From Home Town to New Towns – Sunday 7th July

Things are different in your hometown. You know the place and you are often so well known in your hometown.

This can be good. People know you. You know them. They remember you when you were young because they were young with you. You grew up together, had fun together, went through rough times together. You share the same stories, the same places, the same people. It gives you a certain strength or confidence to know who you are and what life is.

But this can work against you. Because you are so well known, and you know them so well, people might have a bit of trouble receiving you as you grow and change. You might struggle to be and do anything new or different.

It’s like when the guy you went to school with comes back from a long time overseas. He has learnt the trade, got well qualified and now has all kinds of different experiences that have made him a valuable commodity in the industry – a person who can bring new skills and techniques into play – skills and techniques that are not ‘normal’ in the hometown scene.

So, the guy introduces a new thing, a change of practice, a change to understanding in a very important area of life – your livelihood, your friends, your mates, your community …

It is then that you have a decision to make. You can put all the old memories (good and bad) away and receive something new from this person who obviously is now not the same person you once knew, or take offence at his big ideas, dig in, don’t budge and hope he goes away to some other place – thereby never growing, learning, being anything different and needed.

The people in Nazareth chose the latter when it came to this obviously very different Jesus who they once knew.

Isn’t this guy just a local tradee? Hasn’t he always had some rather interesting parental issues – like not a real dad (‘Mary’s Son’ – no mention of Joseph)? Isn’t he just like all his siblings? They haven’t changed.

In other words, “Who does he think he is!”

The word Mark uses to describe their attitude with Jesus is ‘scandalised’. They are not just speaking words of little faith in him, but NO faith in him. They are, in fact, rejecting he is of any use to them. They are offended by his big stories and actions, and they are turning their back on him.

They were not the only ones. Like the Pharisees before this day, Jesus’ hometown folks may have thought that the only way he could do the things he was doing was by being more evil than evil.

Or, they may have thought, as did his siblings and even his Mum, that Jesus was getting a bit unhinged.

Nothing has changed really. So many people would arrive at similar conclusions in our day. Jesus, if he even existed, was just another crazy guy who might have done some good but eventually was shot down.

Or more. Jesus and the community he established is the same –  it is dangerous. It pollutes our minds with myths and fairy tales … – stops our freedom, our effort to be better humans …

We hear that as a result of this ample lack of any faith at all, Jesus could only do a few good things among them and unusually, Jesus was ‘amazed’. That’s rare. Jesus usually does the ‘amazing’ work and words. But he is amazed at their complete lack of faith in him – their total rejection of him.

Nothing new, he knows. He says that this is the way it often was for all the Old Testament prophets. None of them were terribly well receive in their home country. Hosea says (Hosea 9:7)

Can this be us? I think so, because this can be me.

Long term church people can be an awful lot like this hometown crowd. So familiar with the words of faith, the patterns of public worship, the teaching we have received so many years, the stories we have shared and the songs we have sung.

There is of course enormous strength in these things. The biblical stories and teaching we know, the songs we sing, the sacraments we receive and live in, the prayers we pray the solid building we occupy – they do keep us together and give us a core strength in an ever- changing world in which we are engaged in God’s ever moving mission.

But it can be, of course, that this familiarity breeds not so much contempt (although for some that happens), but more a sleepiness, a comfortability and worse – idolatry – where the prayers and the songs and the patterns and buildings and our story become THE thing we want to keep and protect and defend more than the Jesus who gave us all these things.

Instead of being led into new places, new friendships, new ways to hear his Word or pray or serve others in his name, we stick to what we know of him and stay put – even rejecting the possibility that Jesus is still new, still moving, still speaking, still teaching and serving me and you, calling us to follow him into his plans for his world and our lives.

But just because we have little faith at times, does not seem to stop Jesus. That is what I found such good news here.

Did you hear how he responded to the dullness of his hometown crowd?

Wow.  In response to no faith by some he puts his faith in his Father, and in his close twelve and sends them out to do what he has been doing. The hometown lack of faith leads to a new mission of faith expanded. We are still going from hometown to others towns!

The limited healing, freeing, hope and life able to be done by one person is now multiplied 12 times!

Jesus does not settle for a sleepy church but sends it to be a multiplying church.

Finally the belief that puts all the weight on the shoulders of the one person – the Pastor, (and that pastor readily accepting the full weight of all the responsibility and the work as church) are gone, and we now have what we were always meant to be – the Pastor equipping, inviting, calling and support all God’s people in this sent mission in our town.

We see here that the pastor was never only here to do the work of ministry and mission while everyone else just pops in for a weekly spiritual fix, but was always here to send, to call, to help, to equip and support the church doing the work together with him.

I love it that Jesus does not take a backward step. He takes the depressing situation among people he loves and edges out further from them into the new.

But let’s not get it wrong. He does not send them to take on a ‘power’ approach. Those Twelve are given very specific and quite surprising directions as they were sent.

In other words, “Trust me, not your own power and smarts by being a GUEST among the people to whom you are sent”.

Do what you do from a position of reliance on Jesus’ word and power, and on the people to whom you are sent. Go with my word, my authority to where they live. Stay with them, eat with them, be with them ON THEIR TERMS, and exercise my healing and freeing authority as you can. If you can’t, then leave that place and keep going …

See how the mission is not in any way to dominate, cajole, argue, manipulate by sheer power (of which Jesus could do plenty). He gives them his authority, yes, but they use it always as GUESTS, and as Peter would later say – with ‘gentleness and respect’, as they give their account of the hope they have in this Jesus of Nazareth the Son of God (1 Peter 4:2)

Friend, Jesus is beyond your ‘normal’.  He is here to transform, change, call and send you.

He has not finished his work in you or us yet. Every day you have that same decision to make. Will I let what has been go and see what he has in store next or dig in, stay put and hope he goes away?

Your lack of faith or tendency to dwell in the past and run away from the now and the future out of fear or doubt that you can’t do anything valuable is obviously no match for the future he has prepared for us in his new heaven and earth, of which you are part.

So still go. We go from this hometown to other towns.

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