"Divine Democracy" July 8, 2018 at Old First Reformed Church, Brooklyn

Art: The Great Commission, Artist: Nalini Jayasuriya
Scripture: Mark 6:1-13



I often feel uncomfortable when I visit my hometown, the place I grew up.
It’s a town on the South coast of Massachusetts, along Buzzards Bay, with a beautiful coastline of marshes and beaches. This time of year it’s very busy, the summer cottages are filled, people are down from Boston for a weekend at the beach. In the winter it’s very quiet, though still beautiful if a bit desolate.
It’s largely working class. It’s been hit hard by the opioid crisis. It’s somewhat conservative for Massachusetts: in 2016 Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by only 3 percentage points. In recent years the town public library lost its accreditation due to budget cuts.


I love my hometown. But sometimes I feel embarrassed when I’m there.
I feel like I don’t really fit in there anymore.
When I visit now, I wonder if I stick out as a city dweller— do I look like a New Yorker now? Do I talk and act in ways that make seem different? Do I belong in this place anymore? Sometimes I find myself shrinking in ways that feel familiar, apologizing for my identity and myself in ways I used to when I was young. I feel judged, and I find myself judging.


Sometimes going home is confusing. It’s my hometown, but often I don’t feel at home there.


In Mark’s Gospel so far, Jesus has been traveling the Galilean countryside with his disciples, teaching the people, and performing miracle after miracle. When there was a storm on the sea, he calmed the wind and the waves. He cast out a legion of demons from an afflicted man. He’s built an identity as a healer, a teacher, a person carrying the authority of God.


Today, Jesus arrives in his hometown, and on the Sabbath, he stands up in the synagogue to teach, in front of people he has known his whole life— his family, uncles and aunts and cousins, neighbors who knew him as a little kid, old coworkers, his old boss—
And, in modern terms, he bombs.


His old friends and neighbors, they don’t buy it— this whole Son of God shtick.
This is the guy I paid to build my kitchen table, (he didn’t even do that great of a job!) and now he thinks he’s gonna stand up and teach me? Who does he think he is?


I imagine Jesus finding a neighbor— maybe an older guy, kind of grumpy, who hurt his leg when he was young, and walks with a limp.
And now, Jesus all grown up, comes up to him, and asks to lay hands on him, and heal the pain in his leg. And this guy looks up at Jesus, sees somebody who believes that he’s carrying a special power— a special truth — but maybe all he can think of is Jesus as an annoying teenager next door. Maybe Jesus hit a baseball through this guy’s window, and the old man’s never forgiven him.
And so the old man laughs in scorn. Rolls his eyes, shakes his head. “Kid, you’ve really lost it.”


In the Gospel, when Jesus stands before the people of his hometown, the people don’t deny the reality of what they see-- they recognize he speaks with wisdom, and carries power in his hands.
But what they see, doesn’t fit with what they know. They’ve known Jesus for thirty years. And this person in front of them, speaking and acting in the power of God, doing new and wonderful things— this person isn’t the Jesus they know. Their minds and hearts are made up about him already. So they see the truth right before them, but the truth isn’t what they expect and know—
So the truth offends them, and they turn away from it.


In the Gospels, there is very little about the life of Jesus the man, before he began his mission. We have a few stories about his infancy and childhood. But then for thirty years, we have nothing.
So this moment in the Gospel, when we encounter those who knew Jesus before,
is revealing. When I read it, it suggests that Jesus as an adolescent, as a young man, didn’t give any indication of being special, or holy.
If Jesus had been wise beyond his years, if he had shown leadership and moral courage as a youth,  if he had been more pious in worship than the average young man, his old friends and neighbors might not be dumbfounded to see him stand up in the synagogue and speak the truth with authority.
But they are shocked.
Which suggests to me that before he began his mission, Jesus was just an ordinary guy. Maybe he wasn’t particularly well-liked or respected.
Whatever came before, in this new moment— the people do not believe this new Jesus.


And in this moment of rejection, Jesus can do no deed of power.
What happened to the power? Did God take it away?


I think this moment of Jesus’s powerlessness, reveals how the power of God works.


In Jesus, God does not work in isolation:
because, God wants to cooperate with human beings.
We are participants in God’s power.
The evangelist Mark is bold and unambiguous on this point:
“Jesus could do no deed of power there.”
Not only that he did no deed of power—
But he was not able to do a deed of power there.


Jesus is God and man working together, cooperating for one purpose.
Jesus is God’s desiring participation in the power of human flesh and the weakness of human flesh. So if human beings take offense to presence of God among them, then the power of Jesus does not work.


But in order for me to believe in the presence of God working among us—
God working in you—  I do have to give something up—
As this story shows, I have to give up my expectations about you—
And I have to give up my knowledge about who you are—
Because when God is working with you, you become something new.


The people of Jesus’s town are not willing to give up what they know about Jesus.
And in this moment, Jesus is amazed at their unbelief.
He’s not angry. He’s not sad. He’s not frustrated, embarrassed, ashamed, disappointed.
Jesus is amazed at their unbelief. He is surprised, he marvels at their unbelief.
Because he was expecting something different.


When he rolls into his hometown, Jesus knows his crowd—
He has a history with these people— he remembers who he was with them, and how they knew him for thirty long years.
But Jesus expected that when the people saw the power and goodness of God in him— A power to heal— That they would believe this power of God, receive it, and cooperate with it.
Even though it was new and unfamiliar. Jesus trusted them to let go of their assumptions, and accept him as he is now—- And he is amazed when they don’t. He is genuinely surprised.


I wonder if that is God’s response,
In the moment of my unbelief:
In the moment when I fail to embrace love and healing—
When I hold to my old assumptions and expectations of another—
When I reject the new truth and power of God, in front of me—
Maybe in this moment, God is not angry, wrathful, or hurting—
Maybe God is amazed. Genuinely surprised—
At my lack of belief.
Because God trusts us.


Even after this moment when Jesus faces human unbelief— and is amazed—


His next act is simply to continue trusting in people, and continue working.
He moves on to the next town.
And then he sends out his disciples to do the work.
He trusts them, with the work that, until now, he has done entirely on his own—
He sends out his disciples to proclaim repentance, to heal the sick, and he gives them authority over the unclean spirits.


Whoever we are, whoever we are not--
Whatever we have done or failed to do,
In whatever ways we have believed— or not believed,
God trusts us. The Kingdom of God is a Divine Democracy.
The power of Jesus is not somewhere else, up in the sky or on top of a mountain
The power of Jesus is with us, among us—
Cooperating with our power as human beings.
The power of God is in the bread we break with one another,
And in the words we share
In our willingness and courage to pick up our authority
The authority God gives to us, over the unclean spirits
spirits of fear, spirits of hatred, spirits of arrogance, spirits of greed, spirits of violence.


Jesus trusts us with his authority.
And so congregation, I want to leave you with a question and an invitation today.


My question is: This week, where is God asking you, trusting you, to take up power and authority?


I invite you to use the power and authority God has given to you.


In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.