Note: The following is a sermon delivered on July 7, 2024, at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina. An audio version is found below. A video version follows the end of the written sermon.
In June, I found myself walking in the woods. Not just any woods.
I was in California for a seminary intensive. Two weeks taking classes and engaging in worship and eating and drinking and exploring and building community with the folks I met there from as far away as Hawaii and Massachusetts and Taiwan.
One morning after our seminary work concluded, I hopped in my rental car and drove a short 45 minutes to Muir Woods National Monument. Muir Woods, if you’re not familiar, is an old growth forest of coastal redwood trees situated on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The trees are big. On the Tuesday I visited, they were also warm. And the smell of redwood was thick and delicious.
A few steps down the path, just before I get to a place called Cathedral Grove, there’s a cluster of trees growing in a circle. In the middle of that circle of trees is a much larger jagged stump of an older tree that was burned in a forest fire at least decades ago. I can see the charred remains of that older tree jutting up into the air.
There’s a sign. It’s titled “Family Circles.” Here’s what it reads, in part:
Hundreds of years ago, a single large redwood grew here. Then disaster struck. The trunk of the large redwood was killed, perhaps by repeated and severe wildfire…
Beautiful things die. Hold this idea in your head for a bit.
Today’s Gospel reading from Mark is in two parts. The first part may be more familiar to some of us as it includes one of Jesus’s “greatest hits” – “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.” Jesus has gone home and he’s brought his friends with him and it does not go well.
You can imagine it, can’t you? Jesus goes to visit Mary and Joseph in Nazareth and maybe have a home-cooked meal of his childhood favorite foods and catch up with his siblings and ends up preaching in the synagogue. And the friends and neighbors and uncles and aunties and cousins and you-name-them show up. They are astounded.
“Where did this man get all this?”
“Isn’t this the guy who used to build houses with his dad?”
“I lost to that dude’s brother in poker last week.”
“I know his people. What’s his deal?”
Some of us know what it is like to go home and not be welcome. And we know how painful that can be. Home is the place where your people are supposed to be. Home is the place where your roots are. And while we are led to believe that home is not supposed to hurt, it is at home where we are often hurt most. After all, home is where people know you. They know your triggers. Your habits. Your secrets, some of them. All of that makes it more likely for you to be hurt and to hurt others.
And so what happens when Jesus goes home may not be a complete surprise. Jesus’s hometown is small and insular. We know homes like this, don’t we? After life on the road – maybe we go away for college or join the military or see the world in some other way – and we come back. We have changed. Home has not.
The questions asked by the folks in Nazareth read to me like they’re coming from a place of insecurity, don’t they? Uncertain of what this guy they thought they knew has to say, they question not what he has to say but where he’s from.
“How can we possibly have produced such a weirdo?”
“I’m offended. He’s not like us anymore. He thinks he’s better than us. He’s abandoned our traditions. He’s too radical. He’s too worldly. He makes me uncomfortable.”
There are echoes of this thinking in John’s Gospel, when Nathanael asks “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” If you ask the people of Nazareth, their answer seems to be “no way.”
And they make an outsider of someone who was once an insider.
That’s what I mean by insecurity: the idea that nothing good can come from what happens to also have produced us.
There are all sorts of homes, of course, and hometowns. We might think of the places we live, but also past relationships, church homes, work “fam,” a denomination like the Episcopal Church or maybe a different denomination that you grew up in, or even Christianity overall, a political party, or even a country. We become insecure very quickly, especially at threats that come from within — ones that look like us and are tied up in the people we know. Resentments build out of that insecurity. We are easily offended. We look at someone like Jesus – perhaps someone with new ideas or a new approach or new friends – and we resent the fact that we will never live up to that. And to be clear, that resentment is as much about ourselves and our own failure to live up to some imagined ideal as it is about this guy over here.
It’s significant to note that Jesus is upset, too. So upset that Scripture says “he could do no deed of power” here. Jesus can’t. He just cannot. It is almost as though Jesus’s home strips him of his very nature. Not only are the folks of Nazareth offended at Jesus, their reaction has caused him to be offended as well. He is “amazed at their unbelief.” The feeling here is that he is exasperated. Like he doesn’t belong in the very place he is from.
And it’s more complicated and deeper than this. As we’ve been encountering in Mark’s Gospel in recent weeks, Jesus has been preaching in the synagogues and the leaders of those places are taking considerable exception to what Jesus has to say. That’s partly what’s prompted him to go home to Nazareth and the surrounding villages where he thinks he can get a little more purchase. And as he’s gone around to this point, he’s worked his miracles. He restores a demon-possessed man. He raises a dead girl. He heals a sick woman. So when he’s home and the synagogue leaders there are just like the others he’s encountered and he can do no deed of power here, I imagine this is just the worst. Home is not home, perhaps thinks Jesus. And maybe that he cannot be himself. Not here. Now now.
I suspect this sounds familiar. It does to me. I have found myself in all sorts of places I’ve called home that are no longer home. And where I am not myself.
I, for one, take great heart in the idea of a Jesus who cannot. Sometimes I can’t either. To know that God knows and sits with me in frustration – who feels bound in, even briefly, by circumstances – is helpful and rich and perhaps one of the primary distinguishing factors between God and, I don’t know, those folks who insist that I be resilient and positive and goal-oriented. There are days and places I call home where I, like Jesus, can do no deed of power. It’s all I can do to just keep up with the paperwork.
Thanks be to God, this is not where the story ends. Because, it turns out, that Jesus roots go deeper still. And so can ours.
Power is made perfect in weakness, we read in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians today.
In this strangest of pairings, Mark’s Gospel shows us how Jesus makes his move.
Some scholars call the second part of today’s Gospel reading “The Sending of the Twelve.” It’s a weird piece of Scripture, let me tell you as a new seminarian preaching his first sermon. Go out in pairs, says Jesus. Wear a belt. Take no money. Take no food. Put on walking shoes. Stay in one home when you’re visiting a place. Cast out demons.
These rules Jesus has for his pairs of disciples land strangely on our ears. On the heels of the story about his visit home, these may not quite feel fully connected.
But, oh Church, they are.
Imagine the space between the story of Jesus going home and this sending story. Jesus, rejected in his hometown synagogue, rejected in his hometown, rejected by his people — has a choice to make. And that choice is a powerful one.
He decides to move on.
And it is how Jesus decides to move on that I’d like us to focus on for a moment.
Jesus makes some really surprising moves here.
When the synagogues and its leaders start to reject him, he makes it not about him. He sounds out the twelve to do the work.
When his hometown friends and neighbors take offense at his message, he calls for the work to happen elsewhere.
When home is no longer home – when it is no longer secure – he chooses not the insularity and defensiveness that the people of Nazareth choose, but instead vulnerability. No bread. No bag, No money. No change of clothes.
When institutions and places and affiliations fail, Jesus calls on his followers to become migrants. Mobile. Unhoused. Housing insecure.
When those insular communities no longer have the answer, when they become untrustworthy, when their relevance is in decline and scarcity mindset sets in, Jesus calls his disciplines to live relationally. Not at the town and village level, but at the level of someone’s home. Completely at their mercy. Breaking bread with them. Constantly pursuing invitation.
When the folks who should have been most eager and willing to love him and include him and welcome him do not do that – and are just plain mean – Jesus responds to this rejection and powerlessness by turning to his disciples – his dislocated and homeless community of friends – and sends them out with instructions to put themselves at even greater risk. -Paraphrased from Dr. Nichole Torbitzky
Hang on a second. Jesus responds to a feeling of powerlessness by choosing more powerlessness? Who even is this guy?
Jesus could have chosen a new town. A new synagogue. A new platform. Instead, he dispenses with structures and institutions and the hallmarks of security and belonging because those walls turned out merely to be facades. Jesus could have chosen coercion. He chooses the opposite. Jesus could have chosen a display of conventional power. He does not.
Jesus instructions to his disciples are wild: don’t go looking for a cushy place to stay. Don’t buy a house. Don’t go for the primo AirBnB. Don’t worry about your influence. Don’t sweat the local politics. Don’t go trying to save everybody. If the town’s not interested in what you have to say, leave. - Paraphrased from Dr. Nichole Torbitzky
Jesus invites his disciples – and us – to choose divine entanglement over collective insularity.
Insularity looks like communities that become cliques. Churches that behave like clubhouses. Political parties that become personality cults.
Jesus offers a different path. A divergent one. A de-centralized one. An entangled one.
Jesus may be rejected in the synagogue, so he moves to the streets.
Jesus may hurt when he his home, so he becomes homeless.
This entanglement is not withdrawal or dissociation. It’s the opposite. It is ultimately an invitation to live in relationship with each other. The look each other in the eye, maybe over a shared meal. Too see and be seen deeply.
In a few moments, we’re going to gather around the font and actively choose to follow Jesus by saying with each other our baptismal vows. At its core, baptism is an invitation to become entangled with each other – not just to this pair of candidates for baptism who have arrived on our doorstep like Jesus’s disciples, ready for our hospitality – but again with each other. That, church, is what church is: the ongoing, organic, frustrating, vulnerable, holy choice to become entangled with each other. It’s a choice to change and be changed. And so I’m clear, while this morning’s baptism will take place within the four walls of a modern day institution, like Jesus and his disciples, the real work begins when we are out there with each other. Church is the gathering of each other. I think that’s why Jesus sends his disciples in pairs. It requires at least two people to be in relationship.
A brief word about the people of Nazareth: it may be easy, after today’s reading, to think that home is hopeless. It is not. Though the people of Nazareth may be looking at Jesus cross-eyed, it has not always been so. Jesus is a product of that community. He grew up there. He learned what a community is by being in that community. And by several measures, the people of Nazareth did a pretty good job at raising up this Jesus guy.
Back to Muir Woods. And back to that sign I saw next to the grove of trees with the blackened, jagged, charred stump of some old institution of a tree at its center. Here’s what the rest of the sign reads:
Despite such terrible damage, the tree did not die. Below the ground, its massive root system was full of vitality. Before long, hundreds of young, bright-green burl sprouts began to come up around the circle formed by the root crown of the original tree. Some of those sprouts have grown into full-sized trees that today stand in a circle around the original trunk.
May it be so with us.
A Coda from St. Teresa of Avila:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
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