A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 5, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  Mark 6:1-12

[Jesus] could do no deed of power

was amazed at their unbelief. — Mark 6:5-6a

We come to chapter 6 of Mark’s story of “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  So much happened in the last chapter or so—a storm stilled, a Gerasene Gentile freed from an evil spirit called Legion, a woman healed from a flow of blood, a young girl seemingly raised from the dead.  As Jesus heads home to Nazareth, rumors must have been sweeping furiously through the village—“Where did this man get all this?  [the people ask]  What deeds of power are being done by this man’s hands!” [they exclaim]   Such wonders, such mighty works, do they really happen?  Can they be believed or not?  The people wonder.  And now here is Jesus himself, come home a grown man to teach in their synagogue on the sabbath.  Will the people who watched him grow up and go off into the world welcome him with open arms as a “hometown boy who made good”?

Well, hardly!  Yes, they’re astounded, but still they reject him.  Jesus will know rejection again and again throughout his ministry right up until Good Friday.  In Nazareth, it’s partly a matter of “familiarity breeds contempt”—or as Jesus puts it, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”  (Do you think it makes any difference at my house that I am a pastor when I make some grand pronouncement?  Not one bit!)  So, according to Mark’s story, Jesus could do no deeds of power in his hometown on account of the people’s unbelief (literally, their “unfaith”).  Some Bible translations speak in terms of miracles, saying, “Jesus could do no miracles there…”  But “miracles” is too loaded a term in our rational, scientific world.  The Greek word here is dunameis, from which we get our word “dynamite.”  And the better translation is “deeds of power” or “mighty works.”

How odd that there is such a close connection between faith and “deeds of power” or “mighty works”!  How strange that hardened hearts and closed minds can short-circuit even the power of God!  It’s more than simple familiarity.  Sure, this is the carpenter, the son of Mary.  His brothers Joses and Judas and Simon live just over on the next block, and his sisters can be found shopping in the  town  square.  They all stayed home like fine, respectable folk should.  But beyond “familiarity breeding contempt,” the people of Nazareth took offense at Jesus.  In the literal Greek they were “scandalized” by him.  This points to a much deeper, more devastating problem.  At issue here is the scandal of the incarnation.  It shocked and puzzled Galilean hearts and minds then, even as it shocks and puzzles us now.  Incarnation.  “Carné” as in chili con carné—chili with meat.  Enfleshment.  The Word made flesh.  This is God fully present in flesh and blood and bone, within the physical limits of a particular human being.  The incarnation is both our salvation and the greatest bugaboo of modern Christian religious belief.

We want Jesus to be God, by God!  And this he certainly was.  But Jesus was also a carpenter who worked with his hands.  When he was a baby, Mary wiped his runny nose, played peek-a-boo with him to make him laugh, and changed his diapers as often as any mother does.  As an adult he got hungry, angry, lonely, and tired.  He was the brother of Joses and James and Simon and of sisters unnamed.  And the truly great wonder of the incarnation is that this is precisely how Jesus gets to be your brother and my brother.

But downtown Nazareth was having none of that.  And it doesn’t fly much better in our world—in downtown Columbus, in uptown Manhattan, or in greater suburbia.  One difference is that whereas Nazareth couldn’t make out God’s presence in the being and actions of a hometown boy, we have difficulty seeing Jesus’ humanity.  Yet the mystery of the incarnation—God completely present within full humanity—is our greatest solace and comfort.  For it proclaims that wherever we might find ourselves, in suffering and pain, in sorrow and despair, in loss and grief, God has gone there first… goes there with us… is present and glad to be there with us and for us!  Everywhere!

The first great heresy in the church was not people saying that Christ was not God, rather they said he was not really human.  The earliest of the creeds address this heresy, which was called “docetism” (from the Greek word for “to seem like”).  Docetism claimed that Jesus only seemed to be human; God was only play-acting.  But the earliest church councils insisted upon Jesus’ full humanity alongside his full divinity.  We still struggle with this puzzling idea.  For we want a strong, two-fisted God, a King Jesus who comes on like thunder.  We imagine a Jesus who knew everything, including every last thing that was going to happen to him.  And we are offended—scandalized!—by a God who puts him/her-self at our mercy on a hill called the place of the skulls and by a Jesus who stands revealed to us in the face of a hungry child, or nursing mother, or our crazy Uncle Charley.

But that’s the Jesus we have in the Gospels.  He called Mary mama.  He had sisters and brothers with names and faces and backaches.  The Gospels tells us that God is his father, that he called God “Abba” (which means “Daddy”), yet Jesus himself proclaimed that God is your father and mother too… and mine, and everyone’s.  When we truly begin to believe that, when we begin to trust in God our Father and Mother, then amazing things happen.  When we seek God in the ordinary, daily sweep of things and find God in each other, in the everyday wonders (and muddle) of human relationships, and in God’s beautiful, dangerous, bountiful creation, then “deeds of power’ and “mighty works” begin to happen.  Deeds of mercy and compassion.  Works of healing and comfort.  Deeds and works of forgiveness and of understanding and of deep, joyous laughter.  Somewhere Frederick Buechner writes that faith doesn’t come as the result of miracles.  Rather it’s the other way around.  Miracles proceed from faith.  I think he’s right.  Deeds of power are rooted in faith.  Faith is what lets us see them.

Those poor people of Nazareth, with their hardened hearts and closed minds, do more than short-circuit divine power.  They cut themselves off from something that has to do with spouses and parents and children, with neighbors and friends, and with all that builds and sustains a living community.  I suspect those people lived in a world where anyone who cooked was just a cook, where a shopkeeper was just a competitor, where any politician was just a crook.  It’s a bleak world when people are reduced to labels—she’s just a woman, he’s just a typical bleeding-heart liberal, we’re all just consumers.  It’s a barren world with no wonder, no great expectations, no enticing mystery, and precious little hope.  It’s a desolate world that suffers from cynicism and a loss of nerve (which may be another word for faith), a world with little self-awareness or consciousness of wonder.  Is this our world too?

Near the end of Thorton Wilder's play Our Town, Emily Webb comes back from the dead to the town of her childhood, and she finds her mother and father and all her long-dead acquaintances still “alive” (so to speak).  It’s all the same as when she was a child, but she ends up begging to go back to the grave.  The sheer beauty and wonder of it all—every sight and sound, every gesture of love and devotion, every tender grace of existence is overwhelming to her.  Too much to bear her!  For she had never realized the shear wonder of her life when she was living it.  She says to the Stage Manager:

“I didn’t realize.  So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait!  One more look.

“Good-by, Good-by, world.  Good-by Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa.  Good-by to clocks ticking… and Mama’s hot baths… and sleeping and waking up.  Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
Then she looks toward the Stage Manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:  “Do any human being ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

The Stage Manager answers:  “No.”  He pauses, and then he adds, “The saints and the poets, maybe—they do some.”

Maybe that’s how it was for the people in Nazareth.  Maybe that’s how it is most of the time for us too.  We miss out on experiencing Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s earth and bushes that are “crammed with heaven.”  We miss out on Walt Whitman’s ordinary, everyday miracles of strangers… and honey-bees… and fishes… and ships with men in them.  The poets know glimpses of the hand of the Maker at work in all the powerful deeds and mighty works of creature and creation.  Surely Jesus realized it each and every single minute.

Maybe we need to go back to those old lessons from safety patrol and driver’s education, the ones for entering a crosswalk or crossing a railroad grade:  “Stop!  Look!  And listen!”  Soften your heart and open your mind.  Know a prophet when you see one—even when he or she comes cloaked in familiarity.  Look with the eyes of a poet.  Taste and smell of life like a connoisseur.  Hear the wondrous truth when it is proclaimed—even when it is the hard truth, even when it asks you to change, especially when it summons you into newness. “Stop!  Look!  And listen!”  And “realize life”—full, abundant life—if not “every, every minute,” then every other minute… or as often as we can.  Maybe then we won’t short circuit God’s power working in and through us, God’s mighty works meant to heal the world.  Maybe then we can allow ourselves to be led into the eternal life that begins in the here and now of this moment as God calls each and every one of us by name.   Let it be so.  Amen.