Go Big or Stay at Home
Luke 4:31-37
Gettysburg Presbyterian Church
Rev. Daniel T. Hans
September 30, 2007

We had a saying when I was in college: "Go big or stay at home."  It was on a par with the adage: It's what separates the men from the boys; or the women from the girls.  Such proverbs take on a life of their own and become an appeal to authority and action in time of need.  I never did know the origin of our college saying but its power and promise were undeniable. Whenever we were confronted with an imposing challenge, the words: "Go big or stay at home" could jump-start our courage and launch us into action.

I

Never was that boldness-booster more needed than in the spring of 1975 as I sat in the locker room at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  My visiting lacrosse team from Denison University in Ohio was about to take the field against the Hopkins Blue Jays who were ranked #1 in the nation.
Being a science major at the time, I knew that every stimulus produces a response.  However, little did I imagine that the prospect of facing the best team in the nation would produce the reaction it did within our team. Many of my teammates, who had grown up in Baltimore and stood in awe of Hopkins' perennial lacrosse prowess, were almost catatonic with fear.  A couple members of team sat half-dressed mumbling to them selves, "We could get beat 30-0!"

As one of the co-captains I tried to lift my team's spirits.  "Listen," I said, "I know these guys are good but they use the same equipment we do and they put it on the same way we do!"  My teammates stared at me with a look that said, "That's about what we would expect from someone who grew up in Ohio!"  I reminded them that we, too, had a national ranking.  However, the comparison seemed more like that of a mid-scale Chevy to a top of the line Mercedes.

Time was running out.  We had to be on the field for warm-ups.  But, my co-captain and I had no idea how to get our team out of the locker room. Then somebody said it!  It was quiet and I didn't hear who said it, but I heard the word ring out clearly: "Go big or stay at home."  Yea!  That was it!  Go big or stay at home!  We could have stayed at home during that spring break and played some mediocre teams in the Midwest or we could go big and go East and go against the best!
From another part of the locker room the words echoed, until the team chanted: "Go big or stay at home! Go big or stay at home!"  That was all we needed.  We took to the field and played the one of our best games of the season.  When the final whistle blew, the scoreboard read:  Hopkins 18 - Denison 8.  Sure, we lost the game!  What did you expect?  This isn't a fairy tale!  We lost the game but, by taking the risk of "going big"; we gained something no scoreboard could measure.

II

"Go big or stay at home."  The spirit of that saying must have resonated in Jesus’ mind at the beginning of his ministry. Jesus could have played it safe, continued in the family business and never taken a first step into his mission as God’s Messiah, the world’s savior. He could have stayed home but he didn't.  He began his ministry.  He went to the town of Capernaum.  In telling Jesus’ story, Luke was not too concerned about the sequence of events.  In verse 23 of chapter 4, as we heard last Sunday, mention was made of Jesus being in Capernaum.  But, as we hear today, Jesus didn’t go to the town until verse 31. In the Gospels, theology trumps history and overall meaning trumps specific details.

In Capernaum, being true to his Jewish faith, Jesus went into the synagogue, the Jewish church, and taught the people.  His action produced a reaction among those who heard him.  Jesus acted and they reacted: stimulus and response.  They were astounded because he spoke with authority.  Upon hearing him, the people instantly recognized there was something different about this teacher.

No two people are the same.  Sometimes we don’t note or appreciate the difference until we take a closer look. A four-year-old Catholic boy was playing with a four-year-old Protestant girl in the backyard wading pool.  They splashed each other and go so wet they decided to take off their clothes.  The little boy looked at the little girl and said, “Golly, I didn’t know there was that much difference between Catholics & Protestants!”

Luke borrowed the account of Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue from Mark’s gospel almost verbatim.  In Mark the people’s verbal reaction to Jesus’ teaching: “He speaks with authority” also included “not like our scribes.”  The scribes were the religious professionals, the official teachers.
All had degrees from esteemed schools.  They were fully credential-ed but completely uninspiring.  Along came Jesus, a lay preacher, who had not only not attended the right school, he hadn't gone to seminary at all nor was he properly ordained.  But, he had something that the professionals lacked.  He had conviction.  “He spoke with authority.” The Greek word for authority is exousia meaning “from one’s being.”  Jesus taught and preached from the Holy Scriptures and from his being in relationship with God his heavenly Father, from his own experience of God in his life.  He spoke from his deepest convictions arising from his experience and he spoke to their deepest yearnings arising from their needs.

In Jesus’ day, faith formation had become little more than passing along information about God.  Yet, people had a hunger for God.  They wanted to know God personally, to encounter God in their daily living, to experience transcendence right where they stood, and to catch a glimpse of eternity in their moment in time.  Are we any different today?  We sell ourselves short when we settle for messages about God.  Our need and desire is to meet God personally and astonishingly.  Our need is to Go Big with this faith of ours.

III

The folks in Capernaum heard words infused with conviction.  How refreshing it is to come across someone who does something, not because she’s supposed to do it and not because it’s his job, but because she believes in what she’s doing; it’s his life: the professor who publishes, not to get tenure, but to pass along some insight that she believes will benefit others; and the coach who spends extra time with a player off the court, not because it is in his job description and not to make the boy a better performer on the court, but because the coach sees potential and wants to help the boy become a better person in life.  Such people gain our respect for they possess an authority that arises not from convention or credentials but from conviction and character.  Such people are as astonishing in our day as in Jesus’ day.

The Capernaum crowd’s astonishment about Jesus begs the question – Can we be astonished about Jesus today?  I suspect for most of us there was a time when we were enthralled with faith in Jesus and entranced with hope in Christ.  Life seemed alive with the new possibilities that Christ offered us.  But, with time, our faith became routine, predictable, even boring.  I’ll say it bluntly: whenever the message of God’s amazing love and transforming power for our lives becomes dull and boring to us, we have been in church too long! We have been hiding from the world rather than facing it.  We have been staying home in safe, familiar surroundings rather than going out and going big and taking our faith into the world.  We need to be astounded anew by the transforming and transcending grace of God present everywhere.

This has been a tough summer for our congregation.  First, we lost 31-year-old Jackie Knox in a car wreck in California.  The week before last, those of us who participated in the June Honduras medical and dental mission trip lost 27-year-old Becky Yarberry in a car wreck in Colorado.  This past week all of us lost our former church custodian and good friend Paul Karchner after a 9-month battle with leukemia.  Death is becoming familiar to us and for that reason we must open ourselves to the astounding power of God at work in and beyond life and death.  What will it take for words like hope, resurrection, and eternal life, words we hear repeatedly in church, to come alive with conviction and authority for us?  Will we Go Big and stake our lives on the Christian message or will be Stay at Home with a safe yet half-hearted religion?

IV

In that Capernaum synagogue, Jesus’ power accompanied his conviction.
Jesus had what is every preacher’s nightmare: Right in the middle of his sermon, someone interrupted him in a screaming fit.  We are told the interrupter had an unclean spirit. In the 1st century world people believed angels and demons were everywhere. Any unexplainable phenomenon was attributed to spirits – good or bad. Epilepsy, seizure disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia were all seen, back then, as unclean spirits possessing people.

Whether Jesus thought these spirits to be real we do not know.  We do know he saw the limited power of evil.  He knew his mission was to disarm and ultimately destroy evil. Thus he drove the unclean spirit, the demon, out of the man. We still have demons today. They are anything or anyone that we let have destructive power over us to control us, demean us and dehumanize us.  Jesus’ power brings liberation and renewal even to lives today.

An ironic twist in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life is that whenever Jesus is identified as the Son of God or the Holy One from God it is not the crowds who state it and certainly not the religious leaders and not even his own followers. It is the unclean spirits who repeatedly declare who Jesus really is. “Let us alone!  What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy?  I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

Today, the voices of those who broker in coercion and discord try the same tactics: Mind your own business, Jesus.  Stay at home and quote the Bible.  Stick to spiritual things.  Stay away from economic injustice and domestic violence and political oppression and family disintegration.  Jesus, what have you to do with such worldly concerns as these?  Jesus still can silence such demonic voices, which out of self-interest, tell him and tell us to stay at home and leave the big challenges to the experts and the government.

Whether in Capernaum or in Gettysburg, whenever Jesus silences the voices of false gods and drives away deceptive spirits, those who witness it react. 
Stimulus/response. The response back then was astonishment: “What kind of teaching is this?  With authority and power he commands the unclean spirits and they obey him!”  Lingering questions are often the best reaction and best response to the stimulus of the convicting and powerful presence of God.

V

Action - reaction / stimulus – response: This theme is present in our passage and it needs to be present in our lives and in our church.  The question remains: What kind of response will we offer to the challenges set before us?
Will we focus solely on the present and look solely at "what is"?  Or will we focus on the future and look toward "what could be"?  The religious leaders of Jesus’ day preached "what is"- a boring, toothless, Stay-at-Home religion.
Jesus proclaimed "what could be"- a powerful, convincing, Go-Big vision.

The Stay-at-Home crowd is committed to the moment and is a product of its environment.  They spend their lives responding to somebody else’s agenda and to circumstances over which they have no control.  They worry about the future but do nothing to shape the future.
Go-Big people define the moment rather than being defined by it. They shape their environment rather than being shaped by it. They take the initiative and assume responsibility for their lives.  Instead of lamenting about the uncertain future, they mold that future by taking bold and decisive action today.

Stay-at-Home folks end up where the circumstances push them.
Go-Big people end up where their vision points them.
Stay-at-Home Christians say: That’s just the way it is.
Go-Big Christians say: Let’s look for a new and better way.
Stay-at-Home Christians say: I can’t.
Go-Big Christians say: With God’s help, I can.
Stay-at-Home Christians lament: Oh, if only…!
Go-Big Christians wonder: Hey, what if…?

Every day Jesus calls us to follow him into our world, his world.  So, what is it going to be? Are we content to Stay at Home or are we willing to Go Big?

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