“How Ministry Begins, Part 2: The Scope of God’s Mission” by the Rev. Dr. Don Wahlig, February 2, 2025, Year C / Epiphany 4 - Jeremiah 1:4-10 / Psalm 71:1-6 / 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 / Luke 4:21-30

THEME:  Be open to the reality that God’s mission of love and justice is always wider than we think and share God’s love with all.

Have any of you gotten sick this winter? A lot of people have. That is because winter is peak season for viruses. It is cold, so we spend more time indoors. When we are in closer contact with other people, we are more likely to catch whatever cooties they’ve got. That made me wonder what is the most contagious virus of all time? So, I did some research. I was surprised at the answer.  The most contagious virus of all time is actually measles. We don’t tend to think about it because most of us are vaccinated. But before the vaccine became available in 1963, measles killed an average of 100,000 people every year.  One person with measles will infect, on average, 15 other people. To put that in perspective, COVID infects 10. The flu infects 2. In the realm of viruses, nothing spreads faster or farther than measles.

I thought about that when I read this morning’s scripture. This week we continue our sermon series on the development of Jesus’ ministry, as Luke tells the story. We are looking for clues to make our ministry here at SSPC more faithful and more effective. Last week, we saw that all faithful ministry is powered by the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is our superpower. It enables us to undertake God’s mission against all odds, just as Jesus did. Where we left off, Jesus is in his home synagogue in Nazareth.  He has just read from the scroll of Isaiah and declared that his mission is that of the Messiah. In fact, he is the Messiah. His home congregation are amazed at the gracious words he speaks.  They say, with admiration and awe, isn’t that Joseph’s son? All seems to be going swimmingly.

Jesus knows, however, that they do not grasp the scope of the mission God has given him. They fail to understand that the liberation and blessing God promises to the poor and the oppressed extends much further than they think, and much further than they are comfortable with. Jesus has been sent not only to Israel, but to the gentiles as well.  In other words, God’s redemption is for everyone, because all people are children of God. To drive his point home, he tells not one, but two stories from the Hebrew scriptures. They illustrate how God goes out of his way to send prophets to heal marginal people, the ones who are unclean, and excluded from participating in the community of God’s people. When Jesus reminds them of God’s past mercy to these outsiders, the Nazarene congregation becomes so livid that they run him out of town and try to throw him off a cliff!

It is proof of what he has already told them. No prophet is accepted in his hometown.  As a result, there will be no healings, or any other miracles in Nazareth. His own people have rejected him. By rejecting him, they have rejected God’s mission.

I’ve been wondering this week, what is the real problem here that Jesus is trying to address?  He knows that what he is saying will shock them and offend them. He says it anyway. He must be doing it for a reason. And, in fact, he is. The root problem here is that, in the minds of his friends and neighbors, Yahweh is their proprietary God.  God’s mercy and goodness are for them – and no one else. But God’s mission is bigger than they think.  That is because God’s love is bigger than they know. Consequently, their love is limited. That is why they turn on their native son in a heartbeat, and even try to kill him.

Luke is holding up two sharply contrasting understandings of God’s love. The first is the assumption by the worshipers in Nazareth that God’s love is limited to them. They treat God’s love like a finite resource. In their view, any of it that gets shared with outsiders means less for them. But Jesus is painting a very different picture. His message is that God’s love is infinite. It is inexhaustible, universal, and multiplicative. It is like a highly contagious virus. It replicates constantly, and spreads quickly through human interaction.  Like all viruses, God’s love is constantly seeking a human host. It does not matter who the person is, where they are, or where they have come from. It wants to spread to everyone, everywhere. But I think we would all agree that there is a distinct shortage of love in this world. So, what is the problem?

The answer is in the way that God’s love spreads. We experience his love the same way we catch a virus: through human contact. We receive his love from others, and we give his love to others.  But if we are not personally connected with other people, then there is no opportunity to share God’s love. There is a disconnect. And that is exactly what is happening. By some measures, the world is more connected today than ever before. In 24 hours, we can fly almost anywhere on the globe, a journey that would have taken weeks or even months not that long ago.

We all walk around with a cell phone in our pocket that let us speak to people across town and across the world.  All it takes is the tap of a button or two. We fire up Facebook or Instagram and we can instantly catch up with the latest doings of friends we have not seen in person for days or even decades. But our increasing digital connections have come at a human cost. Studies show that, as screen time rises, the amount of face-to-face time with others falls. Compared to 20 years ago, teenagers, for example, spend 50% less time interacting with others in person. There is a similar decline among all age groups. By virtually every measure, the quality of our digital connections is low. Online interactions are typically shallow, lacking any real emotional connection. 

It is as if the social distancing of the COVID era is becoming our way of life. But God’s love is not a virus to be feared. It is a blessing to be welcomed. It may be universal, but we experience it one real relationship at a time. And the more real relationships we have, the better conduits we will be for God’s love.

One of my favorite Christian writers and thinkers is Brian McLaren. Brian comes from an evangelical tradition from which his faith has evolved in some remarkable ways. He said, “As a committed Christian, I have always struggled with locked doors—doors by which we on the inside lock out "the others"—Jews, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, doubters, agnostics, gay folks, whomever.  The more we insiders succeed in shutting others out, the more I tend to feel locked in, caged, trapped.”

His point is that, if we start to think and act like the folks in Nazareth, that we are the ones most deserving of God’s love and blessing to the exclusion of others, we not only deprive them of the transforming experience of God’s love, but we too lose opportunities to experience that same transformation. It is all too easy to become insular, to let pride and self-satisfaction lull us into thinking that we have it right and others have it wrong. That we are the true believers – but those folks across town who worship on Friday or Saturday, well, they are just plain wrong, and God surely knows that. That kind of thinking leads to violence, not love.

The same dynamic is present among Christians, too.  We are all familiar with the famous 1794 Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania. We think of it as an economic conflict, but it was a religious conflict, too. Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tenant farmers rebelled violently against their Episcopalian landlords. Sadly, this kind of insular, judgmental thinking was present in my family, too. I loved my mother dearly, but she was a product of her parents’ bias against Catholicism. When I was in elementary school, on Saint Patrick’s day, she would make me wear orange, which represents Protestantism. It was an echo of the violent confrontations in Northern Ireland, between two groups of Christians who each thought they had it right and the other was wrong. Once again, just as it happened in Nazareth, the result was violence, not love.

There is a better way. It comes from opening ourselves to the reality that God loves all his children. He wants to use all of us to receive and share his love. So, the question for us to ask is not are they right, or are we? The real question is how does God want us to share his love in our interactions with others, including those we might consider outsiders? If one person with measles can infect 15 others, how many people can you affect by sharing God’s love?

I bet it’s a lot more than we think. May it be so.