FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

A PLACE IN YOUR OWN HOMETOWN

Luke 4:14-30

Dr. Theodore J. Wardlaw
President Austin Theological Seminary

September 28, 2008

For all practical purposes, this is my hometown. I’ve lived here twice—most recently, for close to twelve years until late-2002 when we moved to Austin; but before that, too, as a kid, I lived here. I wasn’t born here, but we moved here when I was three years old, and so it feels like my hometown. My father was a pastor here in the mid-fifties through the early sixties, and it was here in Atlanta that I spent some of the most formative and delicious years of my childhood.

It was here in Atlanta that I started elementary school, for example, at Spring Street Elementary School (what later became the Center for Puppetry Arts) just a few short years before my brother, who is nine years older than I am, finished high school at Westminster. It was here in Atlanta that I first sang in a choir, the Atlanta Boy Choir, and I credit whatever it is that I know and love about music to that early moment. It was here in Atlanta that I had my first fast food—at the Varsity, no less, the world’s largest hot-dog stand. On many Sunday nights, my family would go to the Varsity, and eat in the room where the color T.V. was tuned to “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” There I would sit with my chili-dog with rings and a Big Orange and a fried peach pie; and I may have been tasting the food that we’ll all eat in heaven someday.

It was here in Atlanta that my mother took me to my first movie, and it was at the Fox theatre. I remember to this day being overwhelmed by that big Moorish theater built in the early 1920’s, with the special ceiling that had little teeny lights that twinkled like the stars we see at night. My mother took me to that exotic place when I was seven years old, and the movie, by the way, was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Don’t know why she did that. Years of therapy later, I’m still not sure what to make of that. We were still living in Atlanta when I had my first experience of “puppy love”—the most stunning eight-year-old at Spring Street Elementary School. I loved her, and she loved me—so much so that we got married, actually. But it’s not what you think. It was what they called back then a “Tom Thumb wedding.” It was really more for the parents than it was for the children. She got dressed up like a bride, and I was dressed up in a tux like a groom, and her older brother was the preacher, and she came down the winding staircase of their house in Ansley Park, and our parents were there and there were pictures and a reception and all of that. It was a little Southern gothic custom back then. And now I’ve probably told you quite enough about my childhood, here in what, in effect, is my hometown, living in the manse with my parents and my older brother next door to the Rock Spring Presbyterian church there in Morningside that my father served. I loved my hometown; still do.

Years ago now, back in 1982, they invited me back to preach there in the same pulpit in which my father had held forth for a number of years. I was serving a small church in Texas and I wasn’t yet thirty years old, and I was preaching on that occasion in a pulpit that my father had preached in. I can’t tell you what a privilege that was. And after this particular service, one of the saints of that church—a older man who has since gone to glory but who at that time was in his eighties—came up to me while I was shaking hands in the narthex to pay me some of the highest compliments I have ever been paid.

He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “It is so good to see you again, and to see how well you have done for yourself. I always knew that you’d turn out well.” He said, “You were always so becoming as a young boy, so well-behaved, so polite, so smart, such a leader among your peers, one who was respected by other kids your own age but one who was also respected by adults, one who was equally at home with people of different ages and backgrounds and points of view, one with unusual and precocious sensitivities.” He said, “You don’t know what it does to me to see how all of those gifts and talents have stayed with you and have seasoned and matured in these years of your adulthood.” He said, “Keep up the good work, because I’m proud of you.”

Well, at the end of all of that, I was practically in tears. It was all I could do to thank him for saying such unspeakably kind things. He paused for a few moments, and then he went on to say, “But that younger brother of yours was a real hellion. Whatever happened to him?”

Ever since, for some reason, that conversation always comes back whenever I encounter these words from today’s gospel lesson from St. Luke: “Truly I tell you,” says Jesus in his first sermon preached in his hometown pulpit, “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” I can’t think about that text without thinking about that dear old man who thought he knew me so well.

“Truly I tell you,” said Jesus, “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

These are ominous words for anybody who has ever considered serving as a minister, or, for that matter, serving God and God’s church in any capacity. They are the words which some smart-aleck, in this or that church, loves to lift up to the preacher on the occasion of the Annual Congregational Meeting. That’s the day, of course, when the church votes on the Pastor’s salary; and sometimes that day feels to some of us like a plebiscite on our ministry. As if that is not a stressful enough day all by itself, some jokester is always around to hold up the proposed Terms of Call, and say, “You know, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” Slap you on the back and laugh, and if you’re the preacher, you’re supposed to laugh too!

But Luke isn’t laughing in this text, as near as I can tell. For Luke, these words sound more like a lament. For Luke, these words set up the drumbeat of what is a common theme that appears, over and over again throughout the rest of his gospel—this theme of tension between the message of Jesus on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ever-widening resistance of the hometown. A central point that Luke makes over and over again is that proximity and familiarity tend to be blinding privileges. Isn’t that just the way it is? Proximity and familiarity tend to be blinding privileges. At Austin Seminary sometimes, we’ll bring in these guest lecturers; and often someone will come up to me and say, “Did you hear what she said? Wasn’t she brilliant?” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but you know, I said the same thing in one of my addresses just a few months ago.” And they’ll say, “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t remember that. But she was brilliant!” It’s often the problem with proximity and familiarity. Here, it is Nazareth that is blind to the message of Jesus; but later it’s Israel in general, and Jerusalem in particular, and finally Jesus is rejected by the very theological tradition that taught him the language of faith.

So that it’s not a joke at all, but a painful lament: “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

What is it about the hometown that makes faithful, prophetic ministry there so unacceptable? Why do prophets have such a hard time in their hometowns?

Well, sometimes faithful ministry doesn’t happen in the hometown because the people of the hometown know the minister too well, or think they do. I suspect that for every minister serving in his or her hometown, there is a host of people like that dear old man talking to me in the narthex. A host of “I knew you when” stories that presume to know too much, as such stories always do, about the vast and complex blueprints of any person’s inner character.

Indeed, the dramatic turn in this story of Jesus in his hometown came precisely at the moment of recognition. Those who were there in that synagogue spoke well of him and were amazed at his gracious words, until somebody said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” And precisely there, at the moment of recognition, there began the diminishing of wonder and the loss of power. These hometown folks—they knew him too well, or thought they did.

“No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

And sometimes, it’s not because the people know the prophet too well, but rather because the prophet knows the people too well—knows them too well, maybe, to expect much from them.

In Willie Morris’ classic autobiography North Toward Home, he traces his own pilgrimage from his hometown—Yazoo City, Mississippi—to his college days in Austin at the University of Texas, and then to graduate work at Oxford in England, and finally to an editorship at Harper’s in New York. Morris writes of an eventful trip he took back home to his hometown, Yazoo City, during his senior year in Austin. While he was there, there was a meeting called in town to consider the formation of a local chapter of the White Citizens Council. This was the mid-fifties, and the folks in his hometown saw the flexing power of the Civil Rights movement as a threat to their way of life, so they were meeting to organize resistance. Out of curiosity, Morris went. He saw that the leaders in that meeting were among his father’s best friends.

One person, a neighbor, had come to protest the meeting, but when he rose to speak, he was shouted down by the mad roar of the crowd. “For a brief moment,” Morris wrote later, “I was tempted to stand up and support my neighbor, but I lacked the elemental courage to go against that mob…In the pit of my stomach I felt a strange and terrible disgust. I looked back and saw my father, sitting still and gazing straight ahead; on the stage my father’s friends nodded their heads and talked among themselves. I felt an urge to get out of there. ‘Who are these people?’ I asked myself. What was I doing there? Was this the place I had grown up in and never wanted to leave? I knew in that instant, in the middle of a mob in our school auditorium, that a mere three years in Texas had taken me irrevocably, even without my recognizing it, from home.”[1]

It’s possible for prophets to know the people so well that they finally detest what they know. I read a survey a while back rating the effectiveness of the church. The main question on that survey was “What kind of job do you think the church is doing?” Four tenths of one percent of those surveyed said the church was doing tremendous, highly effective work. That’s four tenths of one percent. Forty-three percent of those surveyed said the church was doing respectable work. Fifty-three percent, the largest segment of those surveyed, said the church was having little positive impact on souls and society. Three percent of those surveyed said the church was failing miserably at every turn. Rather depressing statistics, don’t you think? It was a survey, by the way, of pastors.[2]

Sometimes prophecy suffers in the hometown because the prophet knows the people too well; and that, too, of course, is cause for the diminishing of wonder. For it’s possible for prophets to know the people so well that they come to detest what they know. But to be fair, it’s equally possible for them to know the people so well that they come to love them so much—maybe too much?—and in that way, too, prophecy suffers in the hometown.

When he was a pastor in Detroit in those formative years before he went to teach at Union Seminary in New York, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his diary that he was not surprised that most prophets are itinerants. “Critics of the church think we preachers are afraid to tell the truth because we are economically dependent upon the people of our church,” said Niebuhr. “There is something in that,” he said, “but it does not quite get to the root of the matter…I think the real clue to the tameness of a preacher,” said Niebuhr, “is the difficulty one finds in telling unpleasant truths to people whom one has learned to love; for to speak the truth in love is a difficult, and sometimes an almost impossible, achievement.”[3]

So this, too, I suppose, is reason enough for some prophets not to be accepted in their hometown. There are in fact a host of reasons for the unacceptability of such prophecy.

But as far as Luke is concerned, I think, the fundamental reason that prophecy is so unacceptable in one’s hometown has more to do with the message than the messenger. This is what Jesus discovered there in that hometown synagogue in Nazareth. And the message, by the way, was not a new message. For following the order of worship carefully, Jesus sat down in their midst the way any scrupulous rabbi does, and delivered to those people in that setting the words from their own scripture; and the radicality on that occasion came from nothing more spectacular than that their tradition was allowed to express its own power and truth. It was a power and a truth larger than their conventional, boxed-in interpretation of it, but it came straight from their scriptures.

You’ve got to be careful about scripture.

Seminary presidents are forever hearing from search committees looking for a pastor. The phone rings, and someone says, “Can you help us find a pastor?” “Well,” I say, “what are you looking for?” And sometimes the answer comes back: “We don’t want a trouble-maker; we just want someone who will preach the gospel.” As if the tradition of scripture is a conventional, boxed-in thing. The sermon from Jesus on that day was that God was bigger than they thought God was, and Jesus made that point by citing their own scriptures. He reminded them that, in the old days when there was a famine in Israel, God didn’t send anyone to help the widows there in Israel but sent help instead to a pagan woman in the pagan land of Sidon. It was all written down in their own scriptures! And later, he told them, when there was an outbreak of leprosy in Israel, no one among the chosen people was healed, but help was sent to Naaman, a Syrian. It was scripture! Which was as outrageous in their context as those bumper stickers I’ve seen a lot in the last several years in Texas—not those bumper stickers that seem to be picking a fight with messages that say “God Bless the U.S.A.,” but those other ones I’ve been seeing more recently that say “God Bless the People of Every Nation.” They may as well say, God bless the Iraqis! God bless the Iranians! God bless the Saudi Arabians! God bless the French! God bless the Canadians! “God Bless the People of Every Nation.” That’s not a radical, “tear down the walls” peacenik critique; that’s a critique that comes straight from the picture of God that we get from scripture. Don’t you think we need to hear that, from time to time—we who wonder sometimes if God isn’t actually a Euro-American, Scottish Presbyterian?

About a month ago, I was having a conversation with our former Board chair—an Austin Seminary alumnus with a Ph.D. in Theology from Princeton Seminary, a wise and wonderful man. We were talking about some of our denominational trials and tribulations, and he said, “Ted, you know what?” He said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”[4]

There in the hometown, Jesus was proclaiming not just a hometown God—the sort of God we create out of our own need for certainty—but a big God: a God more surprising, more loving, more challenging, more inclusive, more gracious, more demanding, more mysterious than they had yet imagined. And ironically, in conveying that message, he wasn’t going off in a new, untried direction. He was simply using their own religious language to make the claim that—in ways they had not begun to fathom—their tradition was true.

Which is why, as Luke tells it, they tried to do him in. And they kept trying, until finally…well, you know the story.

Put Christ at the center of things, and it won’t always play well in the hometown. The message of Christ at the center of things will naturally lead us into conversations about how God doesn’t play by our rules, doesn’t fit neatly into our hip pockets. It’s a dangerous thing to put Christ at the center. Just ask the prophets. And yet, we need our prophets. We need them. We need their message, because, finally, it’s the message that saves us, that blesses us, that forms us for useful service in the Kingdom of God.

I was in a small group a few years ago which was being led by Fred Craddock, the pre-eminent preacher and teacher of preaching, who told us about a conversation he once had with a friend of his, a rabbi. They had been talking about various intricacies of the Hebrew language, when Craddock asked his friend the rabbi what was his favorite Hebrew word for God. Perhaps he was expecting, as I would have, a word like “Yahweh” or “Elohim.” Or maybe some descriptive phrase like “mighty warrior” or “jealous one.” Craddock says the man thought for a minute, and then said simply: “My favorite word for God is a word that the Hebrews developed back during the Exile, back when they were a wandering people, a people on the move. The word means literally, “The Place.” The Place! His favorite word for God—the Place! A great word for God for people who see the faith as a pilgrimage.

In the face of that ongoing temptation to dig in and make our home prematurely in some altogether too comfortable, familiar place, the gospel calls us to remember that God—just God—is the Place where we belong. Which might re-orient for you the way you feel about this place. This place—spectacular as it is, this jewel here in the center of the city—is not finally a destination so much as it is a milepost. This great church, full of beauty and inspiration and delight and servanthood and compassion, is where you come to remember not so much that you have arrived, but that you are still on a journey. Here there is a tradition that can guide you toward God—the Place where we belong. And the challenge for you is to strain to keep your eyes on that place, even as you do your work in this place. Strain to be fed and nourished by that place, even as you gather regularly to be fed from this place. Until even here, in the heart of this hometown, you will remember who you are—not settlers but pilgrims, people on the move, people who find meaning more in the journey than in the destination, people who are energized not by what we already possess but by that which possesses us: a word of good news for the poor, release for the captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the power of what can happen in God’s good time, and even in this place.

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[1] Willie Morris, North Toward Home, p. 180.

[2] From The Atlanta Constitution, January 25^th, 1992.

[3] Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, p. 47.

[4] From a conversation with the Rev. Dr. John M.McCoy of Dallas.