Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 5th, 2015
Text: Mark 6:1-13 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
The Rejection of Jesus at Nazareth
6 He went away from there and came to his own country; and his disciples followed him. 2 And on the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought 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[a] at him. 4 And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” 5 And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them. 6 And he marveled because of their unbelief.
And he went about among the villages teaching.
The Mission of the Twelve
7 And he called to him the twelve, and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He charged 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 put on two tunics. 10 And he said to them, “Where you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11 And if any place will not receive you and they refuse to hear you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet for a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and preached that men should repent. 13 And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
“Just who do you think you are?”
How many have you heard this? How many times has it been applied to you? How many times have you thrown this question at someone else?
It’s human nature, isn’t it? More often than not, we think or say something like this when someone seems to get up on their high horse and starts dictating to us what we should do. I know people like that – people who seem to think that somebody appointed them General Manager of the Universe, and they’re not shy about it. And usually a person like this is someone – a sibling, a co-worker, a friend – who in the grand scheme of things is “on your level,” you might say. So, when he or she starts bossing us around or passing judgments, it’s no wonder that we get a little hot under the collar!
But here’s the thing: The reason we get so ticked off is that, sometimes at least, this person is actually right! Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) they tell us something we ought to know and tell us to do something we ought to do – and that is what just rubs us the wrong way!
That’s what was going on in Nazareth when Jesus taught in the synagogue that day. This was kind of the opposite of the “hometown boy makes good” story – his family and friends had heard about his exploits in other places, but when he comes home and tells them things that they didn’t want to hear – well, the shoe was on the other foot then. It was fine to tell all those people up in Galilee what they needed to do, or those backsliders over there in Samaria, or even give those foreign Garasenes a “bit of what fer” – but when it came to them, then it was “whoa, Nellie! Leave us out of it! Who you think you’re talking to, boy?” There are no critics more severe than those who have known us since childhood.
A friend of mine, who had overcome a lot of obstacles in his life and had achieved really remarkable things, often shared this advice: “Never forget where you come from.” That’s good advice for all of us – remembering your origins can help to strike a balance in your life. The downside is that there will be those who will never accept that you have gone beyond your origins, that you have perhaps developed new interests or skills that would never have presented themselves had you stayed put.
The habits we display when we’re kids have no bearing on how we behave as adults. To put it another way: If you judge the lion by its behavior when it was a cub, you’re looking for trouble. None of us is the same person we were last week, much less ten, twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago. We have changed. I like to think we get better with age. But whether we have improved or not, we are different now than we were then.
But the good folks in Nazareth – some of them, anyway – just couldn’t bring themselves to move beyond what they knew of Jesus in his younger days. “Isn’t this that carpenter?” they asked. “What gives him the right to say these things to us?”
William Barclay writes that some of the people of Nazareth looked down on Jesus because of his origins. He says that, because Jesus was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter, he was a working man, and there were those who looked down their noses at him because of it.
I think Barclay is only half right – yes, Jesus was a working man, but as we’ve discussed before, carpentry was a highly skilled trade, and one that was not left to amateurs – wood in that part of the world was a very scarce and expensive commodity, so you didn’t just let anyone work with it. Nevertheless, there were probably some citizens of Nazareth who were disinclined to listen to his teaching because of his origins.
But I think it’s more likely that people were offended by what he taught – outside of the message itself – because, again, they knew his family, which means they thought they knew him. “Isn’t this Mary’s boy? Don’t we know his brothers and his sisters? So what’s gotten into him? We know him too well to have him try to pull the wool over our eyes, right?”
BUZZ! WRONG! Thanks for playing!
George and Ira Gershwin’s father was not exactly a music lover, at least not at first. He measured the “importance” of a piece, not by any sense of its quality, but by its length. Most of their early works he considered unimportant, because they weren’t long enough. It wasn’t until the debut of “Rhapsody in Blue” that he is said to have exclaimed – “Over twenty minutes long! A very important piece!” He confused something that was really inconsequential for something important – and missed what really was important.
In the same way, those good people of Nazareth mistook something that was very inconsequential – their outdated and irrelevant memories of the boy Jesus – and missed completely the importance of what he was trying to teach them. Kind of a classic case of not seeing the woods for the trees.
And, of course, this was deliberate. In the culture of Jesus’ day, if someone were honored in his village, it meant that others were automatically dishonored. People believed that there was only so much of the commodity of honor to go around, so it was doled out really sparingly. Jesus shows up in his good old hometown and really upsets the apple cart. People get uncomfortable; they get irritable. They even get angry.
So they fire back: “Isn’t that just Mary’s boy? Isn’t he just that carpenter? What has he got to say that we want to hear?”
But what’s the point of the story?
If this were just a case of people refusing to see what’s right in front of their faces, it wouldn’t be a very compelling story. Family rivalries and village squabbles are as old as time. But the significance is that, in being so blind to what Jesus was offering them, by refusing to “get with the program,” Mark astonishes us by saying that Jesus could do no “mighty works” there. And this on the heels of the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead, the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage, and the casting out of a thousand demons from an afflicted man!
Astonishing – and even a bit … well, it almost seems sacrilegious! After all, we all have been brought up to believe that it all depends on God, right? God does not need us to do his mighty works. We are justified by grace through faith, and not through our own merits!
All categorically and emphatically true. But what’s going on here is not about God’s ultimate purpose or even our eternal destinies. What it is about is our relationship with God. It has to do with our willingness to participate in God’s work on our behalf.
Doctors today, for example, routinely do things that even thirty years ago would have been considered miraculous. It seems that we hear almost every day of some new and amazing breakthrough that pushes the frontiers of medical science back even further than before.
And yet, not even the most gifted doctor can heal a person who refuses to be healed. I think of my father-in-law. He fought like a tiger, with great humor and determination, against the disease that slowly robbed him of his mobility and, increasingly, his dignity. At the end, even though there was (probably) more that the doctors could have done, he decided that enough was enough – and he just checked out. Without the will to live, the body dies. Without faith, the soul dies.
There can be no effective preaching in the wrong atmosphere. Even a poorly-constructed sermon can light the fire in the belly of those who hear it – if they are disposed to hearing its message. But in an atmosphere of cold indifference, even the best message falls dead to earth like a lifeless sparrow.
There can be no peace making in the wrong atmosphere, either. The great tragedy of World War I was that hideous instrument of revenge called the Versailles Treaty, because it led directly to World War II. Millions of people died during that war, because the Versailles Treaty was anything but an instrument of peace.
If people come together to hate, they will hate. If people come together to refuse to understand, they will not understand. If they come together to see only their point of view, that’s all they will see.
And even God himself cannot prevail against them.
You see, our God is a God of invitation, not coercion. God has no interest in robots which do whatever he has programmed them to do. God gave us brains, and hearts, and wills – and the capacity to choose him or not.
We have laid upon us the tremendous responsibility – as well as the joyous opportunity – to either help, or hinder, the work of Christ in this world we live in. We can open the doors of our hearts wide to let him in – or we can slam them in his face, just like those people in Nazareth.
If you ever think that what you believe as a Christian, and that what you do because of that belief, is insignificant, think again. One person whose heart has the fire of faith burning in it can change the world! Some of those people are right here this morning!
On this Independence Day weekend, I think it’s appropriate that we remember those brave souls – many of them Christians, like the Anglican George Washington – whose faith led them to defy the mightiest empire on Earth at the time and write a document that is revered, not just here in the United States, but around the world. In this document, the Founding Fathers echoed themes that every Christian knows: The Providence of God, the Law of God, the Law of Nations, the Equality of all human beings, God-given rights, and others. That document helped forge our nation. And I, for one, truly do see the hand of God in all of it!
Our task, today and into the future, is to honor these men, and the men and women who have fought and died to preserve our country, by doing the work of Christ in our time and place!
In the Name of God: The Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.