The Sixth Sunday after Trinity

Sermon

7 July 2024

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

Ezekiel 2.1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12.2-10; Mark 6.1-13.

The people of Nazareth would have known Jesus, presumably, as the eldest son of a family that had arrived from Egypt in the politically turbulent time following the death of King Herod. The family had grown and would have become a significant presence in a village of about 400 people, where everyone knew everyone else. Like most peasant societies, this was an acutely status conscious society, and Joseph, Mary, Jesus, James and Joses and Judas and Simon and their sisters would have had to fit in. A carpenter is more than a labourer, but less than a Rabbi or a landowner. And now Jesus turns up with a bunch of disciples, and the people of Nazareth don’t know what to do. Jeuss used to be a nice polite lad, a little odd, and a slight whiff of scandal around his birth. Are they now to treat him as a Man of God, of more authority than the local Rabbi, the well-known local landowners and officials?

I wonder, by the way, how Sir Keir Starmer’s friends from Merle Common Primary School think about him. For those who shared a desk, at the age of seven, with this solemn and slightly awkward boy with a funny name, it must seem strange to imagine him as Prime Minister. Oxted and Merle Common can cope with Keir Starmer, I am sure, but Nazareth could not cope with Jesus. Here is a disruption to all the structures of honour and deference around which they build their lives. Treat him as an imposter and you will start a feud. Treat him as what he appears to be and everyone else is smaller.

No matter what Jesus says or does, he cannot be accepted. The wiser the words and the greater the deeds, the more intractable the problem. The people of Nazareth do what most people do under such circumstances – they search around for a reason to be dismissive so that they do not have to think for themselves about the challenge. “Familiarity breeds contempt” as the saying goes, and contempt is an easier option than facing up to the possibility that here is something truly new, disruptive, extraordinary.

I think “contempt” is not a bad word to describe how our culture feels about our faith. My students speak elaborately of “respect”, but this is primarily a polite distancing from a phenomenon they believe to be perverse and dishonourable.

And “Familiarity”, in some sense, is part of the problem. I suspect that have been introduced to a few easy to digest fragments of Christian teaching, mostly by teachers who are themselves very “respectful”. They can all see together how absurd they really are.

It is quite convenient, also, as our culture laments our destruction of our environment, and some truly disgraceful episodes in our colonial history, to blame Christianity, and congratulate oneself that at least we are shot of that. They did that. That is not our problem. So, we find ourselves much more marginal that we are used to and facing the challenge of evangelism with far fewer resources than our predecessors. This may, however, be an opportunity as well as a problem.

In his extraordinary 1978 book “Christianity Rediscovered” Vincent Donovan writes of his work as a missionary among the Maasai in Kenya. A proud independent people. Generations of Christian missionaries had come to the Maasai with education, healthcare, and all the panoply of the mission station, and had achieved practically nothing in the way of convincing the Maasai that Christ might be their Lord. Fr Vincent Donovan chose to go out on his own, to meet with groups, to discuss with them the extraordinary mysteries and teachings of the Christian faith. He would offer them, at the end of a few months, the choice to repent, believe and be baptised, or to turn down the gospel – in which case he would trouble them no more. Vincent Donovan believed that this style of Evangelism, which closely echoes the instructions in today’s gospel given by Jesus to his disciples in Galilee, was the only way he could persuade the Maasai to take his good news seriously. It seemed to work.

So, it may just possibly be a good thing that we find ourselves, as Christians, being stripped of the Cultural privilege that we have enjoyed for a millennium or more. There is no doubt that what we have to say is profoundly disruptive, in the way that Jesus and his disciples were profoundly disruptive to Nazareth. Here are some of our disruptive teachings. That God created all things from nothing and infused the entire creation with his love. That human beings are created persons, with eternity in their hearts, and can never be at peace until they acknowledge this. That what we are is not what we wish to be, nor yet what God wills. We are broken, damaged, limping towards healing. That the cost of that damage was so profound that it entailed the death of God in Christ. That we are called to a dance on the cliff edge of eternity and drawing ever closer. All these are profoundly disruptive teachings in a world that copes with the most fundamental realities of existence largely by trying very hard not to think about them.

We find ourselves in the position of those 12 disciples sent out by Jesus, with authority over evil spirits, to teach the good news of the kingdom of God. It turns out that it is a world haunted with evil spirits and spirit sicknesses (Let me tell you some of the names of spirits that hare haunting us. Death, fear, loneliness, anger, resentment, meaninglessness, pride, greed, self-loathing, envy, pornography, opioids to name but a few). Once give such spirits entrance and they will gobble up your life. And we are sent out. Vs 7: He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits.

It is simply our business to tell people who is our Lord. Vs 8. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.

It is hard, because we are familiar people, or familiar kinds of people, and those we speak to have trained themselves to assume that we have nothing new to say. But it is getting easier, because what we have to say is increasingly unfamiliar – extraordinary perhaps, bizarre, but sufficiently startling to command attention.

Six pairs of disciples began a revolution.

Now it is our turn. We need to go out and proclaim the gospel. This is our proclamation. The saving power of God is very close. Rethink your lives. Believe the good news.