The Rev. Jim Young
Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Mark 6.1-13)
9 July 2006
Lynne and I are in Denver to be at a family reunion and a belated opportunity to celebrate the high school graduation of 2 nephews and a niece. We will be back next Sunday. Until then I am grateful that Carmen is helping out with Morning Prayer today.
(pause)In the movie, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy finds herself swept away by a fierce storm and she lands in Oz. Holing on tightly to her little dog, Toto she says, “Toto, I get the feeling that we’re not in Kansas anymore!” Oz looked and sounded very strange indeed to Dorothy, who had never known anything but her family’s farm and the nearby area in Kansas. It occurs to me that whenever we think that we know all about a story we hear from Scripture, it might be helpful to recall Dorothy’s cautious words: “Toto, I get the feeling that we’re not in Kansas anymore!” What trips us up is the familiarity with the story. Unlike Dorothy who knew nothing about Oz, we have both the advantage and the hindrance of knowing the basic words and plotline of stories that we hear from the Bible. We (and I include myself here!) often forget that even though we know outward appearance of a story from Scripture, it is one that comes to us from an Asian culture at least two thousand years ago - and often times much longer ago than that! That is why I will always consider myself a beginner when it comes to thinking that I understand what I read and hear from Scripture. I think (and this is strictly my own opinion here) that this is also the reason why the western world has so often in history made a terrible mess of it when it comes to thinking that we know what we’re doing when we meddle in the middle east!
The familiar story from Mark, chapter 6 today is a good example. We hear questions expressed about the validity of Jesus’ credentials for ministry from his own hometown and this often-quoted passage, “Then Jesus said to them, prophets are not without honor, except in their own hometown and among their own kin…And he could do no deed of power there…And he was amazed at their unbelief.”A friend of mine is a very serious amateur carpenter. When I say amateur, I mean it in the ancient sense of the word as one who does something very well not for profit, but for the love of the skill. This friend is a very skilled craftsman who has very sophisticated tools and often works with exotic hardwoods. The fruits of his labors are exquisite to behold and could fetch very high prices if he were ever to sell any of his creations.
We hear, in today’s passage from Mark, the crowd asking among themselves, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary…?” And when we hear Jesus being referred to as the carpenter, do we not make some very automatic assumptions about the skill of a craftsman and the esteem in which we hold such persons today? My skilled carpenter friend is a retired pastor who has always liked working with his hands as a positive way of coping with the demands and pressure of being a minister. Again, we would find that as nothing more than admirable and healthy.But in the Middle East Asian culture of 2000 years ago, working with one’s hands was a sign of being so insignificant and socially inferior that a carpenter had even less status than a peasant farmer who was a share cropper on someone else’s land. The mindset of the culture was that if someone had wealth and status, it meant that one didn’t have to lift a finger to do any kind of work. To work with one’s hands was a sure sign of someone who would be next to invisible in the social strata of the ancient world. This would mean that Jesus was in the roughly 97% of the population that was illiterate. This would also mean that he would have been expected to know the basics of stories and law from the oral traditions of his religion, but it would have been assumed by anyone in his time who knew him and his trade that he would never have known any of the finer points of scripture and interpretation of the Law of Moses. And yet, how often did he confound the elite religious authorities with not just his wisdom, but with the miracles of his healing?
Pagan philosophers in the time of the early church often attacked Christianity as being socially inferior. They didn’t appear to have any problems with the notion that a person could have a virgin mother, or even be divine. What they found so offensive was that it happened to a person of such low class!So, perhaps this familiar story is not one of simply not accepting a hometown boy who made good. It might be more accurately described as a story of snobbery and a refusal to see God at work in a person of such inferior social status as Jesus, the carpenter, the man who worked with his hands!
Recently, Lynne and I were in Minneapolis for a show, and on the light rail train to and from the downtown area we saw quite a variety of people who would not be easily accepted by so-called respectable people today. Among those who would easily blend into suburban and small town settings, we saw people who were obviously very poor. Some looked to be homeless. Some were decked out in leather and black clothing and had numerous body piercings. We saw one young woman who was very pleasant in her demeanor and had many extensive tattoos on her neck, back and arms. She elicited some stares and even some derisive comments from several young Somali men who boarded the train at one point.As I think on that scene in light of this story from Mark’s Gospel, I wonder about my own built-in snobbery, prejudices and assumptions I make just on the basis of appearance. It makes me wonder about the church and its own snobbery and prejudices based on litmus tests of acceptable theology or Bible interpretation. Have we become so complacent and smug that we might also fail to see who Jesus truly is if he were to appear to us today decked out in black leather, wearing nose rings, showing tattoos and riding a Harley Davidson? I wonder…
Yours in Christ,Jim