“And he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”' Luke 4:21

I would wager that this text, Luke 4:14-30, has been preached more than any other here in Duke Chapel. If you're a regular worshipper here, you have heard it used as a text for sermons at least three times in the past two years. Its proper place is here, on the third Sunday after Epiphany. But it's always in season in the Chapel--with young and fearless prophet Jesus in the pulpit, giving the establishment what for, bludgeoning the status quo. I've heard this text used in the Chapel to attack South African apartheid, North Carolina prisons, the budget policies of the Reagan administration. It's a wonderful text for a progressive, on-the­ cutting-edge University Chapel--young Jesus, putting it to the Nazarene military-religious-industrial establishment. I remember well my own homecoming sermon in Greenville in which I set the home folk straight on Vietnam. Just like Jesus, I was!

If I did not ask visiting preachers here to try to restrict themselves to the lectionary, we might have twenty sermons a year on this text! With all the odd, unfamiliar passages in scripture, it's good to have one with which we are familiar. Put it to them Jesus, we know who you really are, Son of God, Lord of Lords--pity about those in Nazareth who didn't know.

We wonder how they could have been so intractably ignorant.”He is in the very bosom of Judaism, in Nazareth where he was brought up--there he had been circumcised, dedicated. He is in the synagogue, “as his custom was,” says Luke. His chosen text--words from the prophet Isaiah--was as familiar to them as Luke 4:16-30 is to us. Here is no outsider or rebel, but one of their own. When the congregation exclaims, “Is not this the carpenter's son?” There is nothing in the story to indicate that they are sneering or expressing contempt. They are perhaps expressing delight: Here is one of our own, reading so well, texts of our own! Jesus, yes, young Jesus, Joseph's and Mary's boy, home from school for midwinter break. It's good to have him back home. We've heard of his accomplishments in Capernaum. We know him.

We wish we might have been there that Sabbath in Nazareth. Sure, we know this story of the hometown sermon by heart, but wouldn't it have been good to be there as eyewitnesses? Then we could see Jesus firsthand, without having to hear the story secondhand. Haven't you sometimes thought to yourself, “Oh, if I could only have been there--seen a miracle or two for myself, swept away the expanse of two millennia, and stood there, as eyewitness to Jesus?”

We presume that believing would be easier if we were there. We must base our belief on secondhand hearsay. But if we could have been there, belief would be a cinch. This terrible gap of time was what the German philosopher, Ferdinand Lessing described as “the ugly, wide ditch.” Here we are in our time, and there, two thousand years away, is Jesus. “How can an event, once significant in its time, be significant for all time?" asked Lessing. Belief would be easier if just for a moment we could climb aboard our time machine and be there.

Yet, if mere time were the problem, why did the folk at Nazareth not see? Why didn't they know him?

They didn't know him because they knew him.

10:30, Sunday morning, the phone rings. I answer. 

“Whose preaching in Duke Chapel this morning?”

“Uh, Dr. William Willimon, Minister to the University,” I responded.

Silence, “Oh, is that the short man? Nobody special?”

Can you see why I labor so to sound, “special”? New. Unusual. You've heard me before. Worse, you've heard this story before. Now let me see, what new can I say about this? Yes, I've got a sermon, “The story of the Prodigal Son seen from the point of view of the fatted calf.” That’ll get 'em. I bet they never heard that before! When things are new, unfamiliar, strange, we react with excitement. “How odd” we say, “how utterly fascinating!” I've never thought about it that way before. Yes, I shall have to go home and think this one over.” And we so like it when the preacher tells us something that we can go home and think over.

It was the ministers' Monday Morning Coffee Hour and one of the brothers was bragging about a visiting preacher he had at his church. “You should hear him,” he said, “his style, his illustrations, his power, he is wonderful.”

“Joe, you ought to hear me three hundred miles from home, “said another. “I'm downright brilliant.”

Luke wants it well understood: The problem with Jesus is not between the new and the old, between the known and the unknown, but between the people of God and their own memory. Between the known and the known.

I preached in Canada last summer, preceded by a two hundred voice choir, a five minute introduction by a bishop telling everyone how lucky they were to have me. I couldn't fail.

I stand up on the fourth Sunday after Epiphany in Duke Chapel preceded by, “Oh, it’s the short man again. Nobody special.”

Jesus, hometown boy, Joe and Mary's son, addressed Israel from her own scripture, her own past, her own authoritative texts, the familiar prophets, a text they already knew.

“The Day of the Lord is here!” he announced. “Amen!” they shouted. There was an excited stirring among the Chosen People of the Lord at Nazareth. “Amen!” All of our waiting for deliverance, is over at last. The Lord is coming!”At last he is coming to redeem his own!

People lifted up on their crutches, old men wept for joy, the oppressed looked up and their faces filled with hopeful expectation. “Amen!”

“When the Lord came earlier, there were lots of poor hungry women in Israel, but God chose to help a foreign widow, instead. You know that story.” says Jesus. There was silence.

“And speaking of old, familiar stones,” continued Jesus, “You all remember the one about how Elisha healed an army officer, a Syrian--rather than all those poor deserving lepers in Israel.”

The congregation was silent.

When the Lord came to deliver us, Jesus says, remember that he came to human need beyond the bounds of the Chosen. It's in the Bible, Jesus said. You know the story of Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha. And a chorus of “Amens” becomes a thunder of silence. It is the silence of judgment, when an exciting, new sermon suddenly becomes recognized as nothing but an old story we already know and wish to God we could forget.

The church, which like the Synagogue before us, also stands judged by our own, familiar stories, should listen carefully.

Proximity to and familiarity with the persons, texts, and ideas of religion, is a privilege that also blinds, dulls, impedes.

Isn't this the carpenter's son? We know him.

“Yes” says Jesus continuing the sermon, “pagan Nineveh will get to judge this place because Nineveh repented when Jonah preached to them. The Queen of Sheba went across the world to hear Solomon, and yet, here among you is one greater their either Jonah or Solomon. (11:29-32) At the judgment, you will claim your privilege as free passes, recalling the evening you had dinner with Jesus or when he preached in your town (13:26-27), but to no avail. Judgment begins with God's own house.

When someone in his audience blessed Jesus' mother, Jesus countered, “Blessing belongs only to those who hear and keep the word.” (11:27-28). It doesn't even pay to be a relative.

The church should listen, for like the good synagogue-going folk at Nazareth, we can be sure that privilege continues to be perilous. We know. And sometimes our knowing is our undoing. This familiar biblical pattern of going to one’s own people, preaching, being rejected, and then going elsewhere is repeated many times in Paul's ministry, Jesus' ministry, and even is it repeated in the church today.

“I wish I knew the Bible better,” she said. It is possible to know the bible too well. Having scripture, knowing it, owning it, may be the most dangerous kind of knowledge.

“Luke 4. Yes, about Jesus going after those poor, blind, conservative, Jews, yes I already know that story.”

A book review of my last book: “Dr. Willimon's book is engagingly written, well stated, but the informed reader will find nothing new here.”

Nothing new, to be accused of saying nothing new is the kiss of death for a scholar!”But not for prophets of God.

Prophets often cut so deep, not because they predict the future or tell us what we don't know, but prophets, like Isaiah, Elisha, Jesus, dig about in what we already know all too well and turn that on us. And when they do, and you're in the pew, there is a moment of dead silence, when the smug satisfaction of knowing turns to the shocked, silent recognition of knowing. The prophet has stood up and preached your sermon, the one you know by heart and wouldn't dare preach.

“You were preaching to me, today,” he said, shaking my hand as he slithered out the front door of the Chapel.

“No,” I said, “I must have preached for you today. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to preach your sermon.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. did not come preaching something new, he came shouting something we already knew, “You have said in your own Declaration of Independence, 'We hold these truths to be self­ evident that all men are created equal, are endowed with certain inalienable rights.' And I insist that you either live by what you already know - or else be unfaithful to your own constitution.”

And we killed him, because King told us what we already knew. He preached our sermon. Others had preached to us, but when King preached for us...You may be surprised to hear a preacher say this, but here it is: You already know all you need to know about religion.

The people of Nazareth who first greeted Jesus with “Amen!” finally yelled, “Kill him!” because he painfully reminded them of what they knew, namely that God is free, alive, gracious, beyond the bounds of our willingness to know. The worshipers at Nazareth knew that God had blessed an undeserving outsider through Elijah's ministry, and they knew that God had cured a Syrian terrorist through Elisha, but it was a lot more than they wanted to know and they certainly did not come to church this January morning to be reminded that God refused before to play by the rules and might well refuse to play by our rules again.

What to do? Stone this young prophet! They failed in Nazareth, of course, but not many miles and months away, after a few more Jesus-sermons, they succeed. Like Elijah, the prophet Jesus was a troubler of Israel's ignorance ("Father, forgive them; they know not what they do,” 23:34) but it was not the kind of ignorance to be relieved by a trip to the Duke library.

My last church was next door to the Jewish Synagogue in Greenville. The Rabbi and I used to get together and drink coffee on Mondays. We used the parking lot on Sundays; they parked there on Fridays, it was a good arrangement.

Well you can imagine our excitement at Northside Church when we got word, late one Spring, that Jesus was returning. He was coming back, and returning to, of all places, Greenville, South Carolina! Well we finally removed the dead shrubbery from in front of the Church. Yes, and we painted the Fellowship Hall, just like we should have done last year. The choir worked for weeks on a special anthem--with rented trumpets, tympani even.

On the appointed day, we all gathered at Church.”You couldn't get a parking place after 10:30. The place was packed -- people we hadn't laid eyes on in years! The choir entered. Eleven o'clock came. No Jesus, Eleven fifteen.”No clouds descending.”We sang, “Just As I Am” one more time. Twelve noon. No one. About twelve thirty, the kids got restless and had to be taken out. Then one-by-one, others left, dejected, disappointed. We gathered in the newly decorated fellowship hall, had lunch, went home. The Day of the Lord hadn't come.

The next morning, I was in my office, having coffee with the Rabbi.

“Say,” he said, “Met a friend of yours this weekend.”

“Really? Who was it?” 

“This young rabbi, Jesus” 

“Really?

“Sure, he was over at our place on Friday evening, nice boy, good to see him. “

“Your place? But we, but we were waiting for him over here, on Sunday.”

“Oh,” said the Rabbi, “Well I suggested he ought to walk over here and meet you since he was in town. But when I told him you wouldn't be here till Sunday, that you didn't know Hebrew, he said he might be uncomfortable.”

The Gospel of John says, “He came unto his own, but his own knew him not.” No, they knew him. Knowing him wasn't the problem.