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What's on Your Agenda?

Here we are at the beginning of February. It’s a month since we started the new year of 2023. We have been experiencing some cold, blustery, winter weather. Some people love this time of year, and for others, it feels bleak. Those new year resolutions that we carefully thought out ­— the agendas we planned for this new year — may have lost their fervor about now. But God’s agenda for today is a little different. If we open our Bibles we can count on beautiful words of scripture from God’s word.

“Before I shaped you in the womb I knew all about you.” Those are words that have always spoken to me. I have loved reading that God has known me before I was born. I feel that these words speak to us of our life eternal. That we have already begun that eternal life in Christ since we were with the Lord before coming here in our earthly bodies. God had holy plans for us before anyone here on earth knew us. Knowing we are loved and led makes a big difference in our lives.

And then reading from I Corinthians — another love letter to be opened on this winter day. Although we often hear this scripture read at weddings, it is directed at wholeness of community in Christ rather than to a bonded couple.

The Message Bible says

Love never gives up

Love cares more for others than for self

Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have

Love doesn’t strut

Doesn’t have a swelled head

Doesn’t force itself on others

Isn’t always ME FIRST

Doesn’t fly off the handle

Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others

Doesn’t revel when others grovel

Takes pleasure in the flowering of the truth

Puts up with anything

Trusts God always

Always looks for the best

Love never looks back

But keeps going to the end

(1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

God IS love and we who are made in God’s image have that love as our roots. We hear these beautiful words of love and care and expect we will probably hear the same thing from the town people as Jesus returns to Nazareth where he was raised. (Luke 4)

Here is Jesus, a well educated man…but also the boy who these Nazarenes watched grow up, a boy they helped raise. After they hear him speak they ALL speak well of him and they were amazed at his gracious words…and then in a flash everything unravels. Before we know it, a mob is chasing him out to the edge of town to throw him off a cliff. What happened?

I think Luke’s account is open to many interpretations about what explains the fury of the crowd. But that is the wonder of the living word of God — Biblical stories written in this kind of spare, open style so they make room for us to reflect on our own inner thoughts from our multiple perspectives.

So I wonder if colliding agendas could be the question at the heart of this gospel. Colliding agendas between Jesus and his community. Because whether spoken or unspoken, we all have our agendas. We have lists of expectations and desires, things that we want to do, ways we think things should be done. I wonder if there are times when our agendas collide with God’s agenda and if that might be what we are seeing played out in our gospel text.

Jesus came to Nazareth, his home town, and he probably had his agenda: Bring good news to the poor, bring release to the captive, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus picks up some ancient themes of liberty and equality as he declares a new era of redemption.

It sounded great…the people loved it. They ALL spoke well. They know Jesus. He knows them. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” Perhaps hidden in that question is their unspoken expectation — their agenda. Maybe they started to think: If that’s what he is going to do for THEM just think how much he is going to do for us. WE’VE known him all his life.

The cultural norm and expectation is that Jesus, their hometown boy, will give deference to his own people. Why not? They gave him his start. They helped make him what he is today. They expect to be remembered and repaid.

With prophetic insight Jesus unveils their agenda beginning at verse 23 “Doubtless you will quote me the proverb, Doctor cure thyself. And you will say Do here also in your hometown the things we have heard you did at Capernaum.” He talks of the prophets Elijah and Elisha and uses two common biblical images of human need: a widow and a leper.

So maybe the people started to mumble: Why is he telling us about great things that God did for outsiders, for foreigners? What about us? It might have sounded as if one of their own had turned on them, as if Jesus betrayed and rejected them. With these words of Jesus they were ALL filled with rage. If you don’t like the message, kill the messenger.

Jesus has a vision for his ministry and they have another, a different agenda. Their own expectations have deafened them to the fulfillment of the scriptures. They are so caught up in their own agendas that they cannot hear, let alone participate in God’s agenda. What do you think? Does that happen in our world today? Does that happen in our own lives?

Jesus, guided by the concerns of God — by God’s divine agenda — will not be co-opted by the people of Nazareth. And perhaps we shouldn’t think of Nazareth as simply a geographical location, a town in Israel. Nazareth is a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of trying to control God’s agenda. Anytime we see ourselves as more deserving of God’s goodness and grace, his life and his love, we are living in Nazareth. Jesus will pass through our midst and be on his way.

Jesus broke the bonds of kinship that day in Nazareth, not as a rejection of his community but as the way he saw for enlarging his hometown---so that no one would be excluded, no one would receive special favors, no one would feel left out. Instead all would be recipients of the prophecy’s fulfillment. That is not a popular agenda and it isn’t always our agenda. But it is always God’s agenda. It is an agenda of LOVE

So what’s on your agenda for today? For this next week? Or for the next month? That’s not me asking the question. That question is also for me. It is the question God is asking each of us today. Let’s take heed of that question and plan our agendas so that the LOVE and Glory of God shines brightly in all of us.

 

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