“Prophets are not without honor – except in their hometown and among their own kin.” Now is probably a good time to mention that my brother is in the congregation today. Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Collins, along with his wife Emily and my niece Briley, are worshipping with us this morning.
I think if you ask my brother at coffee hour after the service, he might admit that my becoming a priest was somewhat of a surprise to him and to others in my family. And I can’t blame them for that. There were times in my life when it looked like I was bound for ignominy rather than ordination. And as far as being a prophet. Well, I didn’t only develop my prophetic voice after ordination. This won’t surprise anyone here, but I’ve been known to speak out on a few issues here and there long before Bishop Sisk ordained me a priest.
And in terms of my prophetic utterances being honored and heeded by my kin. Let me just say, I know that on every election day, when I step into the voting booth in my precinct in Harlem, and draw the curtain closed behind me, I know that somewhere in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, my brother is stepping into the voting booth in his polling place – and with the flip of a lever, he’s cancelling out my vote.
Just the other night my sister-in-law Emily noted that as we get older, my brother and I look more and more alike -- and we certainly do. But who we are is a bit different that who we look like. Who we all are, our truest identities are colored by where we come from, who our parents are, what our socio-economic background is. But who we are is not solely a matter of background and genealogy. Who we are is a result of who we have chosen to become, and who God intends us to be. And sometimes, as with Jesus in today’s gospel, who we are puts us at odds with our family, our communities, our country, our times.
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has already run afoul of his family once before. In chapter 3, some in Jesus’ family seek to put a stop to his preaching and teaching, fearing that he’s gone mad and is becoming an embarrassment. In the chapters that immediately precede today’s gospel, Jesus has been travelling throughout Galilee and its environs doing many wonderful works. Last Sunday, we heard how he cured Jairus’ daughter. The Sunday before, Jesus quieted the storm on the Sea of Galilee and cured the man of Gerasa possessed by the demon Legion.
And what Jesus has been saying and doing has been greeted by great faith by h the Gerasene demonic and Jairus, the leader of the synagogue, and the woman with the hemorrhage.
But then, when he gets to his hometown – Jesus is treated like an upstart, an interloper in the synagogue, a local boy putting on airs.
And why wouldn’t he be? After all, Jesus is merely a carpenter, a local craftsman, isn’t he? He’s certainly not one of the educated classes who might be worth listening to as he expounds on scripture and preaches to the people.
Who Jesus is, who he really is, is an ongoing concern for Mark. In his gospel, we hear the opinions of rulers, religious authorities, crowds, disciples -- everyone from John the Baptist at the beginning of Mark to the centurion at the foot of the cross will weigh in on Jesus’ identity. By asking the question over and over, Mark gets us to ask ourselves the same question. And our answers help us define who Jesus is for us, and in so doing, we define who we are in Christ Jesus.
If Jesus is indeed a prophet or even our Lord and savior, then what does that make us? And what does that do to our relationships with our families, with those we grew up with? How does who Jesus was and is affect our relationships to each other and to the culture around us? How does who Jesus was and is affect how we relate to injustice, war and violence, hunger and need?
In answering these questions for yourself, you come away from an encounter with the gospel with what we call a confession of faith, a statement of belief that says a lot about who you believe God to be, and a lot about what you as a child of God are going to do about it.
What the townspeople of Nazareth who are so taken aback by Jesus don’t yet know is that Jesus is much more than a local carpenter. He is that, indeed, but he is also the incarnation of God in a human being. In Jesus, God has joined his divinity with our rebellious, distrustful humanity.
Why such a thing, we might ask… Why did the Word become flesh in Jesus? Perhaps because, as Paul tells us, ‘power is made perfect in weakness’. That may be. Some Process theologians might agree that such is the case. When our creator took on human form, then God became something more than God had been before. And God’s creation became something entirely new. God became one with his own creation – and through Jesus, God came to know, from first hand experience, just what it’s like for those of us wrapped tightly in this mortal coil…
What it’s like to be vaunted one minute and reviled the next. What it’s like to loose close friends and mourn for them, as Jesus did for Lazarus, to be abandoned by your comrades in the cause when the going gets tough. To be falsely accused, tried and convicted. To be a victim of capital punishment. Yes, God in Jesus truly lived and died as one of us.
But more importantly, it is we who have become something immensely greater as a result of the incarnation. We have become, as the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘but little lower than the angels.”
As the great 20th century Anglican theologian C. S. Lewis wrote, “The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal -- came into nature -- into human nature -- descended into his own universe, and rose again, bringingnature up with him… If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left.” (“The Grand Miracle” 1947)
Our God knows us, literally ‘from the inside out’. Our God knows what it’s like to be vilified and glorified, what it’s like to flop in his own hometown, what it’s like to love, to be tempted, to grieve, to die.
He might even have known what it was like to have a Republican for a brother.
We would do well to remember that. It will help us to live more faithfully as the beloved of God. To live as if nothing can separate us from the love of God. For truly “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
How could it? For our God resides deep with in us, and it is in him that we live and move and
have our being. For all our great diversity, all our differing identities, it is that one single truth that lies at the core of who we are in Christ Jesus. And nothing can separate us from that, nothing can change that truth. Nothing can change that identity.
The medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart put it another way, “A pear seed grows into a pear tree, and a hazelnut seed grows into a hazelnut tree and a seed of God grows into God. God does not ask anything else of you but to let yourself go and let God be God in you.” +Amen.
I think if you ask my brother at coffee hour after the service, he might admit that my becoming a priest was somewhat of a surprise to him and to others in my family. And I can’t blame them for that. There were times in my life when it looked like I was bound for ignominy rather than ordination. And as far as being a prophet. Well, I didn’t only develop my prophetic voice after ordination. This won’t surprise anyone here, but I’ve been known to speak out on a few issues here and there long before Bishop Sisk ordained me a priest.And in terms of my prophetic utterances being honored and heeded by my kin. Let me just say, I know that on every election day, when I step into the voting booth in my precinct in Harlem, and draw the curtain closed behind me, I know that somewhere in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, my brother is stepping into the voting booth in his polling place – and with the flip of a lever, he’s cancelling out my vote.
Just the other night my sister-in-law Emily noted that as we get older, my brother and I look more and more alike -- and we certainly do. But who we are is a bit different that who we look like. Who we all are, our truest identities are colored by where we come from, who our parents are, what our socio-economic background is. But who we are is not solely a matter of background and genealogy. Who we are is a result of who we have chosen to become, and who God intends us to be. And sometimes, as with Jesus in today’s gospel, who we are puts us at odds with our family, our communities, our country, our times.
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has already run afoul of his family once before. In chapter 3, some in Jesus’ family seek to put a stop to his preaching and teaching, fearing that he’s gone mad and is becoming an embarrassment. In the chapters that immediately precede today’s gospel, Jesus has been travelling throughout Galilee and its environs doing many wonderful works. Last Sunday, we heard how he cured Jairus’ daughter. The Sunday before, Jesus quieted the storm on the Sea of Galilee and cured the man of Gerasa possessed by the demon Legion.
And what Jesus has been saying and doing has been greeted by great faith by h the Gerasene demonic and Jairus, the leader of the synagogue, and the woman with the hemorrhage.
But then, when he gets to his hometown – Jesus is treated like an upstart, an interloper in the synagogue, a local boy putting on airs.
And why wouldn’t he be? After all, Jesus is merely a carpenter, a local craftsman, isn’t he? He’s certainly not one of the educated classes who might be worth listening to as he expounds on scripture and preaches to the people.
Who Jesus is, who he really is, is an ongoing concern for Mark. In his gospel, we hear the opinions of rulers, religious authorities, crowds, disciples -- everyone from John the Baptist at the beginning of Mark to the centurion at the foot of the cross will weigh in on Jesus’ identity. By asking the question over and over, Mark gets us to ask ourselves the same question. And our answers help us define who Jesus is for us, and in so doing, we define who we are in Christ Jesus.
If Jesus is indeed a prophet or even our Lord and savior, then what does that make us? And what does that do to our relationships with our families, with those we grew up with? How does who Jesus was and is affect our relationships to each other and to the culture around us? How does who Jesus was and is affect how we relate to injustice, war and violence, hunger and need?
In answering these questions for yourself, you come away from an encounter with the gospel with what we call a confession of faith, a statement of belief that says a lot about who you believe God to be, and a lot about what you as a child of God are going to do about it.
What the townspeople of Nazareth who are so taken aback by Jesus don’t yet know is that Jesus is much more than a local carpenter. He is that, indeed, but he is also the incarnation of God in a human being. In Jesus, God has joined his divinity with our rebellious, distrustful humanity.
Why such a thing, we might ask… Why did the Word become flesh in Jesus? Perhaps because, as Paul tells us, ‘power is made perfect in weakness’. That may be. Some Process theologians might agree that such is the case. When our creator took on human form, then God became something more than God had been before. And God’s creation became something entirely new. God became one with his own creation – and through Jesus, God came to know, from first hand experience, just what it’s like for those of us wrapped tightly in this mortal coil…
What it’s like to be vaunted one minute and reviled the next. What it’s like to loose close friends and mourn for them, as Jesus did for Lazarus, to be abandoned by your comrades in the cause when the going gets tough. To be falsely accused, tried and convicted. To be a victim of capital punishment. Yes, God in Jesus truly lived and died as one of us.
But more importantly, it is we who have become something immensely greater as a result of the incarnation. We have become, as the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘but little lower than the angels.”
As the great 20th century Anglican theologian C. S. Lewis wrote, “The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal -- came into nature -- into human nature -- descended into his own universe, and rose again, bringingnature up with him… If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left.” (“The Grand Miracle” 1947)Our God knows us, literally ‘from the inside out’. Our God knows what it’s like to be vilified and glorified, what it’s like to flop in his own hometown, what it’s like to love, to be tempted, to grieve, to die.
He might even have known what it was like to have a Republican for a brother.
We would do well to remember that. It will help us to live more faithfully as the beloved of God. To live as if nothing can separate us from the love of God. For truly “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
How could it? For our God resides deep with in us, and it is in him that we live and move and
have our being. For all our great diversity, all our differing identities, it is that one single truth that lies at the core of who we are in Christ Jesus. And nothing can separate us from that, nothing can change that truth. Nothing can change that identity.The medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart put it another way, “A pear seed grows into a pear tree, and a hazelnut seed grows into a hazelnut tree and a seed of God grows into God. God does not ask anything else of you but to let yourself go and let God be God in you.” +Amen.
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
1 comment:
Wow, Loved your sermon. Did Barry enjoy it. Loved the part about him canceling out your vote....I can relate to that. You two do look more alike. Great seeing you today.
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