A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost,
July 05, 2009
by The Reverend Diana Carroll
God be in my head, and in my understanding; God be in my eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking; God be in my heart, and in my thinking. Amen.
“Jesus left that place and came to his hometown.”
Up to this point in the gospel of Mark, Jesus has had a pretty successful ministry. He has traveled and taught, cast out demons, and healed many who were sick. He has criss-crossed the sea of Galilee and picked up a group of disciples who follow him wherever he goes. He hasn’t run into too much resistance… yet. Now, after being away for who knows how long, he finally comes back to his hometown. To Nazareth. And, as he has done in so many other places, he goes to the synagogue, and gets up to speak.
At first, the people are amazed, but their amazement quickly turns to resentment and even indignation. They know Jesus (and his family) much too well to believe that God is doing a new thing in him. To them, he is just a neighborhood kid who has gotten too big for his britches. He is so familiar, in fact, that they fail to see the truth about Jesus or to hear his message. Instead, they take offense at him. “Where did this man get all this?” they ask each other. “What is this wisdom that has been given to him?” Or in the words of the Message translation, “Who does he think he is?”
Well, Jesus knew who he was, but he was not what the people of Nazareth were expecting. They were looking for the messiah, the anointed one, but they thought it would be someone more like King David—a military hero, who, as we heard about in the first lesson today, captured Jerusalem and brought peace and stability to ancient Israel. They were looking for a king, and they got a carpenter. They were looking for a savior, and they got the boy next door.
Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it certainly did in this case, and Jesus’ old friends and neighbors completely missed the boat.
We can shake our heads at the inhabitants of Nazareth and marvel at their narrow-mindedness,
but we are just like them quite a lot of the time. Most of us have a hard a time seeing God at work in people and events that seem, to us, to be very ordinary, very familiar. Let’s face it, we want God to be flashy and exciting, to show up with a neon sign or, in keeping with this weekend’s festivities, lots and lots of fireworks.
We want our experiences of God to be dramatic and out of the ordinary, but that is rarely how God works in our lives. And if we are always looking for God in what is grand and glorious, we will very often miss it when God appears right in front of us in something very ordinary: the local carpenter, Mary’s kid, the person we have known all our lives.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes about a powerful spiritual experience, which he describes as having been “caught up to the third heaven…into Paradise.”
Although he is cagey about it at first, it’s pretty clear that Paul himself is the one who had this experience. This must have been a very significant moment for Paul, one that influenced his life and ministry. And yet, at the time of writing, it had been fourteen years since that experience took place! However exceptional and elating it had been, Paul had spent much more of his life struggling with the all-too-familiar, everyday difficulty that he describes as “a thorn in the flesh.”
Much time and energy has been spent over the centuries on trying to figure out exactly what that “thorn” was, and I for one am not going to add to the speculation. To me, the important thing is that Paul’s “thorn” was not all that extraordinary, or heavenly, or even particularly holy, yet he experienced his struggles with it as an essential part of his spiritual journey. His “weakness,” as he calls it, was where God’s grace was most able to shine through for him. That is why he boasts about it, rather than about his extraordinary revelations. This is where he sees God at work in his life from day to day.
I think that many of us want the whole of our lives to be like Paul’s grand, mystical experience:
to be uplifting and profound and extraordinary, the kind of life that is undeniably holy. But it just doesn’t work that way, does it? Even for Paul, life could not be neon signs and fireworks all of the time.
When I originally wrote this sermon, I was going to talk about the fact that yesterday was my first time watching the Independence Day fireworks here in Philadelphia. But I didn’t actually end up seeing the fireworks. For the second year in a row, I only listened to them instead. Last year I was frantically unpacking boxes in my new apartment. And this year I was invited to watch them from a friend’s rooftop deck, but unfortunately, he hadn’t taken into account the location of the other buildings around the deck, and we ended up not being able to see any of it.
But even though I didn’t get to see the fireworks (and I still hope to someday!), I have still been able to get a sense for what a big deal this particular celebration is in this city. And why not? After all, this is where it all began, or at least, this is where many significant steps were taken on the road to independence.
It’s appropriate for us to celebrate—to have concerts and parades and yes, lots of fireworks. But as I thought about the celebration this week, I found myself reflecting that the ideals we celebrate this weekend really have very little to do with fireworks and parades. (Or even singing patriotic songs. Sorry, John.) Freedom and justice and equality are best lived out not in mass celebrations, but through ordinary, everyday moments. Through painstaking participation in the process of democracy, with many setbacks and struggles along the way, and with a lot of hard work by a lot of people.
For my first summer job in high school, I worked on the election campaign for a local politician. I was too young to canvas door-to-door or make phonecalls, so they had me entering names and contact information for potential supporters into the campaign database. It was pretty boring work, and even when I was old enough to go door-to-door for his re-election effort two years later, it wasn’t that much more exciting. But through that job, I learned that this kind of mundane, familiar activity was the stuff that made democracy work. Those times of fireworks and national celebration? They were just the icing on the cake.
In our spiritual lives, as in our civic life, it can’t be all fireworks and celebration all of the time. God comes to us, again and again, in the ordinary stuff of our lives. We have to cultivate the ability to see and notice God’s presence even in the most familiar people, places, and activities. Otherwise, we will miss those things that are truly worth celebrating.
In one of the eucharistic prayers that we use less often at Holy Trinity, prayer C, the priest asks this of God: “Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us.” That’s a good prayer for any of us to use at any time. Asking for the grace to be able to see God working in our lives: in our most mundane tasks, our most frustrating weaknesses, our most familiar friends, and even in a carpenter from Nazareth.
Amen.
