Ra ee

February 2, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service

John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"And he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has
been fulfilled,..' and they said, ‘Is not this Joseph's son?™

Scripture
Psalm 71:1-6
Luke 4:21-30

Today, throughout the country,.services of worship will rightfully
acknowledge the tragedy of the Space Shuttle Challenger last Tuesday.

It was a national tragedy because it was so visible. It was
national because those who died in a sense were there for us: exploring,
pioneering for country and for humankind.. And it was national because
in many ways they represent us at our best - the way we like to think
of ourselves...inclusive, men and women, ethnically religiously mixed,
married, parents, singles... “As they walked jauntily, confidently to
their spacecraft, they represented, for me, the best of our nation, and
the best hope of humankind to live, somehow, in the future.

And so we are stunned by what happened. And we feel deeply our
common, fragile humanity. And we hurt profoundly for their dear ones.
Are there meanings here? May we presume gifts even? God did not intend
that. God always weeps when people suffer and die. But we do believe
the God of love can use even our tragedies for his purposes. And so in
the midst of our tears we did learn, again...about the fragility of our
humanity...and the finiteness of even our best technology...and we learn-
ed again that even our most sophisticated machines will not ultimately
save us and in fact have always the capability to destroy us.

We learned that we are still pioneers - that it is still dangerous
out there - and that the best of us will always know intuitively that to

live we must go on. We learned as w of life lived
intents iy for noble purposes. Of ali the thousands an of
Ss written and spoken, none, I thought, were more elequent than Mike

— a

"T've known so many people, and you probably have, too, who have
quietly slipped away from lives of frustration, drudgery, fail-
ure, disappointment and sickness. People who never had a chance

to climb the mountains of their souls."

Please join me in a moment of prayer.in death
the creation, you are sovereign. So we pray, in full confidence of your
love for those seven men and women...

We pray for their Loved ones. Stand with them. Help them one day
to know and rejoice in the selflessness, the excellence, the dedication
of their dear ones. We pray for our country. Continue to call our best
out of us. Remind us of the dangers ahead. Teach us always that your
image is in us - all of us: that your intent is a human family living in
peace. In your sovereignty, Lord God, use even this tragedy, to help us
-~ all of us - become more fully your chiidren, more intentionally brothers
and sisters to all your people through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

The situation is timeless. A young person leaves home to become
what he or she must become. And then the young person returns as that
new individual, educated, polished, informed,opinionated: and the
people at home look at each other and smile knowingly and say: “Why
that's just Joseph and Mary's son."

The sequence reminded me of how difficult it is for a young minister
to return to his or her home church and preach a sermon. It's not the
preaching that's hard. It's the matter of being taken seriously. People
say, "Why that's Bob and Blanche's son...that's Fred and Betty's daughter."

Will Campbell, in his wonderful book, Brother to a Dragonfly, tells
about Youth Sunday in his rural Southern Baptist Church. He was chosen
to deliver the sermon.

"The sermon was called, ‘In the Beginning'...It was, in many ways,
heretical and modernistic for East Fork. But on that occasion I could
have denounced Christianity as a capitalist myth cunningly designed to
keep the masses under control, our youth choir could have sung Ukrainian
folk songs, and our Sunday School superintendent could have lectured on
'The Origin of the Species' and all the people would have said 'Amen.'

_Never had they been so proud of us." (p.77)

That, of course, was a young boy, sixteen. When a young man comes
home, people react differently. Jesus returned to Nazareth one time,
his home, and went to the Synagogue. He saw relatives there and old
friends. He had been teaching in the synagogues of Galilee and had
earned a bit of a reputation. And so when he showed up at his: home
Synagogue the Elders invited him to do the reading for the day and to
say a few words. We can almost feel their pride...

He read from Isaiah Gl...

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has annointed me to
preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those
that are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

That may have been their favorite passage of scripture. It had
been a century since Roman occupation and oppression had begun.
Messianic expectation ran high. ‘The people of Nazareth read themselves into those

favorite words of the prophet. They were the poor, the oppressed, the captives,
That passage represented the promised Mes siah speaking a word of hope to them.
And so when he slowly rolled up the scroll and sat down in the teaching posture
of a rabbi and said, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing es
his listeners surely gasped in astonishment: “That's just Joseph's son!"

And then he made matters even more volatile by proceeding to talk about
inclusiveness. That was, and is, a tender nerve. The hope for a Messiah had
always been expressed in a tension between the exclusiveness of a solely
Jewish Messiah, restorer of Israel, and the inclusiveness of a Messiah who is
Lord of all people. Given a choice between those two, the good folk of Nazareth
came down on the side of exclusiveness and parochialism, just as Christians
do when they consign to hell everyone but members of their particular tribe. And
when Jesus told two brief stories, in each of which, the point is that a gentile
is favored, his old friends and neighbors became a lynch mob which actually
started out to throw him over a cliff.

it's infuriating when a young man or woman returns home and tells the
home folk that they are provincial and need to broaden their horizons; itis
even more infuriating when the young person catches them in that very human tendency
to admire abstractions and resist, with every strength, getting down to
particulars. That is the deeper meaning of what is happending here. It is the
dynamic that will happen over and over again in the brief three year ministry of Jesus
until people can bear it no longer and they crucify him. They had hoped for a
Messiah, a Savior, a redeemer, for centuries.

They thrilled to the prophetic images of Isaiah so long as they remained
abstractions. But the particularity: Joseph's son — Jesus, set off an angry and
suprising violent response.

Professor William Muehl of Yale Divinity Schoo! tells a wonderful story
about visiting a colonial house near New Haven. History was in every room
and the experience was enhanced by his guide, an elderly woman who was the
last surviving descendant of the original occupant.

Dr. Muehl noticed a particularly striking musket hanging over the mantel.
When he reached to touch it the woman stopped him. “It's loaded" she said.
She explained that her great-great—great grandfather had placed the loaded gun
there for the day he could use it in the cause of liberty. Muehl asked if he had
died before 1776 and missed his opportunity. “No, she said, "He lived to
a ripe old age and died in 1817. He just never seemed to generate much
enthusiasm for General Washington's revolt."

What happened, William Muehl deduced, is that the particular didn't
live up to the abstraction. The man was enthalled with the ideology of freedom and
revolution in the abstract. And when his farmer neighbors pounded on his door
one April morning and shouted, “There's a scrap over at Concord. Get your Gun!"
He didn't do it. (All the Damned Angels, p. 52-53)

Who doesn't know about that, or some variation of it? Abstractions
are inspiring. Particulars putus off...

We found it possible for decades to affirm the abstraction of “liberty and justice
for all" and to resist with vehemence the particularities of voting rights and equal
access and equal opportunity.

More personally, no one disagrees with the idea of a society free from
racism, but who hasn't missed the actuality, the particularity in an ethnic slur
in the barber shop?

Everyone is for economic justice in the abstract, but the particularity of
pay scales for one's own employees can be a touchy subject.

Who isn't inspired by the promise, in the abstract, of a joyful, romantic,
life-giving relationship? Who can avoid the popularized abstractions of human
relationships in the media, television situation comedies, or commercials ?

Just read the covers of the papers, books and magazines on the rack while you're
unloading your grocery cart at the check-out counter. The particularity, however,
is that person, that man or woman whose specificity, foibles, frailities, irritating
quirks, and unwillingness to put the toothpaste back where it belongs - whose
particularity is always in striking contrast to the abstraction which inspires us.

And so, in matters of faith it seems inherent to stay with the safety of .
abstraction and avoid the particulars: to keep it all at a distance, academic,
unattached, cordoned off from the human particulars of my life. It is the
greatest heresy of all time and it sometimes masquarades in the very respectable
guise of civility: “religion and politics don't mix after all ... or economics, or
how I vote, or my world view, or my opinions, or my leisure. Religion is my
private affair: religion is what I do with my quiet moments" all of which means that
I prefer my faith in the abstract.

Will Herberg wrote a classic study on American Religion back in the fifties
in which he revealed the irony that Americans were becoming more religious and
more secular simultaneously. Herberg found that while people were purchasing
the Bible in unprescedented numbers, 53% could not name one of the four Gospels...
and that when thirty outstanding Americans were asked to name the 100 most
important dates in history, the birth and/or Crucifixion of Jesus came in fourteenth,
tied with the discovery of X-Ray, and the Wright Brothers first flight...
American religion, Herberg concluded, is “Religion in General.“ (See Catholic,
Protestant, Jew)

There is, therefore, constant and understandable pressure in Christian faith
to remain abstract: to deal in the coin of vague emotionalism or dry
intellectualism. To confine Christ to a warm feeling in my heart - ora brilliant
idea in my head. In scholarly circles there has always been tension between
philosophy and the actualities of history: between the Christ of theolody and Jesus
of Nazareth. It was the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche who clammored about
the “scandal of particularity" in Christianity. He saw - and continued to be

amazed that so many devout Christians refused to see - the scandalous

particularity of Jesus, crucified Jew, as the incarnation of all that is good and
beautiful and holy and hopeful. Those ideas - those words - do better as
ideas, as abstractions. It's scandalous to propose that they have their reality
in the life of this particular man,

We begin, in faith, not with an idea but with a man. It starts for us, not
with a thesis that in unknowable infinity there is a source of being, but witha
story. Once upon a time a young man walked into a Synogogue in a remote Jewish
province in the time of the Roman Empire and. announced that God's Kingdom-was at
hand. Religion for us, at best, is not a debate about the meaning of life, buta
celebration and an imitation of a particular life lived one time long ago by a
particular man.

"Revelation" we say, with academic propriety, "happens in the context
of history," and what we mean is that in the life of Jesus of Nazareth God lived
among us. The doctrine of the Incarnation means God getting down to particulars.

Ours is, an “historical religion." Part of what that means is that God's
reality is not a set of ideas but a power and a presence in that little chunk of
history which is your life.

The scandal and the glory of te :Gospel is that God's love for you is
particular. It is not a proposal. You are not an abstraction in God's eyes. itis
love for you in your particularity.

Our needs, as people, after all, are not ultimately abstract. Our fears,
our desires, our drives, our dreams, our loves - are very specific. And in Jesus
Christ, God has acted to be with us, to love us, to empower us, to save us there
in that particularity.

In Will Campbell's book there is a poignant incident which illustrates...

A young black man had died... Campbell and his brother, out of curiosity, went
to the wake. He describes the healthy and vocal expressions of grief: they need...
"The mother shouted
‘Lord !'

"Those surrounding her picked up with their refrain as in a litany:

"Lord"

‘Jesus'

“Now the echo. Softly. ‘Jesus’...

‘O Jesus, Jesus... bring my baby home'

‘Bring ‘im home.'“

The author refiects:

“Whether West African or European, Nigerian or Mississippian in origin,
they were the pleadings of .a -- woman to the son of a Jewish peasant woman to be with

her in her travail...

They were Jesus sounds... And they would not soon depart from us." {op.

cit. p. 60-62)

The good news is that God's love is for you and me in our particularity.
The good news is that we are not abstractions of God: that with all our eccentricities
and failings and petty individual weakness - hopes, griefs, dreams — with all
our particularity God loves us and wants us as his own.

One of the last public acts of Jesus was in a room with his disciples, and
he wanted, I believe, for them to know ina final way that the power of his love
for them would ccntinue to be real - so that men and women in all the years and
centuries ahead would also know that the power of his love for them is real.
And so there were no abstractions around the table of the Last Supper and there
are no abstractions at the table of Holy Communion.

Bread - wine - "This is my body - This is my blood. Do this in remembrance
of me."

Amen.