Sermon for July 7, 2024

July 7, 2024

by Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Mark 6:1-13


Last week, we saw Jesus as a powerful catalyst for healing. Power flows out of him when a woman touches his garment, and his Divine power allows him to bring a dead girl back to life. So when I read the text for this week, verse 6 jumped out at me: “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” Something has robbed Jesus of his power.

One of the advantages of following the lectionary is this opportunity for something new to leap out at us. I’ve read this passage dozens of times through the years, as the lectionary comes back to it, and as I’ve taken classes, and I’ve focused on the part that comes both before and after it: the hometown folks who reject Jesus, and Jesus sending out the disciples, telling them what to do if they, too, are rejected, the famous shaking the dust of rejectors off your feet and moving on.

This past week, however, I kept coming back to that image of Jesus being limited. He can still do a bit of healing, but if someone’s beloved daughter died, this week in the life of Jesus might find the father out of luck. I read forward in the text, and I’ll say more about what I discovered next week, when our Gospel reading does not skip ahead in the text. We are in the middle of a meditation on power, its manifestations and its limitations.

In the earlier parts of Mark, we’ve seen Jesus fully able to control all the elements of the world: he’s driven out demons and forced the storm and the seas to calm down and healed the sick, and even raised the dead. And now, he finds his power constrained? How do we explain that?

In other words, you’re telling me that demons obey him and the sea obeys him, but a little thing like human unbelief keeps him from doing much beyond a bit of healing here and there? The answer seems to be yes.

Notice that he’s not simply refusing to do miracles. It’s not like Jesus says, “Well, if you feel this way about me, then I won’t help you, even though I could.” The text says that Jesus could not, not Jesus would not. And what is the element that is binding him? Many Bible scholars say that Jesus cannot act because of the people’s unbelief. One aspect of this unbelief, if we dig down into the Greek word, is a withholding of belief in the power and promises of God. It’s a much deeper issue than simple doubt. It’s quite a contrast to the people in last week’s Gospel.

If we look at last week’s text, we see that the people in need of miracles, the bleeding woman and Jairus, father of the dead girl, have faith, which looks like fierce hope or maybe desperation. They are in need of intervention, and they know it, and they put aside all that they have thought might be possible or impossible.

Last week, on our way home from Bristol, Carl and I talked about faith and hope and miracles. He pointed out that even with the strongest faith, a person might not get a miracle. But without faith, we can be sure that we won’t get a miracle. We talked about any number of doctors that we know who have told us the value of faith and hope in making a recovery, even if the recovery doesn’t mean healing but means learning to live with a disease.

Jesus has a very different experience in this week’s text. The people in his hometown are so constrained by what they’ve been trained to think that they seem to have lost their hope in the possibility of something different.

They cannot believe what they have seen. The people in Jesus’ hometown have seen what he has done, the miracles he has performed. It’s not like he went off to Rome, did miracles there which no one in the home town witnessed, and then came home. He’s been doing these miracles in their midst. Why do they have trouble believing?

We see in this Gospel that the familiar can be constraining. The people in Jesus’ hometown reject him because he is so familiar that they cannot conceive of him in any other way than son of Mary (a specific slur about legitimacy in a patriarchal society to refer to the mother rather than the father), than as a carpenter, a worker of low social status. Those questions about family, status, occupation, education—these are still questions we ask today, and they are questions that can undercut us all, from the smallest member of our communities all the way up to God Almighty.

Like so many people today, the people in Jesus’ hometown are people who are invested in life as they have always known it, so invested, it turns out, that they cannot imagine that anything might be different. And their closed minds affect Jesus. Today’s Gospel shows us how essential it is to maintain our hope and our faith, not just for ourselves, not just for our communities, but also for God’s ability to work in the world.

Throughout the Gospels, we see the trait that keeps people imprisoned is their inability to break free of what they have always known. Here we see that this inability has even broader implications—the inability to conceive of life in any other way keeps God from acting too.

Earlier this year, my Systematic Theology professor said something similar. He said that God has a vision of the world, a vision of how creation should be, and God is always moving towards that vision, no matter how many roadblocks humans put in the way. God invites us to be part of the vision, but even if we say no, God is going to find a way to continue the creative work that needs to happen. But if we say yes, oh how much easier a time God will have. Our radical hope in God’s vision can be the fuel that helps it to happen.

All week, I’ve thought about the way that Jesus feels power drain out of him when the bleeding woman touches his hem and how this week, Jesus is like a drained battery. Would we live our lives differently if we thought of ourselves as God’s battery charger? Would we commit to radical hope each and every day?

Where are we stuck in our preconceived notions of how society should be and what redemption looks like? Where do we need to shake dust off of our feet and move on? Where might God lead us, if we can just learn to trust, hope, and act?

Music Week Begins

It has been a week:  a week of getting ready for our first overnight house guests in this house, a week of attending to tasks we've been waiting to get to for too long, a week of moving furniture, a week of buying furniture, a week of sore muscles and a sprained finger, a week of moving tools back to the shed, a week of cleaning, a week of going back and forth to Lowe's.  Music Week at Lutheridge begins today, and I think we're ready.

Our house guests arrived last night, South Florida friends that we haven't seen since we moved two years ago.  We sat outside and chatted while the sun set.  One of them will be at Music Week, the reason for the trip, and one of them will explore area waterfalls and take pictures.  My spouse, too, will be at Music Week, as will my parents who are staying in camp lodging.  I will be the support and logistics team:  buying food, driving the car/golf cart, keeping an eye on the weather.

We've been planning this week for a long time, and I'm hoping it all works out.  Our Music Week participants will have a very full schedule, so it should be fine.  I've been thinking about how long it's been since we had house guests.  We used to have people come and stay with us for a week, but that was pre-Covid.  I feel like I've forgotten how to use these hosting muscles, but happily, it's coming back.  It helps not to have to plan activities.

And of course, my regular life activities will still be happening:  the seminary class that I'm taking, the online classes that I'm teaching, and the quilt group at the local Lutheran church.  But it will be a good week, full of friends old and new, family, and music.  It's just what I yearned for when I used to live much further away.

Clay and Creativity on Independence Day

Yesterday was a very strange Independence Day, a day where we went to Lowe's late in the afternoon looking for the ever elusive pieces of the plumbing that my spouse is trying to construct.  Were we successful?  I have no idea, because our afternoon was going that badly.

When I look back on this year's Independence Day, I want to remember my morning.  I went over to the house of my dearest neighborhood friend to play with clay.  She had clay that needed to be used up, and I had ideas.  She also has glazes and a kiln--and an outdoor picnic table.  

We sat in the cool morning air, along with another friend of hers, and made all sorts of creations.  We all made pieces for a windchime (or 2 or 3).  We cut all sorts of shapes out of the clay and added all sorts of embellishments.  I have a vision for some small pieces that I can add to the yard, pieces with indentations that will also serve as mini bird baths.

I loved having my hands in cool clay, talking about art and process with friends, not talking about the state of the nation (we all know it's bad, and we all know the work that lies ahead--AND we know the need for creativity and self-care). I loved having an idea for what I wanted to create, but heading in new directions as the clay suggested.  I love that I am making one of a kind pieces.

I also delivered the mail to campers yesterday, also a treat.  Each area is decorated for the 4th, some with more handmade verve than others.  I love that the campers have friends and family who are sending them all kinds of mail and e-mail messages for me to deliver.  I love riding the golf cart in the summer sun.

We did not go to see the fireworks, although I did hear them later.  A bigger treat for me:  waking up close to midnight and NOT hearing any fireworks going off.  In South Florida, regardless of which neighborhood we lived in, there would be booms and bangs all night.

I like these reminders, in clay, in pine cones, in ribbons, and rocks, in found objects and manufactured ones, that the country has always been a cobbled together creation, in all its glorious messiness.  It gives me a strange hope for the future.

Independence Day on a Tilting Planet

It's a strange year to be celebrating Independence Day, to be thinking about the founding of the country and what it means for the future.  And it's not just citizens of the U.S. doing that.  The world seems to have tilted in the past two years, and I think we're all still in a tilting world, and it's unclear where we'll end up.  More liberty or less?  It's not just the U.S. voting on these ideas.  The Supreme Court has weighed in, and I think that the founders would be aghast at giving a President so much power.  The founders had seen the problems with having a king, and they wanted to avoid that.

I have spent time thinking about humans during past times of hardship:  life in communist Russia/Europe, people trying to survive the U.S. Civil War, all the ways that life unraveled during the long, slow collapse of the Roman empire, among others.

When my brain spirals that direction, I try to remind myself of the times when humans have rallied, worked hard, left the planet a better place than they found it, or at least left their little part of the planet a better place.  I'm thinking of the Civil Rights movement and all the movement for human rights that it birthed.  I'm thinking of those founders of the U.S. who signed their names to a document that was treason, in the eyes of their government.  They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.  Each July 4, I think about my own life, my own beliefs.  To what would I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor?

Most days I'm just trying to fly under the radar of all the powers and principalities that would keep me in bondage, in fear, in slavery of all sorts.  I'm trying to take care of friends and loved ones and my immediate community.

I can't resist posting this picture of me and my dad, dressed up as colonist and British soldier, standing in front of a painting of British soldiers:

I have always been amazed that the rowdy colonists could pull off this defeat of the greatest empire in the world at the time. I don't think it's only that they were fighting on their home territory that helped them win. Plenty of people fight to defend their homes and don't win.

Each day I try to prepare for whatever the future may require of me.  My apocalyptic brain thinks it might be a grim scenario, but perhaps it will be wonderful.  The other night, my spouse and I spent a delightful hour imagining what we would do if we bought the lottery and convinced Lenoir-Rhyne University to sell the campus of the Columbia seminary to us.

In this time of political elections, let me close this way:  I've always told my students that they should plan what they would do in leadership positions, because they may very well find themselves there some day, and it might be sooner than they think. I tell them about Nelson Mandela, and that the reason that he was prepared to be president of South Africa was that he spent all that time in jail (more years than most of my students have been alive) planning for what he would do if he took over the country. He didn't nurse anger or bitterness. No, he planned, along with his compatriots, who were jailed with them.

Then I give them a copy of an interview (in the fabulous book We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews) with Jello Biafra which has this challenge: "It's time to start thinking, 'What do I do if I suddenly find myself in charge?'" (page 46 of the first edition). Many of my students find this idea to be a wonderful writing prompt, even as they're doubtful that they would ever be allowed to be in charge of a national government.

Maybe today, as so much conversation swirls about the future of the U.S. and who should lead it, maybe today would be a good day to think about that question:  if you found yourself in charge, what would you do?  And how can you do it now, even if you're not in charge?

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, July 7, 2024:

First Reading: Ezekiel 2:1-5

First Reading (Semi-cont.): 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

Psalm: Psalm 123

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Psalm 48

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Gospel: Mark 6:1-13

What an intriguing Gospel reading for this Sunday: Jesus rejected by people who had known him since he was little and who knew his family. Perhaps you can relate.

The first part of this Gospel (in the reaction of the people of Christ’s own country) gives us a clear warning about the risks we face when we have expectations of God that might be a bit too firm. We're not really open to God or God's hopes and plans for us when we think we know what God should be up to in the world. The society of Jesus' time had very definite expectations of what the Messiah would look like and what he would do--and Jesus was not that person. How many people ignored God, right there in their midst, because they were looking for someone or something else?

This Gospel also warns us about fame and acclaim. If you've been alive any length of time, you know that the world grants fame to an interesting variety of people, for an interesting variety of reasons--and very few of these people gained fame for their efforts to make the world a better place for more people. If we expect God to act like our modern media stars, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Much of the Bible shows us God appearing as a stranger, as a baby in a manger, as an itinerant preacher, as a crucified prisoner. We hear God speaking in dreams, in a burning bush, a whisper here, a glimmering there. If we’re waiting for angel choirs in the sky to give us a clear message from the Divine, we may wait a very long time. We need to learn to listen for God in other settings.

And the end of the Gospel has a warning for us, as well. If we become believers because we think we'll be famous or we'll make lots of money or we'll have political influence--well, we're likely to be disappointed. The Gospel of Jesus is not about those things that the world considers important--no matter what those Prosperity Gospel folks would have you believe.

If we think of Jesus as building a church, the model that we see in a Gospel might point us in a different direction than the path that many of us have been treading.

Jesus sends out his disciples two by two, with no possessions and not much of a plan. Notice what he does not do--he doesn't make them create a mission statement or a business plan. He doesn't have them raise money. And he doesn't expect them to work fruitlessly--they are allowed to shake the dust off of their feet and move on if a community rejects them.

What would our lives look like, if we followed this model? What would our lives look like if we trusted God more than our retirement plans, our family members, our bosses? Where are we stuck, needing to shake dust off of our feet and move on? Where might God lead us, if we can just learn to trust and learn to move?

We Love Jesus, Yes We Do! We Love Jesus, How 'Bout You?

Yesterday I went for my morning walk and went by the dining hall in the minutes before breakfast, when all the campers wait outside.  I heard this chant/shout:  "We love Jesus, yes we do.  We love Jesus, how 'bout you?"  Then another group chanted/shouted the same thing back, only louder.  It was both a challenge between cabins/groups and a way of keeping kids occupied until the dining hall was ready for them.

Some might say, "Yes, and it was also indoctrination!"  Perhaps.  We might be kinder and say it was theological training.  But it seems less a way of mind control than a way of keeping kids focused and out of trouble while waiting to go into the dining hall.

Yesterday was the kind of day where there was lots of shouting in the news cycle.  Lately, it seems like every day is a day of lots of shouting in the news cycle.  I reflected on the purposes of shouting:  drowning out competing voices, keeping people focused, raising people's emotions for good or evil purposes.

When the news cycle shouts at me, I often turn off the TV/radio/internet site.  Yesterday, listening to children chanting/shouting outside the camp dining hall, I was charmed and wanted to linger.

But it's not my week of volunteering, not my week to enjoy breakfast at camp.  And so I rambled onward, picking a few berries out of the brambles on the downslope of the hill that took me away from the dining hall.

Gospel in Bread Sculpture

On Saturday, I worked on my sermon and made the dough for communion bread--it's not a special recipe, but it's the one that yields the most consistent results, King Arthur Baking's recipe for an oatmeal bread that I make without the cinnamon.

My spouse made this bread creation to illustrate the Gospel for Sunday, July 1, 2024, about Jesus and the bleeding woman who touched the hem of his garment for healing.  I wrote this Facebook post:  "Today's Gospel, Mark 5: 21-43, in bread form (touching the hem of Jesus). I made the dough, but Carl Berkey-Abbott is the artist who shaped it. Just another fun Saturday at the Berkey-Abbott house."