Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Trinity

Sunday 9th July 2006

Preached by Rev Brian Parker

The Ordinary Jesus

A photographer for a national newspaper was assigned to get pictures of a great forest fire. He was told that a small plane would be waiting to take him over the fire.

He arrived at the airstrip just an hour before sundown. Sure enough the Cessna was waiting. He jumped in with his equipment and shouted, “Let’s go!” The pilot swung the plane into the wind, and soon they were in the air.

“Fly over the north side of the fire,” said the photographer, “and make several low-level passes.”

“Why?” asked the nervous pilot.

“Because I’m going to take pictures!” retorted the photographer. “I’m a press photographer, and photographers take pictures.”

After a pause, the pilot replied, “You mean, you’re not the instructor?"

That was a moment of recognition. The fact that it happened at 10,000 feet above a forest fire made it all the more meaningful!

I listened to an interview the other day with a cyclist who was taking part in the Tour de France. By all accounts he had done well. In the interview he expressed how thrilled he was to be racing on the roads where he trained.

The Tour de France had reached his hometown. He had been given a great reception by local people who knew him well. He was their local hero and he said their support for him at this crucial stage in the race had been a great encouragement.

When Jesus began his public ministry in his hometown of Nazareth all his friends and neighbours and indeed former customers recognised “the ordinary Jesus.” They knew his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters.

They had been happy for him to repair and make furniture for them. Now in spite of the stories coming out of Galilee of his miraculous works and healing power, they didn’t want to recognise him as anything special. To them he was nothing out of the ordinary.

St Luke tells us that in Galilee he had “been praised by everyone” and crowds of people had been “amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Not so in Nazareth.

On the contrary they looked and listened to Jesus and thought him rather pretentious. “Is not this the carpenter?” They blocked their ears with prejudice. They turned a blind eye to his grace.

We could say they were filled with what the novelist George Eliot described as “the vulgar consciousness that sees nothing beyond its own petty prejudices.”

Recognising Jesus in the ordinary circumstances of our lives and in the ordinary people around us is a blessing that encourages faith and “lifts our hearts”.

But so often we cut off our nose to spite our face. Rather than open up to the love of Christ we respond to him as someone said, in an attitude of ‘discreet rebellion.”

In the crowd there were those who were openly dismissive of Jesus. Their resentment, jealousy and prejudice blocked him out. There were others who were politely dismissive. They neither welcomed him home nor turned away. They politely kept their distance.

We all know the housewife who lives in the clutter of the family home and is acutely embarrassed when someone calls unexpectedly. “The place is in such a mess”, she says and apologises profusely.

But truth to tell, the so-called mess is just the way it is. It doesn’t really matter.

God knows we live cluttered lives, no need to pretend otherwise or try to impress. God knows. He comes to us as we are – in all the clutter, warts and all. He recognises each one of us for who we are.

Jesus knew the Nazarenes of his hometown. Perhaps their reaction to him was an act of self-defence. Perhaps they were protecting their self-centred attitudes and were simply not prepared to open up to his grace. They were incapable of thinking beyond their prejudices. They weren’t prepared to get to know him better

Peter Marshall, one-time chaplain to the US Senate wrote this little poem around the idea of being open and prepared to get to know someone in spite of our prejudices and presumptions.

“We have the nicest garbage man

He empties out our garbage can

He’s just as nice as he can be

He always stops and talks to me

My mother doesn’t like his smell

But mother doesn’t know him well”.

Many people that day in Nazareth knew Jesus but they didn’t “know him well” and they were not prepared to make the effort to get to the truth of his words and his mission.

Jesus ‘marvelled at their unbelief’ and continued his ministry in the villages all around.

In doing so he showed a certain sensitivity and compassion. In the days ahead they would hear more about him. Jesus gave them time to take in the reports of his ministry. Meanwhile this ‘ordinary’ Jesus had to be about his father’s business.

Did he leave Nazareth with a sense of failure? He had failed to impress for whatever reasons.

The exam results will soon arrive. For young people it’s a time when exam success means so much and when failing can seem so final and disastrous.

Jesus failed in Nazareth but he moved on. There’s a lesson in that for anyone who meets disappointment in exams or indeed in any other circumstances.

The inventor Thomas Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime and experienced more so-called failures than successes. He didn’t look on them as failures. When something failed he would say: “Now we know one more thing that doesn’t work. We’re closer to finding one that will work.”

Failure is part of life. It was part of Jesus’ life, part of the ordinary. However some folk refuse to accept failure, refuse to move on and carry a needless burden of rejection and misery.

There was a golfer once who teed off and sent his ball into a nearby river. He gamely set out in a rowing boat and with much splashing and prodding finally landed the ball on the riverbank. However his next shot soared into dense woods. After another hacking session he managed to get it out of the woods only to see it fly into thick rough.

Two hours later he arrived on the green having taken 166 strokes on a par four hole. He had perseverance. But as a golfer on that day, on that hole he had failed big time.

 

W C Fields once said: “If at first you don’t succeed, then quit. There’s no point in being a fool about it.”

 

There are times when we will fail. We have to accept the possibility of failure and learn to accept the grace that makes it possible to go on, to pick up the ball and go to the next tee.

In Nazareth “The ordinary Jesus” failed and moved on.

Shortly before drug dealers in El Salvador murdered her, the medical missionary Ita Ford wrote to her young niece about her work helping people who were severely oppressed and suffering under an evil regime.

She wrote: “We all know the Sermon on the Mount but we somehow forget and have to re-learn it. We have to re-learn it, not so much in theory but in our own situation”.

She concluded: “I hope you can come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you: something that energises you, enthuses you, enables you to keep moving ahead.

“I can’t tell you what it might be. That’s for you to recognise, to choose, to love. I can just encourage you to start looking.

We are encouraged then to be always looking and re-learning, to recognise the Risen Christ in the ordinary. In our prayers we thank God for ‘the likeness of Christ in ordinary people” and “among the changes and chances of this mortal life” for the grace to recognise His presence with us.

In such recognition we find encouragement for today, strength to move on and peace at the last.

God of the prophets,

In every age you send the word of truth

Familiar yet new

Give us the vision to see Christ

In our midst and to welcome your saving word.

Amen.