All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. – Luke 4:28

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 9, 2014): Luke 4

Jim Collin’s, in his book “Good to Great,” uncovered the secrets of taking a good company and making it great. Often, it seems, that our culture is simply willing to accept what is good and we do not seem to want to stretch ourselves toward what is great. But even if we do, there is an inherent problem. Great often requires something very different out of us than good does. Growth in any endeavor is often hard because it take the ability to re-organize and to think in a different direction. And the truth is that the people we have in key positions might be good enough to take us to where we are, but to go beyond takes the ability not to do what we do better, but rather to move in a totally new direction with our actions.

So Collins surprised himself with the kind of leader that was consistently needed for a company to make the leap from good to great. His expectation was that the leader of a good to great company would be a charismatic powerhouse. He would end up calling these leaders Level Four leaders. But these leaders were inadequate to lead a company from being good to being great. What he found a Level Five leader was necessary to take a company from being good to being great. And Level Five leaders were servant leaders – leaders who refused to allow their egos and the way things had been done in the past to impact the way things needed to be done in the future.

Jesus goes home. He meets with his own people – some people he had known all through his growing up years. And they came to see him with a set of expectations, expectations that were set in the past. And in the past he had been a carpenter, the son of a carpenter. He had been heavily involved in the family business – he had been trained by his father, Joseph, and he had probably been involved in the training of his younger brothers. But now it was time for him to go in a different directions. But Jesus also realized that moving in a different direction would be hard for those who knew him. So using the example of Elijah and Elisha, neither of whom were accepted in their own time, he explained that he understood that he would not be accepted, either by the people of his hometown or the people of his time.

And the people got angry. There are probably a couple of legitimate reasons for their reaction. The first was that somehow this child of their town seemed to think that he was more important – and smarter - than they were. But he was also comparing himself to two of the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible – Elijah and Elisha. And he was neither. The people of Nazareth, and really of all the people of Judah, were locked in to a certain expectation of the future. It was that expectation that Jesus was about to break.

Often to move with God means that we need to be willing to change. The idea of the church was never intended to be a fixed organization grounded in concrete, but rather fluid – flowing with the changing times. We move with God through our culture. And our success depends on our ability to be servants, to move with God – and without ego – through all of the changing circumstances of life – recognizing that even as things change, God is still in control.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Luke 5