The danger of half a story

 A sermon for St. Paul Lutheran Church, Postville

Luke 4:14-21

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus preaches a one sentence sermon. He reads Isaiah and then preaches, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Nice, brief sermon. The problem with this break in the Gospel is that this is only half a story—and the other half of the story comes in next week’s readings when I won’t be with you. So, I could preach half a sermon or pretend that this scripture is only about Jesus as the fulfillment of Isaiah, but it does sort of lack a conclusion, doesn’t it? More to the point, it’s misleading: The way the reading is cut makes it almost seem like the people of Nazareth cheered and lifted Jesus up on to their shoulders and carried him out of the gym, like a basketball player hitting that game-winning three-pointer. It feels like that is where this is going.

The whole story—however—is something altogether different. At first, the people of Nazareth did love what Jesus was saying—they were eager to cheer on the local kid. After all, who doesn’t love a little pride in the hometown? Nazareth was small and easily overlooked, but the Messiah born in their midst? How about that! Jesus’ friends and neighbors had reason to believe he was going to lift them up and take Nazareth from nowhere to somewhere, and they feel this way right up until verse 24.

Then, Jesus says, “Truly, I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” You can almost picture the peoples’ faces changing, can’t you? The trouble with getting people all riled up and excited is that you now have a mob ready to destroy you if you let them down. The cheers turn to rage, and the people of Nazareth—Jesus’ people—drove him out of town and ultimately attempted to murder him, the child that grew up in their midst, who was the Messiah, but not the messiah they wanted.

Now, I suspect Pastor Lynn might have some things to say on that part of the story next week, so I am not going to touch on the implications of Jesus preaching to the hometown crowd today. Rather, my sermon today is about the danger of half a story—and how camp helps bridge the gulf between two of the most challenging stories we face in life today.

The first story:

            This is the story of getting by in the United States of America in the year 2025. It is certainly not the worst time or place in history, but life here is not without its challenges. People are divided, especially around political beliefs, which drives division in churches and between friends and neighbors. Our young people are more aware of these divisions than ever, because they are more connected to the world around them than ever. With their phones in their hands, they are told who is wrong—they are told who to hate—they are told they are wrong—and they are also told they need to be skinnier, smarter, and funnier—they are told they must achieve more, must be more—they are told they are the problem, and they are told others are the problem. They are told in a thousand different ways every single day that they are not enough—and the problem is themselves or the problem is other people—and then they are hammered further by other Christians who use the Bible as a weapon to beat the life out of those who already feel beaten by the world around them.

            So, while in many ways life these days is nowhere near as hard as it has been at most other times in history, it doesn’t feel that way, especially to young people, as the expectations they are fed meet a reality that feels impossible. That is story #1.

The second story:

            This is the story of a God who came in Jesus Christ to save those who could not save themselves. This is a story of grace. It is also a story that runs so counter to the first story that it is increasingly easy to believe that all the principles of the first story apply to the second—that God helps those who help themselves; that we have to earn grace; that we have to accept it as true or believe it in the right way. The second story is a story that has become harder and harder to believe as we convince ourselves we are our own saviors—that God favors the powerful and looks down on the poor.

            In short, America in 2025 looks surprisingly like Nazareth two thousand years ago. We nod along; we cheer; then we crucify.

            Our young people may not have the words to express the cognitive dissonance between the story of the self-sufficient American ideal and the story of Jesus Christ, but they feel it. Boy, do they feel it. I think we all do. We face a very challenging question: How can we reconcile the world of achievement where we beat each other back in order to climb the ladder of success faster with the world of grace that proclaims that the first shall be last and the last shall be first?

            I tell you what most people have done—they have turned away from the church, but not for the reasons we so often cite. The prevailing sentiment is that church attendance has declined for some combination of factors involving sports or clubs replacing churches as the center of the community and people backsliding away from being good Christians. I want to suggest that our busy-ness is a symptom not of a lack of faith but a lack of connection, and I believe that people have turned away from the church because the church in the developed world has always been allied to the powers that be and those powers-that-be realized little by little, then increasingly rapidly, that they didn’t need the church anymore, and they gave permission to folks who never wanted to be part of the church anyway to no longer be.

            And our young people, who need grace as desperately as any of us, don’t see it in the church, because the church is just another extension of the first story. If you don’t feel this, that’s probably because you and your forebears helped cultivate the church into what it is today, and that has served you and your community well. For other folks—adults and youth and children alike, faith feels like just another obligation—just another thing to graduate from on their ascent up the treacherous mountain of success. And it doesn’t matter if we tell them otherwise, it still feels that way.

            So, we have two stories and one is winning, because we mostly don’t see how to bridge the chasm between achievement and grace.

            Enter camp.

            Now, this is all very convenient for the camp director to come in and say, so I want to be clear: I don’t want to pretend that camp is the lone solution to this problem or that camp is one-size-fits-all or perfect—it is far from it—and I also don’t want to suggest that we have some magical formula for creating good little Christians—we don’t. But I have to say: Ewalu is a place where people who are looking to challenge themselves encounter a world drenched in grace, and that combination of striving to leave our comfort zones and discovering the love of God does something to people. We proclaim grace, but not cheap grace—not the kind of grace that says, “just try your best and God will take care of the rest.” No, here we preach the kind of grace that does not shy away from death—that does not pretend we can fix everything. And kids discover it to be true not because we tell them it is, but because they already know it is. They encounter death and resurrection in the world around them. They get their hands dirty in the mud and their feet wet in the water and when they do, something cracks open, some part of them dies, and then they rise.

          If the church is to be the bridge from story one to story two, it has to take us into the world—sometimes quite literally into the natural world through a place like Ewalu but other times into the places where the poor and meek and incarcerated live—and there we will find what it means to be a Christian. Never in the halls of power, only ever in the muck—in the places where people are crying and where people are dying. This can happen indoors, but for many of us, it is easier to feel it out under the open skies.

            Ewalu is far from perfect, but it is a place apart. And boy, do we need places like that. Our kids need places apart—I need places apart—you need places apart. Because when the prevailing story of the day whispers in your ear, saying, “You are not enough,” it is such a nasty thing to hear not because it is a lie but because it is true, and nothing we can say to the contrary can change that. The chasm between story one and story two are those words: You are not enough. Our kids know it to be true.

            But the good news of Jesus Christ is that you are saved by grace, that you are loved by a mighty God who knew you before you were born, who saw you as you are and called you “good,” not because of what you could someday become, but because of who God has made you to be. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we will hurtle headlong through death into something more glorious on the other side. The good news of Jesus Christ is that no matter what, we are beautiful and wonderful children of God, who did nothing to deserve this grace, yet God created us for exactly this—that we might rise on the other side.

            So, the church and camp are in this together, because together we can proclaim that dead things rise. And tomorrow, we will do it again and again and again—sometimes for other people so that they can hear it, but let’s be honest, most often we need to preach this for ourselves because we need to remember that it is true when the first story has so much power over how we see the world. The great news for those of us who have seen a lot of decline in the church and who fear the possibilities of tomorrow is that there is one and only one thing required for resurrection—and that is to die.

            So, here’s to the counter-cultural movement you and I are members of that welcomes our newborns into the world by splashing them with water and saying, “You are drowned in the waters of baptism.” That does not sell a lot of t-shirts, but damn is it what we need to feel in our bones. Rather than seeing our lives as a conveyer belt pulled toward some destination we can do little to avoid, we can break free from the need to save ourselves and experience a world absolutely drenched with grace. It happens around a campfire… and around the dinner table… and even in the car on a Sunday morning on the way to soccer practice, because the church was never the point—it is only ever the community of Christ-followers supporting one another by proclaiming we are dead, yet through Christ we rise.

            So, rise up, church! Rise up to live beyond fear. And together we will rise with Christ and proclaim that second story—that we are children of God, so we are recipients of grace upon grace. You and me and every child who is here and is not here. Because it is not about the hometown team—and it is not about winning—and it is not about getting our way—it is all about grace for a world that is forever broken, yet beautiful. A world God created and called good, just as God calls you and me.