It’s been a minute. Haven’t posted in quite a while. Hoping to get more sermons up here as we emerge from the pandemic and I’m doing a bit more preaching around the New England Synod. This sermon from July 4, 2021 was for Immanuel Lutheran, Oxford, CT. The service, including the sermon, can be viewed here: https://fb.watch/v/Jn2UF9nS/
1[Jesus] came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him.2On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. 4Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” 5And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching. 7He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; 9but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. 10He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. – Mark 6:1-13
I’ve often heard people wish that we had more stories of Jesus as a child. Aside from the birth story, a brief glimpse of infant Jesus, and pre-teen Jesus in the temple impressing the religious authorities but a little snarky with his mom when she finally finds him after he’s been missing for days, we don’t get much. Probably what we’re looking for is some fun miracle stories – like the joking comics or memes that come through every once in a while, like Mary trying to give Jesus a bath but he insists on walking on the water. Something like that, maybe.
What we do get is today’s strange and in some ways disturbing story of Jesus as an adult but seen by his hometown friends and family only as the child he once was. In some ways this is probably more realistic than our imaginations – a town that went about its business. They knew Jesus and he knew them. They shared daily chores, they sat by one another in the synagogue, they shared meals and holidays. And they thought of him as the ordinary kid he was. In fact, most of them would always think of Jesus as the little kid he once was. Is not this the carpenter? The son of Mary?! Who does he think he is?
In one sense this is just the innocent failure to make logical leaps in our brains about the age of people we know. People we know well but don’t see very often tend to live in our minds exactly as they were when we last saw them. It’s most noticeable when we see young people we haven’t seen in a while, but it’s true of adults, too.
But in another sense, a more serious sense, it’s a dangerous and crippling fear of letting in new information, new realities. It’s a failure to welcome change. Jesus has some hard things to say. He has power that is more than they are used to. Even though we’re talking about healing and feeding and bringing peace, it’s a change. Not only this not the little kid they know and can boss around, he’s bringing into their midst something that disrupts the order of things. Even if it’s for the better, they’re not so sure they welcome the change.
And it’s tempting, perhaps, to scoff at them. How could they not welcome Jesus and his miraculous work? I don’t know about you, but I know sometimes I’m comfortable with the way things are. Sometimes I want a Jesus, a church, a world I can control. Ok…maybe most of the time. Maybe that’s part of our longing for more stories about a sweet child Jesus. That Jesus might be easier for us to wrap our human minds around. That Jesus might not push us so hard to get out of our comfort zones. That Jesus might just let us get by with staying just as we are. But here’s the thing – Jesus grows, and not just grows up from a child into an adult. Jesus’s ministry expands and changes as it moves through his years of ministry toward the cross, and certainly after resurrection as the reality of Jesus upends all of reality as we know it by upending death and unleashing that victory into the world. That’s a Jesus we can’t always pin down and use how we’d like.
Yesterday my daughter and I were at a wildlife encounter show, and as an introduction to one of the animals the presenter reminded us that the best scientists are ones who recognize and seek out new information, even if it contradicts what we think we know about the world. It stuck with me the way he put it, and I think that’s what makes for some of the best church folks, too – the ability to recognize and seek out when God is doing something new.
But when people present me with new information that forces me to rethink how I’ve been doing things, how I’ve been thinking about things – I don’t always welcome it. Even when the new information helps me learn and grow, even when it helps me live more fully into my own values. As I do my own anti-racism work, confronting places where I have upheld systems and policies that exclude and discriminate is not easy. I’m afraid to misstep and sometimes fail to take a step forward for justice. But taking on an attitude of learning and growing is helping me keep learning and keep doing better in my community and in the church.
Sometimes we get like this as a church, too. I’m sure no one here at Immanuel has ever said the words “We’ve never done it that way before.” Right? Maybe you’ve heard it somewhere though… As a church sometimes we want to look back on those “good old days” that actually weren’t always as good as we remember and weren’t always good for everyone. Instead the church is growing and changing. Maybe it’s growing into something we aren’t comfortable with yet. Maybe the form will look different. Maybe some of the things we hold beloved will be less available. But if we as a church don’t grow and change it means we die – that’s the simple fact that living things are always changing and developing. I wonder when we’ve failed to listen to the voice of Jesus in our midst because it didn’t sound to us like what Jesus said a few years ago. I know I sometimes failed to listen to Jesus’s nudging to push me out of my comfort zone around worship and outreach that was different from what I was taught, what I knew.
Today we mark the declaration of the independence of the United States 245 years ago. There will perhaps be picnics and fireworks, patriotic displays and parades – though probably still curtailed by lingering COVID cautions and iffy weather. I wonder if in our celebrations we will make room to listen to the prophets who in every age are calling us to be a better country – those who call us to racial equity in a country founded on slavery and racism, those who call us to welcome the stranger instead of building walls, those who call us to care for the land on which live and the peoples who first tended it before a modern nation-state was created on it by European settlers. Do we make room for prophets of peace who despite the realities of a violent world help us see a vision of a day where there is no more war and no more bloodshed? Do we celebrate today a fixed idea of what America once was or do we celebrate an America that has the space to listen to prophets and which has the capacity to change for the good of all? If we want to be a living nation, then we have to be a growing, changing, adapting one, and, I pray, one that learns better to repent of the wrongs we have perpetrated alongside the good that has come in our history and that seek the kind of change that makes for a new reality.
Whatever the arena, change and growth are difficult. They are not without pains and losses. They involve hard work and willingness to see something new. Sometimes we manage it well enough, other times we become like the stubborn people of Nazareth.
Jesus may have picked up and moved on from Nazareth after his inability to do many deeds of power, but his work didn’t stop. Just because the people didn’t recognize or respond to the true power of God made flesh in front of them didn’t stop God’s life from being unleashed on a hurting and dying world. Their unbelief did not change that God was working among them. They certainly missed out in the moment, but they did not miss on the life of God for all the world.
I leave you today with the words of Debie Thomas, an Episcopal lay minister who blogs weekly about the lectionary. She captures what I think is behind this text so perfectly:
“[There] are questions to ask ourselves as individuals and as communities, but also as the church. Whose voices have we sidelined across history? Whose perspectives do we still deem unworthy of prophetic authority? Where has our love of tradition hardened us against new perspectives? How has our fear of the new made us obsolete and lifeless?
“The scandal of the Incarnation is precisely that Jesus doesn’t stay in his lane. God doesn’t limit God’s self to our small and stingy notions of the sacred. God exceeds, God abounds, God transgresses, God transcends. The lowly carpenter reveals himself as Lord. The guy with the tainted birth story offers us salvation. The hometown prophet tells us truths we’d rather not hear. We might be scandalized by his lane-crossing, but he’s not. We might put limits on his deeds of power, but those limits won’t confine him for long. We might amaze him with our unbelief, but he will call out to us, nevertheless, daring us always to see and experience him anew.”
Amen.
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 