Driving Out God
Luke 4: 21-30
I often wish that you could follow me around for a week and see what I see- well most weeks I wish that. I have seen many of you at your worst and at your best. I have see you trying with your whole heart to take one step at a time toward healing broken relationships or struggling to forgive or figuring out how to talk to someone who has hurt you. I have seen you working through recovery and facing the challenges that come with raising children and managing on a tight budget. I see you for all that you are and all that you hope to be with a life grounded in Christ. And your journeys, your ups and downs, your faithfulness and struggles are constantly with me and they have taught me a lot about faith and family and what ultimately matters in the end.
And even though people often mistake me for someone holier than I am, simply by virtue of my profession, I am just another Christian trying to figure out how to live this life the way God wants me to. But in spite of the fact that I am just as flawed as any of you, even if being a pastor does not grant me a smooth road, the pastoral life has afforded me a bird’s eye view that has served up on a platter more lessons than I will be able to take in over my lifetime. There are far too many to recount here, but there is one lesson among so many that I want to share with you, perhaps because it has become for me something of a mantra. This lesson is one that I hold as close to my heart as I can, with all that I do and all that I say and all that I commit to as a follower of Jesus Christ and it is this: Ask for your limitations and they will be yours. Actually the full quote from Richard Bach is, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.”
When I first heard these words I was annoyed. They do not account for circumstances beyond our control or the fact that a lot of what is possible in life seems to be about timing and luck or the work of the Spirit leading off in a different direction. But as more and more time passes and I watch as a possibility emerges or fades in a person’s life or in the work of a group or committee this seems truer than ever. Ask for your limitations and they will be yours.
I have listened as a young father told me how it was simply impossible to seek more education to find another job to change how much time he could spend with his family. I have watched as one bad decision unraveled a family not because it had to, but because it was too hard to put in the work to say the things that needed to be said, to move forward. I have seen what happens when one group decides that it is simply implausible to find another way of doing things and chooses to slowly end its work, instead of changing course to allow for new life. Ask for your limitations and they will be yours.
It is not easy, but it is simple. God is the one who, like a green blade pushes with all its might to find light in the arid, cracked desert and we are the ones who look across the dry earth and say, “There is nothing here, it is not possible for anything to grow in this place.”
God is the one who like a beam of clear golden light finds the dark cavernous corner and illumines a path out of the depths and we are the ones who sit in the cave with our eyes covered and say, “I am stuck here forever there is no way out.”
God is the one who like a drought stricken river winds Her way with a small stream of water, trying to nourish whatever life is found and we are the ones with our backs turned and our hearts closed who say, “There is no water here, life is not possible, it is all dried up.”
Again and again, God says to us, “Listen up, with me, you will be alright, with me you will have what you need, with me, you will be carried to new life, new light, new nourishment. With me the sky is the limit!” And again and again, out of fear, out of anxiety that what we know will be no longer, out of our own need to cling to the illusion that we are in control, we limit what is possible for our lives. We ask for limitations; we draw a line in the sand and say one way or another that we will not cross. We tell God by setting the bar low, that we cannot move forward because we know that often it is easier to close our eyes, to cover our ears and to do what we have always done, than to risk moving out of our own way and letting God take over. We ask for our limitations and again and again they are given to us maybe because God is answering prayers.
There is so much we cannot understand, so many things that we long to know for sure as a follower of Jesus Christ, but this I know, on this I would be willing to stake my life: if we ask for limitations, they will be ours. I haven’t figured out why this is so difficult for us, but we do know that those who lived in Jesus’ time struggled too. We know that human beings throughout history have frequently gotten stuck and looked to God to pull us out and God has offered a hand or sent a messenger or cleared the way and again and again we have remained where we are and wondered how we could ever get out.
Jesus spent a lot of his time speaking to those stuck in the trenches: those stuck in the hole of pain or adultery, those trapped by the bondage of systemic oppression, those caught in addiction or sin. And again and again he said, take my hand, I am the way out. Follow me and there is nothing you cannot do. Listen to what I say and I will lead you to light. But, people went on living as they had been, perhaps because like us, it is almost impossible to see beyond our myopic view. They were used to thinking that Rome would always rule, that they would always be hungry, that those with the most lavish robes and the widest chariot and the finest feast would be the ones on whom God looked with favor. And Jesus comes along and says, that is what the world wants you to think, with God the world looks differently, ask for your limitations and they will be yours.
Last week we met Jesus in the Temple. He was quoting Isaiah and telling the people gathered that there is no time to waste, there is no appointment in the future for which we must wait; God is fulfilling God’s promises right now, right here, with all of you. And our scripture for this morning is on that same occasion. We read that “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” And like all good church people when the preacher is finished with his feel good message, the crowd cheers. “Look at him up there! I remember his Bah Mitzvah and that marvelous party his parents threw.” “Isn’t that Joseph’s son? Oh Mary and Joseph should be so proud!” “Boy that Jesus is something, isn’t it wild that he grew up here in this town of all places?” “He sure knows his Hebrew scriptures!”
But not long after Jesus is praised, not long after the crowd is bubbling with pride, the tone changes. We don’t know exactly what happened but we know that the home town group started to feel left out. Jesus had just told them that God came for all people, that God came through him to free us from all of the walls we build and the obstacles in front of us and the pain we hold…and maybe that’s not what they wanted to hear. We can easily picture the grumpy guy in the back elbowing his buddy next to him, “Have you heard that this Jesus has been healing people all over the place. Why doesn’t he do that here? Why wouldn’t he give priority to us?” And for some reason Jesus isn’t happy with what he hears or sees or feels in the room. For some reason, he is set off and he lashes out at the congregation in front of him. And he says something like, "I suppose you're going to quote the proverb, 'Doctor, go heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what we heard you did in Capernaum.' Well, let me tell you something: No prophet is ever welcomed in his hometown.”
We don’t know exactly what happened, but we do know that the congregation was angry at the preacher, they were furious at Jesus and the scripture says that they were filled with rage. We read, “that they got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”
(I guess I should be careful what I preach!) Jesus comes to them, breaks into their hearts, opens their eyes, uncovers their ears and threatens to tear down all of the barriers they have built for themselves, all of the walls they have constructed, all of the trenches they have dug, all of the limitations that they crafted around their lives. They love what they hear. They love the idea that in Jesus God reverses all of our expectations. They love the idea that in Jesus God makes all things possible. They love the idea that there is hope. They love what they hear from Jesus…that is until they realize that his words are for them too.
Because of what they heard from him, there was no longer a need to put off anything. Because of what they heard from him, there was no longer a need to continue living the way they had been. Because of what they heard from him, they would have no more excuses for staying stuck in the hole of pain or adultery, no more reasons to remain trapped by the bondage of systemic oppression, or caught in addiction or sin. But because of what they heard from him, they drove him out.
And I think we know why. We human beings ask for limitations on what is possible because that is who we are, but in Jesus we don’t have to be that way, in fact, he asks us to look to him to become what he calls us to be. If we ask for limitations on our lives, on our faith, on our relationships, on communication with our children and people we love, if we ask for limitations on what is possible for our struggles as human beings they will be ours. If we ask for limitations as a church, if we ask for limitations for what we can do here right now, they will be ours. So, what would it look like for us to stop setting limits on what we could do with God? Because the truth is, asking for limitations is simply another way of driving out God. Asking for limitations is another way of joining the crowd that sat in front of Jesus and driving him out of town. Ask for your limitations and they will be yours. Let us start asking for something else, let’s ask Jesus to stay with us, to walk with us even when it is hard and all we want to do is to close our eyes or cover our ears. Let us ask for the limitless possibilities we find in our God. May it be so. Amen.