January 31, 2010, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, All Souls' Episcopal Church

No Fences around God’s Love
Luke 4: 21-30

 Today’s Gospel story is the continuation of Last Sunday’s Gospel recounting of Jesus’ 1^st coming back to His hometown of Nazareth. The sermon was over. The young preacher, known to all in the congregation, had chosen a great text from Isaiah and had pleased the listeners by the way he had expounded the lovely passage.  “They wondered at His gracious words.”

 If the message had stopped at that point when He handed the scroll back to the attendant, it would have been a pleasant Sabbath day.  But Jesus was not finished.  There were some matters which needed to be examined in clear fashion even if in the process some cherished prejudices of the listeners were brought under judgement.  This was precisely what Jesus did.  He perceived that the people of his home town had fallen victim to a common human malady.  They had sought to build fences around God’s love.  They did not see themselves simply as the recipients of God’s love; they made the spiritually dangerous mistake of assuming they were controllers of God’s love and could determine who would be the objects of such love.  This provincialism, this building of fences around God’s love, needed to be judged and overcome; and this is exactly what Jesus did.

 He did this in a way which can easily by passed over. You see, Jesus believed in Biblical Truth! He simply mentioned a couple of incidents out of the Bible, but the people, well-versed in their Scriptures, understood at once what he was saying.  Not only did they understand what Jesus was saying but they also understood that their cherished assumption that they had a special and exclusive claim on God’s love was being questioned—and condemned. Jesus read to them from the Old Testament and did not….nor would not…change or revive its meaning. In essense, He was saying that you can’t hide from Biblical truth. (Which (I might add) has a contemporary application in our church today)

 Jesus cited two incidences, and the reminder of these two actions infuriated the people of Nazareth.  The one incident, recorded in I Kings l7, pointed out that Elijah was sent to Zarephath, a widow whose son had apparently died but was restored by Elijah.  The trouble was that the widow was not a member of the right group; she was not a member of the commonwealth of Israel.  The second incident, recorded in II Kings 5, announced that Elisha cleansed a Syrian, Naaman, who also was not a Jew.  “When they heard this,” Luke tells us, “all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.”   They took Jesus to brow of the hill on which the town was built and sought to hurl him over the edge.  What had begun as a rather pleasant time in the synagogue ended with overt hostility.  It is clearly dangerous to upset the firm assurance of people that they enjoy a special stature in God’s sight.  The fences they have built around God’s love are not to be smashed.

This provincialism was common then and is common today. Sometimes provincialism  takes a fairly harmless form. Most of us have a preference to where we live in this country. We can understand the story of the elderly ladies from Boston who took a trip to San Francisco. It was very hot in the city, and the one lady exclaimed, “It is so hot here!” Her friend said in reply.

“But, remember, my Dear, we are 3000 miles from the ocean!” The city of Boston has no monopoly on that sort of outlook.

But this idea that walls or fences can be built is stubbornly persistent. And it doesn’t take very long for our fences to get so high and our walls so thick  Our common humanity is thereby denied or ignored.

 This danger is seen with tragic clarity in the relation of nations to one another. Fanatics ( and we are surrounded by them) love walls and “wallow” in the “insider”/”outsider scenario But, in a world like ours, which is so global, we recognize that we can    no longer tolerate the walls and fences of life.  We’re all in this together. Truly, there can be no health or peace for some which does not involve others.

 This is a truth clearly emphasized in a short true story. The story is simply called “Pollen” and it’s a story about a farmer named Ira Mean and his field of corn.  Ira had the finest corn in the county and it won prizes at the fair every year.  Neighbors asked for seed corn and were always refused.   But after a few years, Ira noticed that his corn did not have the quality it once possessed, and as he stood one day by his neighbor’s fence he saw the truth:  the wind carried pollen from his neighbor’s field to his.  That night he filled a burlap bag with seed corn and when his wife asked him what he was doing, he said that he was going to the neighbor’s house to give him some seed corn.  When his wife asked, ”Why?”, Ira simply said:  “Because I can’t have good corn when his corn is poor.”  The story is a parable for our day of global interdependence. Our farmer, Ira Mean, symbolically, took down the fence between he and his neighbor.

 This same principle applies to our churches as well.  It is dangerous to assume that God’s love can be channeled exclusively one way and be limited by the denominational fences some try to erect.  There is a very dangerous kind of spiritual imperialism involved in any such idea.  We do not control God’s love.  God is sovereign, and any attempt on our part to determine the appropriate channels for the divine love is a sin.  Some of the saddest chapters in Christian history have been those which have recorded the presumptuous claims of church bodies to be exclusive channels for God’s grace and they twist what the Bible says.

Our Gospel tells us that Jesus was taken by the angry listeners to the brow of the hill on which the city was built.  That’s an important spot, and if we take our stand on that hill today, We can gain insight on how to handle this matter of fences and God’s love.

The view from the brow of the hill does two things…..#1….  It provides a panoramic view of the greatness of Israel’s faith and history.  Sir George Adam Smith has described how Israel’s history was visible from that spot.  There was the plain of Esdraelon where Deborah and Barak had fought.  It was the place where Gideon had won his victories.  It was the scene of Saul’s plunge into disaster.  It was the place of Naboth’s vineyard, where a prophet defended a single person against a king’s power.  It was the place where Elijah had fought on Carmel and defeated the priests of Baal.

That view from the brow of the hill leads to a sense of the greatness of Israel’s faith and history.  It is truly an amazing story of God’s choice of this people and his guidance of them through the turbulent years of their history.  It is a splendid story, and it properly leads to a sense of gratitude and pride.  In the same way, it is important for us to have a sense of the good things about our country, our state, and our Anglican tradition.  We’d be deficient if we didn’t have such a sense.

But, the view from the brow of the hill does something else:

Our second thought The view doesn’t just take in Israel’s history… from that same vantage point, your eye can see the roads that lead to the wider world.  Three great roads skirted that hill.  There was a road from the south that carried pilgrims to Jerusalem. Then there was the great Way of the Sea which led from Egypt to Damascus; caravans moved along it constantly, and finally, the great road to the east was busy with caravans from Arabia and Roman legions marched along it to the frontiers of the empire.  From the brow of the hill, in short, you could see Israel’s history and also be carried in thought to the wider world where God’s love was also needed.

We are fortunate to be living in a time when walls have been coming down. We “mature types” can remember the thrill we experienced when The Berlin Wall finally came down, a pile of rubble. The iron curtain had parted! The universal yearning for peace and concord is given new encouragement.  When walls come tumbling down, human hopes go soaring upward.

But, as we talk of walls, everything is not totally “black and white”, is it? There are extenuating circumstances where shades of gray can be a factor. I have a beautiful true story to make this point:

During WWII, In France, some soldiers brought the body of a dead comrade to a French cemetery to have him buried. The priest told them gently that he was bound to ask if their comrade had been a baptized adherent to the Roman Catholic Church. They said that they did not know. The priest said that he was very sorry, but in that case, he could not permit burial in his churchyard. So the soldiers took their comrade sadly and buried him just outside the fence. The next day they came back to see that the grave was all right, and to their astonishment could not find it. Search as they might, they could find no trace of the freshly dug soil. As they were about to leave in bewilderment, the priest came up. He told them that his heart had been troubled because of his refusal to allow their dead comrade to be buried in the churchyard; so, early in the morning, he had risen from his bed and with his own hands had moved the fence  to include the gravesite of the soldier who had died for France.

This is what love can do. The church rules and regulations had put up the fence; but love moved it. My friends, love can move all fences in this world.

From the perspective of Christian faith, this is not just a human enterprise.  Back of the clearing of fences, the moving of fences, and the smashing of walls is God’s intention.  If anything is clear from a reading of the Bible, it is that God wills and intends a world where people live adhering to Biblical truth in peace and concord. The obliteration of walls and the breaking down and moving of fences is part of God’s moving in the events of our day.

This is surely clear if we remember that one of the great words of the Christian message is the word “reconciliation.”  In this word there is an insight into what God is doing…….  Where there has been enmity, God in the Holy Spirit, brings people together. …….Where people stray away from the principles of Biblical teaching as the hometown folks in Nazareth did, God seeks to change minds and heal…….. Where there has been estrangement, God brings a sense of common humanity…… You and I are guided by a Hand we really can not hold, but that Hand leads us….guides us… over and beyond the fences of the world. The common denominator for all of this is love…..and…..We build no fences around God’s love.

Amen