SERMON OF JANUARY 31, 2010
M. Bruce McKay
Pilgrim - St. Luke’s United Church of Christ
"From Comfort Zones to Kingdom Zones”
 Jeremiah 1:4-10, I Corinthians 13, Luke 4:21-30

 
In her short story “Revelation” Flannery O’Connor presents a woman with a serious attitude problem.
 Ruby Turpin had gotten very comfortable constantly complaining and criticizing others.  At one point in the story she’s sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, judging everyone around her, including a very poor, unkempt teenager named Mary Grace.
Ruby wondered aloud about the girl’s appearance and manners.  Finally Mary Grace couldn’t stand it any longer.  She threw the book she was reading at Ruby, hitting her on the head and causing her to fall to the floor.   “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!” Mary Grace yelled.
In some sense Jesus did the same thing in his hometown synagogue on that Sabbath day in Nazareth.  He threw the book (or more accurately the scroll) at his friends and neighbors.  (Lectionary Homiletics, Dec. 2009 – Jan. 2010, p. 75)
Up until that point things had been going very well.  He’d read with passion and understanding from the prophet Isaiah, where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.  The Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
When he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Luke tells us:  “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”  (Luke 4:21-22)
They were all feeling proud of Jesus, Joseph’s son, the hometown product whose reputation for healing and helping others outside of Nazareth had preceded his return to the synagogue that Sabbath day.
You might say the synagogue become, as it often was, their comfort zone - a place where they felt comfortable and at ease with who they were, with who God was, and with what it meant for them to be God’s people.
Then something happened.  Jesus threw the scroll at them, making them even madder than Mary Grace was that day in the doctor’s office.
Jesus said, “You’ll probably want me to do here, what you’ve heard I did in Capernaum.  But don’t hold your breath.  You’ve heard it said that no prophet is accepted in his or her hometown.  Well, join the club.  You know your Bible.  You know that when there was no rain for 3 ½ years and there was an incredible famine in the land that God sent Elijah to no one, except Zarephath, that Gentile woman in Sidon.  You also know that even though there were more lepers in Israel than you could count, God sent Elisha to none of them, except Naaman, that Gentile general from Syria.”
Hearing this, their hometown pride dissipated into furious rage and they tried to throw Jesus off the cliff at the edge of town. 
Hearing Jesus speak turned this comfortable, complacent congregation into an angry, violent mob.
Now, how do you think this makes me feel as your pastor and today’s preacher?
There’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to be liked. 
There’s a part of me that wants nothing more than for my congregation to be proud of its pastor. 
When I was preaching a few weeks ago at the installation of Rev. Faith McCausland at Kenilworth UCC someone later said, “I felt so proud that you were my pastor.”
There’s a part of me that ate that up.  Like  each of you I enjoy operating within my comfort zone and being affirmed in being there.
But Jesus didn’t return to Galilee, after being baptized in the Jordan, saying, “Your comfort is my greatest concern.”  Jesus didn’t say, “Your comfort zone is at hand!” 
Do you remember what he said?
“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”
Jesus didn’t come to create a comfort zone for all people (despite what you hear from many pulpits much of the time), he came to usher in the Kingdom of God for all people.  And that’s what almost got him killed that day in Nazareth.
He told his hometown neighbors that God was as concerned about the Gentile widow in Sidon and the Gentile general in Syria as God was concerned about them. 
And it just made them angry.  It made them very angry. 
Jesus came into his hometown synagogue shattering boundaries and building  bridges to places people never dreamed of going.   And they wanted to kill him.
Jesus came not to confirm people in their comfort zones but to lead them into Kingdom zones – places where people’s understanding of God’s inclusive, justice seeking love would be challenged and stretched to the point where many would become incredibly uncomfortable.
When I was going through the Gamaliel Foundations’ weeklong training in April 1996, I had a very uncomfortable moment when Greg Galluzzo, the Executive Director of the Gamaliel Foundation, was leaning over me in room with 40 other pastors and lay leaders. 
He said, “Bruce, are you going to be like every other UCC pastor I’ve ever met and be addicted to being smiled at, or are you going to make a difference in the world?”
Greg did this because he knew me well enough to know not just the part of me that wants to be liked, but also the part of me that wants to make a difference in the world – the part of me that is absolutely determined to live the life God created me to live and not end up having written on my tombstone, “He was a nice guy.”
All of us want to be liked and all of us want more that just being liked by others.
All of us, want to live the life God created and called us to live, but we’d just as  soon do it with as much comfort as possible.
We’re like Woody Allen when he said, “I would prefer to achieve immortality without dying.” (Feasting on the Word – Year C – Vol. 1, p. 295)
And yet, the call comes to all of us, as it came to Jesus and to Jeremiah to share in God’s mission in the world.  And we can’t do that without moving from our comfort zone to the Kingdom zone where God would have us be.
To think that we each are called by God can be a pretty scary thing – if we take it seriously.  I believe these calls come to each of us in as many different ways as there are people called.  Often it takes a while for God to get our attention.
 
For those of you who either read the first Harry Potter novel, or saw the movie, do you remember the owls that were sent to carry invitations for Harry to attend the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?  The owls keep coming and Harry’s foster parents keep trying to destroy the invitations.  They take Harry to a remote cabin, but still the owls keep coming.  Finally, when nothing else has worked, the invitation is delivered by a gentle, angry giant named Hagrid.  ((Feasting on the Word – Year C – Vol. 1, p. 292)
God is as persistent in calling us as the owls and Hagrid were in inviting Harry Potter to Hogwarts.
 During Bible Study here at the church someone mentioned a phone call she had received several years earlier.  She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line, so she hung up, thinking that they had the wrong number.  It was someone calling her to see if she would preach at her home church.  She has since become a lay preacher – only after thinking that the person inviting her to do so must have had the wrong number. 
 Jeremiah thought God surely had the wrong number when it came to his being a prophet: “Ah, Lord God!  Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” (Jeremiah 1:6)
 Jeremiah was afraid that he was too young, and afraid that he didn't know how to speak with enough eloquence.  And there was more that he was afraid of, for God went on to say, "Do not be afraid of them..." - those who may reject your leadership, make fun of you, or persecute you in some other way - "Do not be afraid of them..."
Whenever we realize that God is calling us in some particular way to do something we’ve never done before the chances are pretty good that we’ll think God must have the wrong number.  We’ll think that God must have the wrong person in mind to do what needs to be done.  You can count on feeling like you’re not up to the task and, like Jeremiah, you may find yourself offering any number of excuses.
 I remember well my first preaching class.  Terror would not be too strong a word to describe how I felt delivering a sermon to the other students and teacher for the first  time.  My heart was pounding, making it a struggle to breath.  As I stumbled over words and lost my train of thought, I kept thinking, "This can't possibly be what I'm called to do.  There's got to be some other line of work that the Lord has in mind for me."
 The other students in the class felt so bad seeing me struggle that rather than offer any verbal critique when I finished red-faced and sweating they burst into applause.
 When Jeremiah tells God that he isn't much of a public speaker and he's still not old enough to vote, God simply reminds him that he won't be alone -- "Do not be afraid..., for I am with you," says the Lord.
 Our call and our capacity to respond to our call both come from the same Source – the One who promises to be with us, every step of the way.
 Jeremiah's preaching against worshiping idols, relying on military might and forgetting the needs of the poor would put him in prison and at the bottom of a well.   He would lose his family and friends.  His eyes would become, in his own words, a fountain of tears and he would accuse God of deceiving him and overpowering him, using a word that literally means rape.  He accused God of raping him. (Jeremiah 20:7)
 And yet, in his next breath he said: “`If I say I will not mention him (the Lord) ,or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones ; I am weary from holding it in and I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:9)
 Jeremiah knew as well as anyone has ever known that God calls us to move from our comfort zone into the Kingdom zone of doing what God is trying to get done in the world through us.
In his book The Spiritual Life of Children Robert Coles tells the story of an eight-year-old girl.  Connie lived in Boston.  She and her family were active Catholics.
In conversation one day Connie said to Coles, “The church saves me.”  When he asked her what she meant by this, she replied, “The church saves me from bad habits.” 
Again, he asked Connie what she meant.  She identified pride as the “sin of sins” and defined pride as being “stuck on yourself.”
As the conversation continued, Connie assured Coles that children her age could be as religious as priests and nuns because God knows everyone and everyone is expected to make the world a better place to live.
Connie explained this to Coles by saying, “The whole big world out there, it’s God’ worry, and it’s mine, I guess, because I belong to God.”
Knowing that we belong to God - knowing that God created and called each of us to share in God’s mission in the world – we can’t help but move from our comfort zone to God’s Kingdom zone.
I did something this week I’ve never done before.  I met for the first time with a spiritual director.  I did this to get clearer about how God is at work in my life and where God is leading me in the days ahead.
This first session with a spiritual director helped me see more clearly than I’ve ever seen before how important it is for me to be a pastoral presence in people’s lives and how angry I am about conditions in our community that our destroying hope and denying dignity to those who are desperately trying to live the life they were created to live.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that “preaching allows the risen Christ to walk among his people.” (Pulpit Resource, by William Willimon, Jan.-March 2010, p.22)
If the Risen Christ were walking among us today he would be leading us to families that are being told they now have to pay the full cost of child care, even though doing so will force them to leave their jobs. 
He would be leading us not to Sidon or Syria, but deeper into the West Side and to places on the East Side where everyone knows someone who has been a victim of violence in recent years.
He would lead us to working with young people who feel like they can give up on everything and lose nothing because no one has ever invested themselves in their future.
He would lead us to work with other congregations and organizations through participation in the work of VOICE-Buffalo.
He would lead us beyond boundaries that shape our comfort zone into places where people may not look like us or think like us or act like us, but want what all of us want for ourselves and those we love – safe streets, good schools, comfortable homes and living wage jobs.
He would lead us to both deepening our personal relationship with God and  growing in our public commitment to make a difference in the world that God loved enough to send God’s only Son.
After Mary Grace knocked Ruby Turpin out of her chair in the doctor’s office by hitting her in the head with a book, people noticed a change in Ruby.  From that moment on she began being more compassionate and less critical – more hopeful and less harsh in dealing with others.
We can’t follow Jesus into God’s Kingdom without sacrificing our own comfort.
Mary Grace helped Ruby Turpin understand this and Ruby shaped her life accordingly.
Jesus would help each of us understand this and shape our lives and our life together accordingly.
If we don’t he won’t throw a book or a scroll at us.  He’ll simply pass through our midst and be on his way.
Amen!