5 PENTECOST, PROPER 9
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
5 JULY 2009
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2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Psalm 48; 2 Corinthians 12:2-12; Mark 6:1-13
Of late in Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been busy. And successful. He has calmed a raging storm at sea, he’s healed a man with an out-of-control demon, he’s healed a dying child and a bleeding woman. People have been marveling at him---and wondering just who he might be. They don’t know him.
Now, finally Jesus takes a break and goes home, where his fellow townsfolk DO know him. Or, rather, they THINK they do. “We know him. He’s Mary’s son, see, there are his sisters and his brothers, he’s the builder who lives in that house over there. We know him. Just who does he think he is, anyway?”
Unlike the out of town strangers, Jesus’ neighbors know him. But aside from some preaching and a few healings, Jesus is unable to duplicate at home what he has been doing in the outside world.
This is apparently the only time in the gospels when Jesus is unsuccessful—unless you count his crucifixion as a failure.
“Prophets are not without honor except in their hometowns…”
This story is all about the preconceived ideas people hang onto. It’s about the misconceptions that rule our lives. It’s about the struggles and alienation and disappointments that result from our preconceived ideas and misconceptions. Beginning with our notions about Jesus. Just who do WE think he is? What do we expect from him? Where do we find evidence of his power??
Jesus’ neighbors knew him as a worker who used his hands, a builder. Like everybody else in his village, Jesus had a status which was well-established. Like everybody else, his rank was known. And like everyone else, Jesus was expected to live according to his rank. John Dominic Crossan points out that as an artisan, Jesus was two rungs up from the bottom of the social ladder, lower even than peasants. To those who knew him, or thought they did, Jesus could never amount to a whole lot except as a worker with wood; but now, here he was, clearly way out of his league. So they took offense at him and they rejected him.
It seems that Mark is telling us that God’s power and authority can be found anywhere: right under our noses or beyond familiar stomping ground, in extraordinary places and events and people and in very ordinary places and events and people, in places where we might expect it to show and at times when we least expect it.
The youngest brother, David, was made a king with God’s blessing at age thirty. The founding parents of our nation, doing and praying for the sacred enterprise of forming a country for those who lived there were young as well, most of them in their early thirties. And there is Jesus himself, a-thirty something, too, a lowly worker from a non-descript village.
God’s power is found everywhere, even here, especially here. The kingdom of God is about earth not heaven. About now, not just someday. Glimpses abound right under our noses.
Speaking of which, I was pulling weeds yesterday and trying to organize my garden before leaving for General Convention the next day, which not is today, before leaving the garden in David’s non-gardener hands. (If any of you would like to pop over to my garden in the next two weeks and give David some advice, check with him first, but I’m sure he’d be happy to see you!).
But maybe I don’t need to worry as much as I think I do. Because as I worked yesterday my eye fell on the remnants of a little marjoram plant I’d bought and planted. Most of the things in my garden are from seed, but this little plant I grabbed at a local big box store. Almost immediately after I planted it, the marjoram plant gave up the ghost. It’s been a horrible growing season so I wasn’t surprised, just sad. “What could I expect? I should have known. So I let it die off, even chopped the little twigs that stuck up, so it had the appearance of a guy with a butch haircut.
Then yesterday, as I moved by on my knees, I noticed something odd about this wizened relic of a plant. Tiny little green leaves dotted haircut twigs, tiny little specks. I was stunned. Who’d have thought! A lousy little plant from a chain store, and I’d never had much hope for it anyway. Now look! A miracle of God’s own making, not mine. The power of God in the most ordinary place, in the most commonplace of plants and in MY garden!
The power and authority of God at work is never far from us. It is, in fact, within us ourselves, a gift straight from Jesus. We have it in us, although we so often keep it from showing. We and our preconceived notions of how things should work and look and be get in the way. We fail to let Jesus work through us. Fail, too, to notice Jesus in others, because they don’t meet our expectations. Sometimes parents, for example, are the last people to recognize the gifts deep within their own children, the last people to recognize their own children as the treasures that they truly are.
My prayer, on the eve of the General Convention of our Episcopal Church, is that we who are there, deputies, alternates, bishops, volunteers, visitors from around the world, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, that we all of us will step out of our own way and let the Jesus in us and in each other burst forth in spades, glorious spades. That we can let ourselves be startled and moved by what we see and hear, and from whom. That we can travel light, dumping the excess baggage of our stale expectations, and instead work with hope in our hearts because Jesus is telling us to do that. That’s not a bad prayer, as a matter of fact, for everyone!