Off the Bench

1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

January 31, 2016

As I was pondering worship this week, from the snow-bound comfort of the living room, I was scanning the file with this morning’s bulletin and I misread the title of the hymn we sung a few minutes ago. I read it as “O Carpenter, Why Leave the Beach.” Being housebound for days does weird things to your brain.

Why leave the beach, indeed?

The middle of January is an excellent time for pondering that existential question. Heck, tomorrow morning I’m actually heading to the beach for a couple of days of retreat time with some colleagues and our beloveds. I’m guessing that, even in February, walking along the Atlantic coast is going to leave me wanting more when it’s time to leave. That’s in February. Imagine what that would be like in warm weather. Seriously, who among us doesn’t want to be on a warm, sunny beach after the week we’ve just lived through here?

How many times have you headed home at the end of a beach trip and thought to yourself, “Can’t we just stay here? Forever?”

Staying on the beach is not a realistic option for most of us, for reasons that we all know well.

On the other hand, staying on the bench is an option, and it’s one that most of us choose much of the time.

The Old Testament reading this morning is about leaving the bench. The text tells the story of the call of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah tells it like this: “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appoint you a prophet to the nations.’ Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.’ But God said to me, ‘Don’t say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you will go to all to whom I send you, and will say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid, for I am with you.’”

In other words, “son, get of the bench and into the game.”

But, you know and I know, that it is so much easier to sit out, to sit back and watch, to hesitate, to make no firm commitments, to avoid making a decision. It’s so much easier to say, “I’m too young for that” or “I’m too old for that” or “I’m not talented enough for that” or “I’m too talented for that” or, this is the one I say and hear most often, “I’m too busy for that.”

And, thus it is that callings pass us by.

As I live past the middle of my sixth decade I’m learning something about the advantages of growing older. When I was a young adult I regularly put off significant decisions; I’d linger at a crossroads fearing that I would come to regret the loss of the path not taken. I know now that time will take care of that on its own. If you stand at the crossroads long enough somebody will come along and build a parking lot over one of the paths before you. Not to choose is a choice. Not to decide is a decision.

Carpenter, get off the bench. Traveller, pick a road.

For when we refuse to decide, refuse to make a choice, we are deciding. We’re deciding, in fact, that we prefer the known comfort of the status quo to the unknown outcome of the choice we face. Heck, sometime we choose the known discomfort – better the devil you know.

But for followers of Jesus this is simply not a faithful response to what calls us. For we know two essential things, and these two things make all that we do not know irrelevant.

First, we know the promise of the truth captured in the beautiful words of the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth: “love never ends.”

Second, we know that the status quo is unjust – unfair to literally billions of our sisters and brothers around the world, and to many tens of thousands who live in our midst in the metro area.

Those two truths are enough to get us off the bench even though we know a third truth: responding to the call of God to participate actively in that never ending love comes always with a cost.

The little story from Luke about Jesus’ first public proclamation in his hometown underscores this third truth. For no sooner does Jesus take down the scroll of Isaiah and read about the spirit of the Lord upon him anointing him to bring good news to the poor than his neighbors give him the bum’s rush and threaten to throw him off a nearby cliff.

There’s a lot of insider/outsider historic dynamic at play in this little story, and if we had more time this morning we could examine it in detail. Suffice it to say that any proclamation of good news to those who suffer under the status quo may well be heard as threat to those who prosper under the same status quo.

Nevertheless, those who would follow the way of Jesus are called out, ordained to this vocation: preach good news to the poor, freedom to the captives, new sight to the blind, forgiveness of debt to those suffering under its crushing weight. We’re called to do justice. We’re called to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to comfort those who mourn, to bind up the brokenhearted, to love without limit.

There will be scars.

We may stumble and we may fall when we follow this difficult calling.

But there will be other hands to lift us up along the way.

Because the arc of the moral universe is surely long, but it does bend toward justice.

When we do the work of love, we bend it just a little bit closer.

Carpenters, get off the bench.

Amen.