Today’s Gospel is about much more than family dynamics, however. It’s about more than wounded prophetic pride. It speaks to the very core of who we are as followers of Jesus. Today’s Gospel is about power and vulnerability, a fitting Gospel for Christians on Independence Day.
You may remember from last week’s verses in Mark that Jesus has been doing mighty acts of healing before he travels to his hometown in today’s lesson. He has raised a little girl from the dead; he’s healed a woman who merely touched the hem of his cloak. He’s driven out demons and stilled a storm with a word. But Jesus doesn’t fit the world’s image of a powerful leader. He’s not a Temple priest; he’s not a government official. He isn’t educated; he isn’t from holy Jerusalem or even from mighty Rome. He’s from Nazareth, and what good ever comes out of Nazareth? In Jesus’ day, men were normally recognized according to who their fathers are, not their mothers. Jesus’ childhood friends and neighbors know that Jesus’ birth was a bit fishy. They call him “Mary’s son.” (wink, wink) Who knows if Joseph was his real dad? “What’s an illegitimate day laborer doing with so much power?” they exclaim. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, Jesus has clearly been “working unauthorized miracles with unapproved people.”[1]
We, too, expect power to come from the right places. What if _________ [whatever child is there] suddenly stood up right now, grabbed the microphone, and finished this sermon, pointing out all my errors? What if the rector of another parish came over here uninvited and started “fixing” us? We would be as scandalized as the people of Nazareth, wouldn’t we? In our churches and in our nation, we want power to flow through the proper channels. That can be a good thing, a way to avoid chaos and misrule. Just look at what happened this past January 6! But those of us in positions of worldly power can also get too comfortable with the status quo. We certainly don’t want the power dynamic, so long in our favor, to shift and leave us out in the cold, do we ….?
In the late seventeenth century, as I’m learning in my thesis work this summer, some Anglican clergymen heard the call from Jesus to bring Christianity to the native peoples of this country. The trouble was that for our Anglican forebears, Jesus' life-giving message was mere icing on the cake of "Britishness." One missionary writes, "It is to be found to be to no Purpose, to talk to [Native Americans] about our Holy Religion in their wild native state … they must be made Men, that is rational considerate Creatures, before they will become good Christians."[2] Christianity, for the missionaries, was inextricably tied to their power and privilege as Englishmen.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us: “It is [a] great mistake … to assume that loving Christ can be the same as loving one’s native country … What is Christian depends on the ‘extraordinary,’” the strangeness of God that is seen in the scandal of salvation through “Mary’s Son.”[3] Jesus wants us, his followers, to know that our true power, like his, comes neither from our position, nor from our education, nor from our skin color, nor from our nationality. True Gospel power is found only in the vulnerability of love, the vulnerability of compassion, of "suffering with." That’s why Jesus sends the first disciples off into the world stripped of worldly power and possessions, without food, extra clothing, or money. Their mission is not self-promotion and love of power. Their mission is to bear the healing power of Love. In order to do that, they must be free enough to rely almost entirely on the hospitality of others.
Paul confesses in today's Epistle that God has given him a thorn to take on his journey—a painful thorn that will remind him constantly of his vulnerability as Jesus’ disciple. God transforms Saul the powerful Pharisee into Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ, the one who transforms the world through his own "weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ." As Jesus’ followers, we too must be free to be transformed ourselves, just as we are free to transform. It makes me wonder: What assumptions about power do we carry with us into our world today--assumptions that slow us down in our call to live into God's Kingdom? Do we have rigid ideas about who can be a good Episcopalian? Who can make decisions for our parish? Who can be a good American? Do we leave room for the scandal of God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth?
To be fair to my mother, her world was one that taught her early on that the power of the pulpit belongs to men, and a woman’s power lies in her beauty. While thinking about Mom-failures and today’s lesson, though, I remembered a faux-pas of my own. One summer, I was trying to get my younger son ready for his all-boys’ camp. Throwing items together at the last minute, I couldn't find the required white cot sheets. Desperate, I grabbed an old set of sheets from the cupboard. They happened to have little yellow and pink flowers all over them. The day after camp started, I got a call from my son’s counselor. The young man's voice dripped with disdain: Could I please send a new set of sheets for my son ASAP …. The flowered ones had made him the laughing stock of the whole camp.
My son rolls his eyes at me about this incident to this day, just like I roll my eyes at my own mother’s remarks. But perhaps … perhaps what Jesus is asking of us as his followers is to wrap ourselves in flowered sheets in a plain-sheet world? Perhaps Jesus is asking us to stand up to witness to the powerful ones of this world with all of our blemishes uncovered? Perhaps what Jesus desires for us is that we follow him, standing up for Gospel power, standing out like sore thumbs: vulnerable, yet unstoppable, bearing witness, two by two, to our crucified and risen Lord.
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