People Change: A Sermon
4th Sunday after the Epiphany
I guest-preached this morning at a friend’s church. I told him I wanted Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Luke 4:21-30 from today’s lectionary for my scriptures. As I was finishing my sermon late last week, I realized that the lectionary epistle would have tied in quite nicely - 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, since I cite “love does not end” from verse 8 and talk about how we change as we grow, which is the same ideas as verse 11, “when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” Yet listening to the scriptures read this morning, it became clear to me that the Jeremiah passage wasn’t for my sermon; the Spirit had nudged me to choose that passage because I needed to hear it read. There may be more about that in a future post.
There’s an old saying that “you can’t step in the same river twice.” Are y’all familiar with it? The original quote is attributed to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 BC. The full sentence is, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The river is constantly changing as it flows downstream. Even if you step in twice at the same spot, the water you touched the first time has moved on, taking some of the silt and sediment with it. Likewise, we grow and change as well. This is life. If you think you’re not growing and changing, well, that’s called stagnation and it leads to wither and decay and eventually death. It’s change, either way. There is no not changing. The world around us changes, and we change. We know this, right? We are not who we used to be before the pandemic, or ten years ago, or twenty years ago. Our bodies have changed, our relationships have changed, some of our opinions and tastes may have even changed. We, like the river, are always changing.
A related saying is the one about how “you can never go home again.” Have y’all heard that one, too? Once you leave home, home changes and you change. Things will not be exactly the same when you return. This truth is what Jesus experiences in our Gospel reading this morning. We are reading from the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. In Luke 3, Jesus was baptized. Chapter 4 begins with Jesus being tempted in the wilderness for forty days, and now, fresh out of the wilderness and riding the high from not giving into Satan’s temptations, Jesus has returned home to Nazareth in Galilee. He began to teach in the synagogue and one day he was given the scroll of Isaiah to read out loud, which was a normal thing for him to do. Jesus read from Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, proclaim freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then Jesus goes one step further and says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s where last week’s Gospel ended and this week’s picks up. “Everyone spoke well of him and were amazed at his words.” Amazed, like surprised, wondering. The compliment is that they were impressed by the words; the wondering was about the source. Who was Joseph’s boy to be saying these words? They knew Jesus as the son of the local carpenter. It was a struggle to reconcile what they knew of Jesus from him growing up with how they experienced him now. The two didn’t seem to match.
You see, they thought they knew Jesus. They had watched him grow up, changed his diapers, taught him Jewish rituals and holy scriptures, saw him grow into a young man and grow facial hair. They thought they knew him. Jesus, for his part, seems to only add fuel to the fire, saying out loud what they’re thinking, “Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown the signs and miracles we heard that you did in Capernaum.” In other words, “Ok, hot shot, if you’re all that, strut your stuff. Give us a show! Don’t just talk to us. We want water transformed into wine. We want to see someone healed. You can act differently that way. We don't want you acting differently this way.”
Have y’all ever grown up with someone, a sibling or neighbor or friend, and then had time apart, whether one of you moved away or went to college, or something, and then you see them again later? My best example from my own life was when I went off to college, and then coming home that first time a couple months later. My two younger sisters, who are five and nine years younger than me, both changed quite a bit while I was away. When I came home on breaks during college, I discovered how much they had changed. I had changed, too, but was less cognizant of my own changes. I’d try to interact with them like before, but they weren’t the same person. They’d had experiences I hadn’t been part of. They’d grown in ways I hadn’t witnessed. There were times when we would fall back into old habits, but guess what? By my 20s, I didn’t like being treated like my 18-year-old self before I went to college. I had changed; I wasn’t that person any more. They had changed, too. So, we had to make allowances for how each of us had changed and get to know the other person how we were now. I couldn’t go home again. Combined with my parents’ divorce, home how I knew it before college had radically and permanently changed. Jesus couldn’t go home again, either. The people in his hometown didn’t want make allowances for how he had changed; or, they wanted to dictate how he could change. They wanted to say how the river changed, instead of acknowledging that it had changed outside of their control, instead of acknowledging that the Holy Spirit had changed and shaped Jesus through that time in the wilderness and the other experiences he had had without them.
Generally, we don’t like change, especially change outside of our control. Change that we’re in charge of is a different story. But when other people change, and we didn’t know it, didn’t expect it, are surprised by it, it can take us a while to adjust and accept how the person is now. Sometimes the person is never accepted in their new way. Always, the relationship changes. Jesus is no longer the kid running around with the other kids; now he speaks with authority, he’s living into his call. He’s no longer shorter than his elders; he’s all grown up and eye level as one of the adults. He’s been through some major, life-changing experiences that others didn’t experience. He’s not the same person he was when he learned carpentry from Joseph in the woodshop. Now, the Spirit of the Lord has anointed him, to preach good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for those bound in chains, and, as in the examples Jesus gives of Elijah and Elisha, to include all people in God’s plan for salvation. This is part of the revelation given in this season after Epiphany. Jesus has changed from the sweet baby boy we sang about five weeks ago.
Last year I was in a training program up at the Durham VA for outpatient mental health chaplaincy. Previously, I pastored for a long time, which is how I know your pastor, and then I moved into chaplaincy. The Veterans I worked with were primarily referred to me for grief counseling, over the loss of a loved one. Invariably, this new loss had brought up old losses and I was often told, “I thought I was done with that.” Or, “My PTSD has gotten worse again since my loved one died, the worst it’s been in years.” And I’d tell them that’s normal. It’s normal for new grief to bring up old grief. It’s normal for a major change in your life to impact previous major changes, no matter how well you thought you had dealt with them. They’re all connected. Chaplain Service at the VA has a grief workbook that we’d make our way through, and it ends with talking about how we have a better sense of well-being when we live closer to our values. The final exercise was to explore and name your values and decide on one concrete step you could take. For example, if you value time with your spouse, and you’ve been feeling distant from them, then a concrete step would be to make a dinner reservation for the two of you to go out.
Big life changes are going to happen. Y’all know this. Sometimes it’s one that you choose: you chose to move, or you chose to change jobs. Sometimes it’s a big change that is simply part of life: your kids grow up, your body ages and doesn’t work the same way it used to. And sometimes it’s a change that is forced on you: you’re laid off; a loved one dies unexpectedly. The people here with Jesus feel like this is a change that’s been forced on them; they didn’t know Jesus was going to change so radically. It is natural to initially resist surprise change. Most of us don’t like surprise big changes. Trust me, I’ve met enough patients in hospitals who have had a surprise big change which landed them in the hospital. That’s why they, or their nurse, requested to speak with a chaplain. When you are surprised, it matters what you say about the people involved and it matters how you adjust to this new reality. That you’re going to miss your old life is a given. There is always grief when there is change. That’s normal. Even when it’s a good change, you may still miss the old. Kids have to grow up and move out. And you can miss them. Things can happen for good reasons, and you can still be sad. Grief may never end; that’s possible, especially when it’s for a loved one, because the love does not end. However, it is still possible to live a life with meaning, accepting what happened, and making meaning from it.
I imagine some of the people in Jesus’s hometown adjusted and supported him. I imagine others just ignored him completely and never accepted him. Sounds like today, right? Some people accept Jesus and some ignore him completely. Everything – the world, our friends and family, ourselves – changes eventually. It’s what you do with the change that counts. The people in Jesus’s hometown wanted to throw him off a cliff. There are times you may feel that way, too. Hopefully, however, before you get too far into your wind-up, you can take a minute to consider some other options. Because you have changed, too. And God loves you no matter what. Amen.
