Sermon preached at St. John's IV Epiphany

Sermon: Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, 2010
Luke 4 : 21-30

Jean Jacques Rosseau was no friend of the church. As a young man, he was disgusted by the actions of some members of the clergy incumbent in cures around his family estates. By his account, they cast aside their vows of poverty and chastity and invoked the ancient feudal rite of “prima nocte,” by which the Lord of a manor was entitled to any woman who lived on his lands on her honeymoon night. These early memories helped to form his famed cynicism toward the Christian Religion. In his comments on the idea that man is made in the image of God, he is reputed to have said that “men love God so much that they regularly insist on remaking him in their own image.” In short, that is a major theme of today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus had returned to his home synagogue. With good reason, many of the people there were excited and looked expectantly forward to what the hometown rabbi might say or do. His words were not what they had hoped to hear. He castigated them bluntly, and indicated that he would not do great miracles there. Many in the crowd were outraged, and sought to do him harm. I would suggest to you today that Jesus was addressing the same human propensity that day in Nazareth that Rosseau would address so many hundreds of years later. The people in Nazareth were more than willing to acknowledge God, as long as he turned out to be the god they wished to acknowledge. Like those early enlightenment French clerics who so disgusted young Rosseau, they reserved the right to design their own god, according to their own wants. It is so easy for us to do the same thing today. I am always ready to quote God and the Bible when I perceive them to support my particular political or personal ideal. Let me give you an example. The Bible says, and we believe the Bible to be the word of God written, that we are to respect all human life. As a matter of fact, it says clearly that if we even think ill of our neighbors and call them fools, much less kill them, we are in danger of hell fire. I am glad to run out all of the verses about the sanctity of life in my opposition to abortion, but when someone points out to me that these same verses have something to say about the relatively indiscriminate use of high explosive munitions in the global war on terror, or that they also would seem to apply to the debate over the death penalty in Ohio, I am not so willing to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture. You see, I am much more ready to apply the Scriptures logically to what I perceive to be shortcomings in others, than I am to apply them to what they perceive to be shortcomings in me. In effect, I redefine who God is to satisfy my own druthers. And generally speaking in modern American political debate, folks on the other side of any given issue do the same. But we have all missed the point. God says that all life is sacred because all people are created in the Image of the one true and living God. There may be a time in this sinful world when a soldier or a government is forced to take life in war, and some of that life may be collateral damage, or innocent life. There may be times when the state must use the death penalty as a punishment or deterrent in this fallen world. And there may be a time in this fallen world when parents and their medical team must choose between the life of a child and the life of a mother. But even in this fallen world, where choices are sometimes between the lesser of evils rather than between good and bad, God’s clear admonition is that we respect every human life. True Christianity does not give us the option of defining his will in any other way.
Let me give you another example. Have you ever prayed for something good and true with all of your heart, only to have your heart’s desire crushed? Perhaps you prayed for the healing of a loved one, and they died. Or perhaps you prayed for a job that you did not get. The possibilities of such negative answers to prayer are endless. Did you become angry and walk away from God, saying to yourself, “If there is a god and he would allow that, he is no god of mine!” By imagining your situation to be the most important thing in the world, and by placing yourself at the center of the universe, you have just refused to accept God’s self revelation, and demanded a God of your own making. The Israelites did such a thing in the wilderness when Moses did not immediately come down from the mountain, and it led to a total breakdown of lawful moral authority in the camp, and ultimately to the deaths of thousands.
And this brings us back to the example of today’s Gospel. People were glad to have Jesus back home, if he would do the kinds of miracles he did elsewhere in Israel. But they were unwilling to acknowledge him as anything but the carpenter’s boy. That he would see himself as the fulfillment of the prophesies was unthinkable to them. They were willing to accept him on their own terms, but not on his. It is not uncommon for us to do so. It is a human propensity. We demand that God fit within our box, and we are willing to accept only those parts of his self-revelation which fit with our presuppositions. The problem is that when we do this, we break the first two commandments as we create a false god, one that has the ability to make us feel good for a little while, but one which effectively separates and isolates us from the true God, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; the creator of heaven and earth, who sent his only begotten Son to die for our sins and to prove the power of his love by taking up his life again on the third day; the one who will come to be our judge, and our vindicator.
It is so easy to design our own God to meet our own perceived needs. But to do so is to make ourselves into false gods. It is to imagine that we stand at the very center of the universe, that we are the single most significant being in the entire cosmos. We have all done it from time to time, regardless of whether we are on the right or the left, whether we are formally educated or educated in the school of hard knocks, and whatever groups we may identify ourselves as being a part of, or not being a part of. You see, whatever else he may have been, Rosseau was a keen judge of human nature.
And now the question remains: to what God do I give my allegiance today? Is it to a god of my own making, one who justifies my attitudes, positions, and actions? Or is it to the living and true God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to whose nature the Holy Bible, inspired and preserved by the agency of the Holy Ghost, bears witness? For us Christians, God calls us to accept and acknowledge his character, his love, and his person even if it does not make sense to us, and even if we wish it were different. He allows us to ask questions, and I dare say even encourages us to the same, but at the end of the day, the people of God are those who submit to him as he is, casting ourselves on his mercy and receiving his grace. In just a few moments, we will say together the Nicene Creed, the great Eucharistic confession of the Church. In it we find the true Scriptural definition of who God is, and of what his character means for each of us. Let it never be said that we crossed our fingers as we affirmed our faith. Rather let it be said that we came to the foot of the cross, with our questions and our issues, but that at the end of the struggle, we accepted by faith the living and true God, who is our judge and our saviour, our brother and our friend. AMEN!