Maybe you don’t think of Jesus as one who pushes people’s buttons. Maybe you think of Jesus as one who, when he spoke, brought to those who heard him a deep sense of peace, of calm. But that is not the Jesus we meet in Scripture! Often when Jesus speaks, people are stirred up, and trouble starts. Jesus speaks, and the rich young man who lacked only one thing goes away angry and disappointed. Jesus speaks, and the scribes and Pharisees go away plotting his downfall. Jesus speaks, healing a man possessed by evil spirits – and the whole neighborhood begs him to leave town.

It is no different here, right at the onset of Jesus’ public ministry. Can you picture the scene? It has all started off with such promise. The community is gathered for its weekly worship; Jesus, the hometown boy, Joseph’s son, has returned, and he is preaching, and that preaching evokes -- wonder: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

But Jesus will not leave well enough alone – he starts to push the buttons. And just three minutes into his sermon he has pushed their buttons so well that they drive Jesus out of the synagogue, out of town, and almost off a steep cliff.

You see, the gathered faithful had high hopes. Jesus, the local lad who grew up to make it big, has just told them that the kingdom of God was being fulfilled in their hearing. They take that to mean that as privileged insiders, they were going to be first in line to collect all the goodies that were bound to be showered upon them by God in this new messianic age. God was going to put to rout the hatred Romans and set up a new Israel as the grand people of God, with the people of Nazareth – Jesus’ neighborhood gang -- in the vanguard. Yes, they say to one another, our boy sure can preach the good news!

But then Jesus reminds them of two moments in their history when God acted to redeem and save two outsiders. In the time of the prophet Elijah, there was a famine throughout the land, but God sent Elijah to a Canaanite non-believer, to make known God’s presence and power. In the time of the prophet Elisha, God sends healing to a Syrian general. No one can miss Jesus’ message: God’s continuing unfolding of God’s new plan for the world will not come through them, but through others; not through the “insiders”, but through those they considered “outsiders.” God’s love is so inclusive, Jesus is saying, that it even includes these foreigners. God’s love is so broad that it even includes our enemies. What God wants is not necessary what these people want; what God desires for the world will not necessarily align with the private agendas of the hometown crowd. God will not be confined to the tight circle of our own prejudices and tastes.

A couple years ago, during the last presidential election campaign, one of the candidates got into a lot of hot water because of a sermon preached by his local church pastor, a sermon that was construed as anti-American and unpatriotic. A week after 9/11. a week when you couldn’t go more than an hour or so without hearing another rendition of “God Bless America”, this preacher wondered whether given the many shortcomings in this nation (shortcomings which included injustice for millions, not the least of which included a black community still not recovered from the long legacy of slavery of racial discrimination in this nation; shortcomings which included a pronounced tendency to divide the world into two camps, American representing unalloyed goodness, the Muslim world representing pure evil; shortcomings which included a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor) – whether given all this, God indeed was ready to bless America as she is.

Strong stuff indeed. Shocking stuff. Unpatriotic and un-American stuff, his critics charged. What the candidate should have done, they insisted, was get up and leave and never go back.

Jesus, well he should have been so blessed to have a congregation that, once offended by the preaching of God’s word, would simply get up and walk out! No, when those folk in Nazareth heard his sermon, one which they took as anti-Israel and unpatriotic, they got up, drove him out of the place, and tried to throw him off the nearest cliff.

The great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian, German pastor, hung by the Nazis just before the war ended, wrote that “preaching allows the risen Christ to walk among his people.” That’s what we preachers do when we are doing our job right – we let Jesus loose among us. But as today’s text reveals, this is often when all hell breaks loose. Because Jesus comes not to dispense innocuous bits of advice which may or may not make our lives a tad easier – he comes to upend our settled expectations, to question our accommodation with the ways of the world, to give us a metaphorical slap upside the head. As James Capon writes,

“Jesus proclaims unlimited forgiveness, not the excoriation of sinners. He hands out the resurrection of the body, not spiritual perfection in some alien heaven. He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery; he meets us in all our endless and inescapable losing…..” (Robert F. Capon, The Astonished Heart, pp. 14-15, quoted in Pulpit Resource Jan. 31, 2010 p. 23)

So no wonder the crowd wanted to throw him off the cliff, and no wonder sermons – when they preach Christ, and Christ crucified – no wonder they can push people’s buttons, get people fired up, and even evoke angry responses.

And here is the thing, of course – it is not just your pastor that gets to preach sermons, and not just your pastor that can get into hot water when Christ is rightly preached. Why just last Sunday, in our sermon talk-back, our session on the recent developments on the state and national political scenes, a member of the congregation did just that. “Why is it,” he wanted to know, “that not only are we engaged in two wars at the same time, but for the first time in history we as a nation are not even paying for those wars – instead, we are just running up the national debt for our kids and grandkids to pay? And why – now understand,” he continued, “I was drafted and served in Vietnam – and why is it that the burden of fighting these wars is not shared by everyone, but is dumped on the shoulders of many who have had to volunteer to serve because they can’t get a job in this lousy economy?” Strong stuff. Shocking stuff. Word-of-God stuff. Now no one threatened to throw him off the cliff, but many of us were shifting uncomfortably in our seats.

So maybe the Sunday question of the day for us is this; are we willing to let Jesus walk among us, are we willing to listen to the truth he has to tell us, and when he pushes our buttons, are we ready to do the hard work of holding our lives up to the revealing light of the Gospel, ready even to change our ways if that is what that light reveals we need to do if we are indeed to walk in all God’s ways? Or do we simply respond by imaginatively throwing him off the nearest cliff?

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