“From ‘Here I Stand to Here We Go’”
Mark 6:1-13
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/8/18
Brian McLaren
is a pastor, preacher, teacher, and writer who grew up in a strict,
fundamentalist household and community. As a young adult, he shifted toward
evangelicalism. His theology was still fundamentalist, but its contemporary
clothing freed him from some of the wagon-circling confines of his upbringing. Still
feeling restricted, McLaren began to ease toward broader understandings of God,
scripture, and humankind. Through all of that evolution, each step had one
thing in common: As he progressed, Brian was simply moving from one static
theological encampment to another. He was searching only for a place to stop
and to say, “Here I stand.”1
In his book The
Great Spiritual Migration, McLaren calls his own bluff. And he challenges
the Church to consider where God is calling it to go in the future. “The
Bible,” he says, “is a book of migrations.”2 Humankind is always on
the move, and “Jesus himself [is] perpetually in motion, leading his disciples
from town to town, their physical movements mirroring the spiritual odyssey on
which he [leads] them.”3
McLaren’s argument makes sense to
me. Just think about the stories of creation, the flood, Abraham’s and Sarah’s
journey, Joseph in Egypt, the Exodus, and that’s just the first two books of
the Bible.
Back in
Nazareth, his hometown, Jesus confronts the immovable feast of theological and cultural
stasis, the self-satisfied entrenchment of Here
I stand. After preaching in his childhood synagogue, he gets a blistering
review from the crowd. Where’d this guy
get this stuff? Who does he think he is? We know him, and he’s no better than
us!
The people
around whom Jesus grew up can’t seem to handle the idea that anyone of
significance could arise from their midst. Indeed, Nazareth has a reputation
for being a uniquely unremarkable place.
In John 1, Nathanael initially dismisses Jesus saying, “Can anything good come
out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) If the Nazarenes are given to
such self-loathing, then they’ve earned their reputation. When folks are that
stuck, life has more in common with potted plants than pilgrims on a journey. Jesus
upsets them because he challenges not only their assumptions about who God is
and what God does, but about who they
are, and what they are capable of
doing.
After being
dismissed in his hometown, Jesus laments the people’s uninspired faith with a
familiar Greek proverb: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own
country.” Jesus expands that proverb to include the prophet’s “hometown…kin…and
house.”4 The lament isn’t a selfish thing. Jesus isn’t upset that
the crowds don’t swarm him with celebrity worship. He aches for those he
couldn’t help. And he couldn’t help them because of the community’s spiritual inertia.
Jesus leaves
Nazareth and heads into nearby towns to continue his work. And somewhere in the
midst of it all, he seems to decide that while he will do what he can, if he
empowers his disciples to do what they
can, together, they’ll reach a lot more people. That sets Jesus apart. He’s not another Pharisee. He’s more like
Moses – the leader of an Exodus. Like God taking some of the spirit that rests
on Moses and using it to empower more leaders, Jesus shares his spirit with his
disciples and sends them out. As the mastermind of a new and continuing
spiritual migration, Jesus comes not to say, Here I stand. He comes to say, Here
we go!
Yes, sometimes
we must make a stand and hold firm for justice and righteousness. Racism,
genocide, sexual abuse, exploitation of people and the environment – such
things cannot go unopposed. But we make such stands precisely because we
journey with the one who fearlessly stands
with the oppressed and stands against brutal authority. When we separate piety from discipleship,
when we separate “whosoever believes” from “when you did it to the least of
these,” a place merely to stand can allow us to ignore the commands that
bookend Jesus’ ministry: Follow me
and Go into all the world.
In one of her
books, Barbara Brown Taylor distinguishes between Christians who are ordained
to full-time ministry and Christians who make their living doing something
else. Vocationally speaking, all
Christians are called not simply to mission, but to the same mission of experiencing,
following, and sharing Jesus. The Church just hasn’t always been faithful about
empowering the laity to see themselves as ministers. The unfortunate result, Taylor
says, has been to “turn clergy into purveyors of religion and lay people into
consumers.”5
Religious
consumers, ordained and lay alike, look for a place to stand. “I’m
comfortable here,” they say.
Ministers,
ordained and lay alike, look for a place to launch, a place to say, Here we go. They say, “There’s work for us
to do together.”
Like Pharisees, many clergy have
become satisfied with, or maybe addicted to, their authority in the community.
And much of the laity has turned loose of its call to live as the priesthood of
all believers in the work-a-day world. I understand that, too. To work a
regular job and then to layer kingdom ministry on top of that sounds exhausting.
In a lecture on the ministry of the laity, Taylor called lay people “God’s best
hope for the world.” (And there are a
whole lot more folks like you than there are of folks like me!) After the
presentation a woman, perhaps from Nazareth, came up to Taylor and said, “I’m
sorry, but I don’t want to be that important.”6
Taylor
imagines that no one ever suggested to the woman “that her ministry might
involve just being who she already is and doing what she already does, with one
difference: namely, that she understand herself to be God’s person in and for
the world.”7
That can be a
hard place to get to in wealthy and entitled cultures. Having chosen to
associate ease and excess with divine blessing, western Christianity struggles
to make sense of Jesus’ call to journey with nothing but a staff, just like the
Nazarenes’ struggle to make sense of someone from Nazareth being anointed by
God. Shaped by a culture of scarcity and fear of loss, Here I stand theology trusts a stance on Jesus rather than Jesus himself.
It reduces faith to church-attendance and creedal orthodoxy.
Here we go theology – migratory theology
– is the theology of discipleship. Come what may, it trusts and follows Jesus.
Come what may, it proclaims and relies on God’s abundance. Maybe the truest affirmation
of faith is to pick up a walking stick and say, “Jesus has called us. Come what
may, here we go.”
Now, how do we
know where to go? More than once I’ve shared with you one of Frederick
Buechner’s most famous quotations: “The place God calls you to is the place
where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”8 That’s
not a call to some self-centered and nebulous follow your bliss. It’s a call to claim your baptism, to claim your
Belovedness of God and your God-given gifts and to go where you can develop
them, delight in them, and offer them for the sake of the whole creation.
Discipleship is hard work. But it’s
life-giving work. And all it requires of you is a staff. On one end of the
staff, the end that grounds you and stabilizes you, is gratitude for who you
are and for what God gives you. The other end of that staff, the end with which
you reach out to help, to forgive, and to heal, that end is love, love for God,
love for neighbor, and love for the earth.
You have your staff.
Where are you going?
1Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration:
How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian. Convergent
Books, NY, 2016. Pp. x-xi.
2Ibid. p. x.
3Ibid. p. ix.
4Efrain Agosto in his article, “Exegetical Perspective”
in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Year B/Vol.
3), Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2009. p. 215.
5Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life,
Cowley Publications, Lanham, MD, 1993. P. 28.
6Ibid. p. 29
7Ibid. p. 29.
8Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological
ABC. Harper & Row, NY, 1973. P. 95.
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