13<\/sup> And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.<\/p>\nMartin Luther was famous for his disdain of pilgrimages, seeing the effort to travel to an exotic location\u2014or at least to a \u201cfar from here\u201d location\u2014in hopes of gaining some spiritual benefit as, at best, a waste of time and money. Far better, he declared, to turn your focus on what was happening in your local parish, for there, he said you \u201cfind Christ right where you are\u201d as you serve the neighbors God has so helpfully placed around you.<\/p>\n
We, of course, (to the relief of tour organizers everywhere) reject such an idea, for we are enamored of the new and the novel, the out of the ordinary. We want innovation, celebrating what economists call \u201ccreative destruction\u201d that brings the original and the avant-garde to every aspect of life, including our very selves. A recent confessional-style essay described how a woman walked away from her marriage because any effort to save it would be a conservative betrayal of her progressive, avant-garde life and consequently close herself off to new discoveries, new growth, a new way of being. Many may cluck tongues at her conclusion, but most of us operate by the same logic, even if we are not willing to take such logic to it\u2019s\u2026 err\u2026 logical conclusion.<\/p>\n
Jesus is not immune to our desire for the novel and unique. Over the years, people of all walks of life have insisted that Jesus was not who he is as presented in the Gospels, but rather was someone special: a space alien, a world traveler, a Muslim, a Mormon, a Buddhist, a secretly married man with kids, a secretly gay man, a secretly disguised woman, and so on. Even as I share this list, you may be thinking in your mind \u201cokay, but Jesus was not ordinary!\u201d<\/p>\n
Would his own family agree with you?<\/p>\n
Part of the challenge this story from Mark puts to us is that it strongly critiques our notions of what God should do, or what divinity is about. Jesus comes to his hometown, his own family, and it does not go well. They know<\/em> this kid from Nazareth who went away and managed to build up a bit of reputation for himself. He\u2019s a carpenter! He\u2019s Mary\u2019s son! His brothers are all here! In an echo of an earlier story where Jesus\u2019 family suggests that he is out of his mind, the townspeople might as well have said \u201cyou\u2019re out of your mind if you think we\u2019re going to take someone as ordinary as us<\/em>seriously.\u201d They will not accept him as he is, but are scandalized, outraged stumbling over what they see\u2014or do not see. God should not work this way, among the ordinary and the common.<\/p>\nIn this story of Jesus coming home, we are confronted by the theology of the cross\u2014the fact that God is found in places and moments that we do not expect and flatly refuse to accept. God should not, cannot <\/em>be found in moments of ordinariness, much less in moments of humiliation and failure. \u00a0Suffering may come, but it must be suffering for a noble cause or born in noble fashion. The hometown crowd rejects the one who comes in the name of the Lord because they know \u201cthe truth:\u201d there is nothing noble or extraordinary in him.<\/p>\nWe hope to solve the problem of the cross by highlighting how extraordinary Jesus is. It does not help. We also believe that God (gods?) should be extraordinary, and so we try to save Jesus from the shame of ordinariness by creating for him a story that shows his superiority and uniqueness, that explains his suffering as we want our suffering to be explained: I am special, and I suffer because I nobly do things \u201cmy way\u201d which the world does not understand or accept.<\/p>\n
Mark reports that after the poor outcome at home, Jesus moved on. His way is forward, moving toward other villages, other places that await the dawning kingdom. His way is the way of God, and those whom he invited journeyed on with him. As they journeyed with the Lord, they found the days were so ordinary: there were meals to secure and arrangements to be made; there were sleepless nights, arguments and fights; there was boredom and confusion and puzzlement; there were people who got on board and more who did not; there was at least as much failure as success. But as they traveled with Jesus, they saw in him\u2014and in time, themselves\u2014the power to turn back the power of Satan, the power of chaos and sin and death. This power did not come because of an extraordinary back story, or because of any special qualities: it came because the disciples were willing to be obedient, to practice what Jesus taught, and rise each day and put up with each other and themselves.<\/p>\n
And now we journey with him, we have been invited to come along and discover in one another\u2014and yes, within ourselves\u2014something that is truly extraordinary: that in the midst of all the things from which we\u2019d gladly walk away, and all the events that outrage us, and all the people that we would overlook and dismiss as ordinary and common\u2014God is at work, bringing forth healing and forgiveness and peace, bringing forth wisdom and purpose and joy, bringing forth the kingdom right where we are.<\/p>\n
Amen.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Pr. David H. Brooks<\/p>\n
Raleigh, NC USA<\/p>\n
Pr.Dave.Brooks@zoho.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HOLINESS IN ORDINARINESS | The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost | 07 July 2024 | Mark 6:1-13 | David H. Brooks | Mark 6:1\u201313 English Standard Version Copyright \u00a9\u00a02001 by Crossway Bibles 1[Jesus] went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2And on the Sabbath he began to teach in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7920,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,440,157,853,108,266,110,683,349,3,109],"tags":[],"beitragende":[],"predigtform":[],"predigtreihe":[],"bibelstelle":[],"class_list":["post-20067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-markus","category-6-so-n-trinitatis","category-beitragende","category-bibel","category-current","category-david-h-brooks","category-engl","category-kapitel-6-chapter-6-markus","category-kasus","category-nt","category-predigten"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20067"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20068,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20067\/revisions\/20068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20067"},{"taxonomy":"beitragende","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/beitragende?post=20067"},{"taxonomy":"predigtform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtform?post=20067"},{"taxonomy":"predigtreihe","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtreihe?post=20067"},{"taxonomy":"bibelstelle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bibelstelle?post=20067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}