An Unspoken Sermon

As you may know this weekend is pretty much a white out in the Mid Atlantic region.  Church is cancelled, but hey, here's a sermon anyway.  It is based on Luke 4: 14-30, and could have been delivered next week, but I'm really sort of itching to get on to 1 Corinthians 13, plus, who knows what would happen if I thought about this thing for another week, it would probably be totally different anyway.  So here goes, the blogified version.
The first thing that struck me about Luke's tale of Jesus returning to the old hometown is that his version is a bit different than Matthew or Mark's version.  For one thing, it's longer (duh, Luke almost always is), but it also presents a different slant on what annoys the Nazarenes and how annoyed they are about it.  In Matthew and Mark, they just don't buy that this Jesus, whom they watched grow up, is actually the Messiah.  Their speaking line (in Mark 6), "Isn't this the carpenter the son of Mary..." they talk about how they know his brothers and his sisters and how he can't possibly be anything special.  And it pretty much ends there, Jesus can't do anything except heal a few sick people (not really too shabby, but not up to his standards I guess).  In Luke, however, their first response to Jesus claiming to be the Messiah is sort of positive, "All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.  They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?'"
So far so good, I suppose.  It's not the only time Luke gives us a little more information about a story.  Here's where it gets weird though: Jesus keeps talking.  This admiration seems to actually make him a little angry, he starts pushing buttons: "surely you will say to me, 'doctor, cure yourself...'"
He then proceeds to tell them a bunch of stories from the Hebrew Scriptures about times when God decided that the Jews just weren't getting the message, so God went to Gentiles and healed them and provided for them and basically fiddlesticks to all of you horse's rear ends for being so thick.
Except apparently what he did was not exactly that polite, so that the people who had been oohing and aahing over him a minute ago were now lynching mad.  Again this is a bit of information peculiar to Luke's account, and I suppose you could explain it by taking into account that Luke's community was probably the most Gentile oriented of the three synoptic gospels.  Especially when you consider that Luke probably wrote much of the book of the Acts of the Apostles as well which told the story of how this Hebrew story became the faith narrative of so many Gentiles.  He could just be telling us a tale that backs up his premise that perhaps the message of the Gospel is truly best understood as an evolutionary step that moves beyond the Law of Moses and the structures and rituals of Judaism.
But I think that allows us to sort of feel too superior, like we're the ones that get it and those poor benighted Nazarenes were just too slow to catch on.  No, I think Luke's account gives us more nuance to deal with than that.  Think about it for a second, they're not being stubborn or surly like in Matthew and Mark, they first think he's just the bees knees. They're okay with him being the Messiah, the fulfillment of Scripture and all that.  They're all right with him making the claim.  They don't like it when he challenges them to actually see what that might mean, specifically that God's plan is going beyond what they expected.
Grumpy cynicism, in Matthew and Mark, comes from simply not having the faith to believe that Jesus is the one.  Murderous rage, in Luke, comes from the idea that the Messiah may not be their own special savior.  It is not the claim that he is the fulfillment of the prophecy that enrages the Nazarenes, it is the suggestion that they might be missing the point, despite their declarations of faith.
How true is this of American Christianity in the twenty-first century?  It seems to me that we accept demagogues rather too easily as long as they tell us what we like to hear.  We will enthusiastically consume preaching and writing that tells us of the certainty of our salvation, and how Christ is for us, and how God intends to prosper us, or make our nation great, but what do we do with a word that tells us that God might be bigger than our particular field of vision had previously surmised.
It may be a bit of a morbid fascination on my part, but I am indeed fascinated to see that line get crossed within the American church, where does God's plan get too big for our comfort zone.  Where does his love simply become too audacious? Where does the challenge of the Gospel cross the line from being "gracious words," to inciting rage?  I have some ideas and observations, but on this snowy weekend, I'll let you fill in those blanks for yourself.