So, here we are in the fourth week of Epiphany and it
seems a long time ago that the control freaks amongst us added the Magi to our
nativity scenes – that is, assuming we hadn’t already put them away by Jan 6th.
It’s hard to see initially in what way today’s Gospel is linked to the Epiphany
theme of the revealing of Christ to the nations ie: the Gentiles – non Jews,
the other – as represented by those Wise Men.
We meet Jesus here quite early on in his ministry
before his own theological thinking has expanded to include the Gentiles. We’ve
still to meet the Roman Centurion and the Syrophoenecian woman who do so much
to challenge Jesus’ sense of his own ministry as being exclusively to the Jews.
What I'd like us to consider as we think of the Epiphany is a sense in
which the greatest gift the world has ever received, Jesus, was the gift of a
marginalised community - Nazareth.
I work in a rather odd place that I’ve become rather
fond of over time. I don’t know when exactly this happened, but the sign that
you used to see as soon as you left the motorway and which celebrated
Cleckheaton as a centre of “Leisure, recreation and industry”, has gone.
There is no new sign. Cleckheaton, it seems, has
nothing to celebrate or boast about these days. It is famous for nothing
apparently, and has no illustrious sons or daughters. It’s the sort of place
people don’t go to. They pass through it on the way to somewhere marginally more
interesting like …. Dewsbury.
When I first started working there one of my pupils asked
me where I was from, which I misunderstood and assumed she was asking where I
lived, so I replied, “I’m from Leeds.” There was a pause while she digested
this. “Do they all talk like you in Leeds?” she said.
“Well, surely you’ve been to Leeds?” I ventured.
“I once went to Dewsbury on a Saturday with my mother.
It were busy. I don’t think I should like Leeds.”
I think the word that stuck in my mind then was
“parochial” - the same word that jumped into my mind when I read today’s gospel
story.
I think Nazareth may be the New Testament’s equivalent
of Cleckheaton. People passed through it on the way to somewhere marginally
more interesting such as Capernaum.
I think it’s probably about the way peoples’ minds
work but, having made that connection, I was interested to know a bit more
about Nazareth and it certainly seems very likely that had it not been for
Jesus, it’s not a place many of us would’ve heard of.
In John’s gospel we hear the story of Nathaniel’s
first meeting with Jesus. Philip had met Jesus and in turn went to bring
Nathaniel to meet him.
“Nazareth? Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Nathaniel wonders.
Nazareth is barely mentioned in first century
documents outside of Scripture. The little we do know is largely speculative
and wholly unremarkable. Scholarship suggests that Nazareth was a small
community probably located not far from a major East-West trade route that ran
from Egypt to Asia: picture it as one of the obscure communities you see exit
signs for off the motorway. Nazareth was situated in the rural part of Galilee,
a region of fishing and farming that was also known in Scripture for its
distinctive regional accent and for having a large population of immigrants,
foreigners and resident aliens. Indeed, not unlike Cleckheaton – apart from the
fishing, obviously.
And, of course, many of these foreigners were
Gentiles: not the religion of the locals. I know we need to be careful with
such comparisons, but does it sound to any of you like anywhere else we might
know?
Maybe Nathaniel said what he did, not only because of
Nazareth’s seeming insignificance, but maybe Nazareth also had something of a
reputation. After all, Jesus didn’t always have the easiest time in Nazareth.
Mark says that Jesus could do few healings in Nazareth, because of the
residents’ unbelief and lack of faith. Matthew suggests the people of Nazareth
won’t listen to Jesus because they still just think of him as the carpenter’s
son, Joseph’s boy. Or, as in Luke this morning, we consider Jesus’ first sermon
in front of his home people. Jesus returns to the synagogue in Nazareth to
preach, and he stands up to read and chooses the scroll from the prophet
Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach
good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and
recovery of sight to the blind, the let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the
year of the Lord’s favour.” And then he tells them, “Today, now, this Scripture
has been fulfilled in your hearing: here, in Nazareth.” It’s amazing how much
can change in the course of one sermon. Jesus knows his people so well that he
knows what message they most need to hear, and he loves them so much he is
willing to preach it. He’s said he was anointed to release captives and open
the eyes of the blind, so that is what he will do.
Jesus is aware that the people of Nazareth are clamouring
for him do the same kind of healings and miraculous cures there as he has done
elsewhere. And they probably think that since Jesus is from Nazareth, and that
they are his own people, that they’ll receive preferential treatment: after
all, they’re from Israel, and believe they are more important than those
Gentiles living across the border.
“Doubtless you will quote to me the proverb,
‘Physician, cure thyself,” Jesus says. But what Jesus is referring to is the
fact that the people of Nazareth believe Jesus the physician should heal his
own people first: them. But Jesus opens the eyes of their blind provincialism
and tries to set them free from their captivity to prejudice by reminding them
that God’s love extends beyond them, that it was an immigrant widow to whom God
sent Elijah, and not a widow in Israel, and that out of all of the lepers in
Israel, Elisha only cleansed the foreigner Naaman.
At which point the congregation threatens to throw
Jesus off a cliff.
Those of us who’ve grown up in a Nazareth, live in one
now, or work in one know that it has its challenges. We’ve seen some of the
violence that simmers beneath the surface, the willingness the draw hard lines
between insider and outsider, them and us, the family identities that can crush
true expression of self, the casual prejudice masquerading as a joke. Jesus has
had to rescue some of us from that. And it’s not the last time a congregation
in a rural community would try to run a preacher out of town who dared to
preach the truth of God’s word.
Anyone who keeps their eyes and ears open to the daily
news will know that Nazareth has gone through troubling times and continues to
do so into the present day. It is a great model for marginalised communities
everywhere and the communities it represents can all catalogue times of great
change and suffering.
This is a marginalised community – technically an area
of social deprivation – just one of many in this city. I remember listening
recently to a group of girls in my registration group at school talking about
some task they‘d been given in their GCSE Child Development course. They’d
clearly been discussing the concept of “failure to thrive” as a diagnosis when
a baby or small child fails to grow or mature in the proper way. That may seem
an odd comment to throw into the middle of a discussion on the Epiphany theme
and marginalised communities but I don’t think it’s too big a jump to apply the
same thinking to the spiritual growth of marginalised communities like the one
in which this church sits.
Many marginalised communities and churches have failed
to thrive because they have been the ones who have borne the changes of the recent
decline of our manufacturing industries, and as that industry has disappeared,
communities have suffered a double blow with the current economic crisis. It is
the poor and the marginalised who suffer as a result for our insatiable
appetite for cheap and highly processed food. Marginalised Communities have
born much of the brunt of globalization’s impact, as jobs have been lost, and
the textile industry has all but disappeared in West Yorkshire. Marginalised
communities have often been at the front-lines of the difficult issue of how to
welcome the sojourner or foreigner in our midst. Marginalised communities have
struggled with plagues of poverty and hunger; and many in these places have
tried to address their spiritual emptiness with methamphetamine instead of Methodism.
Community leaders, including church leaders, have often lacked courage or
proved ill-equipped in facing these challenges in a visionary way. And there
seems to be growing evidence that a disproportionate number of the military
casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been borne by the people of
marginalised areas.
God loves and cares for these communities, and calls
upon Christ’s church to respond to these challenges in creative and faithful
ways, so that they can thrive in the abundant life that Christ offers, and be
what they were created to be.
And yet for all of the current struggles, and for all
of the real challenges facing our churches in areas which believe they’ve been
forgotten today, the Epiphany message we can take from today’s Gospel is that
marginalised communities can be thriving communities because of what they have
to offer but may have forgotten to value - gifts of genuine human community, a
rich storehouse of practical skills and wisdom: a beautiful image of what
Christ’s church can be because isn’t the Gospel message the Epiphany that we
still celebrate today? And isn’t that Gospel spread to “the other” through the
quiet and often unrecognised work of today’s disciples? “The Spirit of the Lord
is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent
me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, the
let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
I think this takes us back to one of other Gospel
themes: not being an effective prophet in your own backyard. I asked the Vicar
what initiatives this church is already involved in and some of them would be
roundly condemned by some of our evangelical friends: doing the Gospel counts
for less in their eyes than speaking the Gospel. In that
worldview someone’s material circumstances are less significant than whether or
not they’ve heard about the saving grace of Jesus. Those of us here on the
liberal wing are only too aware that a holistic approach is needed and that
very often actions speak louder than words. I have a friend who works in this
area, not a million miles from here in fact. His work brings him into contact
with a wide range of local residents and he often talks about spiritual
matters. Note that what I didn’t say was that he often talks about Christian
things. Many of his customers are Muslim and over a period of time his general
lead-in via a conversation about spiritual matters, or current issues in the
local community, has led on to a wider ranging discussion that encompasses both
Muslim and Christian perspectives. He talks of conversations being picked up
from where they left off the last time on each new meeting. I think he has, as
a disciple, earned the right to speak of Jesus – a conversation topic, that
would probably not have been welcomed as an opening gambit.
If we look at how Jesus approached people we see a
pattern: he always seems to deal with people where they are. His dealings with
people are responsive.
When I was at Vicar School we spent a lot of time
discussing the Missio Dei – God’s mission. There are loads of models of this
throughout the history of the church but what always struck me was the fact
that most of them seem to be following a human agenda. The model that really
struck me – and at a stroke dealt with residual guilt from a previous
incarnation as a gauche Evangelical – was the idea of finding where God is
already at work and joining in. That was
a revelation to me. But isn’t that what you are doing here? Within a
marginalised community and often on behalf of other marginalised communities?
Inclusive Churches, Changing Attitude, work with asylum seekers and refugees,
the South American Community project, Ecumenism. Plus all the simple acts of
neighbourliness and human contact.
Living, working, worshipping in a marginalised society?
Working with the modern equivalent of the Gentiles – the other in our society? Want
to be an effective prophet in this backyard? Want to “preach good news to the
poor… proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, let
the oppressed go free, proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”? See where God is already at work around here and
join in.
Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Can anything good
come out of Hyde Park?
Amen.
