“Two by Two with Authority”
“Two by Two with Authority”
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 Psalm 48 Mark 6:1-13
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, July 7, 2024
First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho
Andy Kennaly, Pastor
Church tradition, doctrines and dogma often teach that Jesus is fully divine and fully human. Most Christians assume this is a fundamental truth. But it’s skewed because we tend to overplay the God card. The divinity gets most of the emphasis, but in doing this, we minimize the humanity of Jesus.
Stories like the one from Mark remind us that Jesus is a person, a human. This story shares of him going to his hometown. That Jesus even has a hometown, and several siblings, brothers and sisters who are named in these verses, and people who know his parents, these are aspects of Jesus’ humanity that are not typically focused on.
When I worked at Clearwater Forest in Minnesota as the Program Director one of my jobs was to plan retreats held throughout the year. Each retreat had a theme, such as Confirmation, or Snow Camp. One of the key parts of retreat planning is to have keynote speakers who can inspire through their words and stories, and hopefully teach people something that helps them leave the retreat a better person.
One of the unwritten rules about having someone come as an expert on a certain subject, to carry a special persona and be granted almost celebrity status, a type of prestige, is that they have to be from someplace else. To be an expert, you need to come from at least 50 miles away, minimum distance, the more the better. To have someone local just doesn’t have the same zing to it, the same impact. Not because the person doesn’t have things to say, but because people are not as open to hearing from someone familiar. But at a retreat, with someone brought in as an expert, people are attentive and open to the wisdom shared as the speaker taps into a larger desire to learn and grow.
In Mark, they all hear Jesus on the Sabbath in the synagogue as he teaches. “Many who heard him were astounded” is what it says. Then comes a list of questions, most likely asked in a mocking tone, with irritation. The peoples’ assumptions, perspectives, and ability to control are challenged by whatever it is Jesus says. The hometown crowd didn’t like the type of wisdom he shared. Or maybe they liked the wisdom, but they didn’t like that he shared it.
Two things are happening. One, he broke the rule of being an expert because he was a local guy. But more influential is a second thing, that most people identify with their false-self, and through dualistic thinking, from their perspective, the judging mind is easily offended. Once judgment has been passed, this shuts down other possibilities. Because now they are close-minded, their ego limits contact with their heart, their mentality closes them off by pride. Even Jesus “could do no deed of power there…and he was amazed at their unbelief,” their lack of open trust.
They did recognize the wisdom. Something about it was more than what they were used to. But they reject it, because they reject the one they thought they knew. Jesus couldn’t do any deeds of power because the people were not open to the possibility of those deeds or him doing them. So much for homefield advantage.
But this scene is also a necessary check. It is a glimpse at Jesus’ humanity, and it’s good for us to see it and for Jesus to experience it. Up to now, crowds of people have followed to seek healing and hear this teacher share his wisdom. In his hometown, he is amazed that God’s power has almost no effect among the people he knows from growing up and living there for years. Maybe Jesus was baffled, even disappointed, but maybe he knew it was coming and this was confirmation that he’d grown in ways they had not, in the ability to receive the Wisdom he’d come to know. Either way, it’s a reality check; a reminder that the essential never imposes itself, even while the unessential always demands attention and pushes its own way. Jesus was in relationship with the people of his hometown, but he had to move on.
God’s love does not coerce people or force them to love God back. This presumes a subject/object situation anyway, and love is much more than that. Wisdom is gained by living it, not by hearing about it, and you can’t push it on someone, especially if they haven’t experienced it. Our ego, which thrives on subject-object, keeps control by pushing away anything unknown, mysterious, or fearful. To stay safe, we’re quite skilled at staying distracted and identified with lesser things; no room for mystery. Conventional thinking keeps things familiar, keeps them simple, and stays protected from the unknown.
The term, “hometown” assumes a sort of knowing. It’s where we’re from, it’s who we are, it’s what we know. Hometown implies the familiar. It’s more than a mind thing, or certain thoughts, but also involves feelings that are held very deep. The people reacting to Jesus are unable to accept him partly because what he says does not match up with their expectations and what’s familiar. Expectations can lead to resentments, which festers negativity and shuts down creative options. How do we get beyond expectations?
One thing that is certain about life is that eventually you get wounded. There are disappointments, things don’t go as planned, setbacks occur. Maybe we get double crossed or suffer injustice. Perhaps death intrudes and loved ones pass away, which can really throw us off. Something happens and the way we thought life would be is forever changed.
What do we do when things don’t line up the way we want them to be? What do we do when we hear new teachings that seem to threaten what we’ve been taught up to then? How do we stay open, released from the tyranny of our own judging thoughts and fearful ego? Are we even open to being open?
Jesus goes about to the other villages to teach. He sends out the disciples two by two with authority over unclean spirits. Maybe our judging mind, our perspective, is one of those unclean spirits? To be freed from the totalizing, narrow, siloed mind, to live in the aperspectival world, able to hold multiple perspectives; this would open up so much more possibility, and there’d be a shift from deficiencies that dualistic, either/or limits us to; there’d be a shift to efficiencies, to ride on creativity’s building wave, the younger end of a growth curve.
When it comes to what God is doing in the world, would you rather be involved in the decline or the increase? Would you strive to maintain what once worked but no longer does, or would you be looking for the new wineskins because an amazing vintage is starting to flow?
It’s a mix. This story shows us that some people are open to Christ teaching new things, and some reject the message and do not welcome those who have been sent. We all experience that mix, and people are complicated.
But remember, the essential never imposes. Love never imposes, does not demand. But the essential, love, does have authority. The disciples have authority to teach and heal, and their authority, given in love, also gives them the ability to notice when this is not received, and to respond by leaving in a certain way.
When the village is not open to their message, Jesus says, “shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” This is intense, like a coin with images on both sides, loaded images at that. One is kind of like flipping them off, giving them the bird, to hold up your middle finger on the way out of town. But the other, it can also mean you simply signal that you did what you could. When it’s time to move on, rather than hard hearts, you entrust the people left there to the teachings of someone else. You trust God will continue in their life and find some other way to give them the experience they need to open them to deeper wisdom. This is a teaching that helps the disciples learn what to do in the face of rejection, and how to deal with pain. Part of us wants to react, to justify our position; part of us wants to respond, to learn to trust more.
For how to deal with pain, and how to live freed from resentments, to discover healing from how we cling to our wounds, it’s important that they brush off the dust. Because dust settles. As it settles, the feet move on and the disciples learn to trust the journey ahead, but in an honest way that doesn’t push away the pain or the rejection. The dust is still there, but it doesn’t have to choke us.
It’s important to recognize pain, to honor the reasons it exists, to look for the lessons it teaches as only it can, and to integrate suffering within a larger wholeness. Pain never goes away, but it can find balance. Wounds can either fester or heal. Learning to live with scars is a gift of grace sometimes disguised through suffering. Challenges of hard experience help us learn to be content through reality checks. Reality, both in terms of the harsh conditions of creation, and the creative power that brings beauty out of those chaotic conditions. Grace is the Ultimate Reality. As Jesus sends the disciples, including us, we are held in this grace, in the depths of Love.
That’s the context in which Jesus instructs the disciples to be content. The confidence of love creates humility and helps people to be satisfied and patient as they receive hospitality. In middle eastern culture, hospitality is very important, both if and how it is given, and if and how it’s received. Jesus says, “wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.”
In 2017 on the Sabbatical in the UK, Shawna and I stayed at Buckfast Abbey. We were there for a week, and had time to enjoy the grounds of the monastery, and explore the region of Devon in southwest England. We got to see the herd of wild horses in the protected area up on the hill, we could walk the public pathways over the countryside and into the villages, and I could learn more about the Buckfast Bee, a subspecies of honeybee developed by Brother Adam back in the day. When my friend, Jason came to visit, he and I got to see the bees with the current expert beekeeper, Clare Densley. That was a fun day as our small group got decked out in veils and coveralls.
The first part of the week, Shawna and I stayed in the south accommodation, a comfortable building and our room was nice. But at the end of the week when our friends, Jason and Julia came, we moved and got rooms in the North Building. Wow! That was a fancy place, very luxurious. It was nice to trade up, even though we were fine before in the south accommodation, the North Building was amazing.
That’s the kind of trading up Jesus tells them not to do. He doesn’t want them to reject someone’s hospitality just because the deal could be sweeter in another home. In other words, be content, be humble, patient, and thankful. These are qualities of character that are built on trust, a type of trust in God’s care, to have a sense of enough. They help us live in ways that don’t impose or force our will.
No money in their belt, no extra tunics, no cumbersome luggage. What this did was create a dynamic of dependence. The disciples were dependent on someone or something larger than themselves. They needed to learn how to be free from themselves; to learn about the benevolence of the universe, and as they found support from others, to trust in the goodness that is inherent in who we are as created beings.
So, there you have it, a word of Wisdom; did you catch what I just said? That goodness is inherent in who we are as created beings. Is that Christian? Maybe this doesn’t match up with the teachings you’ve received, like the doctrine of original sin, that says inherently we’re trouble.
Original blessedness is an alternative, one that pre-dates Augustine’s fourth century doctrines that were created to defend the Empire and control masses of people in a way that kept them dependent on the priesthood and on the Church that imposed this teaching and banished those who resisted it, like Pelagius, who was accused of heresy and banished from the Roman Empire, because he promoted original blessedness as taught to him from his teacher, who learned from another, who learned from the Apostle, John. So Pelagius moved away from Rome and the centers of power, to the margin, to Ireland where he continued Christian Wisdom based on Celtic spirituality.
We too, continue this journey of exploration into Wisdom, to practice not clinging too tightly to our attachments, even our own thoughts. In our ponderings and our praise, our meditations help us stay disciplined in our trust of divine Presence. As we live our lives as expressions of the living Christ, sent and shared in the world, may we too claim the authority of love’s command as we discover what love teaches along the way. Let us continue to repent, which means to turn to God, to notice. In these discoveries we claim the Source of deeds of power, the Origin in whom we trust. As we follow the man, Jesus, who helps us develop an integrated wholeness, in Christ, and rediscover inherent goodness, may God be glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.