Sermon of Dr. David Evett
All Saints Parish
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
July 5, 2009
And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. Mark 6:5
It's been an unquiet week in Lake Wobegon, or at least in Arlington, one of Lake Wobegon's important suburbs. More precisely, an unquiet couple of months. Marianne had shoulder surgery on April 23, and since she came straight home from the hospital rather than going to a rehab center I have been obliged to test at length an idea I developed n a book I wrote, taken from the Collect for Peace in Morning Prayer, that willing service is perfect freedom. So far the results of the experiment are ambiguous. That's partly because she went back into the hospital the second weekend because she'd developed a blood clot in the shoulder that also affected the lungs; and then, just to keep things interesting, got nailed by some virus (not, I assure you, H1N1) last week. So her recovery has been longer and slower than we had hoped: she's still on orders from her medical team not to lift anything heavier than a mug of tea with her right arm. And her left, nominally healthier shoulder, in sympathy, and because it's had to do all the heavier lifting, has gone out on strike, too.
For my part, at the beginning of May I had an episode of atrial fibrillation that put me in the hospital for a day, and provoked a slew of tests, and then I had a tooth filled, and then I turned temporarily deaf in one ear (on my birthday) so I had to get about half a pound of wax extracted, and then I had a mysterious pain in my back which baffled my doctor. And then on Wednesday I had minor surgery to remove a growth in my bladder, revealed by the fact that for three or four months now I've periodically had blood in my urine, which under the old Deuteronomic law that David Killian preached about last week would have marked me as unclean and exiled me to the dark margins of society.
We've been lucky. In the same two months I wrote five letters to spouses or relatives of friends condoling the deaths of their husbands or wives or uncles, all about my age, and learned from another such friend that his cancer, which modern science had been holding at bay for several years, was on the rampage. One of our sons has received a highly distressing pink slip. This week we've heard from three other parishioners who are receiving those condolence letters for parents or other loved ones. We've experienced with all of you, of course, the devastating effects of the recession, the gloomy news from Iran and Afghanistan and Honduras, and the lousiest June weather anybody can remember.
But this sermon is not about me, or endless clouds and rain, or about our physical or economic trauma. It's about Jesus. About his bad week. As best one can figure from the Gospel of Mark, the oldest of the four, sometime around the end of June or beginning of July in the thirty-second year of his life, at the outset of his career as an itinerant holy man, he completed a wonderfully successful couple of months, recruiting followers, healing the sick, driving out evil spirits, calming storms, attracting immense crowds come to hear about his fresh new understanding of God, recalling young girls from the threshold of the house of the dead. So he came home, to Nazareth. And as we just heard, the people among whom he had grown up rejected him. In the version of the story in Luke, they even get violent, driving him out of town and to the edge of a cliff; here in Mark, as in Matthew, it's milder. But still hard to take.
I know that Nazareth was a lot like Lake Wobegon, because I grew up in just that kind of town, out in the boondocks, a few miles from a big lake and on the edge of a wilderness. The residents, most of whom had lived there all their lives, were narrow-minded and set in their ways, suspicious of new people and new ideas. The idea that a local kid, one of them, could have some kind of special commission from God, was impossible for them to deal with. "What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?' And they took offense at him." In response, he says something, now very familiar to all of us, about how prophets are honored everywhere except in their home town. And then, Mark tells us, something remarkable happened. "And he could do no deed of power there."
When you think about it, Jesus' career as a worker of deeds of power, of miracles, is remarkable for its selflessness and its modesty. In particular, what he does not do is to respond to his enemies in kind. We hear in today's psalm about how God the Father matches up against the great powers of the earth.
4 Behold, the monarchs of the earth assembled
and marched forward together.
5 They looked and were astounded;
they retreated and fled in terror.
6 Trembling seized them there;
they writhed like a woman in childbirth,
like ships of the sea when the east wind shatters them.
Jesus doesn't ever do anything remotely like that. He never blasts anybody with a bolt of lightning, turns them into a toad or a cockroach, afflicts them with boils, allows the Philistines to defeated them in battle. When challenged, threatened, or vilified, he is sometimes silent. Once he draws in the dirt with his finger. Mostly he replies with a question or a story. Only once is the response physical, when he overturns the tables of the money changers in the Temple, and there, the challenge is not to him but to God; nobody gets hurt, and they are doubtless back in business in an hour. He can be peremptory — "Get thee behind me, Satan!"— but rarely rude. To his unbelieving neighbors, at least as the story gets told in the Gospels, beyond the remark about the honor of prophets he makes no response at all, just quietly leaves town to continue his journey to Calvary.
He does manage, Mark says, to heal a few sick people. This reminds us that by far the majority of Christ's miracles, in all four gospels, involve the healing of the sick, in body or mind. Most of those are done quietly, in somebody's house, or out in the country side. And it seems to me crucial that they happen because somebody requests them. He travels through the countryside, and sick people or members of their family find him. They appeal to him. He makes them well. The observations connect all three of our lessons today. David does not actively seek the kingship. When he collects a little guerilla army out in the wilderness of southern Judea, he does not attack his primary enemy, Saul, or go from tribe to tribe asking for support. When Saul falls to the Philistines, David does not immediately seek out the Jewish leaders and say, "My turn!" Instead, David waits in Hebron, and it is the leaders who come to him.
All the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron, and said, "Look, we are your bone and flesh. For some time, while Saul was king over us, it was you who led out Israel and brought it in. The LORD said to you: It is you who shall be shepherd of my people Israel, you who shall be ruler over Israel."
Paul, too, does not seek power. He tells us about a person "caught up into the seventh heaven," where he received communications directly from God. The person, of course, was himself. Just in case he should want to "boast" about these, however, God has sent him a thorn in the flesh, a tormenting messenger from Satan, presumably bringing messages about how hopeless and helpless Paul really is, how unworthy. The kind of messages all of us get at 3 a.m. But there's a further message. It's not about you, God says, its about me. "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Like David's weakness in the wilderness. Like Jesus' weakness in Nazareth.
Which does not mean that any of them were weak. Under David, wonderful things took place: the nation was unified and defended its borders against hostile incursions; the Ark of the Covenant was restored to its rightful place at the center of Jewish religious and cultural life, and the preparations begun for a magnificent house, the Temple, to become its home. Paul and his associates headed up the spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem outward to Corinth, Rome, Brookline and Lake Wobegon. Jesus healed hundreds, fed thousands, died on a cross, and by that death saved billions from sin, despair, and the death of the soul.
He did not do it by himself. Last week, we heard about the miracle of the woman with the bloody flux — a lot longer lasting than mine, and socially a lot more disastrous. Jesus was traveling toward Lake Wobegon with his disciples followed by a large crowd of people attracted to him by the reports about his ability to work deeds of power. The woman, forbidden by Jewish law to touch any other person, made her way through the crowd to the point where she could touch, not Jesus himself but just the hem of his tunic or cloak. In that moment, Mark says, power passed from him to her. "Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?'"
And when he got an answer to his question, his reply was predictable but not the less crucial: "Daughter, your faith has made you well." It is impossible not to see that Jesus' inability to work deeds of power in Nazareth arose from the inability of his neighbors to have faith in him. David did wonders in Israel as long as the people believed in him; when some unwise actions raised doubt, his powers waned. All Paul's gifts could not forestall his own death on a cross at the hands of a scornful Roman government.
The implication is that if Jesus is to do deeds of power in our lives, we must first believe, and then seek. The miracle of the Resurrection, which we observe today and every Sunday, means that he is here, among us, in the church and in homes like the ones where most of his healing took place, but also in the streets and fields, mountains and deserts, on the sea and under the ground. Waiting for us. Waiting for us to turn to him, to push through the crowd, touch the hem of his garment, receive the healing power, for ourselves, or for others. If I need support in my role as caregiver, or strength to overcome debilitating anxiety, I have to ask for it, and I have to expect it to come. I can't be woebegone — desperate, or merely mournful, or just apathetic. Our doubts, like the doubts of his neighbors in Nazareth, do not diminish Jesus' power. They mean, however, that it goes untapped. The electricity we all depend on for so many things in our lives sits quietly in the system until we ask for it by turning a switch. The power of Jesus is different; it's a spiritual power, which cannot be measured in volts and watts and ohms. It has its own circuitry, indeed, and that is the circuitry of faith — our faith, yours and mine. And it has its own switch, which was also David's switch, and Paul's switch, and the switch of a few quietly faithful people in Nazareth, willing to go against the skepticism of most of their friends and neighbors, the courage to put it to the test.