Outside In: Church on a Cliff Edge (with Jesus)
A sermon on Luke 4:21-30 and 1 Corinthians 13 for Epiphany 4, 2025, Preached at St Paul's, Ashgrove
Luke 4:21-30 and 1 Corinthians 13
Every four years I share my birthday with the inauguration of a US President. To be honest, I didn’t even notice until the start of President Obama’s first term. Having a birthday that coincided with the inauguration of America’s first black president: that was something to be proud of!
This year, with so many people around the world so very concerned about what a second Trump presidency might mean, I felt a deeper connection with this event: not just because of the birthday, but because I am a Christian and Christians played a key role in giving Trump his presidency.
The right-wing Evangelical Christians who support Trump are my sisters and brothers in Christ. They are not some different species. And so, this year on my birthday I was feeling something like remorse.
I grew up in a little church in a little town. My church had faults, but the good or harm it could do were limited to the few families that made up the congregation. The idea of the church having influence over international affairs never occurred to me. The church was far too little and disorganised! We had a big, powerful, life-changing message, but it was a treasure in a disposable cup, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4. We had no power in ourselves: Certainly, no political power.
We had a powerful message and a call to exercise power through prayer. As a young adult, I remember how hard my friends and I prayed for the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and for the fall of the Berlin Wall. And I remember how clear it was to me that our prayers had made a difference. We had influenced the course of history through prayer. Not through political machinations. We were not players, we were pray-ers.
Since then, I have studied Church history and discovered that the church has indeed often been a player in world events, and as a player has sometimes done great good and sometimes worked terrible evil.
In the past, I have given thanks to God that the church no longer has any political power. Thank God Christendom is a thing of the past! Thank God the church is now small and disorganised! Now we are weak, we can leave room for the power of God, like Paul talked about in 2 Corinthians 12.
I wanted to keep Christendom into the past, with empire and slavery and racism; way back in the past where I don’t have to do anything about it. The church is fine now. We have no power, so we are safe. That is, the world is safe from us. But in the United States, all this began shifting again. While mainline churches like us Anglicans remained small and powerless, independent churches began to grow at an intoxicating rate.
And one of the strategies that led to that growth was the simple, age-old fortress mentality. Divide the world into us and them:
Insiders and outsiders.
WE are right. THEY are wrong.
WE are the people of God. THEY are of the devil.
WE stand in the truth. THEY are lying to us. We can’t trust them. We can only trust other insiders.
But how can you tell who is US and who is THEM? Who are the trustworthy insiders and who are the dangerous outsiders?
You need boundary markers: things that clearly identify people as either US or THEM.
In the 80s and 90s one of these boundary markers was evolution. I know an American who broke off her engagement back then when she discovered her fiancé thought evolution might have happened. He was a Christian, he loved her, and she loved him. But his views on evolution made him an outsider, and she could not marry an outsider.
The issues have changed since then, but the dynamics are the same. Today, rejection of evolution has morphed into rejection of environmental sciences. Opinions about gender, sexuality and abortion have added extra bricks to that wall separating US from THEM. Agree with right-wing Evangelical Christians on those issues and you become a trusted insider. Disagree and you are a rejected outsider.
The danger for those of us who do disagree about those issues is that we can fall into the same trap. We can form an insider group made up of people who hold the opposite opinions. Then we have two camps, each behind our own walls, lobbing word bombs at each other and never really communicating.
When the church is divided like this, it becomes very easy for politicians to manipulate us. All a politician needs to do is choose a side and express the “right” opinions on those boundary issues – on the environment, gender, sexuality and abortion, and they are accepted as an insider – no matter what else they do. This can deliver a lot of votes.
Dividing the world into insiders and outsiders can seem harmless when the church is small and weak. But when the church is big and powerful as it is in the United States, it can be devastating for the vulnerable people who live on the wrong side of those boundaries. This is why Jesus would have none of it.
Today’s Gospel reading follows on from last week’s when Jesus stood up in his hometown synagogue and announced that he was the fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy. That was shocking, but he got away with it because it appealed to their civic pride. A boy from Nazareth turning out to be the centre of God’s plan to restore the world. One of us at the centre of God’s plans! That’ll show those arrogant southerners!
So they gave him a hearing.
But Jesus knew what they were thinking:
‘Doctor, cure yourself!’… ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’
Do you see what he has picked up on in their attitude?
‘You say you have come to open the eyes of the blind? Well, we have blind people right here in your hometown. Shouldn’t you start with them? Shouldn’t we be your priority? After all, we are your people. You are one of US, right?’
They wanted Jesus in their insider group. But Jesus knew that insiders and outsiders have never been part of God’s plan. He decides they need a history lesson:
there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when a drought lasted three and a half years, and led to a severe famine; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them. He was sent to a Gentile widow in Sidon. 27 And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of his successor, Elisha, and none of them was healed except Naaman the Syrian.
There were real needs in Israel, yet God sent relief to foreigners. The Israelites were God’s chosen people, yet God left them to suffer, while healing outsiders.
What does that say about God?
And what does it say about us when we insist that God is on our side? When we use God to win our arguments? When we expect God to bless us first? To heal us first?
When God chose and called Israel, it was not to make them a cosy insider group that could expect God to give them priority, to give them victory over their enemies, to bless them and curse those outside.
That was never the plan.
Creating a group of insiders would have made all the rest of the world into outsiders. This would have kept all the other nations at a distance from God’s blessing. But God called Israel to be a light to the nations and a blessing to ALL the families of the world.
God’s work with them was never about them. It was about the ones who worshiped the wrong Gods and believed the wrong things. God always intended to bless outsiders. God called and trained and disciplined Israel in order that Israel would be a blessing to everyone who was not Israel.
That was always the plan.
God is all about the outsider. Always has been. That’s the life Jesus lived. And if we are going to be followers of Jesus then we will live that way too. Those people who have all the wrong opinions are our sisters and brothers – made in the image of God just like we are. That means showing respect. It doesn’t mean we fail to challenge them when they cause harm. It certainly doesn’t mean we sit back and do nothing to stop harm to be done to vulnerable people in the name of Jesus. But it does mean acting with love.
This means taking Jesus as our model when we respond to Christians we disagree. It means taking Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13 seriously:
Patient Kind Not envious, boastful, arrogant or rude Not insisting on our own way Not getting irritated when the others get their way Grieving every time wrong is done and celebrating every time the truth is told Putting up with harsh words the others speak about us, Looking for a grain of truth in things the others say, Hoping they really can become more Christlike – and that we can too, And getting up tomorrow to do it again.
There is nothing sentimental about Christian love. Living this way led Jesus to the cross. It is dangerous and difficult. We all fail at it – probably several times every day. And every time we fail, we have a choice:
We can stick closer to Jesus – ask him to give us the strength and courage to do better next time.
Or we can do what the people of Nazareth did when they failed. We can try to throw Jesus off a cliff – try to silence the voice that calls us back to the path of love.
Those are our options. We follow Jesus along the hard road he walked, knowing it may lead to a cross, or we try to throw Jesus off a cliff. We make this choice every day: Individually and as the church.
Huge numbers of our sisters and brothers in the United States have been making the wrong choice – giving in to US-and-THEM thinking and making themselves vulnerable to manipulation by cunning politicians. And plenty of Christians in Australia have followed them down this dangerous path.
What will we do about that? Will we distance ourselves from them? Say they are not really Christians? We are the real followers of Jesus, after all, not them!
How would that help? If we made them the outsiders and us the insiders, would that change anything?
Or will we find ways to love them and their victims at the same time? Will we share their disgrace and carry the burden of their misdeeds? Will we shelter, protect and bind the wounds of their victims – refugees, rape survivors, trans kids, endangered species? And will we weep tears of repentance as though we are the ones who caused the wounds that have been inflicted by our brothers and sisters? Will we keep doing this even if everyone tries to throw us off a cliff?
This is a hard call that Jesus has placed on us. We did not choose to live at such a heavy time in world history. But we can choose how we will live.
Jesus chose to live as an outsider - even in his hometown - so that all us outsiders might come home to God’s love. And it is in that place of absolute belonging, in the heart of God, that we can all find the courage to be outsiders like Jesus, and to love outsiders in His name.
So let’s pray:
When you are excluded from the inner circle of belonging, May you see Jesus, the ultimate outsider, at your side. May you work there with Jesus To heal those broken under the weight of popular opinion, And then turn to those who broke them, With challenging, countering, converting love, Empowered every day by God who invites, God who suffers And God who unites. Amen
With Love from Rev Margaret
Thank you, this is very helpful and meaningful. Budde showed such courage and kindness in how she spoke. I think her gentleness was what was so remarkable.