Mark 6: 1-13

Scorn Bites

July 9, 2006

Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay

An old African American man, innocently unaware of the prejudices held against him and staunchly religious, some years ago applied for membership in an exclusive church. The pastor attempted to put him off with all sorts of evasive remarks. The old man, becoming aware that he was not wanted, said finally that he would pray on it and perhaps the Lord would tell him just what to do.

Several days later he returned. “Well,” asked the minister, “ did the Lord send you a message?”

“Yes sir, he did”, was the answer. “Jesus told me it wasn’t any use. He said, ‘I’ve been trying to get in that same church myself for ten years, and I still can’t make it.’” (cited in The Spirituality of Imperfection, pg. 197)

The sermon this day calls us to consider how it is we welcome the Christ.

I spend twenty days a year in a Benedictine monastery. The Rule of St Benedict is grounded in the insistence that each of us is to see in the other the image of the Christ. See it, and welcome it, and know it to be sacred.

The Benedictines talk about the power of hospitality a lot. And they don’t just talk about it. They seek to live it. And I am one lucky woman for having been on the receiving end of it. Twenty days a year the community of Our Lady of Grace Monastery takes in a group of thirty clergy women in various stages of burn out, exhaustion, and hope. And they see Christ in us so exquisitely that we become able to see it within our selves.

No small gift, that. It is an intentional commitment to ministry in the way of Jesus.

Because he knew what it was to be turned away as suspect or less than sacred. And he didn’t want his disciples to participate in that kind of blasphemy. For it is a sort of blasphemy, the judging of others to such an extent that they are pushed out of community. It is blasphemy, because we are, each one of us, made in the image of God. So to shun one is to shun God and that is not the way of the gospel. It just is not.

So, what has this to do with us?

Today’s text would have us to know that sometimes the hardest people to treat as Christ in our lives are the ones we are most familiar with. We make assumptions about who they are based on some of the things we know about them: whose child they are, what their profession is, who they are partnered with, what color their skin is.

In the case of Jesus, the crowd in Nazareth told him what they thought of his credentials. He was known to them as “Mary’s Son”, a polite way of saying they were none too sure who his father was. There are words for that in the vernacular of our day. And, he was a carpenter. A man who worked with his hands in order to make a living. Surely this man of questionable heritage and social standing would not presume to teach them? Who, exactly, did he think he was?

So they shut their hearts to him. They bit him with their scorn and judgments and sent him away.

And who was the poorer for it? What had they missed, these complacent and judgmental villagers?

I served the United Methodist church in Duluth at the Coppertop church on the Skyline. I was able to meet the Christ in many I encountered. And some of the people who radiated that witness were some of the least expected.

One of them was a woman by the name of Susan. Susan dealt with a host of mental health issues. I first met her on the Fourth of July at a carnival we held in the parking lot - we had the best view of Duluth in town. Susan was scaring people, especially the children, because she was foul of mouth and full of anger. I engaged her, trying to soften or silence or, quite frankly, shut her up so I would be more comfortable. She complied, a bit, but every time she came to church - and she was one of our most faithful attendees - I was never sure how it would go.

She didn’t have much time for me. She adored Cooper, the male pastor. For him, all things were possible. With me, well, in her mind I was cast in an adversarial role. So I was always wary. And grateful when it went well. And frustrated by my lack of connection with her.

I was ordained an elder in the United Methodist church five years ago. It was the culmination of five years of seminary, five years of parish ministry, and five years of navigating the ingenious- and of course very meaningful - hoops the United Methodist church creates to insure that ordained Elders are able to serve in healthy ways.

As United Methodists we ordain in a group. Other denominations ordain their clergy in services designed for the individual, and those services take place in local churches. Not so we United Methodists. Because we are ordained to serve the world as our parish and thus are not ordained to serve an individual church as a distinct individual, we are ordained with our brothers and sisters in the movement.

The service of Ordination takes place in St Cloud every year. The music is wonderful, the liturgy is moving, and the Spirit of God took me as an ordinand by the heart and said “yes, you I can use”. I was so huge with the Spirit.

So I was to preach the next day, back in Duluth. I was grateful to do so. I had so much I wanted to say by way of thanks and so much savoring I was happy to do back in my ministry setting.

Still stuffed from the feast of worship and Spirit experienced at ordination, I walked up to the church on Sunday so full of vision for the ministry to which I was called. The world sparkled with promise.

As I approached the door, the first person to greet me, outside for her morning cigarette, was Susan. She was in a particularily cantankerous way, wanting to know when Cooper was going to be there and other sorts of things that jostled all the tender places in my nice woman’s heart.

And I thought: O God, you are truly amazing!

You will not let me forget.

You won’t let me forget that the trumpets and glory of worship and sacrament are not why we are church. Worship and community are meant to be bread for the journey as we go undertaker the real reason we are your people:

We are ministers of your Gospel.

People who know what it is to fall down and get back up again and fall down and get back up again and so we tell the story of what it means to live the way of repentance - an intentional turning to God.

We are a people called to exorcise demons. To cast out the “isms” like racism and classism and other ways of judging and sorting that bedevil our world.

And we are a people called to heal. Oh, to touch with the grace of your love the places of pain in the world and in the soft good of our own hearts.

Dorothy Day was a Catholic woman who knew this well. She began the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, a hospitality and justice ministry fierce in speaking the message of seeing the Christ in all.

She is being considered for canonization by the Catholic church. And she has this to say to we who would dodge our call to ministry:

“It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give
room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have
been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in
our hearts.

But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that He speaks, with
the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes;
with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that He gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that He walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that He longs for shelter.

And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is
giving it to Christ.” (Dorothy Day, “Room for Christ“)

The challenge we face as church and as people who are sanctuaries is this:

Would Jesus be able to get into this church or our lives?

Where do we let our scorn for the differences in others blind us to the Christ in each?

Because we know this: Jesus will show up as a Republican or aLesbians or Gen X’er or a schizophrenic or as a poor person or a person of color or a Democrat or as a classical musician or jazz lovers and as people who frustrate us and scare us and whom we have written off.

So will we welcome the Christ in each as the image of God?

Or will we send them him on his way, bearing scorn bites?

We are church in order to do the work Jesus calls us to:

Teaching forgiveness, calling out oppression, and healing.

And we do this work in the best of company.

Amen