Last week we were with Jesus in his home synagogue, worshipping there as was his custom, and reading that day from the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit of the Lord is upon ME, he read, and generations of his followers since have wondered along with us just what those words mean for our lives, what it is to know that God's Spirit is indeed upon each of us.

I urged you to ponder that question for yourself during this week just past and if indeed you took some time to do so, listening for God's voice and call, seeing perhaps a glimpse of some new direction or new involvement for your life, then this week's reading will be especially alarming. I suppose these verses 22-30, which follow the passage from last Sunday, should always be included as the proverbial fine print, the warning label accompanying God's call.

What's going on here? It had started so well. Hometown boy makes good. Isaiah's words are always popular, beautiful, poetic, stirring. And he had read them so well, as if he really knew what they meant. Wow, they had thought. This is exciting. Something important, holy even, is happening right here in our own synagogue. There's new energy, new life evident here in our Jesus! God is going to take care of us finally by sending us a new prophet! Alleluia.

However ... their home boy prophet is now following another script. One they had not expected and one they didn't particularly care for. God's reign, he begins to tell them, isn't just for you alone, it is for everyone. Everyone. And there's the rub.

The stories he retells to make this point that day are most likely lost on us. This business about Elijah and Elisha and the widows and the lepers and Naaman the Syrian. So let me unpack it a bit and you'll see. During the time of a great famine, God had sent the prophet Elijah to a widow, who was able, from the most meager provisions in her pantry, to not only feed him but rescue the whole nation. And then Elijah brought her son back to life. The thing is, though, both she and her son were foreigners, outside the covenant with Israel, and the twist of the story is that, astonishingly, it is through these foreigners that God works miracles.

Jesus' congregation that day in the synagogue would have known that story, but it's the kind of thing they preferred not to remember. Same for the story of Elisha and the lepers. God had worked through Elisha to heal the Syrian, the foreigner, Namaan through his command to wash in the river Jordan, the holy river of Israel.

Jesus is mixing it up here. Blurring the lines between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the lost, the privileged and the expendable. Actually, not just blurring, but erasing those lines completely. Evidently, you see, these old stories reminded the people that their God was as eager to save the Syrian as the Israelite, and as concerned about the leper as the leader.

God was as appreciative of the widow as the prophet, as eager to work in partnership with the foreigner as with his own chosen emissary.

The message that day, you see, was not a comfortable one. It was as if Jesus were implying: You sit here in your comfortable pews content to hear the word of Scripture read to you. Excited even to imagine that it might be fulfilled among you through me. But, what you would rather not remember, from your own scripture, is that this promise is not for you alone. All the people of the earth, all the nations, are included in God's design. All of them. From the high and mighty to the lowly and insignificant. From the chosen people to those we call "enemy." From "our kind" to those who are strangely different. From those who speak our language to those who speak in tongues we cannot understand. From those with citizenship papers to those who have been cast out.

This is the truth, Jesus said to them that day, reminding them of the full scope of God's inclusive, expansive love. And the Scripture says that "when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up out of those pews and drove him right out of town and led him to the brow of the hill so that they could kill him." But ... he passed through the midst of them and kept right on going. Out and away. Beyond the confines of that synagogue. Out past the city limits of his hometown. Moving out from his people, his family, his kind . . . to share God's great good news with all the earth.

The thing is, Jesus does not go elsewhere because he is rejected. It's the other way around. Jesus is rejected because he goes elsewhere. He moves through them and keeps right on going. Because, as he says to them, your hearts are small and you think God's is, too. You think this great gift is yours alone, but God means for everybody to share it. That's my job, to let them know. And it's time to get on with it. And so, as we hear in verses 31 and 32 which follow: "He went on down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and taught them on the Sabbath. And his teaching made a deep impression on them because his word carried authority."

You know, dear friends, I sense that it's just as hard for us now, in our congregation, to hear these words and take them to heart, as it was for those faithful folks in Jesus' home town synagogue. The truth of this takes us way past our comfort zone. It shatters our treasured stereotypes and exposes our cherished assumptions. It blasts the doors of this sanctuary wide open and invites everyone in. It causes us to look again at who we are, and if we find that our self-esteem is based on trumped up self-importance or some sort of superiority, to think again and know that God loves us not because we're more special than somebody else but that everyone is made special by God's great love.

How oddly appropriate this lesson is for us this day as we honor and install our congregational leaders for the coming year. For while we have much to do in our own house, so to speak, it was abundantly clear at the church conference last week that our ministry and mission must also send us out beyond our comfort zone and our familiar ways of doing things. We need to grow, not just because we want to be big, but because we are failing to reach too many of God's people with the message of God's love in Jesus Christ. We need to find ways to go out and invite more people in. We need to move out into our community and show forth God's love in such a way that people will want to come and learn more.

In a society that is increasingly unchurched, unfamiliar with Christian teaching and practice, we can redefine "foreigner" to mean those who do not know our Christian vocabulary, who are not familiar with the customs of the church, who do not walk through these doors and just automatically know what's what. Increasingly, those who seek out a spiritual home come not knowing our songs, our prayers, our sacraments. Even folks who've been around a long time are asking basic questions about Christian theology and faith. Foundational concepts like grace and redemption and forgiveness and prayer are not necessarily familiar.

The culture we live in increasingly makes it harder to be "church" in the ways we've defined it for so long. Women working outside the home are not available for the traditional women's organization. Children's sports events scheduled on Sundays make the choice to commit to Sunday school and the Youth group very difficult. The increasing economic disparity in Santa Monica makes it nearly impossible for the grown-up children of the congregation and their families to live here. More and more people have not grown up learning what it means to be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.

These are just some of the challenges we face. Staying as we have been or trying to recreate what was at one time or another will not suffice. Our leaders and our staff will be working very hard to understand and move out into this strange new world in which we are called to be the Body of Christ. In a wonderful way, today's story of Jesus' ministry can become indeed good news for us. It reminds us that we, too, are called to go out to those called "foreign" or different, and there witness to the love we know. And it reminds us as well that sometimes the home folks will not understand and we will face the hurt and anger of resistance.

Our Bible shows us that growth and change and renewal have always been difficult for the people of God. That we have to be reminded over and over again that God doesn't want us to rest on our laurels or become self-complacent or become inward-looking and self-serving. Jesus comes and ministers to us, opens the scripture to us, reveals the love of God to us, showers us with the presence and power of the Spirit and then moves through us and beyond, to reach out to all the people who do not yet know, who have not yet heard. People longing to hear good news, dying to be set free, people aching to hear that there is always a place and a people ready to welcome them home.

May that place and that people be here. For, indeed, the Spirit of the Lord is upon us.

© Patricia E. Farris, 2001. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.