Sermon Title: Faces in the Crowd – the Common People

Sermon Text: Luke 9:10-17

Sermon Date: Lent 1, February 10, 2008

Do you think of yourself as a common person? You know, an everyday kind of man or woman. Someone who doesn’t make the evening news as a celebrity or a fugitive. Just somewhere in the middle. That would describe most of the people who followed Jesus.

Recently I discovered a new writer Bob Kaylor, a United Methodist pastor in Utah and senior writer for Homiletics Magazine. Last year Bob did a sermon series called “Faces in the Crowd” and I was so taken with it that I asked him if I could sort of use it for our own Lenten experience. And he was happy to help out. I say “sort of” because I am not going to preach his sermons but his historic information is really well done as are his insights. I hope you are challenged by these Lenten sermons.

(Check out http://bobkaylor.typepad.com/bob_kaylor/. With his permission, I borrowed liberally!!!)

Today we will be looking at those everyday people. In the future we will look at the religious leaders, the Revolutionaries, the Women, and the Disciples. There will be much food for thought in these days of Lent.

In addition to putting things away, Lent is also meant to be a time of reflection and penitence in preparation for Easter. Rev. Kaylor’s point is that when we read the scriptures we read them through our own experiences and not the experiences of those first century people, the people who would have actually heard Jesus’ message. This stops us from really understanding what his message was about. After all, he wasn’t actually talking to us in 2008 anymore than I am talking to my great-grandchildren. He was talking to the common people of the first century. Let’s explore the first century so we will get a better understanding in that particular world. Maybe it will even get you into the Bible for yourself and you will gain a new perspective.

From Rev. Kaylor:

“We know the history of the Old Testament—that God had led the people of Israel out of Egypt in the time of Moses, they settled in the Promised Land, established a monarchy. David became the beloved king, but his reign would be the high point of the Israelite monarchy. His successors quickly came and went and Israel actually wound up splitting in two after the death of David’s son Solomon. The ten tribes of the northern Kingdom (Israel) were absorbed by the Assyrians during their conquest of Palestine, while the southern kingdom (Judah) was conquered by the Babylonians in 586BC. This is a marker event for the people of the first century. Exile was evidence of God’s punishment on the people. While some of the exiles would return, the people were still subject to outside rule from the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Assyrian Greeks who threatened Judah after the breakup of Alexander the Great’s empire.

“In about 175 BC, the Assyrian Greeks overtook Jerusalem and began to dictate what the Jews could and could not do in their worship. The king desecrated the temple, the center of worship and the symbol of national pride. This was clearly unacceptable, so in 167 the Jews began a revolt, led by the Maccabee family. They retook Jerusalem and, in 164 BC, cleansed the temple of pagan influence and re-lit the temple lamps. This act of revolution and restoration is what is commemorated each year during the festival of Hannukah—the candles representing the lights of the temple.

For about a hundred years, the people of Israel were self-ruling. Revolution had been successful and true worship restored. The Maccabeeus became the prototype of what a Messiah or deliverer was to be about—not a divine figure, but a ruler ordained by God to restore true worship and purify the temple for God’s presence to dwell again with the people.

“Israel’s self-rule was short-lived, however. In 63 BC, the Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem as the Roman empire expanded and ruled Israel as a pagan agent. The Romans realized that they needed the help of local agents and aristocracy in order to keep order and collect taxes in the remote parts of the empire, so they appointed “kings” like Herod the Great (not even a true Israelite). Herod was ruthless— but we already knew that.

“The first century Israelites were a people still under occupation; they dwelt in the land but it was not truly theirs. Ordinary people simply had no voice in the shaping of society.
“Politically, there was seething resentment in many quarters about the situation—resentment that often flared into violence against Rome. Men claiming to be messiahs came claiming to be the one who would restore order and overcome the oppressor. But the Roman power crushed them or internal chaos destroyed them.

“Economically, the situation was very hard on the common people. The aristocracy became wealthier by buying up and claiming ancestral lands from the largely desperate and poor rural population. People who had once been farmers with their own plots of land now had to work the land but then buy their food back from the wealthy landowners. One half to two thirds of the society’s wealth went straight into the pockets of the wealthy because they had used their political influence to set the system up this way through laws about land ownership, taxation, indentured servitude, and other systems that were designed to keep the wealth in the hands of the few.

“Religion was also part of this “domination system.” Many of these political and economic policies were backed by religious language, like the divine right of kings. When the people tried to form a protest they heard things like “God wants it this way.” Democracy in some form had been present in ancient Greek society and in early Rome, but with Julius Caesar and especially with Augustus, even the empire had shifted to a dictatorship. Power was, in the opinion of the powerful, divinely ordained.

It’s fair to say that life for most people was pretty hard in first century Palestine. The gap between rich and poor had widened, leaving many people wondering where their next meal was coming from. The poor clustered in small villages like Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Capernaum, while the rich dwelt in the grand cities like Jerusalem and Caesarea. It is little wonder, then, that people were generally desperate for a messiah—a deliverer who would change this oppressive status quo.

Jesus was born into a peasant family, lived the peasant life, worked hard at his father’s side in the building trades. He was no soft-handed philosopher spending his days in the homes of the privileged. Like most Jewish boys, he would have been educated in the synagogue and at home by his father. He would have been able to read Hebrew, but spoke Aramaic which was the common language of his people. He may have been familiar with Greek, which was the common language of the empire and surely would have seen Latin words on the Roman standards around the country. Jesus would have understood the situation in the land as well as anyone could have. He was one of the common people.

But somewhere around age 30 – pretty late in those days – Jesus emerged from his humble upbringing to enter a larger stage. People in those days were marked by three identifiers that predetermined their lot in life: Gender, Genealogy and Geography. It was patriarchal culture where males dominated the political and social landscape. Women had little status, and none if they weren’t married. Your ancestry, rather than your ability, determined your job, your status, and your economic standing, as did where you were from. Jesus lived in the Galilee region—a beautiful place, but far from the centers of power. Most cosmopolitan people in the first century would have seen the region as the realm of country bumpkins.

But it was here in these hills and beside the lake shore of Galilee that Jesus began to preach, shaking off the destiny society dictated he should have embraced. He began gathering an audience in these small towns and remote places by preaching a message of good news—good news contained in the sentence, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Can you imagine how desperately those first century Jews needed to hear this?. The “Kingdom of God” was a phrase that meant something. If you have been reading “The Secret Message of Jesus” you might be beginning to get this part.) It was not a phrase connected at all to the afterlife (it was not about saying to people that they could go to heaven when they died)…it was instead an announcement that the great day of the messiah was imminent. For first century Jews in general, God’s kingdom meant the reign and rule of God—God coming again to dwell among the people, restoring true worship to the temple, casting out foreign oppressors, and reversing the fortunes of the poor and needy. In other words, God’s coming kingdom was a code word that indicated that God was coming to re-order the world, breaking the systems of domination and oppression and setting things right. It was an historical, immediate and transformational announcement—truly good news for people who had experienced nothing but bad news everywhere they turned.

See, salvation was not about heaven but about restoration, inclusion, the hungry being fed and the disgrace of poverty and marginalization turned into joy.

When people gathered on these Galilean hillsides to hear Jesus preach, then, they came because Jesus offered them hope. That’s what makes the feeding of the 5,000, today’s Gospel lesson, so important and is why it is the only miracle of Jesus that is common to all four Gospels. This is often preached as a kind of neat trick—Jesus shares lunch with everyone, but it is a story loaded with much more meaning than that. What was Jesus doing out there but showing people in a very practical and powerful way that hope was the on the way! Jesus was announcing and showing the common people that God’s kingdom was closer than they thought. That’s what all the healings and exorcisms were about, too—people being made whole, people being fed physically and spiritually. Real hope, real possibility—the kingdom being at hand.

You know that this didn’t go as planned. Soon the crowds turned on Jesus because he didn’t do it the way they thought he should. If I were speaking to a group of pastors, there would be Amens all around the room. The common people of the first century wanted a violent revolt. Jesus wanted them to love each other.

Expectations, after all, can be very dogmatic. The great preacher Fred Craddock puts it this way: “Everyone had a sermon under the title, “When the Messiah Comes,” a message including every hope, every dream, every ideal condition for which the heart longs. It is no wonder that the church’s message that the Messiah has come and he is Jesus has not been as popular. To believe the Messiah has come means we can no longer shape him to fit our dreams; he shapes us to fit God’s will. That is a difficult adjustment. There is enough misery in the world to make the message that a Messiah will come believable; there is enough misery in the world to make the message that Messiah has come unbelievable. The first and major task of a Messiah is to get people to quit looking for one.”

Can you relate to that? We have lived our lives in a country built on the idea that independence is a good thing.. We belong to a denomination that prides itself on local church autonomy and the priesthood of all believers. We raise our children to think for themselves and not just follow the crowd – “if everyone else jumped off the bridge, would you?” sort of thing.

So where does that leave us when it is time to embrace Jesus as the Messiah and come together to figure out what his life and ministry mean?

Well, that is part of the reason for the dysfunction in the Baptist world. One group of Baptists believes that only doing this or that is right for everyone. And the local church autonomy thing gets pushed to the side when those beliefs become the thing that holds us together (in the minds of some).

So what happens if we go back to some of the things said at the New Baptist Covenant – “did we really come together to give the gift of respect or did we come together to give the gift of love?” Or: “We only really love God when we love the person standing in front of us at any particular time and place.”

I want to ask you to ponder this during this Lenten season. Are you looking for a Messiah to meet your expectations or are you willing to meet the expectations of the Messiah?

Do you need to put Jesus the Messiah in a box filled with things you are comfortable with or can you let the Messiah do the filling?

Are you ready, at whatever age you are, to really and truly give your heart to Jesus, with no strings attached? Are you ready to let Jesus set the agenda for your life, our church, our denomination?

We all want a messiah who will validate our way of life, our beliefs, and our politics.

The problem is Jesus won’t do it. He’s too busy feeding people, preaching the kingdom, showing us how God is at work putting the world to rights. He invites us to join him—“You give them something to eat.” We are called to be partners in bringing salvation to the world.

Today’s thought was from the theologian Karl Barth: “The Christian community does not exist for itself. It exists for the Gospel.”

Are you common folk enough to give him a hand?