Strangely Familiar: Family Matters (Mark 6:1-13)
Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
He left that place and came to his hometown, and his
disciples followed him. 2 On 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! 3 Is
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. 4 Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not
without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their
own house.” 5 And he could do no deed of power
there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6 And
he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching. 7 He
called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them
authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He ordered
them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no
money in their belts; 9 but to wear sandals and not
to put on two tunics. 10 He said to them, “Wherever
you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11 If
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.” 12 So
they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13 They
cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
(NRSV)
One year ago I trooped over to a
sanctuary I’d only seen once to balance my laptop here on the pulpit and record
my promise that I was going to fail sometimes in the ministry of leading this
church—specifically, that there would be times when I was “going to have moments when my words or actions do not contribute
to your wholeness and healing, and you are going to have moments when your
words and actions cause me pain.”[1] And we have; this last year has asked me to
be a pastor in ways for which I certainly never trained and some ways in which
I had never before imagined; and it has asked you to learn a completely
different way of being community, of being church. And we have not always done that well. I am, at the end of the day, still human,
much though it occasionally pains me to admit that.
And for some
people, that was not enough—or too much.
Some folks heard the new pastor, saw the new direction, and asked who
does this congregation think it is?
Where did they get all this? This
was no longer the church for them, and I do honestly pray that they have found
a church where they can hear the Spirit’s direction as they could not here at
St. Luke’s.
Others
stayed. Others joined; I know there are
several who worship with us online from all over the world because we have gone
into that digital village and said, “Here is a place where you are
welcome.” On that particular journey, we
took rather a lot more than a staff and a pair of sandals; in a couple of
weeks, the governance board will talk about just how much St. Luke’s has done
in the past year to be able to do online streaming, as well as the many other
changes that have helped us as a church stay vital and connected in this
unexpected and difficult time.
But here we
are, a year later, and now I stand in this pulpit with technology a great deal
more complex than a laptop and I say again, I will get some things wrong. We have another year together, St. Luke’s,
and it will not go like any of us want.
I will not say all the things that you want me to say, and you will not
go every direction I want you to go. It
is a process, this ecclesia thing, this koinonia thing of
Christian fellowship. But the thing is,
we have a pretty decent predecessor in working around things not going the
“right” way.
Our text today
begins right on the heels of Edythe’s sermon last week about a little girl
brought back to life; the place Jesus left to go to His hometown was the house
of Jairus. After that moment of putting
a family back together and healing their grief, perhaps it made sense to Jesus
to go check on his own parents and kick around home for a while. He was established as a healer now; he could
go speak of His ministry to the people who had watched Him become Himself.
It doesn’t
work like that, though.
We do not get what
Jesus teaches here in Mark, only that “He began to teach.” The Gospel of Luke tells us a bit more in
that version—no surprise that Luke is chattier than Mark. In Luke 4 we learn that Jesus “unrolled the
scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he
has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight
to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor.’…Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled
in your hearing.’”[2]
Thinking about
some of the folks with whom I grew up, yeah, I also would be asking, “Where did
this man get all this?” That’s a heck of
a claim, to fulfill Scripture—especially to fulfill that Scripture, a
repackaging of Isaiah 61 that promises justice, healing, and hope. We need all that, sure, but from this Guy?
The people of
Nazareth, understandably, are suspicious. “Is not this the carpenter?” Surely carpenters don’t know how to unpack
delicate Scriptural matters—especially not illegitimate sons of carpenters, a
status hinted at by the mention only of Mary and not of Joseph. The people were so weirded out that they “took
offense” at Jesus and said no, You are not this. We know Who You are; get back into place.
Family units
and familiar communities are tough places when they create a space in which we
can only be the thing we have always been.
We get used to each other; my sister is the one who always makes the
deviled eggs, my cousin is the one who always has a sketchpad at hand, this
friend is the one who always has a music lyric reference, this church is the
one that always has a Halloween event, this town is the one that always has a
Polish festival. We expect because we
have learned to expect, learned to understand.
Humans like patterns and we seek them out; they’re comforting.
But God
doesn’t let patterns sit forever. A
hometown boy comes back to say that Scripture has been fulfilled; a global
pandemic utterly flips over our expectations of who can do what and how; a new
pastor gets sent to a church to learn a community; a community shifts to make
room for a new pastor. “I am about to do
a new thing,” God says elsewhere in Isaiah; “now it springs forth, do you not
perceive it?”[3]
This is not to
say that everything that has come before is terrible; far from it. We would not be who we are were it not for
who we have been. But as we start this
second year together, St. Luke’s, I am saying that the reality that we will be
surprised is still in place—and that we will still cross over each other and
not hear each other properly, just as the folks of Nazareth did.
Jesus, for His
part, doesn’t strike down the town or tell everyone they’re terrible. He rebrands Himself as a prophet—a telling lineage,
given how badly things usually went for the prophets we have in the Hebrew
Bible—and then sets out to continue doing ministry and to encourage His
disciples to do the same.
What a strange
pairing of stories! It’s almost as
though Mark is setting up the work of Jesus’ followers with a failure to say
see, it will not go to plan all the time.
Whether in your hometown or not, there will be people who can’t get past
who you are to see what you’re doing, to hear what you’re saying, and that’s
normal. Church, not everyone is going to
be able to listen to our stories of who Christ is and who we have become in our
faith; we’re each in a different place of connection to God and, even, to
ourselves. So, if we are not heard, we
shake the dust off our feet and move on.
This has
become such a negative phrase, shaking the dust off our feet. It implies a disgust, almost, with the place
that rejected us, that rejected our stories.
But I appreciate the idea of Pastor Mark Davis that the disciples “go
out with authority over unclean spirits and receptive to hospitality. If there
is no offer of hospitality, they demonstrate that they are not there to take
anything – not even the dust – that is not freely given.”[4] It’s not a matter of declaring another person
or community unfit for God’s grace; it’s recognizing that the relationship
there isn’t ready yet and it is not ours to take. Moving right along.
Lewis
continues on to say that, “This rejection-leading-to-new-ministry is the same
pattern of 1:14-15 when Jesus began his ministry after the arrest of John” and
that he “would argue that this is part of the resurrection motif of Mark”.[5] God is all about resurrections, but they take
time and timing. It’s not about coming
into a town or a church or a friendship or a workplace and saying okay, I have
the newest and best information, listen up.
It’s about earning trust, speaking truth, and continuing on if folks
aren’t ready or willing to hear. We are
called to this work of bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to
the captives, recovering sight for the blind, letting the oppressed go free,
and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor even if no one listens to us at
all.
And it starts here,
in the community that reminds us of who we are and Whose we are. We return to each other in all the various
ways we stay connected and hear again the call to go into the world and build
the Kingdom where all are welcome, where God’s grace is freely given. We return to this table that connects us to
thousands of years of fractious homecomings and uncertain new ministries, of
people whose names we don’t yet know and people whose names are branded into
our hearts. We return to the promise
that God’s invitation is everlasting.
It has been a
while since we’ve been able to take communion and that has been hard, I
know. It has been a painful stretch of
our own theology to recognize that Christ never wanted this gift to be
dangerous and so we have had to hold our love for and protection of each other
higher than the peace of ritual. Now, as
we ease back into in-person connections with the new vaccines, we find
ourselves again having to rethink how we do this. “What about the way we used to; what about
the way others are doing; what about the opinion I read that says we
can--?” Why is this thing we thought we
knew suddenly out of character, suddenly different? “Where did this man get all this?”
Fortunately,
God shows up even when our invocations change—just as the disciples were able
to do the great work of witness as they went out after Jesus’ failed sermon in
Nazareth, just as we have made it through this past very weird year, we come to
the table flung wide across the very world and know that God is present in the
faithful act of open reception. John
Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, said in his sermon “The Means of
Grace, “We know that there is no inherent power in the words that are spoken in
prayer, in the letter of Scripture read, the sound thereof heard, or the bread
and wine received in the Lord’s Supper; but that it is God alone who is the
giver of every good gift, the author of all grace; that the whole power is of
him, whereby through any of these there is any blessing conveyed to our
soul. We know likewise that he is able
to give the same grace, though there were no means on the face of the earth.”[6]
A pandemic
cannot stop God; a new way of doing old rituals cannot stop God; a bumpy
adjustment period of a new pastor cannot stop God; an unwelcoming hometown
crowd that only sees a carpenter cannot stop God. The Spirit dances as She will through all the
places where we breathe into the marvel of justice, healing, and hope,
sometimes shaking off the dust that is not ready, always returning to say the
table is open, come, eat.
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