Text: Luke 4:14-30

It’s a little bit of an odd thing to work and worship in one city and live in another. It’s a disconnect that is all too common in urban and suburban contexts where in order to balance all the elements of finding a livable and affordable neighborhood with schools and work and an aligned worshiping community it’s pretty hard to worship in your own backyard. Particularly if you’re Mennonite and live around here.

So as a non-resident of Kirkland, I would not really have a reason to visit city hall, even though it’s right across the street. But I’ve been there twice in the past couple of months. This past week meeting right in the council chambers. 

I was there with other clergy from Kirkland to hear about and consult with the City Manager’s office on their responses to unhoused folks in Kirkland. I am pretty impressed overall with their desire to respond seriously and with compassion the the experience of homelessness. They have a plan called a continuum of care that spans the spectrum of responses from prevention to permanent supportive housing.

However, when the city rolled out this plan to respond to unhoused residents of Kirkland last fall, the city responded in a HUGE uproar: many Kirkland residents rose up saying things like, “We don’t have a homelessness problem!” “If you provide services we’ll attract all kinds of needy people from other communities!” We don’t want those people parking their RVs on our streets and parking lots.” “Tent encampments are a hazard!” “What about the children?!”

Neighbors in Kirkland may be crying “Not in my backyard!” but the city knows – and church leaders know because of the calls and requests that they receive – that people without homes and other resources do indeed already live here. Their children go to schools with housed kids. And the city is trying their best to connect people with services and create ways to connect people to what they need.

They came to us in this meeting asking: How do you talk to people about homelessness? How should we?

There were lots of great answers, not least on which was creating opportunities for folks to see and understand people’s experience and opportunities for conversation and relationship building. But I kept thinking about how we in the church have a unique angle that the city will never be able to use, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have the ministry and teachings of Jesus to ground and guide our responses to our neighbors around the world and across the street and even on the street.

Our text today is sometimes called Jesus’ mission statement. His proclamation of who he is and what he’s about. I’ve always thought of this moment as the beginning of Jesus ministry. But it’s actually pretty clear in this story that he’s already been active in teaching and interpretation and even healing – at least to some extent – in the region around his home town of Nazareth. 

Luke writes that “News about him spread throughout the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.” Synagogues being not only a place of worship but a community center and a town meeting place. So while I’d been thinking that until this moment his main gig was probably being a carpenter like Joseph, it may be more likely that he was already doing a lot of traveling around and speaking. A bit of a small-town celebrity.

Even so, this speech does seem to define his sense of call. He goes to his own home town, where he’s most well known, where he grew up and probably spends the most time. And he reads the assigned text for that week. I expect this was much like following a lectionary, an ordered set of readings throughout the year. He reads:

18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
19 and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Then, the Gospel continues, “20 He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the synagogue assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him. 21 He began to explain to them, ‘Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.’”

And whoo boy, did they ever love that. They raved about him. They are so proud!

As a long-time pastor for youth and kids, I have had plenty of opportunities to see what the young people I’ve worked with and taught in Sunday school are doing in their adult lives: teachers and accountants and scientists, social workers, world travelers – using their gifts to serve the world. I get especially proud when any of those young people come back and we get to hear about their work. 

Jesus’ people are not even upset that he’s making grandiose claims about the scripture being fulfilled, connecting himself to the prophetic text. They love it!

But Jesus can’t leave well enough alone. This guy! He gives us a little foretaste of how he likes to poke the beast. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, essentially. “You’re wondering why I won’t bring my skills here. Why won’t I set up shop in Galilee and build my healing empire here? Well, let me remind you how God works and has always worked.” 

Then this kid they raised – Joseph’s son! – reminds them of the stories that they taught him: God’s prophets and teachers are called to heal and feed – and even raise to life – the outsiders, the non-Jews, the foreigners.  To be fair to them, God does have quite a history with the Jewish people as well, but Jesus is leaning into God’s love and compassion for those outside of that covenant relationship.

Jesus is basically saying, Not in my backyard. That is, in this case, I’m not staying here and keeping the ministry that I’m called to do fenced in and walled off from the world God loves. God’s love doesn’t have a boundary.

Well, that turns the Nazareth home-town pride right around into extraordinary anger. It made me wonder how the Mennonite community would respond if Mennonites with influence would refuse to engage in the Mennonite backyard. Like, what if Girl Named Tom refused to play any churches or Menno colleges or events.  I bet there would be some pretty nasty gossip and facebook posts.

But this isn’t just nasty gossip. This is rage. This is run him out of town and throw him off a cliff fury. I don’t know how much Luke is exaggerating to make his point. He also says Jesus simply ‘passed through the crowd and went on his way.’ When he probably just picked up his robes and high-tailed it out of dodge. 

But people do get that angry when they feel like the thing they deserve or the control they are entitled to is threatened or taken from them. As I was reflecting on this in light of Anabaptist Fellowship Sunday and the origins of Anabaptism in Europe, I think there was a lot of that anger and indignance going on in the state institutions threatened by the first reformers.

The city councils and church leaders of 1520s Switzerland and Germany were certainly angry enough to throw the first reformers like Blaurock and Grebel and Manz off of a cliff. Or at least angry enough to drown them or burn them at the stake or torture them for heresy. 

When those first Anabaptists said to the powers in the state and church, No actually, you don’t have the authority to decide for me whether I’ll be baptized, or take up arms for the crown, or compel allegiance. When they said, you don’t have the authority to be the sole interpreters of scripture – that’s for the community to do together. That turned their communities against them as they began a new witness for the Word of God.

My former colleague Jonathan Neufeld used to say, What you see depends on where you sit. Meaning, good news to the poor and liberation for the oppressed and the outsider almost certainly doesn’t look like good news to the one with wealth and security.  But Jesus is declaring that good news and his reference to the Year of the Lord’s favor is the return to jubilee, a time of  re-distribution and leveling out – now it’s here!

This is the Gospel that we Christians have to live and proclaim in communities like this very one. Kirkland City Hall is by no means declaring a year of jubilee. They just want to do their best to get some city resources to the people who need them most. And yet that feels like loss to many KIrkland residents: We pay the taxes – why should our money get spent on those people. Outsiders, addicts, drains on the economy. We want control.

I like to have control too, as it happens. Makes things a lot easier to predict and understand. But there’s no controlling the Gospel. There’s certainly no controlling God’s love. 

If we listen to the call of Jesus mission statement, and better yet, if we make it our own, we’ll be called to “preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

Healing and liberating. Within our own backyard, our many backyards, and far beyond our backyards. May it be so.

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