Nothing But
Mark 6: 1-13

July 6, 2003

Two stories, different but related, are before us. The first tells about the lack of success Jesus had in teaching in his hometown. People are offended he can talk like that, that he’s gotten uppity and thinks he is better than them. You know very well the words and attitudes. Jesus could perform no deed of power there. After all, Jesus keeps saying it, a person is healed by his/her own faith, not by Jesus’ touch.

Then in obvious contrast, Jesus travels to the rural villages teaching. People evidently listen; there is a receptive environment. There is no word about Jesus trying to heal people in this region; instead he sends out his disciples, with nothing but their faith, and they do heal.

Too bad about Nazareth or Capernaum, we think. Of all the places in the world, these towns were blessed to have Jesus live and grow up there. And then they blow it because of all those small town attitudes with which most of you are all too familiar. Was it really Galilee, or didn’t the evangelist make a mistake and mean Saskatchewan?

It was back to Kneecap, Saskatchewan, that the young doctor had decided to return. He had grown up there, went to the U of Regina, then on to medical school in Saskatoon, and eventually had migrated to a big hospital in Toronto where he really established himself as an excellent doctor. But Toronto is sprawling and fast and impersonal, so he decided to return home to the slower pace of Saskatchewan. His young children would reap the benefits of growing up in a small prairie town where everyone knew your name.

That’s what we want in these towns: “one of ours” had come home to set up a practice, and God knows doctors are needed desperately in small-town Saskatchewan. Ol’ Doc Benson had retired after 35 years here and it took Kneecap two years to find someone willing to come. However, once the word had gotten around, a handful of residents started making arrangements to take their “doctoring” out of town.

“What’s wrong?” some surprised residents asked the ones leaving for medical care elsewhere. “Don’t you think he’s a good doctor?” “Nope, I guess he’s a good doctor. But we’ve known him and his family since he was a little kid. All I can see is a dirty little kid running around with a runny nose. I just want to take my handkerchief and wipe his nose every time I see him. I can’t go to a doctor like that.”

The problem was not that they didn’t know him; they knew him too well. Actually, they couldn’t think of this young doctor except as the little kid of the past. It was too hard to listen to anything new he had to say, because that meant since he had changed, you had to change and adjust as well.

I grew up in a large downtown church like this one. I went away to university, then seminary, and after one pastorate, circumstances worked out that I came back to my home congregation as the associate minister. This is a major taboo for ministers: you can’t go home again and serve in your home church.

But things worked out very well, and it wasn’t because I was good. I was still quite wet behind the ears. Growing up in the church almost anywhere in the 1950s is a far cry from today. I remember my mother, brother, and I always being a little behind schedule and barely getting to squeeze into the balcony of that 1200 seat sanctuary. When I returned in 1974, the average attendance was 125. Lots of the older members and a few younger people knew of me and they were glad to have “one of their own” come back.

But this had been a large metropolitan church where people lived in every zone of the city and in the suburbs. We lived about three miles from the church and no one who went to the church lived anywhere close to us. So no one in 1974 really knew me. Therefore, it was safe for me to be the minister in that church, for I had no baggage or runny noses to remind people of.

“Prophets are not without honor, except in their own hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” That’s not just a folktale, it’s a scientifically tested fact. The first quality of an excellent speaker is that he or she needs to come from out of town.

They were so unreceptive, even hostile to Jesus that they did not even listen to his words. He could do no deeds of power in Nazareth because there was no attitude of faith in the place. All they could see was a dirty little boy running around town, messing with the carpenter’s tools. Jesus could do nothing but lay hands on a few sick people and cure them, no big deal.

The big deal was left to his disciples whom he sent out as apostles to every Middlesex village and farm. He sent them with nothing but their faith, no reliance upon supplies and weapons or any fall back measures. People who did not know them listened, and had faith, and the apostles healed and cast out demons. Deeds of power, you bet.

Is the Gospel saying that if you know people really well and live closely among them, that you are more likely to reject them, to be prejudiced against them, to ostracize them? The mathematics seem to be wrong - it would be dangerous to say this in small town Saskatchewan - but the answer is undeniably Yes.

Jesus is not making some statement about the social life particularly in small rural towns, for in his experience those hinterland places were very receptive. The problem is even here in the downtown city church, wherever you know people so well, so intimately, that you know exactly who they have been – and therefore, exactly what they cannot be or become. Those attitudes are supposed to keep you humble – but humiliated is the real intention. You are not great no matter what you have accomplished. In fact, no one can do anything great, nobody is really good. The Gospel is lost.

The hardest part of being a Christian is being able to listen to and hear the Gospel. The Good News is Good, because it is invariably new, something we have not heard before, at least in that way.

You know what it takes to accept something new? Faith. Faith is the state of mind and soul that realizes that something new will not destroy who you really are, that you will survive and even thrive after something new comes into action. However, faith knows that you will have to change, sometimes radically, and you will not be the same person, the community will have to operate under different principles, different rules. For some people that is a form of death, the old ways are cast off like worn out clothing. But the message of the Gospel is that you do not die; indeed, you may live in eternal life.

If you insist that no one is better than they used to be, if you have no faith that something new may happen in the next moment, then just as we see with the Nazarenes, no deeds of power can ever take place. Maybe that’s why that saying circulated around, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” or Kneecap, Saskatchewan?

Our history and heritage are precious to us, but only if they nudge and shove you and me into doing something new as we had done in the past. If you have faith as tiny as a mustard seed, you can move mountains. Let’s keep listening to the Gospel as if you are hearing it for the first time, not assuming you already know what it says and what it means. Have faith, trust that God will make you into someone new who is more full of life than you could imagine. Everything you touch will turn into powerful deeds.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan