If you’re gonna preach to the folks back home, you’d better pick your text carefully. Because somewhere in the crowd there may just be someone who remembers what you were like when you were seventeen. In my case, I’d cringe to see David Hunt out there in the pews. David would remember when his younger brother and I let ourselves into his house while he was at work, and in a few busy hours, between fits of wicked, adolescent laughter, packed up and loaded every stick of furniture, every personal item he owned onto a U-Haul truck - which we then drove off to go get pizza. On arriving home, David might well have called the police on us and taught us a lesson - had we not also taken his phone. So I’d say David’s presence for my homecoming sermon would knock “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” right out of contention as something I could credibly preach.

For this (and many other reasons) I cannot imagine going home to Vale UMC, Oakton VA, and declaring “friends, I stand before you today as the fulfillment of God’s faithful promises! The Good News has come to you this day!” But that is exactly what Jesus did - as you just heard. And at the outset, the congregation responded warmly - pleased at the notion that ‘the Year of the Lord’s Favor’ was declared unleashed in Nazareth. Heads nodded; this hometown boy was indeed eloquent and looked like a preacher.

But then, quietly, perhaps, a murmur started among them. If the blind were to recover their sight, the oppressed to go free, then why wasn’t anything happening? When was Jesus going to perform some miracles, the way they heard he had in Capernaum? Had he forgotten where he was from, who his people were? What did it mean “today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing?”

I think we can understand their sense of disappointment - after all, there are things in our church, and certainly things going on in our lives that we’d like Jesus to transform. We carry around weighty burdens of pain and regret, of anger and indignation. We are pushed to the edge to keep hope alive for a relationship, after experiencing disappointment so often. We wonder, we who are church-going, Bible-believing Christians, when Jesus is going to manifest some power in our lives. So it isn’t only in Nazareth they would hope for a miracle of healing.

Perhaps then we can understand those Nazarenes expecting that Isaiah’s words of hope were meant for them - and only for them. When Jesus unexpectedly goes in another direction, declaring that God’s abiding love for the poor and the oppressed has always been for outsiders as much as insiders, that is not the message they were expecting. Luke suggests that Jesus leaves them with an ugly implication to ponder: that when insiders presume God’s favor, or try to restrict God’s grace to only themselves, they may cut themselves off from the very grace they need. Indignant, enraged, the congregation hustled Jesus out of town, intent on throwing him off a cliff.

Just how he slipped through them and out of town, Luke doesn’t say. He just says Jesus left, which is a terrifying thought, when you think about it. The people who should have known Jesus best went home, unchanged by the experience of hearing him, and more sure than ever that God was NOT what Jesus claimed. Jesus said God has grace aplenty for foreign widows, for Syrian generals, that his Father cares for the stranger, the orphan, the illegal alien. Hah! the congregation thought. Yahweh was their God. The Good News was good for them. And Jesus, well…what do you want from a mere carpenter from a working-class family. (Why I hear his closest friends are fishermen!)

Why is it that again and again in the Gospels, the people who by rights and by relationship should have known Jesus best, objected to him just as deeply as, and in many ways more tragically than, his enemies? What do you think: could a group of religious people, gathered together for the purpose of worshipping God, refuse to take seriously what Jesus claimed about his Father and then forcibly run him out of town? Could such a thing happen? If we have the courage that Luke is calling for, we have to admit that it did happen. And that it could happen again.

A good many years ago, student leaders at a small liberal arts college in the South invited a guest preacher for Rally Week. The Rally was intended to get the Christian students together, FCA and Intervarsity and BSU and Wesley Foundation tribes, to reinforce their Christian goodness in the face of the rampant paganism that reigned on campus from Thursday night into the wee hours of Sunday morning. Like I said - a Rally.

The preacher came highly-recommended as dynamic speaker - and boy, he was that and more. He read from the Bible, slammed it shut, and commenced to making trouble. Folks started wondering who it was invited this guy to the Rally! After forty minutes every toe in the place had been stomped on. At one point, the visitor even threatened to throw the Bible out the window, because he said it needed to be freed from those who wanted to worship a Book instead of the Living God who comes to us through Scripture. Finally, it was over. Nobody tried to throw him off a cliff, no, but plans were made right away to boycott the rest of that Revival!

Back in Nazareth, those butchers and shop-keepers and housewives who had watched Jesus grow up were disappointed. They wanted a reward for their godliness. Instead, those who presumed to be on the inside, who had turned the Gospel of God’s unmerited salvation into religious formulas and self-congratulatory slogans, got a rude surprise. God is not a little tribal deity, not a national mascot. God won’t be partner to the racial and social and economic and national barriers we set up to keep order and keep score between us. That was not the message they had turned out to hear.

Still, you do wonder. Perhaps there was someone there that day in Nazareth, someone who had played stickball with Jesus in the alley or handed him a ripe fig from a produce stand, back when he was about yay-high. She begins to see, as he speaks of the fulfillment of the year of the Lord’s favor, that God’s love is incomprehensibly vast, far greater than she ever imagined. Later, she will hear that this man had eaten with one too many sinners, blurred the boundaries of religious decency once too often, let in one too many outsiders, and was crucified. She’ll consider the fact that but for Christ, she too would be an outsider. And deep within her heart, she will know the power of God’s forgiveness.

Now back to Rally Week: the Christian students I told you about made good on their threat of boycott, and stayed away the second night. A few minutes before the hour, it looked like the low turnout might just teach that guest preacher a lesson. Then, something odd happened. A battered, late-model BMW pulled up, and four baseball cap-wearing ruffians got out of it. They sheepishly filed in and sat near the back. Then two couples came in, the girls with their teased, Sun-In striped hair, the guys smelling of Listermint and something else that was probably tequila. There they were, frat boys, party-girls, those known never to be in church on Sunday mornings, in fact those often unaccounted for until Sunday afternoon. You see, the Word gets around on a small campus. And there were plenty of seats, what with the defection of the good, Christian students.

That night, the preacher brought a very different message, having to do with the forgiveness offered in the blood of Christ. After a brief address, the visitor engaged the congregation in dialogue. One young man in the back, intrigued but skeptical and emboldened by his friends, stood and asked: “I heard what you said, but how can a person really know that they are forgiven?” The preacher answered firmly “I tell you, in the name of Jesus, you are forgiven.”

“Right, right, I heard you say that,” the student replied. “But my question is, how can you know that for a fact?” “I tell you,” repeated the preacher, in an even more forceful voice, “in the name of Jesus, you are forgiven.” “Dude, let it go,” muttered one of the ballcap-wearing, back-pew sitters. But the student dug in his heels: “I don’t think you catch my question. I want to know how a person can really know, for sure, that he’s forgiven.” A third time the speaker looked him in the eye, and said more quietly, “I tell you, in the name of Jesus, you are forgiven.” And something outside time and space took place, a flowing current somewhere deep, and this one who would never have darkened the door of a church, this outsider, knew, just knew that Jesus is that good, that his sins were forgiven.

And the lesson? Without the upsetting, unsettling love of God, we are all outsiders. Our worship risks becoming a hollow sham if we do not rediscover that God has extended grace to Syrian generals and poor widows, to frat boys and party girls. And even to such as you and me. Of course we wish for a great many things, but what we most desperately need is the transforming reality of our own forgiveness, the saving knowledge that in Jesus, God’s news for us is that good. What if our fellowship, our worship, were an encounter by which we could actually experience the Scriptures fulfilled in our hearing? Would we greet it as Good News? For Good news it is.

Thanks be to God.