The Barrier of Expectations: Sermon for Proper 9B

It seems like the last few weeks, we have been hearing about miracles in our worship. Today, we get an interesting side discussion about the power of expectations. Jesus returns to his hometown in our gospel today, and his former neighbors, rather than embracing him, react with disbelief to his ministry. When they look at Jesus, all they can see is “the carpenter’s son,” or “the brother of James.”

Jesus's neighbors have him pegged in a certain way, and they are unwilling to consider that Jesus could be anyone other than who they understand him to be. It is often said that “you can’t go home again.” The problem is that often, home is not as you remembered it, and that’s further complicated by the fact that YOU are not as your neighbors and family remember you, either. 

The trouble begins when Jesus enters his hometown synagogue and begins to teach. The reaction Jesus receives here in his hometown is especially thrown into relief when we consider the synagogue leader who had approached him in last week’s gospel, begged for healing for his daughter, and was willing to believe that Jesus could heal her even after the father was informed that his child was dead.  

There are similarities to the story of David in our first reading. David also has been a person who has defied expectations—youngest son, shepherd boy, slaying giants with just a 10th century BC equivalent of a BB gun. When first introduced, he was just a young sheep-herder, who surprisingly became a great warrior. It took years for David, Jesus’s ancestor, to be accepted as a great leader, as our reading this morning shows, even with the favor of God resting upon him.

In Jesus’s case, he himself had spent years there in Galilee before starting his public ministry, and his neighbors expect him to be a simple carpenter still, as he was before he left them. They expect him to be living a simple life like his brothers and sisters-- and his sisters, like so many women in scripture, are considered so nondescript that they don’t even get names. Those expectations of anonymity get confounded, however, the second Jesus opens his mouth and rolls up his sleeves. And the crowd does not like it.


The assumption is that Jesus has changed. Suddenly Jesus is preaching with authority. Suddenly he has a reputation as a healer and miracle worker. The problem is that Jesus was no longer rooted to that one particular place and that one particular identity, and that unsettles those who not only think they know him, but think they have Jesus pegged and filed away neatly under the “unexceptional” category. Note also that Jesus isn’t condemned just by individuals, but by groups of his neighbors. They “take offense at him”—possibly because they think he is getting above himself?

To be blunt, Jesus is finding it impossible to overcome the stereotypes and expectations that those around him have on him, based on what they assume they know about him. Those expectations we have about people can often become not hopes but barriers to fulfilling our true potential.

Who among us hasn’t encountered that at some point in their lives? I am old enough to remember being told that I couldn’t use the computer time I had earned as a reward in my high school classroom because I should make way for a boy, since, as a working-class girl, I was “going to be nothing but a housewife anyway” (and that’s actually a quote from that teacher). That teacher didn’t really know me. But his assumption of familiarity of me certainly bred contempt, as the saying goes. And yet, he did not last long in teaching, whereas here I am—so I win!

In our gospel, Jesus’s neighbors may also be reacting, not just to Jesus himself, but to the content of his message, which then and now aims to shake up the very heart of the social order, and thus is in itself perceived of as a threat to the community as a whole. One thinks of the reception that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King received from not just conservatives but the “white moderates” he ended up having to call out in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was itself a response to a letter published in the paper criticizing his radical ways and urging “patience.” No matter how much Dr. King is lionized now, the fact is that some who celebrate him now, across the normalizing distance of time, and especially fifty years after his assassination, might have not been so fond of his tendency to act in ways that even today in some circles might be decried as “uncivil,” or “radical.”

In the past few weeks, we have heard the stories of Jesus performing incredible feats of healing— and often that healing had social as well as personal implications, since some illness often also brought outcast status. Last week, a woman was healed of a chronic condition that left her outcast, simply because she had enough faith to believe that merely touching the hem of Jesus’s robe could accomplish a healing that twelve years of doctors’ visits could not. Jesus was so energized by the faith of those around him that he felt that power and energy depart from him when the woman touched his clothing grounded in that faith, even though people were pressing in on him from all sides.

Jesus was able to perform no deeds of power in the presence of his own kith and kin, because they did not have faith—in him, in his ministry, or even in themselves. They were comfortable with thinking of themselves as simple, rural folk—who was this former handyman turned stranger who appeared among them, full of startling wisdom?

Worse, they not only did not believe in him, they “took offense at him.” You can almost hear it now: “Just who does he think he is?” And behind that question is always this question: “Does he think he’s better than us?” Due to his own people’s lack of faith in him, the one who could calm storms and cast out demons and bring little girls back to life could only heal a few people in his own country. Those who are incapable of faith in something often also have a hard time allowing themselves to hope, much less allow miracles to spring up right in front of them.

A prophet is called to speak the uncomfortable, unpopular truth. This is why people are not lining up to nab prophet jobs, and why so even in scripture we see prophets, such as Isaiah and Jonah, try to wriggle out of having to fulfill the commands of God. They know this is not going to be accepted by those around them. In some cases, like Jonah, they are called to minister to the people they can’t stand.

But that’s when we have to remember the moral of the story—God will have mercy on whom God will have mercy, and we humans don’t get to put fences around the offer of reconciliation and mercy. As the writer Anne Lamott says when she quotes one of her friends, “You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do.”(1)

A prophet is called to speak the uncomfortable, unpopular truth-- and that includes Jesus, too. Are there ever times when we are perhaps secretly offended or scandalized by the radical gospel that Jesus preaches? Or have we too, tamed and domesticated Jesus in our minds, maybe even trimmed that beard and washed that hair and put him in the first century version of a three-piece suit?

Have we ever fallen into that most comfortable of habits of remaking Jesus in our own image? Because I can tell you from personal experience that I often find that a whole lot easier than taking the terrifying, uncomfortable, and always radical process of remaking myself in Jesus’s image instead. Yet Jesus came as the Incarnate Son of God to reveal to us our full potential as humans who are nonetheless bearers of the image and likeness of God.

The gospel of Jesus as we know it proclaims radical and universal salvation for all who are willing to believe in him. For all who are willing to open their hearts to him and to the God who gave him to the world. And that might actually be the easy part. Because the other side of the Great Commandment is I think, perhaps harder for us grudge-holding, judgy, fallible humans.

Jesus’s gospel commands us to open our hearts to God with everything we are, but also commands that we be willing to open ours hearts to each other --especially those in categories we might like to declare as “less-than.” Jesus’s gospels demands that we leave the judging to God, and just love each other—but not some pale, passive love but rather love in action, love that risks everything and holds nothing back. And that upends a lot of our notions of justice and especially retribution.

Jesus’s gospel itself defies all our expectations and our attempts to tame it, because the gospel is not based on the way we want things, but on the abundant grace and will of God. Jesus’s gospel is based on a concept of love that forgives, forgives, forgives even more than seventy times seven times. Love that grows from the knowledge that Jesus loved us that much first, setting the bar for us pretty high on purpose, because Jesus also has that much faith in US. Faith that calls us to break through the barrier of expectations, and in doing so, be transformed and healed, opening ourselves to the power of the Spirit to give us abundant life and hope. Alleluia!

Amen.


Preached at Christ Episcopal Church, Rolla, at 8 and 10 am, July 8, 2018.

Readings:
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13

Sources:
1) Anne Lamott, quoting her "priest friend Tom," in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, p. 22

Images:
1) Jesus rejected in the synagogue.
2) Martin Blank finds he can't go home again... because his childhood home is a MiniMart, from Grosse Pointe Blank.
3) Prophets aren't alway popular-- scene from Bruce Almighty.