Pentecost 7B
July 8, 2018
1 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13
INTRODUCTION
The first
five chapters of Mark have been a sort of, Discipleship: 101 course. We’ve
learned what the kingdom of God looks like, we’ve seen the importance of having
faith, not fear, we’ve watched Jesus heal people, and cross boundaries to get
to them. It’s been a tough course, but a fulfilling one. Today’s part of the
story delivers two more lessons: first, a lesson in rejection, as Jesus is
rejected by those in his hometown. Second, the disciples are sent out,
two-by-two, for a hands-on learning opportunity, an internship of sorts, and to
risk rejection themselves.
The past
weeks I have been pairing the Gospel reading with an Old Testament reading, but
this week, I chose the epistle instead: this wonderful text from 2 Corinthians
about God’s power being made perfect in weakness. It seemed like the
appropriate choice to get us ready to hear the Gospel story in which Jesus is
rejected by his own people, and then is unable to perform any miracles, and
then Jesus uses that experience to give a pep talk to his disciples before
sending them out into a den of wolves, telling them specifically what to do if
they should fail in their mission. I’m sure they feel weak and powerless – so
hearing the God’s power is made perfect in weakness is good news!
Today’s
texts are about vulnerability, about failing and falling, about rejection – and
they speak to our constant efforts to avoid having to endure any of these
things! As you listen, remember some times when you have fallen, when things
haven’t gone as you hoped and worked for, when you have been rejected,
criticized, or wounded. Listen for what God’s Word has to say to us in these
inevitable moments.
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| 2018 ELCA Youth Gathering |
As you may
have heard, last week was the ELCA’s National Youth Gathering, an event that
happens every three years, and draws 31,000 youth and adult leaders from
Lutheran churches across the country into one city for a week of worship,
service, dynamic speakers, fellowship, and inspiration. Many youth cite this as
an event that changes their lives, helps them to understand what it means to be
a Christian, and makes them feel closer to Jesus. We didn’t send anyone this
year, unfortunately, but I did thoroughly enjoy reading the Facebook posts from
my colleagues who were there, and various articles and interviews about the
event all week. One in particular that really struck me was about how the youth
were moved by the speakers they had at mass gatherings. The article said, “It
was the first time many of our youth heard people of faith speak openly about
taboo topics such as substance abuse, eating disorders, racism, gender
identity, rape, and cutting. The honesty and inspiration in these well-crafted
monologues moved many in our group to tears of recognition, seeing their own
struggles reflected in other teens and adults brave enough to share their
stories.”
What a
concept – and what a gift! – for faith-talk and God-talk to be relevant to our
daily struggles! We are sometimes tempted, I think, to keep our church life
separate from our “real” life, and the various challenges we face. We don’t
want to talk in church about uncomfortable topics, like politics, or money, or
sex, or immigration, or racism, or anything controversial because we come to church
to feel better, and those things are too fraught with negative feelings and
disagreement. We want to “all get along,” leave feeling better than we came,
and not stir any pots. And we really would rather not have to examine our
hearts too deeply in the presence of others, and thus risk revealing to anyone
the real pain and fear and doubt that we feel about issues that we would rather
not talk or even hear about anywhere, and certainly not in public.
And yet, it
is into these painful realities that we need the good news of the gospel to be spoken
most of all! This is the brokenness Jesus came to heal, to which God can offer
us grace and guidance. And so, we absolutely should be talking about these things in the context of our faith,
yes, even at church!
And that is
precisely why Jesus doesn’t shy away from difficult topics. 2000 years later,
we may miss a lot of what made this story of a miracle-working carpenter so
radical, radical enough to get the man killed. It was a different time and culture,
we miss the nuance of the original language, and there is a certain amount of
familiarity causing us to miss how remarkable this story is. That is part of my
job – to help you see just what a political, controversial, and sometimes
downright uncomfortable figure Jesus was!
Take today,
for example, where Jesus tackles a big trigger for pain and vulnerability: the
fear of rejection. In the first half of our Gospel reading, we see Jesus
experience rejection, and in his hometown no less! “We know this guy,” they
say, “and we know he’s no better than any of us. Who does he think he is,
anyway?” I think we’ve all been there, on one side of that conversation or the
other. The crowd’s reaction speaks to the ways humans make judgments about
people when we think we know how they ought to be. That person must be
uneducated, we think, or poor, or a ne’er-do-well, or a terrorist, or a racist,
or elitist, or… you get the idea. We dismiss one another based on what we think
we know about them. It’s very human: people did it to Jesus, and they do it
today. And in seeing this interaction with Jesus, I hope we can recognize:
“Maybe I do that to others… but also, it really stinks when someone does that
to me.”
How many of
you here have ever felt judged or rejected based on who you voted for, what you
do for a living, where you live, or how you look? How many of you have felt
like what you have to offer, your particular gifts, have been rejected or unappreciated
– by a work place, by your peers, by your family? It doesn’t feel very good,
does it? It’s not very good for the self-esteem, is it? I have felt that way,
like I am seen only for my very worst qualities and none of my best, and it has
taken me months or even years to overcome the damage to my self-esteem. Can anyone
relate?
Does it help to know that Jesus also
endured that feeling?
Jesus, after he was rejected by his
hometown, goes on to use his experience to prepare the disciples for the same
thing. You see, after several months of observing Jesus in his ministry, Jesus
is now sending out the disciples to do their own ministry. He gives them many
instructions, about packing light and relying on the hospitality of strangers, but
what I notice especially this week is this bit about shaking the dust off of
their feet. I used to see this as an insulting gesture, but it’s not – it’s a
Jewish ritual symbolizing separation from anything that would defile you, make
you unclean.
Today we don’t really think about
defilement in the same way. I don’t think menstruation, for example, or
touching or eating a pig, or what have you can defile me. But you know what
can? Fear. Fear of rejection, yes, but also fear of outsiders, fear of
difference, fear of change. Fear of failure. Fear that what people are saying
about me when they reject me or my gifts might actually be true. Fear that I am
worthless, or insufficient, or worse yet, that my insufficiency is not only
harmful to me, but is actually hurting someone else I love – like you, or my
children, or my marriage. All of these fears – they defile me: they make me
unclean and unable to serve God as I’m called to do. They cause me not to act
my best. They make me believe that God made a mistake with me, that I am not
lovable, not worthwhile, not the beautiful child of God created in God’s image
that I know, deep down, that I am.
I’m not proud of these fears. And I
also know I am not alone in them. I know other people feel them, I know we as a
church community feel or at least have felt them, and I know that our country
feels them. I can see those fears play out in the way we treat one another, the
ways we insist that our way is the only way, and that other people are
deplorables, or snowflakes, or bleeding hearts, or racist, or just plain ignorant.
I can see our country’s fear of loss and insecurity play out in our
unwillingness to welcome the stranger (can you imagine today, in this climate,
if travelers were told to rely upon the hospitality of strangers?). These sorts
of treatments of each other do not come out of love, nor out of trust in a
loving God. They come out of fear. They are defiling.
It is not a comfortable situation, to
live in such fear, nor to be confronted with it. We all have been there. Oh, we
may try to shake the dust off of our feet and move on, but sometimes it clings
to us and gets tracked all over the floor of the house, staining the carpet.
Or, we may find some satisfaction in leaving the dust there, thinking that
layer of dirt will protect us from the things that we fear. It can be so hard
to shake off the dust of our rejections and failures, our mistakes and regrets.
And that dust can indeed become like a thorn in our flesh, getting into our
wounds, and aching and irritating us every step of our lives of faith.
And yet, look at this good news
buried at the end of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: Paul has asked three
times for God to take away that discouraging irritant that he so wants to
shake, but rather than take it away, God says to Paul, “My grace is sufficient
for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul goes on to say he will
boast in his weakness, in all those things that he might have perceived as
things to avoid talking about, things to hide from the world – because it is in
these things, these real human experiences that we all share, that God’s power
is made truly known.
I am rarely impressed by someone who
has it all together. What truly inspires me is someone who is riddled with
flaws and weaknesses, and yet still manages to shine God’s love and grace into
the world – not despite their flaws, and their mistakes, but because of them.
Like those speakers at the ELCA Youth Gathering who shared candidly with 31,000
people about the ways they had faced the real issues that teenagers face in
their daily lives, allowing the youth and adults alike to recognize that God is
there with us, even in our failures and rejections. Like Jesus, using his own
experience of rejection in his hometown to inform the disciples how to face
similar challenges. Like so many faithful saints that I have met in this congregation
and beyond it, who have shared the ways that God’s grace shined brightly
through the darkest times of life.
“I will boast all the more gladly of
my weakness,” Paul writes, “so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
Spoken as someone who has seen and believed how the weakest position of all,
what should have been seen as an utter failure – death on a cross as a common,
political prisoner – came to be used as the means to offer all of us eternal
life. Do we dare believe that God can do that with our failures, mistakes and
rejections? Do we dare hope that God could use these deaths, these struggles,
these embarrassing times of our lives that we don’t want anyone else to know
about – do we dare hope that God could use them to shine God’s grace into the
world? Do we dare trust that God is using every struggle we face to better
equip us as beckons of the hope of Christ?
The real question is… how can we dare
not believe, and hope and trust in that?
Let us pray… God of power, we fear that we may be crushed under weakness, failures
and rejections, yet you have shown us how you use weakness to reveal your
power. Help us to trust in that promise, to shake the dust off of our feet, and
lift our eyes to you to see how you would have us reflect your grace into this
broken world. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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