Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

7/9/06 - Proper 9B

The Rev. Sarah Ball-Damberg

Mark 6:1-6

I grew up spending summers in north Georgia in the southernmost end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I know the woods there well, just like I know the bends and rocks in the creek where we spent hours and hours building dams and taking creek walks. But it wasn't until a few years ago that I began finding chantrelles there. Some of you may know about chantrelles: they're beautiful little orange mushrooms that smell a little like apricots.

It's not that chantrelles suddenly appeared where they'd never been before. It's that a friend of the family's came to visit and walked through the woods saying, "Oh wow! Chantrelles!" So my parents learned what they looked like and taught us in turn.

Now we walk through the woods keeping an eye out and, lo and behold, we see chantrelles. Just last Monday my girls and I took our dog for a walk in the woods and came home with enough chantrelles for a very nice mid-afternoon snack.

Learning to see something is like that sometimes. Someone shows us something new and suddenly we see that new thing wherever we look. It's been there all along, right before our very eyes, it's just that we didn't know what we were looking at.

Mark's description of what happens when Jesus goes back to his hometown for a visit is a portrait of what it's like before we learn to see something new. Jesus has been roaming the country curing the sick, casting out demons, and - most recently -- raising the dead. And he gets home and a crowd gathers and exclaims, "Wow, he's so wise," and "oh my goodness he's done so many deeds of power," and "gee whiz, this is Mary's boy, right?"

And then - in one of the most spectacular non-sequiturs in all of Scripture - they take offense at him. Right at the point where Jesus' neighbors might be expected to start ohhing and ahhing and laying claim to him -- "Isn't he something? Grew up right here, you know." -- they draw back instead. When these people who know Jesus best of all look at him, they don't see a powerful healer. They don't see the Son of God who was incarnate right there before their very eyes. They see Mary's illegitimate son, the boy who grew up in their midst. And what they see is what they get: Mark reports that Jesus could do no deed of power in Nazareth.

Their reaction isn't all that surprising, really. What rational person expects to discover the Son of God at the neighborhood potluck, or working in the woodshop, or walking down Main Street in the middle of the day? Jesus' neighbors were Jews who expected the Messiah, the King of Israel, to come as God had promised. But they surely didn't expect that the Messiah would turn out to be Mary's kid, the carpenter who lived down the block. Shouldn't the Messiah come with a little more panache? A little spectacle? Shouldn't he ride in on a horse like a mighty warrior and king? At a minimum, shouldn't there at least be a few trumpets playing?

And, of course, we're not so different from Jesus' neighbors. We have our own assumptions and expectations about God and how and where God should appear, whether we're aware of them or not. And sometimes those assumptions and expectations block our view. Sometimes we're so busy looking heavenward for the clouds to part and the light to stream down, we miss seeing God who's already in our midst.

Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes something's so awful - a tsunami hits, a hurricane wipes out whole cities - we're left asking, "Where was God? Where was God for those who were suffering?"

In both instances - both when there's not much happening and when there's too much happening - we may not be able to see God yet. We may stand with the psalmist who 'waits with eyes look[ing] to the Lord our God until He shows us His mercy.' God reveals God's self on His schedule, not ours. We may have to wait, and that's hard.

But we can be learning to see. We can be learning to recognize God while we're waiting.

There's a phrase Celtic Christians use to describe places where the veil between this world and the eternal world seems especially transparent. They call those places 'thin places.' Places where the holy seems especially visible to the human eye. Some of those places are well-known, places like Iona, Scotland which has drawn pilgrims for centuries because there is just something holy about the place.

The Eucharist is one of the thin places in the world, one of the places where it's easier to get a glimpse of the holy in the midst of our ordinary lives.

One reason we gather for worship Sunday after Sunday is precisely so that we can learn to see. Gathering together to hear God's Word, to hear the story of our salvation, to offer our praise and thanksgiving in response, to exchange the peace of Christ with one another, to be fed by Christ's Body and Blood, and then sent out into the world to be Christ's Body for others - all of those practices train us to see as God would have us see.

A book came out a few years back entitled, A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman. In it the author, Robert Hughes, writes:

It is easy to look, but learning to see is a more gradual business, and it sneaks up on you unconsciously, by stealth. The sign that it is happening is the fact that you are not bored by the absence of the spectacular.

What is true for someone fishing is also true for a Christian: learning to see can be a gradual business. It takes practice and it takes community. We need each other's help to get beyond seeing our idea of God to seeing God. None of us can be the Body of Christ on our own.

But once we begin to see, God turns up in all kinds of unexpected places. It turns out there are a lot of thin places out there. One of the state's mental health facilities -- John Umstead Hospital up in Butner -- where I did an internship last fall, is one of those places for me. I'm curious to know if Ocean Springs, Mississippi was a thin place for any of the folks who went there a few weeks back.

The difference between learning to see as God would have us see and learning to see as Robert Hughes describes it is that we're never bored by the absence of the spectacular because what we learn to see is spectacular. Here we are, longing for God to act, longing to see God in our midst. And here is Jesus, right in front of us, as near to us as our nearest neighbor. That's what we learn to see. And what we see is indeed what we get. Jesus is what we have been given and he is present with us always. For those with eyes to see, the spectacular is all around us.                   

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