I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, February 20 as part of our ongoing exploration of the book of Mark. The text is Mark 6:1-13; read it here.
The word that struck me in this passage was “hometown.”
Oh my goodness, what a word.
Our hometowns, the places that we came from, can represent so much. Depending on our situations, our families, and our contexts, they can be many things.
They can hold memories that we’d rather forget.
Or a represent a time that we long to return to.
They can be models of what we’re doing our best to live up to.
Or be places we’ve worked hard to escape,
or are still trying to escape.
They can bring comfort,
be inhabited by people we miss a great deal.
Or they can bring a sense of disconnection:
they can be places where we always feel that we don’t quite fit in.
Probably for most of us, they’re some complicated cocktail of all the above.
Hometowns can mean many things, but one thing they often mean, especially if you’re from a small hometown, is characters. Every town has it’s characters, almost stock characters, as if we’re all playing out the same drama.
There’s the mean guy who won’t let kids run on across his lawn.
The weird guy who lives in that beat up house where no one will go trick-or-treating.
The gossip who knows everything about everyone.
The kid at school whose parents have more money and a bigger house than everyone else.
The kid who was always different, who never quite fit in.
Our towns have stock characters because we need them too. Some primal, elemental part of us needs everyone to find a role and play it well. If we didn’t have the weird guy in the beat up house on the north side of town, there’d be someone on the sound side who we’d decide is equally scary.
Because we need someone to fear.
Or to ostracize,
or to idolize,
or to gossip about.
My guess is that Jesus’ hometown wasn’t much different. There’s certain things that never change. And my guess is that, just as returning home means something to each of us, returning to Nazareth probably meant something to Jesus. We can’t know why he chose this moment to go home, or what he hoped to accomplish there, but these passages do give us a rare picture of Jesus as part of a family. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus the oldest child of a family of four brothers, plus at least a few sisters. The townspeople say he’s a carpenter: someone who works with his hands doing manual labor. They also call him “Son of Mary,” a not-so-kind way of pointing out that folks in town whisper about who his father really was. The rumors have followed him his whole life, and he’s a quiet man. Some might say strange.
Then a few months ago, this oldest child walked away from his family, and all the responsibilities of that role, to go and follow this preacher John the Baptist in the wilderness. And now he’s back, the carpenter who has no schooling to speak of, sitting up in the temple and preaching.
One translation of this text has the townspeople scoffing to each other, “Who does he think his is?”
It’s not only that these folks saw Jesus grow up from birth, toddling around in a diaper when he was just a kid, though that was probably part of it. And it’s not only the fact that he was always a little strange, always standing on the outside of things, though that was probably part of it too. It’s that he, of all people, should have the nerve to get up in the synagogue and teach when that’s not his place, not his role. It’s that he, of all people, seems to be preaching this message that calls into question everything they believe about how their lives are organized.
He sits among Levi the tax collector and women who have been sick for many years and Jarius, the leader of the synagogue, all these people who are from completely different parts of town, who should have nothing to do with one another.
He sits among them and looks at his own family and says “Who are my mother and my brothers? Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
It doesn’t matter who your father is, he’s saying,
where you came from,
what you do for a living.
If you do God’s will, you are God’s family.
“Who does he think he is?”
If Jewish culture was a structure made of stone,
Jesus has just pulled out the keystone,
and the whole thing has come crumbling down.
Because if the son of a carpenter
can teach and preach and heal...
well,
then anything can happen.
In God’s world,
the outsider bastard-kid of Mary stands up in the synagogue to preach.
The crazy guy who lived out by the graveyard moves into the place next door,
and the tax collector leaves his booth and never comes back.
Turns out he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
The paralyzed beggar who was always at the city gate is suddenly gone,
and the woman who’s been sick for so many years
is sighted buying spices in the market.
Who will we be be afraid of?
Who will we ostracize?
Who will we idolize?
Who’s playing which character?
How will we know who we are
if we don’t know who they are?
As usual, Jesus is preaching a message of change.
A message that dismantles,
stone by stone,
everything we thought we knew about the way life works.
A message about shedding all those expectations
about who we are,
who others perceive us to be,
who they need us to be.
It’s a message that asks us to rely,
not on stock characters to tell us who we are,
not on parentage or lineage
or job titles or social circles,
but on God and God alone.
Our parents may need us to be straight-A students,
or the black sheep who always gets blamed.
Our hometowns may need us to be someone to ostracize,
or someone to idolize,
but Jesus needs us to leave all that baggage behind.
Jesus needs us to drop everyone’s expectations for who we’re supposed to be,
because he’s gonna send us out two by two
to find out who we’re called to be.
And we don’t need anything for this journey.
No bread, no bag, no money in our belts.
It means leaving all sorts of things behind.
All the expectations everyone’s ever held for us,
the expectations we’ve held for ourselves,
even our very sense of identity.
It means opening our hearts to an experience
that we can’t control,
a call that we can’t choose,
a fate that we can’t predict.
It is wild and unexpected
and beyond the reach of
what all those folks might have had us pegged for.
There are no stock characters here.
Only a death of the old life
and a new one to grow into,
like shedding a skin,
transforming into a new creature,
God’s creature.
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