caught in a rip tide in India. She recounts contracting amoebic dysentery in China; there’s a narrow miss from a speeding car and a scary escape from the murderous intentions of a tramper predator.
It’s an odd way to tell a life story, but it’s also intruiging that a life can be told in such stories and in reflecting on the meaning of each, the impact and the what ifs.
And it reveals a deep truth about human beings. We often define ourselves by the stories we tell:
The stories we tell about ourselves, so that others can know who we are, as well as the stories we tell to ourselves about who we really are.
Stories are powerful, even when they are not true. Stories are powerful, even when they are only part of the truth.
And stories are also powerful to help us see a bigger truth, to help us see and recognise Truth with a capital T.
Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest said that the shortest distace between a human being and Truth is a story.
And in our gospel reading this week, we hear Jesus challenging the fullness of the truth in the stories about Joseph’s boy.
So, for context, we are rejoining the story from last week when we heard how, fresh from his baptism, anointing of the Holy Spirit and wilderness temptations, Jesus begins to preach and teach and heal on a circuit that leads him to his home town and home synagogue.
There, after reading an edited version of the prophet Isaiah’s vision of God’s Messiah who brings healing, restoration, liberation and renewal, Jesus makes his announcement that begins our reading for this week.
This prophecy has been fulfilled – right here, right now.
By Josephs’ boy. Well, say the people, This is wonderful. Joseph’s boy! How he’s grown, and it’s so great to have him back home with his gracious words!
And then Jesus, who has just told us that God’s welcome is wide and God’s concern is focussed on the vulnerable poor, differently abled, enslaved and exploited, turns around and slams his home town congregation with some pre-emptive objections.
Standing in the prophets shoes, he anticipates how unwelcome his interpretation of this good news will be in his home town.
He knows that when they praise him it’s because they haven’t really heard him.
He knows that the truth that he comes to preach is a bigger picture Truth that they are not ready to receive.
Wait, say the people. We know you…we know Josephs’ boy…wasn’t that the kid who…didn’t his mother….remember that one time when he…. We know Joseph’s boy.
He knows that they will resist this and they can resist it because they think they know Joseph’s boy.
We know who you are, and where you’ve come from.
I wonder if you have some shared experience with Jesus here.
Have you ever tried to change something about yourself and found your family resisting?
Is there a story in your family that always gets told about who you are, what you did, how you deal with things, how you fit?
This is often our experience as a teenager or young adult, when we do need to work out who we are beyond the story of our family identity – when we are perhaps most aware of how those stories are partial and sometimes restrictive or even destructive.
It is hard to change at home, because then everyone else has to change too.
Everyone has to allow their story of you to get bigger, to let some part grow and other parts recede.
Everyone has to shift – sometimes a bit, sometimes a lot – to allow your new shape to emerge.
But Jesus doesn’t stop there, challenging their story of who he is.
He continues to provoke as he challenges their story of who they are, and anticipates their next demand:
Do some miracles for us! Work some wonders among us! Show us a sign like you did for that lot down the road!
And then he tells two stories, both of which point to God at work in and for people outside of the Jewish tradition.
The widow of Zarephath, who was a foreign nobody, received the miraculous provision of God in a time of famine,
and Naaman the Syrian who was a commander of the army and posed a real threat to Israel’s sovereignty and security, received healing from leprosy.
A story of a marginalised woman and an outcast leper.
Two stories of how God acts for those outside of rather than within the people of God.
The good news of redemption and release, the wide welcome of God’s Kingdom is not just for the Chosen people.
God’s intention is inclusive.
The fullness of God’s invitation to life invites us to respond with our whole selves – we heard this invitation in the story of turning water into wine.
We heard it again in the description last week of the way the people engage with and responded to scripture so that, having experienced the goodness of God, that goodness also flows out to others.
This week Jesus’ words about God’s attention on those who are on the outside is not just a challenge to the people of Israel back then. It is a challenge to us now, because we have become the home crowd.
We are the ones who he is seeking to provoke out of our familiarity.
Because, we think we know his story.
We think we know our story, and the story of the church.
We each have our own history with this Jesus. It started from when we first encountered him, what we learned and have experienced since.
What we think about him now, how we talk to him, hear him, follow him…
and we have the history of the church through the centuries – the good and the downright despicable – as well as the stories of this particular church here, in the shadow of Maungarei, Mt Wellington.
The story of this building and the two congregations who united to build it.
The story of how this site was chosen when it was still paddocks and old landfill.
The story of this community, and how it has evolved, thrived and diminished in seasons and over time.
The story of this suburb and how the motorway divided it, how the Sylvia Park mall has changed it.
The story of this city and how it has grown, what it has lost, what it is becoming…
These are all powerful stories. They shape what we know and what we can see and imagine.
And these stories all have a number of shock points in them – places where you faced something that threatened to rip the fabric of your life, to rock the boat of your faith, to overwhelm you in one way or another.
This pandemic has been and continues to be a shock point.
Like Jesus’ confronting words to his home town, these shock points shunt us in one of two directions.
They can be powerful enough to draw us forward – into courageous and creative new paths, or they may be powerful enough to send us into our most defensive, guarded and cautious state.
The people in the synagogue that day responded to the shock point of Jesus’ words with outrage. Their defensive reaction was to attack – they were angry enough to want to do some serious damage to Joseph’s boy.
Because Jesus was intentionally provoking and shocking, it’s a little confusing that this story shares the same Sunday as 1 Corinthians 13.
Love is patient and kind, hopes and believes, bears and endures.
So this is what I’ve wrestled with this week:
How is Jesus’ intentionally provoking monologue an embodiment of God’s wide, welcoming, patient, kind and inclusive love?
Well. Here’s how I see it:
Love is a verb. Love is acting, moving, fluid, flowing, growing, engaging.
Love is a power, an energy that always hopes, bears and believes, waits and seeks growth.
Everywhere and for everyone.
Like the flower that grows in the crack in the wall, love looks for a small way in and then looks for a way to make it wider.
Love is the idea that wants to grow in us and change the world.
So any time we find ourselves resisting a new thing, resisting the invitation to grow, even when it comes in the form of a shock point pandemic, we need to hear again these words from Jesus.
I know what you will say… I know what your story tells you about what you are worth, what you can do, whether you are truly known and loved for your whole self, what gifts you have to offer, how important you are.
I know what you will say…And this story tells us, God does not want you to remain stuck in a limiting story, a story that keeps you captive to the fears of what others will say, or what growth might cost you, ask you to do or let go of.
Any time you find yourself stuck in a story of limitation, remember, too, we are one body, we are connected and we belong together. So you are not alone.
You are part of a growing whole, and we’ll grow together.
And while it’s almost always painful to open to growth, it’s also painful to stay closed to growth, to squash the prompts of hope and joy, and to shout down the provoking nudges of love and compassion.
The writer Anais Nin wisely observed that the risk of remaining tight in a bud eventually becomes more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.
I believe there are flowers and fruits for every single season of our lives. None of us is too old, or too young – your time is not past, your time is not still to come.
This is your time. You each have unique gifts and talents, here in this community, that the God of Love is even now calling you to grow into, to risk bringing to bloom so that we all grow.
So may you hear the challenge of Joseph’s boy and be nudged into deeper awareness of your own limiting stories.
May you be encouraged by the idea of Love growing in you to bring us all the fullness of your beloved and beautiful self.
Amen.
