Hometown Conservatism or Mission Readiness

6 Pentecost Cycle B  Proper 9     July 8, 2012

Ez. 2:1-7           Ps.123

2 Cor.12:1-10     Mark 6:1-13

Lectionary Link

  You have heard me repeat the old joke over and over again about why the Episcopalians were so late to arrive on the frontier in the United States.  Answer:  They had to wait for the invention of the Pullman Coach because they wanted to travel to the frontier in style and with lots of baggage.

  Today’s appointed Gospel is about evangelism and strategies of evangelism.  Sending the early evangelists out in two's and prescribing evangelical poverty for them was a “sales” strategy.  Traveling light without lots of baggage would enable them to cover lots of territory quickly.  And they would offer  their evangelical product only where people showed an interest in responding.  They were not to wait around trying to convince those who rejected them.

  In our lives we often have to assess the amount of baggage that we’ve accrued or sold in a garage sale when we left our last residency. Sometimes we have lots of emotional baggage that was formed in our hometowns or the places of our first eighteen years of life.  Nothing requires us to reflect upon our emotional baggage more than the “class reunion.”  How many of you have attended high school class reunions? The days leading up to high school have created interesting scripts in our lives;  it is amazing how much influence that our days of not having fully discovered ourselves still exerts an influence over our current lives.  There is a cliché about attempts at attending reunions: “You can never go home.”  However if you never left home, then you might have a different opinion about those who attempt to come home only at the high school reunions or at  family funerals.  People who have left home and stayed away for a long time have become like foreigners to the hometown.  They have looked for insights and adventures beyond their hometowns.         

  The ministry of Jesus was an itinerant ministry; he was always on the road.  And after he had been on the road, he worked an appearance into his schedule for his hometown of Nazareth.  The traveling evangelist and healer who had gained a reputation in other places was coming home and this was an occasion for the expression of lots of mixed feelings.  "Why did you leave in the first place Jesus?  Why didn’t you stay and help your dad with the carpentry business?  And what is wrong with our religious expressions?  What can you teach us that our local religious leaders can’t?  You come  home with all of these new ideas and then you will leave.  We will have to live with the aftermath of you spreading your new ideas."

  When I lived in Iran in the 1970’s there was an attempt to bring sanitary conditions to the villages.  A student came to the university from a village that had experienced lots of illness because of poor drainage of human waste.  In the water system, the ancient underground aqueduct system that brought water from the mountain was used for irrigation, bathing, washing of clothes and dishes but it also was the sewage system.  The village was not familiar with the microscopic beasties which cause all manner of sickness.  This student returned to his village and tried to teach the village new sanitary patterns.  And even when sickness lessened, after he left, the villagers returned to their old patterns and the diseases returned.  And so the new knowledge became worthless when it was not practiced; when it was not institutionalized.  Creating sanitary conditions was too much of an innovation for the village to change their ancient practices.

  The practice of modern science has had to confront lots of human ignorance regarding all manner of things.  People of faith have sometimes held out the longest on issues because it would seem that sacred texts often have made the “cultural details” of ancient cultures an unchangeable standard of practice.

  Over and over again, people who have attained new learning do not seem to be able to go home to their reunion with their “hometown” faith communities.  People come into new insights and join new movements and then preach and live a different expression of faith than what they grew up with.  And families are divided over religion.  Certainly the life of Jesus, his ministry and the life of his followers represent Galilee and Palestine coming to grips with what was perceived as innovation in the first century.

  Hometown thinking is institutional thinking; it conserves.  Hometown thinking has all of the comfort and the infrastructure of the Pullman Car.  Everything has been thought out and patterns have been set.

  I believe the Gospel narrative today presents us with the narrative of our lives.  How do we both conserve and practice innovation in our personal and community lives?   Sometimes what is very familiar to us, keeps us from entertaining new thinking that might offer to us significant insights and give us new vision.  Such insights and new vision can in turn bring about changes in our practice and such changes in our practice can also bring with it attempts to change our institutions.

  You remember the steam engines on the train used to have firemen.  Firemen would shovel coal into the boilers but their jobs became obsolete when diesel engines replaced the coal burning engines.  But the railroad unions continued to have firemen because that was the institutional pattern.  For a while the term “feather-bedding” was used to designate the unnecessary hiring of people whose  jobs were obsolete.  Institutions conserve even when change is called for.

  We are not going to change the conserving nature of institutions nor are we going to suddenly stop the dynamics of change that comes to our personal or community lives.  The collision between change and institutional fixity is a fact of life.  And sometimes we find ourselves as institutional fuddy duddies and at other times we find ourselves as the revolutionary guard.  It often is simply a matter of what phase of our personal or institutional lives we are in at any given time.

  We need both institutional stability and innovation in life; lots of the countries in our world have not found the right balance between these two dynamics of life.  Change needs to be consolidated by institutional stability but the stability needs to be upset when new problems require new answers.

  The Gospel reflects both our personal and community lives of faith.  The Episcopal Church is meeting in Convention this month.  The institutional stability and innovation dynamics are issues for our continuing life as a faith community.  How can we streamline to do a better job of getting our message of hope, faith and community building out to a post-modern world?  I would suspect that the average age of those who are attending the General Convention is close to the age of 60.  What do people my age have to offer to the generations that are coming?  Are we hometown scoffers of anything new?  The new generations are not fighting our old battles; they are not embroiled in our biases and prejudices, they are not seeking answers to questions that they are not even asking.

  I believe that even though Jesus on one occasion was not able to convince his hometown crowd about some new insights, it did not mean that his hometown refused to change.  In the advancement of the innovation of new ideas the dynamics of conservation and change will test what will come to have the best functional use for us and our community.  And we hope that love and kindness and care will be the final criteria for the functional practice of ideas.

  Today, you and I are invited both to conserve and to change in the advancement of excellent practice in both our personal lives and in our community lives.  I believe that the Gospel of Jesus is realistic about both conservation and innovation.  Amen.