Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was
Luke 4:14-21:
In a speech I saw by Bishop Will Willimon, he recalled the
first time he went to visit a prisoner on death row. He said he was a little nervous going in
knowing that the person he was going to be meeting with had committed some
atrocious crime. After arriving at the
prison he was searched and then given a long set of instructions about what he
could and could not do and could and could not say, and when he entered the
room he had no idea what was going to happen.
After the prisoner he was meeting with sat down, Bishop Willimon asked
him what he wanted to talk about; he said “Do you think the
United Methodist
Church is doing enough to
reach out to a new generation offering them Christ?” That was not really the question he expected
to start the conversation out with. As
they continued to talk, Bishop Willimon found out that the man had become a
Christian while on death row. When asked
how he came to Christ, the man said “well I heard a lot about Jesus and he
thought he and I had a lot in common.”
To which Bishop Willimon said, “are you Jewish too?” “No,” the man said, “Jesus was on death row
and was executed by the state, and I’m on death row waiting to be executed by
the state, so I think we’ve faced the similar things.”
That comment came back to me this week as I was thinking
about he radical claim that Jesus is making in this passage and what it
actually means for us, and what it means for others as well. We often sentimentalize Christianity, and
it’s message, removing some of the teeth and the call, removing the fact that
we worship a man who was arrested, tried and executed, not because he was a
nice guy, the state tends not to kill nice guys, but because his message, his
good news, was seen as a threat not just to the religious leaders of his day,
but more importantly because he was seen as a threat to the Roman empire
itself. There are significant costs to
being a prophet. Tavist Smilley said,
“You can have people like what you say, or you can offer a prophetic message,
but you cannot do both.”
