YOU CAN’T GO HOME
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Text: Mark 6:1-13
As most of you know I spent part of last week in Pasadena, in the greater Los Angeles area, attending the Biennial meetings of the American Baptist Churches in the USA. Newscasts during the week were filled with the deaths of one celebrity after another, each more famous than the one before. First, it was Ed McMahon, sidekick to Johnny Carson, ebullient host of “Star Search” (an ancient precursor of “American Idol”) and the man who promised to bring a million dollar check from Publishers’ Clearing House right to your front door. But poor Ed’s star was eclipsed later in the week by the death of the beautiful sex symbol of the 1970s and 80s, Farah Fawcett, one of Charlie’s glamorous angels and star of television, silver screen and stage, who lost her long and much reported battle with cancer at 62. Her death seemed to be the only newsworthy item on earth on Thursday morning in celebrity-obsessed Los Angeles. There was no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, no economic crisis, no epidemic of Swine Flu or HIV/AIDS, no strife between Israel and Palestine, no inquiry into our government’s use of torture, no violence in the streets, no hungry, homeless neighbors, just the death of a Hollywood star.
Then Thursday afternoon, I was sitting in a Minister’s Council meeting, listening to the speaker challenging those of us from the Gutenberg generation to live into the Google age, when my friend, Jim Hopkins, sitting next to me, busily texting on his Blackberry, whispered the news that Michael Jackson had died. A few minutes later he told me that the international response was so large that the whole Internet had collapsed. I don’t know if that actually happened, even if only momentarily, but I do know that both Ed McMahon and Farah Fawcett pretty much disappeared along with the rest of the news of the world as all media has been focused on the Michael Jackson story. Well, Sarah Palin and Governor Sanders did manage a moment or two of coverage, but that’s about it for the past ten days.
Now why I am dwelling on this? I suppose it strikes me as over the top. I recognize that Michael Jackson was a genius of music making, movement and marketing; I also believe he was a tortured genius, who lived a complicated life and died a complicated death. I know he has an enormous number of fans from all over the world. 1.6 million people have bid for 8700 tickets available for his memorial service this week. I pray that his troubled soul will find peace in the arms of God and that his grieving family will find peace and harmony on earth. But there are other things going on in the world, other figures worthy of our attention – children in poverty, men and women laid off from their jobs struggling to make ends meet, soldiers and freedom fighters bleeding and dying on battlefields, dedicated doctors and researchers seeking cures for deadly diseases. There is even tennis being played at Wimbledon.
I am wondering if Jesus would get any attention at all if he came home this week? The story says he paid a visit to his home town, and though he got their attention, it was hardly adulatory. We usually want to portray Jesus as a handsome, passionate young man in the beginning of his ministry. In our vernacular, he would be something like a rising star, glamorous, intriguing, with hints of smoldering mystery. But the truth of the matter is that in his culture, in which a man was old at 35 and dead at 40, Jesus, at 30, was on the down side of middle age. He was a man at the peak of his maturity and his powers. He had a word to proclaim, a story to tell, lives to change and he did not have a long time to do this work. He gathered around him a group of other men and women like himself, poor, working class peasants, ordinary folk who would never grace the cover of GQ, Vanity Fair or even People. These were people who might make the 6 o’clock news as human interest filler or as victims of violence in their neighborhoods.
Romantic tradition has wanted to make Jesus not only young and handsome but also an artisan, a carpenter, a craftsman, but it is just as likely that he was a handyman, a day worker, who had joined his father and his brothers and neighbors (his cousins, really) to rebuild the Roman city of Sepphoris, some 3 miles from his native Nazareth, destroyed in 4 BCE as the Roman commander, Varus, crushed a rebellion. When he appeared on the scene that Sabbath morning in his old hometown, they were sure they knew who was coming to visit. Why they’d known him all his life! This was no celebrity, this was Jesus who had worked alongside them framing houses, laying stone and mudding walls. This was Mary’s son. Poor old Joseph had been dead for so long now he was hardly a memory and, besides, there were those persistent rumors that Jesus wasn’t his kid anyway, so they called him by his mother’s name.
You can imagine that they were not prepared for what they experienced on that Sabbath. Oh, they had heard the rumors of his healings and exorcisms. They had even heard about his bringing that girl back to life. But you know how stories get embellished, especially when they’re passed on by word of mouth. And hadn’t Mary and the rest of her brood been concerned for his welfare, well, really, his sanity? They had heard about these strange happenings and his stranger teachings. They’d gone up to Capernaum to try talk some sense into him, even bring him home. But the report was that he’d rebuffed them, insulted them, really, denying their kinship, saying something about how those who did God’s will were his true family. Imagine! What would Jesus, the handyman, know about the will of God?
But here he was standing in front of them, talking about repentance and redemption as if he had access to God’s private cell phone. Well, they were having none of that. Who did he think he was to talk to them like that? They knew who he was. They knew all there was to know about him. Where did he get this uppity attitude that let him think he could tell them what to do?
We know the moral, don’t we? “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” “Familiarity breeds contempt,” the sages say. Sure, enough, you can’t go home again. Those closest to you, ironically, don’t get you, don’t understand you, won’t follow you. The truth is that, in Jesus’ time, Nazareth consisted of maybe 120 to 150 people, mostly Jesus’ extended family. They really did think they knew all they needed to know about him. Oh, they recognized something different in him alright – the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, the urgency in his voice as he talked about repentance and redemption, as he laid out for them the coming reign of God. But they just couldn’t get past their prejudice. They couldn’t wrap their minds around any other way of seeing him than the one that was so familiar.
The result was sad. Don’t you suppose it was heart-breaking for Jesus that he couldn’t do anything for his own folks? The text says he was amazed at their lack of faith. It makes it seem as if he expected something different from them, hoped that they, of all people, could hear him. His amazement had to be mixed with disappointment. So, no mighty acts of God could be manifest in a place where there was no faith. As much as he might have wanted to linger to try to convince them, persuade them, bring them along, the urgency of his message and ministry would not allow it. He had to move on. Time was limited and it was pressing in on him.
The text moves on to tell us how he instructed his disciples and sent them off in pairs to carry that urgent message and do that urgent ministry in the other towns and villages around the lake. And, miracle of miracles, it worked! Not only did they proclaim repentance and redemption to good effect, they performed many healings and exorcisms. People not so different from you and me made an enormous difference in the lives of those they encountered. Where faith is present, great things can be done in Jesus’ name. Frederick Buechner has said that “miracles don’t evoke faith so much as faith evokes miracles” (Quoted in Jim Callahan, “The Miracle Worker,” The Christian Century, June 21-28, 2000, p. 679.)
What if Jesus came to our town today? What if he stood up to preach in our pulpit? I wonder how we would receive him? Would he be as big as Ed McMahon or Farah Fawcett or even Michael Jackson? What sort of attention would we give him? Do you think we could get any media coverage? Or is he old news? Are we so sure we know all there is to know about him that he would fit right in among us without any hoopla? Do we have him so domesticated that he really wouldn’t be newsworthy? This message of repentance and redemption is old news. Well, actually it was news for a different time and place. There’s really no need to turn anything around in my life or yours…is there? There’s no real need of healing, no real longing to be more, no desire to be whole. We have Jesus in his place and it’s right where we want him.
Yet there are these rumors of healings and exorcisms, stories of lives transformed in body and spirit. Why there has even been talk of resurrection! But can you really trust that sort of thing? I mean can you imagine us, here at good old First Baptist, moving out from these hallowed walls to preach repentance and proclaim redemption, to heal the sick and drive out demons, to testify to resurrection? “Not very likely,” you say. And yet, as Kate Huey challenges us, “Our call, as followers of Jesus, as those sent with power and authority (that derive from him) is…to heal, to attack the demons that plague our society and the world that God loves, to share the good news.” She goes on, “We so often practice evangelism as a ministry to bring people to church that it's an exercise to picture ourselves taking the good news out on the road, out into our lives, out into the world that hungers for it” (Kate Huey, SAMUEL, Pentecost +5, 2009, at ucc.org.) Perhaps, like Jesus, we can’t go home, at least not very easily, not once we’ve turned on to the road to transformation. Still, we can go out, out and about. Perhaps we will yet find that even our faith can evoke miracles in Jesus’ name. I hope and pray it may be so. Amen.