Sermon – January 31, 2010: Not One’s Own Way
Sermon for Sunday, January 31, 2010 First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Not One’s Own Way
Jeremiah 1: 4-10; 1 Corinthians 13; Luke 4: 21-30
“Familiarity breeds contempt.” I used to think that meant that things which we know
well, which we see every day, don’t impress us. It’s true that the commonplace isn’t
impressive, but that’s not what is meant by “familiarity breeds contempt.” The saying is a
warning not to allow persons who owe you marks of respect to forget those, not to allow
those who are your inferiors to address you, and begin to regard you, as an equal.
This is somewhat foreign to us, because we have an ideal in our society that one
person is as good as the next, and we disapprove of societies with rigid class structures
and distinctions. We say that everyone deserves respect, and we don’t have rules for how
much respect is accorded which person from which other person, or how that respect is
either to be elicited or bestowed.
My generation has accelerated the disappearance of evident distinctions, by having
insisted back in the hippie days that a person’s dress or haircut or cleanliness was no
reflection on his or her value as a human being. All of that is true in a way, and we’ll get to
the way that is true when we speak about the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Love
sees past external things, and is unconcerned with social distinctions, and so affirms the
notion that everyone is equally entitled to profound respect.
In the absence of love, however, many societies have come up with customs which
assign persons various levels of social worth, so that those in positions ostensibly
important are recognized and shown regard, and those with inferior status are offered
compensating consideration, as a matter of noblesse oblige or paternalistic kindness.
Well, that all sounds awful to most of us. Without it, however, it’s hard to grasp
what’s going on in the gospel or the Old Testament reading. Seeing how socially-created
differences in the treatment of persons play into the concerns of Jeremiah and of Jesus, in
turn, shows us that an alternative of some kind is necessary if God’s person is to be given a
hearing in the world, and that gets us back to Paul’s resolution of social relations in love.
But to return to “familiarity breeding contempt.” That means that if a person ignores
social realities, in a class society, and thereby encourages those with less status to treat him
or her as no better than themselves, that the facade of dignity and privilege which social
distinctions uphold is forsaken, and the emperor is without clothes, so to speak–the
externals which uphold a superior position are gone, and one comes to resent the
advantage the other has which used to seem part of a natural order.
Almost every society requires that young people defer to their elders. We pay with
advancing years and arthritis for wisdom, and we want it acknowledged by those who may
be very bright but whose slight experience of life means that we still could teach them a
thing or two. Our physicians may get younger and younger all the time, and we count very
heavily on their education when that’s the case, because their on-the-job learning is just
beginning. When other young people present themselves as qualified to offer direction,
we may be more skeptical.
When God calls the prophet Jeremiah he knows that Jeremiah will expect youth to
prevent him from effectively speaking God’s word. It’s not that a young person can’t
speak; it’s that there may be difficulty in a young person’s getting a hearing. There simply
is not a level of automatic respect for the wisdom of the young. God assures Jeremiah it
won’t matter– that God’s word in Jeremiah’s mouth will still be effective.
It is. When God, through Jeremiah, foretells the fall of princes and the ruin of nations,
it all comes to pass. What doesn’t work so well is in getting Jeremiah’s hearers, his
contemporary rulers and leaders of the Jews, to take him seriously before disaster strikes.
It is natural enough for people who offer unpopular views to become marginalized, but the
young in a traditional society begin on the margin, and that’s a double disadvantage.
People know what to expect from them, which is not much, and so don’t accept them in the
role of truth-teller.
Jesus has this same problem with the people among whom he grew up. He’s in
Nazareth, where he was raised, after living as an adult in Capernaum. In Capernaum he’s
done great things, and people no doubt are eager to see what happens when he visits the
synagogue in his home town. He reads from Isaiah and says that he’s the servant God has
called to do great things for God, and at first everyone is astonished. Then they begin to
question, to put in perspective Jesus’ claims by reminding themselves that he’s only their
neighbor’s boy, after all. He’s someone they have been allowed to treat familiarly, and so
they can’t expect too much from him.
He understands their disbelief, and he offers a couple of comparisons from scriptural
stories about past miracle workers whose miracles only benefited strangers and outsiders.
The point is, among other things, that people who regard themselves as “in the know” are
kept from having the faith it takes to allow great things.
This offends everyone, and they hurry him off to throw him over a cliff. That’s a
strange story. He escapes, it seems miraculously. The whole incident prefigures his entire
career, doing wonders among people on the margin and being questioned and doubted
by people who are established and regard themselves as his superiors. In the end, he
too, like Jeremiah, suffers persecution and injustice and an effort to destroy him, and only
subsequent events, again as with Jeremiah, vindicate his message.
The stories of Jesus’ call and Jeremiah’s call, with their acknowledgment and
expectation of resistance on the part of the society, pose a problem. How is God going to
speak to the world? How is God going to break down the resistance of people who are
used to thinking they have got it right, and who can’t accept the possibility of a social inferior
offering an acceptable alternative vision for how to live?
This is always a problem. People who think that there may be a better approach to
the way the world is working always are regarded as naive. People who suggest that there
is a better way despite the doubts of their neighbors always are regarded as
presumptuous. Society continually goes down the same road allotting privilege and power
to the prosperous and emphasizing the crimes of the poor, exaggerating the distinctions by
which some have standing and some have none, because those who possess respect
and therefore self-respect in this system have no motivation to change it.
The same dynamic is there in the early church. The people of God bring the same
disease of self-importance and assigning worth by outward gifts which they have learned in
the world into the Christian community. The whole letter of First Corinthians addresses it.
Paul tells the Corinthians that they’ve missed the point. Paul tells them that they’ve
forgotten the essence of the gospel. Paul tells them that the possession of spiritual gifts,
which they have permitted to become a source of pride and division, is being
misunderstood and mishandled, and that all those gifts have value to God; that everyone,
no matter how modestly endowed, is to be distinguished not in importance, but by function.
Paul says that the community as a whole, the well-being of everyone at once, is of
paramount importance, and argues for that in various ways. He even urges that those who
may seem less important by worldly standards need and ought to be accorded a
compensating regard, for the health of the whole body of Christ.
That gets him up through twelve chapters of First Corinthians, and then he says, “But
I’ll show you a still more excellent way.” He’s going to give us the ultimate solution to the
problem of people’s interactions in a community. It’s not which gift has first rank or which
doctrine is emphasized. It’s not a sober and humble handling of the community’s rituals and
purposes. All those things are important but they won’t do it. Nothing will achieve a world
of persons living together by the light of God except those people’s loving each other.
That gets us back to the anti-class distinction, anti-outward appearance ethos of
1969. What did the hippies say? Love is all you need. It sounded naive then, when it
was longhairs from next door saying it. The truth is that it probably sounds naive now,
when it’s the central teaching of a religion begun by a traditionally bearded-and-long-haired
man from over twenty centuries ago.
We’re used to hearing that scripture at weddings, and it certainly has its applicability
to the loving relationship of a couple. However, it is meant to prescribe the loving
relationships of a community, of a congregation, a church, a group of people within society
distinguished not by traditional marks of importance, but by sincere interest in the well-being
of others. When The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior knew his death was near, and
spoke publicly about how he wanted to be remembered, he said he wanted it
remembered that he loved. That wasn’t sentimentality, or greeting-card gushing. That was
claiming the gospel. Whatever a person’s importance in social terms, in God’s vision for the
world the only way to get things right is to desire the good of others around you.
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