Shortly after WWII a Lutheran minister named Gunter Rutenborn
wrote and staged a play he titled The Sign of Jonah.
It has a profound impact on the city of Berlin.
The play takes place in a Germany
still reeling from the devastation of the war.
A group of refugees are arguing as to who is to blame for this horror.
Some blame Hitler, of course.
Others indict the munitions manufacturers who finance the Fuher.
Still others contended that the German people, in their apathy,
bear responsibility for the destruction of their country.

Suddenly a man comes up out of the crowd and says,
Do you want to know who is really to blame
for all the suffering we've been through?
I'll tell you.
God is to blame.
God created this world.
God placed all of this power in such unworthy hands.
God allowed all of this to happen."

At first everyone was taken back by the accusation.
But gradually the chorus is picked up by all:
God is to blame! God is to blame!
And so God is brought down on stage
and put on trial for the crime of creation.
Found guilty, the judge pronounces sentence:
The crime is so severe
that it demands the worst possible punishment.
I hereby sentence God to live on this earth as a human being.
Three archangels are called down to execute the sentence.

The first angel declares:
I'm goin to see to it that when God serves this sentence.
He will know what it is like to be obscure and poor.
He will be born in a ghetto.
There will be shame about his birth.
And he will live as a Jew.
The second angel vows:
I'm going to see that when God serves his sentence
he knows what it is like to fail and suffer disappointment.
No one will understand what He is trying to do.
He will be cursed and humiliated despite the good He does.
The third angel swears,
I'm going to see to it that when God serves his sentence,
he will learn what it is to suffer physical pain.
He will die the post painful and humiliating death imaginable.

And the play ends with the three archangels disappearing to carry out the sentence.

Well, like the refugees of Germany blaming God,
the good people of Nazareth couldn't stand Jesus words.
At some level they knew what he said was true.
But to accept that truth would mean they could only blame themselves!
Blame themselves for their lack of concern for the poor.
They knew the words of Isaiah, about God's preference for the poor.


They knew that the one upon whom the Spirit rested
Was anointed to bring good news to the poor.
To proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind.
To let the oppressed go free, to proclaim Jubilee, the year of
the Lord's favor.

They knew that.
And at first they were delighted and responded with applause and
all spoke well of him
and were amazed at the gracious words
that came from his mouth.

How clever of him to preach the Jubilee Year here in little old Nazareth.
And they asked Is not this Jesus Joseph's son?

But then Jesus responded in a most ungracious manner
and left his text and took to meddling,
as they say of contentious preachers.
Jesus drew the logical conclusion of the text and applied it.
For the truth is there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah,
but Elijah was sent to none of them except to a Palestinian widow
in Zarephath, in Sidon, over on the coast of the Great Sea.
No one in their own land was given this "Epiphany" moment,
this sudden visitation of the Holy,
this gift of food in the midst of starvation,
except a woman who is one of those Others,
the Aliens and Strangers and Enemies of their own kind.
God sent Elijah across the border to Palestine
to take food to an alien widow woman,
while thousands of our own went hungry.
And later Elisha was sent only to cleanse Naaman they Syrian,
in spite of all the lepers in their own land.

Now when the Nazarenes heard this off-the-subject interpretation
of the reading from Isaiah the Evangelist,
they went ballistic!
The audience that day,
made up of Jesus' home-boys, his friends and neighbors,
went bonkers.
They left off being the congregation at the first Church of the Nazarene
and became a mob,
bent on lynching this jack-leg preacher
who had forgotten his place,
and had disgraced them all
with abusive language and heresy in the pulpit.
They took him to the brow of a hill outside Nazreth
And prepared to hurl him off.

Rejection.
Like Jesus we, too, experience rejection.
But we also know that to experience rejection
is not necessarily a sign that we are God,
or even that we are one appointed as a Prophet.
And to be scorned or scoffed at
is not always an assurance of one's vocation to ministry.
Most of us, preachers or no, have experienced rejection in our lifetimes.
We often take it as a rejection of us personally,
and sometimes it is indeed that.
People may reject us because we are disagreeable, defensive, distant,
or pretentious, prudish, or proud,
or simply because we have bad manners or bad breath.
They may be right.
They may reject us because of their own bad taste, or ours.
Our bad vibes, or theirs.
They may be right.
But not always.

Indeed, if years of indoctrination and tailoring
have not groomed our liturgical ministers to fit in,
we hope that preliminary service
under the wing of an older or more experienced cleric
will complete the process of trimming and taming,
that the novices may turn out to fit in
to whatever ecclesiastical slot we find for them.
Each denomination has its own style, as well,
which must be at least as religiously observed
as the law of the Medes and the Persians, which changeth not.

Though as Father Charles observed last week, watch out.
Change is the name of the conversion of our patron.
And change is in the air for us.
We were not always anglo-catholic.

But in spite of our best efforts to keep our cages clean
and the animals fed and watered,
we occasionally find that we have a surprise in store for us.
So a preacher whom we thought properly house-broken
and cowed into conformity
may suddenly stand up one day
and preach the way that Jesus preached
when asked to read the lesson from the great pulpit Bible at Nazareth.
Of course only a few may boast
that the congregation then drove them out of town
because of the content of their homilies
rather than the boorishness of their behavior.
Indeed, sometimes it might seem easier to have a guest preacher --
or an interim Rector --
say what the regular preachers are unable or unwilling to say.
A guest preacher -- or an Interim Rector -- who will do her or his best
to try to outrage someone, at least, in the congregation,
with an exposition that would slice sharply through the baloney
that most of us prefer in our Sunday Sermon Sandwich,
slathered with maudlin mayonnaise, and please hold the mustard.
Still, despite the mad cow scare,
St Paul speaks of the strong meat of the gospel,
and it's a more rigorous diet than baloney, as well as more nutritious.
And, thanks be to God,
there is always at least some in the congregation
who long for just that.
And so it may be the parson, himself or herself,
or it may be a member of the vestry, or even a newcomer,
who suggests to the Rector or Vicar, the Muezzin or the Rabbi,
that Jesus Joseph's son
be invited to read one of the lessons at Service that Sabbath morning.

And so Jesus came to Nazareth that morning.
And centuries before there was anything like Liberation Theology,
Jesus became the first Liberation Theologian.
For He announced the Kingdom of God is itself the "buenas noticias",
the marvelous new and good news of God's presence
in our struggle for a new life for the poor & the oppressed of the earth.


Albert Schweitzer wrote in his Quest of the Historical Jesus:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name,
as of old, by the lakeside.
He came to those men who knew Him not.
He speaks to us the same words: 'Follow thou me!'
and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.
He commands.
And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple,
He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts,
the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery,
they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."

The Liberation Movement …..
which his Mother Mary and his Aunt Elisabeth
sang about and birthed and lactated into maturity.
The Liberation movement …..
which his cousin John Baptist provoked by his arrest and execution.
The Liberation movement …..
which Jesus as a young man jump-started into action.
The Liberation movement can look to this day in the synagogue at Nazareth
when Jesus announced that the Bible reading,
which promised good news for poor folk, and amnesty for prisoners, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of Jubilee,
had this day come to life in the presence of this congregation,
in their Here and Now.

Now, the present Pope claims he has upstaged all the Liberation Theologians
with his own copyright and patented brand of it,
which keeps the emphasis on the teaching
on individual liberation from hell .
The fundamentalists, too, side with him in this reading of the gospel
through Me-first World spectacles,
and warn against the reading of Socialism, Marxism
or any horizontal dimension into the gospels.
Let them be vertical -- direct to heaven!

But our reading of the gospel echoes all the way to us
from Amos and Hosea and Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah,
and eight centuries before Jesus,
as well as the martyrs, apostles,
and even Muhammad the Prophet [blessed be he]
centuries after Jesus the Messiah,
whom the Qurán recognizes as such.
And this reading of the gospel
according to the latter day Jewish prophet Carlos Marx
is fully congruent too with the old prophets, saints, and martyrs.
All theology is liberation theology.
The distinctions come
when we want to talk about who is liberated, and how and when.
And from what?..and to what.
Is it to be just "me and Jesus swinging on the outhouse gate"?
Or is it to be an Ark full of all God's creatures, homeward-bound ?
Just as John Baptist and Jesus
were "formed in the womb" of their mothers Elizabeth and Maria,
so the story of the Evangelist and Prophet Jeremiah
is told as a Vocation from womb-time.

Well, this story is our story, too.
We have been "pre-destined", as the Presbyterians like to say.
But from what to what?
From what gospel preparation to what ecclesiastical privilege?
To designate us as the chosen people?
To escape punishment for our sins?
To everlasting salvation?
Not so.

In the Scriptures,
our predestination is to Vocation,
is a Call to Service, to a job to be done.
The story of Jeremiah's calling to serve God, is the story of our own calling.

Monsignor Ronald Knox was told by a friend of his family
that at the age of four he suffered from insomnia.
The family friend asked him what he did at such times,
since no one in the family heard a peep out of him
as he lay there unable to sleep.
Knox was told that he replied, "I lie awake and think about the past."
Age four?
There wasn't all that much of the past to think about for very long
at that age.
But we now know he had a great future, as a priest and scholar,
preacher and Bible translator ahead of him.

Just so we most of us, four or forty or more,
though we may not think ourselves appropriate choices for God's plans, have a great future ahead of us as servants of our God.
And not just as individuals, but as this incredible community of faith,
St. Paul's most blessed parish.

And you know,
the word of the Lord often comes to us when we are asleep,
someone has said,
because it is the only time God can find most of us alone enough to have a chat with us.
So sometimes God comes to us in dreams,
our parish dreams, our mission statement,
and sometimes in waking us up so that we can talk back, too,
on Sunday morning or at a Vestry retreat.
The Holy One wants us to lie awake sometimes and think about he past
and sometimes to lie awake and think about our future.

The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying,
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you."
The word knew here is yahdeh,
And in the Bible is used intimately for sexual intercourse.

Well, or course, God is involved in everybody's conception,
in the beginning of every life,
and makes every conception an immaculate one,
and sets each of us apart for God's new purposes in our time.
We have appointments for God's purposes for your life,
from our Virgin Mother's womb,
for the intercourse whereby we were conceived
did not in any way infringe upon her virginity of spirit,
her ever-youthful hope and joy in life,
her disposition to receive you as a gift from the Mother of us all.

Each of us has been appointed, predestined, from the womb
to be an Epiphany of God -- a special showing of God's love
that can be done in no other way but You and Me.
No one of us can plead, "I am too young" for God's response is
Not to worry,
I am old enough to handle that, and I can make up for it.


No one of us can plead "I am too old" for God's response is
Not to worry,
I am young enough in heart to make your old heart sing.
For to everyone I send you, you shall go with Mary, singing Magnificat,
and with Jesus and Jeremiah and Isaiah
and you will speak my script, so don't be afraid.
I am with you
to liberate you from fear and hang-up and inhibition and disability.
I have set you over nations and over republics
and Peoples' Republics and Western democracies,
and Kingdoms and sheikdoms and shakeups and shakedowns.
I plan to use you
to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow.
Go ahead on.
There's a couple of places on the planet right now
that need some nonviolent jiu-jitsu to put them flat back on the mat.
I have set you to overthrow some tall ones.
The bigger they are the quicker they fall.

So, let's get the charter of our liberation into church life, into St. Paul's life,
and have all the fun we want to
with Anglican chant or soul music or gospel songs
or Ralph Vaughan Williams.
or even Honey in the Rock in concert tonight.
Jesus is back in church today in Nazareth and we are here with him,
to hear him read
TODAY is this fulfilled as you hear it.
Today.
Now.
In your heart and in mine….in our hearts altogether.
Today.

And as proof, consider,
how odd, today, that God now may use Muhammar Khadafy
to show the Empire how to apologize for terrorism.
Like Zaccheus he has promised to pay the victims of his crimes,
and commit himself and his oil money to a better way.
Now if only some others we could name would follow his example.
Can this be the way that God shows us who is in charge here?
When they heard [what Jesus said]
all in the synagogue were filled with rage.
But like Jesus
we can pass through the midst of them.
For on this day God is in charge.
Jesus will pay the price of his outrageous theology --
but later, not now --
on a cross outside Jerusalem,
not on a hill outside Nazareth.
Yes, God is in charge.
And we are called from before we were formed in the womb
to fulfill that charge.
And if we do -- if we do -- if we take the smallest step in that direction --
why that will give us life abundant and everlasting.
Someone once said:
If we don't stand for something, we'll fall for anything.
Let us hear our Lord and stand with him in his outrageous love.