COMMUNION MEDITATION tuKE 2:44-$0
FEBRUARY 20, 1972 JOHN MM, GUCHIANAN
FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT.

It is a long and difficult journey from the abstract to the speci¢ic. i%
is much safer, and easier, not to take the Journey. Think, for Instance, about
“Peace on Earth" = an honorable and noble sentiment: everyone is for It - no
one is against it. The trouble with Peace on Earth is that It is an abstraction,
and the moment we try to make it specific we must deal with the build-up afong
the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and our Asian policy, and the Pentegon and the defense
budget. And, frankly, that's treacherous going: so most of us settle for the
abstract.

Or take "Brotherhood", another noble and inspiring ideal. But it ts an
abstraction, and the moment it starts getting specific we have to deal with a
black man who Is angry, and whose anger Is frightening: the moment brotherhood
moves from the abstract to he specific we have to deal with the result that thet
particular man is my brother.

Or take "free enterprise’. Who is against it? No One. B ut the moment
the abstract concept of free enterprise gets spectfic we have to deal with some
pretty knotty questions such as the propriety of the government bail ing-out
bankrupt industries, or protecting the consumer, or reguleting {nterstate commerce.

Or take God's love = perhaps the most abstract of all abstractions. Who
can respond In any way but positively to that phrase - God's jeve? But the moment
the love of God gets specific we must come to terms with Jesus Christ, And
if history is any teacher, we can see that the human response to the specific
man Jesus Is anything but positive. in fact, sometimes it comes out quite the
opposite.

When ab stractions become concrete the results, Im more caset than not,
offend us, and disturb us, and more often than not, we opt for the relative
safety of the original dstraction.

Dr. William Muehl, of Yale Divinity School, tells a story about visiting
a very old colonia! homestead in New England. The fee! of history wes in the

house, and his quide was an elderly spinster - the last living person in her

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_ pre-revolutionaly family. As he walked through the rooms he could Imagine those

gaitant and brave people who lived and ate and slept there in 1775. in the living
room he saw a musket, hanging over the fire place, and as he reached up to touch
it, his elderly quide sharply reprimanded him, “Don't touch that - It's loaded,”
she said. When he asked about this unlikely sjtuation she told him that the
rifle was placed there by her great, great, great grandfather, loaded and ready
to be fired in the cause of freedom, Or. Mueh! assumed that he had died in the
revolution. "no" she corrected him, "he died quietly at a ripe old age, decades
after the war. In fact he never fired the rifle; didn't even take it down off
the wall: didn’t think much of General Washington's revolt". Dr. Mueh! speculates
then about the old gentlemen: how he probabaly imagined himself a romantic revol-
utionary, mind full of democratic ideals, bravely leading a corps of neatly
uniformed militiamen into valiant battle against the oppressors: fighting for
liberty and justice, shoulder to shoulder with his brave compatriots. That's how
he imagined himself: that was the abstract. Mueht could see him sitting in the
rocking chair before the fireplace, gazing up at his Joaded weapon and contem-
plating revolution in the abstract. But when the theory of revolution became
specific it wasn't anything Iike what he had imagined. Instead it probably
happened one morning when his neighbors gathered in the road In front of his
house, dressed for farming - carrying an odd assortmentof weapons. And the call
was not to the lofty ideal of freedom and justice: rather .tt probably sounded
like this: "get your gun, neighbor, there's been a scrap over at Lexington."

And so the gun remained on the wall - because the specific was mt nearly as
inspiring, or as clear, as the abstract.

Anyone who has ever been commited to a cause knows the truth of this maxim.
Right now there are a lot of creative and hopeful things happening in our own
community, for instance in the areas of juvenile justice and care for pre-
delinquent young people. And they are happening because some people are willing
to take an abstraction and work with it, through night after night of boring
meetings: it takes patience and courage and commitment. It's not always clear

that the time invested is related to the abstract goal. But things happen when

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people are witling to travel that important journey.

Moving trom the abstract to the specific is what happened one day at
Nazareth, at the beginning of Jesus! ministry. After his baptism and temptation
experlences Jesus launched his public career by traveling throughout Galiiea,
preaching and teaching wherever he went. Finally, he came to Nazareth, his home
town. ft was the Sabbath , and he Joined his neighbors and relatives and old
friands in the Synagog. Sabbath worship was both formal and informal. There was
no priest: rather administration was done by an elected leader along with a kind
of Board of Directors calt d Elders. A prescribed portion of the law was read
each week, and the Synagog icader would ask one of the men to read from the
Prophets and, if he wished, to comment on the passage - that is, to preach a
sermon. (f there was a visiting dignitary or Rabbi in the congregation it was
customary to invite him to read - -4 speak. So it was that Jesus ~ the carpenter
They atl know, was on this Sabbath day ~ invited to be the reader.

He chose a very significant passage from the prophets to read: Isaiah 6!:
“The Sptrit of the Lord is upon me, because he has annointed me to preach good
news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim relcase to the captives and
recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

New Testament research has discovered that this was a very important
passage in the year 30 AD. The Dead Sea Scroits reveal that some of the desert
religious committees adopted this prophetic utterance as their own, believing
that it was about to become an actuality. It had been a century since the
period of Roman occupation and oppression had begun. And the people of Galitfea
thought they saw themselves in the words of the prophet: they were the poor,
the captives, the oppressed.

So an electric shock went through the congregation as he rolled up the
scroll, sat down and said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilted in your
hearing’...

They fiked what they hear’: this was it: this was the year of the Lord's

coming. If sounded good, but then they reatized that a very safe abstraction

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was becoming specific. It slowly dawned on them that the lofty messianic dream

was being claimed by this man sitting in front of them: this man they knew and
had watched growing up.

And so they said: "isnt this Joseph's son?’ And the enthusiastic surprise
was infected by sketicism and then hostitity. They knew this man! He coujdn't
be the Messiah! The specific proposal was offensive to them: it had nothing
to do with the abstract. They knew what he was up to: they had heard about him
Spending his time with the truly poor, the outcasts, the lepers, The sinners.
Hts specific interpretation of Isiah's abstractions was most repugnant,

And then to make matters worse, he pulled two ilfustrations out of the
scriptures involving Elisha and Elijah, both of whom did their ministry with
non~tsraelites. That really threatened and angered them. And the good, respec-
table, Synogog people of Nazareth were transformed into a lynch mob. They
threw him unceremoniously out of the city and would have kifled him on the spot,
but somehow he got away.

Thig story, standing whergit does at the beginning of Jesus ministry, is
Luke's intrQduction te everything that follows. As the story unfolds, Jesus
keeps getting more and more specific, and the peopie get more and more anary.

At the end he is not only discredited as their messiah, but altso made to bear

very specific pain and very specific death. And even there - as he was stretched
out on the cross before their very eyes, th: peofie who were thrilied by

prophetic abstractions about the suffering servant spat in the face of the specific
man who was sutferifg for them,

Abstractions inspire: but the incarnation disturbed people. The concept
of a messiah was very popular, but Jesus Christ enfuriated them. So ittas
always been.

We are still inspired and lifted up by those stirring phrases:"good news
to the poor, release to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, liberty
for the oppressed’. But we're not at all certain that we want anything to do
with these ideas when they begin to take on fiesh and form: where poor means

an ACE mother, or captive means a particular prisoner, or oppressed means a

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Mississippi ¢hare=cropper. The good folk of Nazareth became a lynch mob - and

so, in a sense, do we, when the clear imperative of our Lord motivates our Church
to put its money where its Lord was.
Abstractions inspire, but the incarnation distturbs and disgusts. And so
we turn in anger to religion in general: Christianity in the abstract which
talks about the brotherhood of man and love and comfort and lets it go at that.
In the Lenten Season, we are called to confront the specific implications
of a God who refuses to be an abstraction: a God who will not remain a philosophic
concept; a God who came among us in a man, and who keeps on coming among us in
the context of our own tives.
In the Lenten Season we are called to see that we are not abstractions to God
either; that his love is not for mankind in general, but for you and me specifically.
And we begin the Lenten Season at the table of our Lord: no abstractions
here; just bread and wine, representing the real body and real blood of a specific

man, whose body was broken and blood shed, not for an idea, but for us. AMEN

Father, it's easier to think theologically, then to be a disciple; it's more
comfortable to talk about you then to confront your son. In this Lenten Season
as we turn our thoughts to the passion of our Lord, help us to move from the
abstract to the specific, to know once again the mystery of your love for us:

through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN