Hometown

“Hometown”
Pentecost 5 + 5 July 2009 + Mark 6:1-13
Mukwonago United Church of Christ
D. Ross-Jones

Join with me in a little exercise: raise your hand if you presently live more than 25 miles from the place you grew up.  Keep your hand raised if its more than 75 miles.  More than 100?  Over 200?  Even more?

I can relate.  Having grown up in a town in Minnesota’s Arrowhead region, this Lake Michigan corridor between Milwaukee and Chicago is a far stretch from home.  I still take the 400-plus mile pilgrimage at least once a year, and each time I’m filled with conflicting emotions.

Being in seminary and having felt my first calls into God’s ministry in that place, I’m always excited when I have opportunity to worship at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church on McKinney Lake in Grand Rapids.  But when its time for the popular game, “remember when you… were a holy terror at church?” with some of the long-time members, I’m a little less excited.  When I’m at a family function and now happily eating bountiful amounts of fruits and vegetables, its not too long before someone recalls the myriad times during my childhood and youth when I absolutely refused to eat anything remotely healthy.

The band Cross Canadian Ragweed has a song called “17,” and the last line goes like this:

You’re always seventeen,

Yeah you’re always seventeen:

You’re always seventeen in your hometown.

Please pray with me:

Creating and sending God, we thank you for the opportunity to gather together as your community and approach you through your written word.  I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts here in this place be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

For some hometown children, the return home is reason for celebration.  Grand Rapids’ most famous and celebrated resident, Judy Garland, never had occasion to return to her hometown, but her presence is felt in other ways – most notably the Judy Garland Museum on the southern edge of town.  But for Jesus, what first begins as a usual synagogue exchange quickly turns into rejection and estrangement.

As a man, it is entirely normal that Jesus would gather, on the Sabbath, with the other men at the synagogue and begin teaching from the scriptures.  He does so with great authority, though the assembled crowd is skeptical: how could this hometown boy with questionable, sketchy parents – uneducated and parading around with even more questionable company – possibly have something even remotely beneficial to say?

The synagogue exchanges were assuredly heated, appropriate for a people named “Israel,” which means, “to wrestle with God.”  This type of exchange is still popular in Jewish and some Christian circles; what appears as wholly rude and disrespectful to our post-Enlightenment, Western Christian sensibilities is actually the opposite experience for Jesus’ context.  To not raise objections, to not engage in dialogue and craft arguments with the teacher would have been the most dishonoring.  But nonetheless, Mark records that somewhere in the process that line between respect and not was crossed, and Jesus and those assembled quickly get offended at each other.

Jesus is astounded at the people’s lack of faith.  Jesus is so offended that he takes his ministry back on the road, leaving that place and, in fact, is not recorded in Mark as ever visiting a synagogue again.

Beverly Link-Sawyer asks, “What would we think about a neighbor whom we believed to be just an ordinary, hardworking man turning into a miraculous teacher, let alone the reputed Son of God?”  I don’t know about you, but thinking about it from the other dimension, from the people’s reaction, helps me to understand a little more about the dimension here.  What would we think about that neighbor, and even more how would we respond to them?

The word “offense” in Mark’s scripture is from the Greek scandalon, which can also be translated as “stumbling block.”  I think that sums up the situation better than the translation “offense,” since the people were taken aback.  I genuinely don’t think they were really trying to be disrespectful or undermine Jesus’ authority.  I just think that everything which they had experienced between themselves and Jesus was too much to overcome and embrace his status as the Son of God.

Living in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood over the past year has been an experience of a lifetime.  One of our neighbors, almost overnight, went from someone we would run into in Starbucks and have a carefree chat about the weather while we waited for our order to be ready, to someone who lived behind a protective fortress of cement crash barriers, closed-off streets requiring government-issued ID to even attend Shabbat at the temple.  When then-President Elect Obama’s family was at the Starbucks, everyone in the neighborhood knew it because it was surrounded by black Chevy Suburbans and white Chicago Police cars, and we had to wait outside across the street for them to complete their order before we could get our venti chai lattes for the day.

For long-time residents of Hyde Park, a common question has been, “How do we address him?”  Is it still just Barack?  President Obama is respectful, but it seems so impersonal for someone who used to go for daily runs along our streets and eat at Dixie Kitchen.

It helps me now to personalize the people at the synagogue that day; I imagine they were having the same sort of relational crisis.  It was next to impossible to wrap their heads around Jesus’ status and role.  They weren’t intending to be rude, they were just overburdened with protocol and life’s changes.

“A prophet has little honor in his hometown, among his relatives, on the streets he played in as a child,” Jesus is recorded as saying.  Though these people most certainly had heard of Jesus’ works, had heard his teachings in the synagogue, they simply couldn’t get over the fact that this hometown boy was a carpenter! He was trained to work with his hands, so couldn’t that explain his “miracles?”  After all, like the saying goes, we are what we do.

On the Sunday after Christmas, I had opportunity to preach about the irony that is the savior of the world incarnated as a snot-nosed, crying, colicky baby.  How plain, how ordinary, how entirely unfitting for the Son of God.  This is the homecoming of that baby.  How can this ordinary carpenter come back and claim some lofty status?!  And for us today, how are we supposed to accept the presence of God in the ordinary?  Shouldn’t there be trumpets blaring, banners flying, or at least some signal alert on our cell phone?

While it seems that the second half of today’s reading is the second half of the story, its not.  Jesus’ teaching his disciples, instructing them in their transient ministry, is actually a separate instance altogether.  But it connects so well with Jesus’ indignation in his hometown that I can understand why the lectionary committee includes it as one unit.

In the same spirit of response, Jesus tells his disciples to go where they will be welcomed and stay there as long as they are still in community.  If a place will not receive them, he tells them to leave, shaking even the dust off their feet as testimony against the people.  The dust here has a double-meaning: first, the physical presence of the dirt on their feet from the town’s ground; second, an admonition against the people as they are verily “dusted off” from the very presence of God.

I’ve always had trouble with this section, and for good reason.  It’s entirely appropriate that we pause, standing on this side of history, and reflect on the ways this command has been used.  At its core, the Christian movement is missional.  Like the Israelites of old, we are a people continually on the move, spreading out and seeking a place within established communities and societies.

As we are gathered here today, celebrating our modern nation’s 233rd birthday, we recognize and name the harm that our zealous forbears in faith committed on this soil.  Seemingly with divine support, our very own mothers and fathers in the UCC tradition came to North America and decimated existing native culture and religion in the name of Christian mission.  Shaking the dust off their feet transformed into uncompensated claims on native land – holy land – as an effort to follow the Gospel message.

Rejected in their own hometowns, these Pilgrims fled to North America and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a beacon of religious freedom – but only for the other Pilgrims.  Baptists were banished to found neighboring Rhode Island, other Reformed traditions were held off to the south.  The native American Indians were tolerated only so much as they would convert to the Congregational Way of Christian practice and faith.

For the disiples, though, the amazing thing is how Jesus – that local boy from Nazareth, the one who had no status of his own – was so amazed at the people’s lack of belief in the synagogue that he sent his rag-tag clan of scoundrels out to do the same thing as him! He gave these unimpressive, ordinary people power and authority over spirits and healing and all the other miraculous works that he himself was doing.  But not only that, to add on even more incredulous things, he told them to go out unprepared!

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure if some person came in here and told me they were the Son of God and took away the credit card, took away the iPhone, took away my car keys, and to rely only on the kindness of strangers that I would be quick to put faith in their plan.  But to tell me that I had the authority in faith to heal people and cast out demons?  I’m not sure which would be more unbelievable!

This transient faith holds an amazing promise for us.  For me, I couldn’t be where I am today had I remained in Grand Rapids.  To begin with the practicalities, there is neither an upper-division college nor seminary to progress through my education.  There is no UCC congregation for over 90 miles.  But even beyond that, God has called me elsewhere.  Grand Rapids will always hold a special place in my heart, even if I never live nearby again.

It also keeps us humble.  We aren’t the savior ourselves – thank God for that! – and we aren’t the destination.  Even if we have lived in one place our whole lives, we recognize that sometimes life requires a change of plans, if not a change of location.  Following Jesus, listening to and holding close his teachings and example, requires great personal sacrifice.  If not a physical relocation, it is a mental relocation, from our homeplace to a newfoundplace, journeying like the disciples to the ends of the creation alongside our great, awesome, and mighty God.  It means pausing for a moment to praise God’s presence even in the most unlikely of individuals, times, and places.  It means thanking God for another day and another opportunity to minister, learn, witness, and serve God’s great creation.  It means claiming Jesus as our hometown.

In closing, in recognition of the independence day weekend, I want to share with you a song written in 1934 by Lloyd Stone.  It was written during the time between the two world wars and is derived from a tune poem by Jean Sibelius in 1899.  The song is entitled simply, “This Is My Song,” and if you’d like to follow along it is number 591 in our “New Century Hymnal.”

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

Soli Deo Gloria: to God alone be glory.  Amen.