You can't always go home again

 

 Delivered on the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY.

Text: Mark 6:1-13

There’s a familiar image in America of the hometown boy who leaves for greater things and then returns home to a celebration as a hero. Cassius Clay, the black American boxer who grew up in Louisville’s West End and eventually changed his name to Muhammad Ali, had a parade in his honor when he returned from the 1960 Olympics with a gold medal. “Who do you think you are?” “You got no right to be here, to be talking like that, to have what you have.” That was what he said he heard on the streets or in restaurants in Louisville in the days after the parade in his honor. And that was what Jesus heard when he returned to Nazareth where he had grown up. Jesus addressed the crowd that gathered around him, made up of people who had known him over the years and had grown up with him or had watched him grow up. They were astonished by what he was saying and teaching, and they immediately started challenging him: Where had he learned all of this? Who had taught him? Hadn’t he worked with his father as a carpenter? Where does he get off telling us about God and salvation? They were offended by what Jesus was teaching, and not just because it went against what they had heard from their Rabbi. Jesus had changed; he was not the same man that they had known, and they had a hard time recognizing him. His followers were troubling because they hung on to every word he said. This Jesus was not who he used to be.

People were offended that Muhammad Ali thought that he could walk around town like any white person could, after winning a gold medal. Ali realized that in the end, whatever stature he had gained by being an Olympic athlete and champion meant nothing in his hometown, and legend says that he threw his medal into the Ohio River because of that. The problem was that the authority, or recognition of achievement that a medal would have conferred on Ali wasn’t recognized by people in Louisville because he was black. That authority would come later as people saw and accepted the good that he performed. Jesus faced a similar lack of recognition by the people in Nazareth, but for the opposite reason. His authority, his stature among his disciples and followers came from their faith in him, faith that was rejected by the Nazarenes. They saw authority coming from the Torah as it was interpreted to them by the priests and scribes and Jesus wasn’t following the Torah in their eyes. It wouldn’t be until after Jesus died and his teachings spread that they would have changed their minds about him.

Further into the Gospel reading, Jesus moves on from Nazareth and sends the 12 disciples out with minimal things to carry to spread the good news and heal the sick as he had done. He even gave them instructions on what to do if they were not received in the places that they visited: shake the dust off of their feet. The disciple’s authority to preach, heal, and cast out demons came from Jesus, and was probably evident in how they spoke and acted on their own. They would have been more likely to be taken seriously than Jesus in Nazareth because they were going to places where they weren’t known, and to people who didn’t have preconceived ideas about them. The difference in Jesus’ and his disciple’s experience presents a problem for us: why was Jesus’ authority rejected at home when it and his disciples’ authority had been accepted elsewhere? If he wasn’t able to perform miracles in Nazareth, did that mean that his power wasn’t really from God? Was his authority dependent on the community giving it to him?

Or was it both?

God's power and authority are not recognized unless people want to see it where it exists, and the Nazarenes didn’t accept that it could be in Jesus. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus healed through acts of faith on the part of those asking for healing; for example the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus’ daughter that we heard about in last week’s Gospel reading. To each of them he said that their faith had led to their miraculous healing. It was the combination of God's power in Jesus and recognition of that power through faith that led to Jesus’ healing work. Jesus couldn't heal in Nazareth because his kin didn't have faith in him. Both authority and faith are needed, one recognizing the other to make room for God to be present and work through people filled with the Holy Spirit. The Nazarenes were looking for proof of God in Jesus on their own terms, expecting God to conform to their expectations. They were also assuming that people don’t or can’t change, making Jesus’ claim of authority hollow and a mockery as they defined authority. By admitting that Jesus could have authority, they would call into question their prior judgement of him as just another member of the village, a carpenter like his father. They would have had to admit that they were wrong about him, that they were prejudiced, and that they would have had to look at things from God’s perspective, not their own. That’s not so easy to do when you assume that you are right because that’s the way things are.

As we read Mark’s story of Jesus’ homecoming and put ourselves in his place in the story, we find that we are drawn into a confession. We confess our faith in Jesus because we accept the authority of his teaching and commandments on faith and trust, where the Nazarenes did not. We are drawn into a confession of shortcomings because we realize that we don’t always look beyond our assumptions and expectations of the people around us, like the Nazarenes did. We are drawn onto a confession of contempt, because like the Nazarenes, we sometimes reject what God is confronting us with. We were confronted with Ali’s rejection in 1960 on June 10th, 2016 at a second parade for him. From Buechel to downtown, then to Shawnee, and finally to Cave Hill Cemetery, countless people stood in the road and paid their respects to the hearse carrying Muhammad Ali’s body through the city. We showed him respect for the authority and achievement that his gold medal and service had provided together over those 56 years. We confessed that he was someone whom we had learned from, someone we had faith in as a man of God because we saw his work in the world. We didn’t reject him, and showed that we could listen, accept, and welcome the prophetic voices among us, regardless of who they came from. We acted the opposite way that the Nazarenes had acted toward their returning prodigy. It begs the question of how could we give authority to others who speak the truth that we would rather not hear? How do we get past the person to hear God speaking through them to us? How do we make that recognition of authority a part of daily life? These are questions that the Nazarenes would have wrestled with by rejecting Jesus. They are questions that come from our baptismal vows, to respect the dignity of every human being, to strive for justice and peace. This is part of the work we have been given to do as we go back out into the world this morning after worship.