Readings:  Jeremiah 1:4-11 and Luke 4:21-30

Jeremiah and Jesus are large spirits who are a bit of a stretch for others around them.

In Jeremiah's time global political turmoil is putting the kingdom of Israel at risk.  People are afraid, and all the talk is about what political and economic alliances might save them.  The young prophet feels a calling to remind the people most involved in the political scrambling for power and survival, that they should really be focused instead on remembering God and discerning God's greater purposes for all people and nations.

Good luck with that message, some might say.

Jesus, in the reading from Luke, is home after a time of teaching and healing in neighbouring villages.  Welcomed back to his home synagogue, he uses the occasion to remind the members -- his old friends and neighbours, that his concern as a servant of God is for the redemption of all -- especially of outsiders, and for the healing of all Earth, even if it means letting go of home-town glory and local blessing.

Not what the congregation that day wants to hear from the home-town hero; they threaten to throw Jesus off a cliff.

But they don't, and to me that's an interesting part of the story.  When they get him to the cliff's edge, they let him go and he walks through them unharmed.

Does God's power shield him in some miraculous way?  Does the crowd decide in the end that even if he is a heretic and revolutionary, he is their heretic and revolutionary and they won't kill their own?  Or does his word touch something in them, and make them change and grow in some way beyond their first reaction?

Jeremiah also over time is more owned than dis-owned by his people.  Scorned and branded a traitor in his time because of his insistence on a politics of God's will rather than of power politics and economics, his writings and vision are nonetheless preserved and eventually honoured as scripture.  In some streams of Judaism, Jeremiah himself also comes to be regarded as the embodiment of "the suffering servant" of Isaiah's prophecies, the one through whose ministry the people are redeemed.

How does his vindication come about?

It's this sometimes surprising turn that people are capable of making towards embracing the larger issue of God's purpose in the world, even when we are fearful and tempted to obsess about lesser, more immediately self-serving concerns, that I intend to focus on this Sunday in our worship of God.