Sermons
“Speaking the Vision Anyway” based on Ezekiel 2:1-5 and Mark…
I grew up and went to school in a rural area that was pretty stable and unchanging. Teachers in my school district often taught multiple generations of the same family. It was normal for any of us to be referred to by our older siblings names, as our teachers had all taught our siblings before us. I attended the same school district k-12, and most of my kindergarten class graduated with me. Many of us, even, had gone to preschool together.
In a conversation one time about places like that, I heard a very wise reflection, “It is really great to have people you’ve known since 2nd grade, but it isn’t always great that those people remember when you puked on the art teacher’s shoes IN 2nd grade.” It is with this background, and with that wisdom, that I consider this story of Jesus trying to “go home again.”
The problem is that, as humans, we develop theories of who people are. The longer we’ve known them, the more certain we are about our theories. In stable and unchanging communities, people get locked into particular roles, ones that don’t necessarily even fit them anymore. In those places, there isn’t a lot of space for people to take on new roles or identities.
This can also be true in families. Family Systems Theory even says that when one person in a system tries to function in a different way, the entire system around them works to re-stabilize the system, BY pushing that person back into their former role. This is why we often revert to ways of being that we’ve otherwise abandoned when we are with our nascent families.
Nazareth thought they knew who Jesus was. They knew his mother. They knew his brothers and sisters. They knew his training. It wasn’t a big village. Likely they ALL knew how many times he’d puked at age 7, and where.
In their list of knowing who he is, and thus why he can’t be the same guy who is shaking up the world around them with his teaching and healing, they call him “Mary’s son.” As one scholar puts it, “even if his father Joseph had died by this time, to identify Jesus as his mother’s son rather than his father’s might have been intended as an insult, shaming Jesus by insinuating that he did not have a father.”1 In fact, in the book of Mark, Jesus’ father is never mentioned. Mark is the first Gospel to have been written, which suggests that in the earliest stories told about Jesus, his father was not a part of the stories. It isn’t clear what this means. It may mean that the best memory of the community was that Jesus’ paternal parentage wasn’t known, it might just mean that an insult was launched at Jesus and was remembered. However, since Matthew and Luke attempts to “fix” the problem of Jesus not having a father, I think that may mean they were doing clean up work to try to gloss over this question.
Now, I don’t say this just to mess up our stories. I say it because I think it may be important. There has been so much emphasis on Jesus as the Son of God, which has distanced him from his humanity, and from the rest of us. There were rumors in early centuries that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier, which would certainly be possible. What impact would that have had on Mary? On Jesus? It seems to me that a questionable parentage reminds us of Jesus’ humanity, and perhaps even reminds us why he cared so much about vulnerable people who appeared to be at the bottom of society.
In any case, it seems that in his village of Nazareth, the people don’t think Jesus was meant to break out of his roles as his mother’s son and as a day-laboring builder. He was NOT supposed to be a wisdom teacher, a healer, a leader. He was supposed to be a little bit ashamed, and humble. These people knew him, and his secrets. He wasn’t a big deal to them. In fact, to them he wasn’t supposed to be a big deal to anybody else.
I love the little detail that says, “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” (verse 5) That indicates that the expectations of the people, the ways they saw him, impacted his abilities. It may mean no one asked anything of him. It may mean he tried, but couldn’t, not when faced with such disbelief from the people in front of him. In either case, it feels to me like that Family Systems Theory again. The roles people expect of us impact who we are when we’re around them! The energy in the room impacts all of us. I think he couldn’t, not there, not with how they saw him.
This matters for us too. How we perceive each other, and what space we make for each other to grow and change, impacts how we can able to grow and change! Perhaps, even more broadly, how we understand ourselves as a church likely impacts what we can be as a church!!
It seems that Jesus took the momentary setback of his hometown well. He takes the moment and uses it to give advice to his disciples as he sends them out. He seems to easily remember what it is like not to be heard, and tells them what to do if they aren’t heard. They are to shake the dust off their feet. Thus, they leave that place there, and don’t take any part of it with them as they go on.
Ezekiel, too, is about what is to be said whether or not the people hear. It is particularly direct about this, ending with the line, “Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.” (verse 5) As one scholar puts it, ““The role of ‘hearing’ in a traditional society indicates more than an auditory event alone; it is a holistic response to the message. In Ezekiel’s case, the ‘hearing’ of the listeners does not affect the role of the prophet, nor does it require the acknowledgment of the audience. Even if they do not ‘hear,’ they will nonetheless know that there was a prophet in their midst.”2
In 597 BCE the king of Judah had miscalculated the outcome of the power struggle between Babylon and Egypt, resulting in a Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. That siege resulted in his removal, along with many of the leaders of Judah, “nobles, craftsmen, and smiths as well as ‘the men of valor’”3 to Babylon. The king of Babylon put a successor on the throne, one who also read the political winds poorly, which resulted in the nearly complete destruction of Jerusalem in 587/586 BCE and a larger wave of exiles being taken to Babylon. Ezekiel was sent to be the prophet to the first group of exiled leaders. That group likely included his father, a priest. It included Ezekiel too.
As one scholar puts it, “There, in a foreign land, among a displaced people, God appears!”4 I don’t know that Ezekiel, or the exiled community expected that. At least in part, they thought of YHWH as the God of the Promised Land. And they thought of being exiles as being punished by God, or out of favor with God, or maybe proof that God wasn’t as powerful as they’d dreamed. Thus, they didn’t expect God to appear. At the start of this passage, after Ezekiel has experienced an initial vision of the Divine, Ezekiel is told to “get up.” He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t seem able to. He seems like he is in shock, or awe, or something. God has appeared when God wasn’t supposed to. So the Spirit has to get him up on his feet so that he can be sent off on God’s mission!!
This vision of God in the exiled land “assures us that we are never so far away that God cannot find us. Even in moments of exile, God remembers us and comes to us.”5That was good news for the exiles, and it is good news for us when we feel like exiles in our own land. God sent Ezekiel to speak to the leaders in exile. Neither their status as the upper crust nor their status as exiles prevented God from wanting to speak to them. Furthermore, their status as “unlikely to listen” doesn’t to matter either.
God sends Ezekiel to speak, and says Ezekiel is to speak WHETHER OR NOT they listen. His job is not to convince them of something, is not to make himself heard, nor is it to change their ways of doing things. His job is to speak. In speaking to them as a prophet, inherently, he is communicating that God is with them, God still cares, and nothing they do can shake God off. God sends prophets to those God loves.
I have to admit, I’m a bit preoccupied with this idea of being asked to do work WHETHER OR NOT it changes anything. (I nearly said whether or not it matters, which is likely what I really think.) What things are worth doing, even if they don’t change out comes? What things need to be said, even if they aren’t heard? What are we called to do and to be, EVEN if the world around us stays exactly the same?
I guess that’s another way of saying, “What is God wanting us to do or say?” because it seems that the things that could matter so much that they need to be done regardless of outcome would be things that are that important because God asks us to do them. What injustices need to be named, what alarm bells need to be rung, what cries need to be wailed, what joy needs to be exclaimed, what love needs to be exclaimed… whether or not anyone hears it, just because it has to be done?
Jesus went and preached in his hometown, which wasn’t likely to matter. They already knew what they thought of him. Ezekiel got sent to preach to the leaders in exile, and they weren’t going to listen. But they both went anyway. Jesus sent his disciples off giving them a way not to carry with the the failure of any group to listen to them. In doing so, he made it possible to remember that what needs to be said needs to be said regardless of who listens. Some will listen, some won’t, the message needs to be shared.
So, what is it that God needs us to say, regardless of who listens? (Answers welcome at any time.) Amen
1 Feasting on the Word, Exegetical Commentary on Mark 6:10-13, p. 215.
2Feasting on the Word, Exegetical Commentary on Ezekiel 2:1-5, page 199.
3Katheryn Pfisterer Darr “The Book of Ezekiel: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, Leander E. Keck Covener of the Editorial Board (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2001), 1078.
4Festing on the Word, Homiletical Commentary on Ezekiel 2:1-5, page 197.
5Homiletical, 197.
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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
July 8, 2018