Luke 4 : 13-30

Sources include Buttrick on Homiletics, commentaries on Luke’s gospel, and from my own thoughts on gossiping the Gospel. The context is a small congregation of people who were eager to plant a new church where the purpose of the church was to follow the Great Commission. While being eager to work in the mission, they needed some guidance and coaching to grow in their dedication to evangelizing our community.

The crowd was buzzing with excitement that weekend in Nazareth. Jesus had come back to his home town. Now, I do not think it was anything like what might expect from a big theatrical production with people all gathering in the street and singing “Joy to the World the Lord has come, let earth receive her King! Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing,” as they all waited on the streets. No, no I think it was more a buzzing of excitement at seeing the local boy who has been on every podcast and YouTube channel lately.

This, after all, was Jesus who built Judith’s cupboards, the man who had roofed the house they lived in, the guy who had repaired the broken door after Cephas had broken it down in a drunken rage, he was the one who had shown little boys his axes and his
tools and who made their eyes gleam with excitement as they spoke of building a house. Here he was back home.

Now this man who had done so much with wood was coming back to town and by this time they all knew he was no longer just a carpenter. He was now a teacher. A Jewish rabbi. He was gathering several students around him as well. And all over Galilee people were thronging to hear him speak. Nazareth was really just a little backwater town as far as the rest of the province was concerned. The town was just ignored most of the time. It was like living in your little neighborhood that no one has thought about for years.

Well, Jesus was beginning to put Nazareth on the map. For everywhere he went, he was the teacher from Nazareth! And the citizens of the town were excited to have the teacher come to their town. He did, after all, have several relatives who still lived in the area, and there were all the kids he had grown up with. They were now the leaders of the town as they lived through their 20’s and 30’s. They too were wondering what it would be like to have their carpenter friend come back to town. Especially since he was now some hotshot rabbi.

I have observed that one of the more difficult things for any of us to do is to approach our friends with whom we grew up with the good news of Jesus. Why is that? Because these were the guys we stole the beer from the store with. You remember how you took that and went to drink it in someone’s backyard. Those are the gal pals we giggled with for no apparent reason. These friends are the people who have known us in ways no one else can. These are the people you learned how to be an adult with. But you also know that your memories of them are filled with events and words and attitudes that could embarrass them deeply. Isn’t that right?

And then, here comes Jesus back to town in Nazareth. And the people there have known him for 30 years as Joseph and Mary’s kid. Yeah, he’s the one who ditched his folks in Jerusalem one time. Don’t you remember the look on Mary’s face when she came to get him and we said he had never been with us. In fact, he had told us he was going to find a way to stay in Jerusalem. He had come home with them later that week. But you remember how grim old Joseph looked and how his Mom looked like she had been fit to be tied? He sure threw them a curve ball that time didn’t he? Suppose he remembers that?

Those friends of his from growing up would have remembered how Jesus became a carpenter, taking after his Dad. But there were always those whispers about who his dad really was, remember that? Remember those stories your mom told us when she warned us about playing with him? She had those stories about the way his mom had turned up pregnant too soon. And how Mary had talked Joseph into marrying her anyway? You remember that, don’t you?

Now, when you and I think about speaking to our friends about Jesus, that same sort of thinking can go on in our minds. What will they think of me now that I have begun to let them know I follow Jesus? What will they think of what I have to say about Jesus? In fact, what is often all too true is this situation? When a person comes from a non-Christian background and starts to follow Jesus, they will have a whole circle of friends who do not know Jesus. But what typically happens here in North America is that within 3 years, that new Christian will have a whole new circle of friends. All of whom are church people. Why? Not because all their friends from before have become followers of Jesus. No, it is because their new Christian friends have made the new Christian so busy with good things in the church circles that they have abandoned their non Christian friends. They have been discipled into believing that their old friends need to be left behind. I say that to our shame. Is it because we think that the old friends will not accept the new follower of Jesus anymore?

This story in Luke indicates that there are going to be times when friends will not be accepting of our new orientation toward Jesus. Jesus himself ran into trouble in Nazareth when he went there after he had left his former occupation to become the teacher. In fact, when Jesus told them the good news that the prophet Isaiah was fulfilled in his life, they became very angry. The townspeople said, hey, wait a minute! We know you, we know your past, we know your folks, and they wanted to kill him. Remember, these are the people he grew up with. These were people he had chummed around with for about 30 years. It had been maybe a year since he had left Nazareth and had gone to see John the Baptist. Then he had become this preacher like no one had ever heard before. And his townspeople rejected him.

So what do we do with this now? Do we agree that it is dangerous to tell our friends about Jesus and to seek to keep him to ourselves? Or do we find ways of reaching into their lives to let them know of the good news of Jesus that has changed us from the inside out? I am convinced that God wants us to open our hearts to our unsaved friends. He wants us to touch their lives with his good news.

But that presumes something – that we have friends who are not yet followers of Jesus! That we have people around us who need to know that it is no longer I who live but Jesus who lives in me!

Do your friends know that about you? In our lives all of us need to learn that we can be friends with people even though we do not agree with them in every thing. We all have different priorities in our lives, but that does not mean that we cannot enjoy being
around the ones who are not yet followers of Jesus. Imagine, it could be you whom God uses to bring her to Jesus.

For example, I am getting to know some people who are not yet Christ followers. This week we got together for a meeting and one of them, after the business of the meeting was done, was walking down the street with me and said, So you pastor a church, huh?
Yeah, Well, I’ll watch my language around you from now on. To which I replied, you do not have to change to be acceptable to me. No, no, he protested, I want to do that out of respect for who you are.

It is so important to us to be open to having friends who are pre-christians so we can live our lives in their presence. And when we do, there needs to be two things which happen. First, they need to be able to see that you live life a bit differently than they do. The other is that we need to learn to have the name of Jesus on our lips in a casual manner. It’s like a juicy bit of gossip we have, we can’t wait to tell our friends, it’s like a book title I know, Gossiping the Gospel.

Make a point of hanging out with people who do not yet know the Lord. Live your life of faithful service and they will notice. But be sure to gossip about Jesus from time to time. It is our calling as the church to be a part of the great mission of God in the world.
It will not be easy all the time. But it will be a privilege to be the humble servant of God who gossips about the Lord who is coming, soon, and very soon.

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Matthew 6 vs 28 Good Advice for Worriers

Context for this message is a group of young teen boys on a campout in the woods. They were a group  of around 100. This was a part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount adapted for the boys on Sunday morning of the campout.

Matthew 6 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[ e]? 28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ……ff

Sometimes we get worried don’t we? We have to do things like take thought for tomorrow even if Jesus tells us that we can trust God to provide for us. When we came out here, we had to take thought.  For example, what if the weather is chilly and rainy? Or what if the weather is really warm? We need to think about the clothes we are going to wear.

 We need to think about bringing some food along. If you got here last yesterday and your counselors told you that all we would have for dinner was anything you could find in the woods, would any of us had much to eat? I doubt it. We would be really worried about going hungry if we took no thought for tomorrow.

So what does Jesus want us to do? He says, consider the flowers of the field, they do not labor or spin. Yet, I tell you that not even Solomon in his splendor was dressed like one of these flowers. So if God takes care of the flowers in this way, won’t he take care of you? What does he mean?

I want you to think about that for a while this morning as I think with you about how a flower grows.

 One of the merit badges you can earn has to do with watching plants grow. It is the gardening merit badge. And even if you are not into doing merit badges, it is really important to know something about how a flower grows so we can understand what Jesus tells us.

Otherwise, we just read right over this and since we don’t know what it is talking about, we don’t know what Jesus is telling us. If we look at these flowers here, what can we learn?

One thing is that we need dirt. God is the one who makes dirt. Now, God also expects us to be involved in the work of making the garden dirt good. He wants each of us to know that it is important to see that we have a fertile spot for a flower to grow.

That is the first thing. We cannot grow flowers in a polluted spot. I like to do gardening. And I have a place by a church in downtown Grand Rapids where I and several other people grow things. And one of the more annoying things about the ground where we grow flowers is that it is full of broken glass.

Each spring we pick up pails full of glass off the surface of the ground. That is so that it will be a better place for the plants to grow. And then during the course of the summer, we’ll pick up more and more broken glass that just seems to keep coming up out of the ground. So if you were going to grow some flowers so you could take a good long look at the flowers like Jesus tells us to, you would discover that even though it is God who makes the dirt, I have to get involved with God to make the dirt productive.

 Then we take seeds and we plant the seeds in the dirt. What happens next is something that never fails to amaze me. I take these little seeds and put them in the dirt and pretty soon, the plant starts coming up out of the soil. How does it do that?

Well, biologists would tell you that it has to do with the life that is in the seed. The seed has these cells within it that are the stuff that the new plant will be made from.

But how does it know to grow into this kind of plant and not that one? It is all in the DNA in the seed. Now that is all accurate, and I want to add another thing, God makes it grow. God calls to that DNA in those microscopic cells in the seed and says, now is the time to grow.

 And a shoot will come out of the seed and it will form a plant. Now it looks totally different from the seed. But it is like you and I when we were babies, we looked kinda like we do now, but far younger.

So it is with the seeds and little seedling plants. The seedlings are the first evidence that a flower will bloom here someday soon. Then it needs more care from us because there are weed seeds that are in the ground as well. These are not what we are looking for, but there they are. The weeds grow out of seeds that have been in the ground sometimes for many years, and now this year, they decide to grow.

And then it is up to us to come alongside our little plants and help them to grow better by getting rid of the weeds that are growing. Meanwhile, the plants are getting stronger and larger and pretty soon they begin to flower. And all we did was watch in wonder.

Sure, we helped by getting the soil ready and planting the seed, God was the one who did it all while we simply watched in wonder.

Jesus says, God is going to take care of you that way as well. You just do what you should to make the growing area good for the seed of your life and God will make sure that you are taken care of.

How do you make your heart pump? You don’t, God does that for you. How do you get the oxygen from the air you need to live? Do you spend a great deal of your time thinking about that? No, none of us does. But God makes sure it is all working properly.

I want to have us give thanks to God for what he does to take care of us.  I think it would be good for us to give out a loud cheer for God when we think of what he does in our lives. So whatI am goijng to do is remind us of something God has dne and we are all going to shout, Yes God!!

OK, here goes. God makes the sun shine lust like it is this morning.   Yea God!

God makes all these trees around us grow without any help from us.  Yea God!

Continue with ……

The grass we are sitting on,  the rain that fell last nihgt, the springtime when we get to come out here to this camp, the counselors who give their time and their skills, the air we breathe, our hearts that pump, the flowers we see , and on and on.