This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen on Sunday, July 7, 2024, for the monthly worship service of Unfinished Community, drawing from Mark 6:1-13.
So, I have a bit of a confession to make.
I’m not sure if you all knew this or not but….I’m a millennial.
That’s right, having been born in that Jost ancient year of 1984, I am a card-carrying member of that oft-maligned generation; the millennials.
Obviously I’m joking, since being a member of one generation or another isn’t something to be ashamed of, but you wouldn’t know it if you ever read any English-language news articles about the economy. Millennials killed the diamond industry, millennials killed the golf industry, millennials killed the American wine industry. We killed the beer industry, J.Crew, and even chain restaurants. In fact, I recently came across an article from 2016 that was simply entitled, “Do Millennials Even Eat?”; the premise of which was that economic data shows our generation both eating out far less than other generations (as the aforementioned “killing chain restaurants” article suggested) and somehow spending significantly less on groceries than previous generations.
If you’re a millennial like me - or at least someone with some basic critical thinking skills - you’ve probably noticed the problem already: we don’t have any money to spend. We’re not going out of our way to destroy all these various industries, we can’t afford to participate in them at all, which is something an enterprising journalist might have spotted when writing these articles, had they thought to actually talk to even a single member of the millennial generation.
Of course, the vilification of our generation in the media isn’t exactly new - even that “Do Millennials Even Eat?” article was written more than 8 years ago - but therein lies the real problem. After several decades of constant news articles talking about how this devious, malicious, terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad generation is out to destroy any industry, tradition, or practice we can get our hands on, after decades of think-pieces published even today which call us literal children despite the fact that - and this is true - I am celebrating my 40th birthday this month, it is almost impossible to get anyone to take us seriously as a professional, or an expert in anything, even fields in which we’ve spent our entire adult lives working, studying, and gaining expertise.
Everything we present in public is immediately subjected to an absurd level of scrutiny and dismissal. I have seen millennials with multiple graduate degrees try to explain very simple, indisputable, grade-school-level facts from their area of expertise only to be met with resounding cries, of “Yeah, but what do you know? You’re just a millennial.”
This kind of thing is hardly unique. This complete dismissal of a person who is lovingly offering the benefit of their hard-earned experience only to be dismissed because the crowd has isolated some aspect of their character which allows them to infantilize them, to minimize them, so that those in the crowd can retain their sense of superiority, righteousness, or even dominion even at the cost good and kind people who are only here to help; this isn’t just limited to millennials. This experience is shared by LGBTQIA+ folks, minorities, and every woman everywhere really.
Oh, and also Jesus.
Because this is the exact same thing that happens to Jesus in our passage today, when he comes back to his hometown. He’s been gone a while by this point, having presumably left town when he was quite a bit younger to pursue his education and ordination as a Rabbi and having done at least some ministry on his own since then. But now here he is, the “local boy made good,” who’s finally come home. Not only that, but he’s the literal son of God, the Messiah himself, come to stand in that place and show all God’s people the way to a just, loving, and altogether better world. Surely, you would think that the people of his hometown, the people he grew up alongside, the people who know the quality of his heart and the power of his hands, surely they would be the first ones to jump on the bandwagon, right?
Right?
Well, obviously the scripture paints us a very different picture here. Their reaction is at best a kind of astonishment that ignites into a tightly focused flame of unmitigated outrage.
“The gall of that man! Just who does he think he is? Where does he get off talking to us like that?”
“He’s nobody special! He’s just Josh, the carpenter’s boy! Call him a Rabbi if you like, but we know better.”
Of course the gospel of Mark really softens their reaction a bit - in Luke they chase him out of the temple and up to the cliffs, and try to murder him immediately. But the point still stands; the reaction of the people in Jesus’ hometown wasn’t to rejoice in the Word of God being delivered by one of their own, but to use what they thought they knew about him as a reason to dismiss him, to treat the very necessary call to repentance, change, and growth as an offense, as an outgrowth of just one person rather than a clear call from God to do better.
He had all the expertise in the world, and they dismissed it all as just his opinion.
So now we’re halfway through the passage, which means that not only do we have this situation, but we probably have in here the answer to a question that most of us have struggled with for a very long time; a question which has defined Christian conversations about community for as long as I can remember, since I was a young boy sitting and listening to my fathers animated conversations with his fellow church elders on the issue:
Where is the middle point, here? How do we compromise with people who are unwilling to recognize the Spirit at work within us? How do we compromise with people who are only willing to meet us at the point of "shut up and stop being who God made you to be?"
Our LGBTQIA+ siblings, our minority siblings, even nearly every woman here, knows the painful truth of trying to compromise with people who only want you enslaved or dead. It seems impossible, but as Christians aren't we made for reconciliation, compromise, and peace? How do we sit at table with those who only want us there if we can abandon ourselves entirely?
Do we argue? Do we debate? Do we draw up rules and regulations, set boundaries, set up judicatories, call for church trials, demittals and excommunications? Do we threaten those on the other side with grave and terrible consequences if they don’t compromise? Or do we yield completely, forcing ourselves back into silent closets in the name of a peace which abandons justice in the name of an unholy silence?
How do we make compromise happen?
That’s the neat part. WE DON’T!
Verses 5 and 6 cover Jesus’ immediate reaction, and those are verses we like to skip because they make our us deeply uncomfortable. First, we see that Jesus “can do no deed of power there,” save for the occasional healing. Now I know it’s easy for us to think that the disbelief of the townsfolk somehow sapped him of all his Jesus-power or something, but the truth of this is far more sinister. We can see that he still healed, so that reality-breaking divinity is still very much present within him.
No…what’s likely happening here is that Jesus continued to do his work in spite of their offense. No matter how much they got upset at his call to repentance, love, grace, and mercy, he just kept doing the work for as long as he could, giving them every possible chance to bear witness to the ministry of grace he was showing among them. And with every act he took, every miracle he performed, the people of his hometown dismissed it, covered it up, masked the power of Christ with laughing dismissals of young Josh Josephson, the crazy carpenter who thought he was a Rabbi, who thought he was good enough for us.
And after all that, he stood there among them amazed that even the best work of the Messiah could not produce from them anything other than indifferent dismissal, and realized that the time had come for him to leave.
He gathered the twelve to him, and sent them out in pairs to do what work they could, but at the end of all his instructions, he gave them the fruits of what he had learned from the time they had spent in that place.
If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”
See, I have always loved this bit of teaching, and in no small part because of how wild it is, how radical, how bold as brass it is and how almost all of us manage to miss that fact completely.
We tend to think that this is Jesus making some kind of comment about our own internal mental health. Here’s Jesus being metaphorical again, saying that we should just let the haters fall away behind us as we leave town. Forget about them, just as we would the dust on our sandals as we cross the city limits. Ignore them, and go be yourself somewhere new instead.
But, as with a great many Bible verses that we love to throw out there as good advice, we often forget the verse that immediately precedes it. Consider, that if we add verse 10 into the mix, Jesus is actually saying this:
He said to them, "Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”
Jesus isn’t talking about leaving town when people don’t like what you have to say. He's not shaking off that dust on the way out of town, but on the way out of the somebody's house. Did you notice that?
Now, consider that in the Ancient Middle East, the hospitality of the house was a BIG deal, as was the cleanliness of ones feet within the house. That's why most households had servants whose whole job it was was to just wash the feet of guests, to clean their sandals, and to make sure that they tracked no dust into the house, and that when they left they were as clean as it was possible to be. This is why that later scene when Jesus washed the feet of the disciples was such a big deal, after all; everyone knew that servants cleaned your feet and washed your sandals while you sat, clean and comfortable at table.
So…to leave someone's house, and shake off the dust from inside the house…that's anything but subtle. That's not some personal, internal, mental dismissing of the haters…
That's an insult. A BIG one. And to that house specifically.
But, like many things, the way in which Jesus chooses to do this speaks volumes. He knows that, in a place like that, there is no word he can say which will ever be heard. He knows that anything that comes out of his mouth will be dismissed as the rantings of some young kid, and that any work he performs will be washed of its power by a crowd of people all too willing to dismiss it as the work of anyone or anything other than this errant carpenter’s son with his fancy big-city education and whatnot.
There is no sermon he can preach that will convince them to see, no miracle he can perform which will open their eyes, nothing he can do or say which can testify to the rot that has taken hold of their collective hearts, stagnating them in that tiny place convinced of their own righteousness while the poor suffer in silence, the widow is pushed to the side, the orphan is cast out into the street, the outsider is barred from entry, and the hungry and homeless ache with want and need for community.
There is nothing Jesus can do to testify to all that. Not that they could hear, anyways.
But the dust, on the other hand. The dust can testify all on its own.
In leaving that place, he doesn’t need to say or do anything to show the world the truth of who they are. Oh, they can dismiss him as lil’ Josh the carpenter’s boy, drive him up to the cliffs, ignore his teachings, plug their ears when he reads the scriptures, and deny for the whole world that this fully-equipped and well-trained technically-also-a-millennial rabbi might know a thing or two about God.
But they can't explain away the dirt and dust that permeates their own home. Dust born of the dead skin of ancient practices unevaluated. Dust born from the dying embers of passions extinguished for the sake of an unfeeling sense of belonging. Dust born from all the "ways we've always done things," which have sat untouched on a shelf like dried flowers, slowly painting the house in the beige and grey hues of decay. Dust which settles on all our instruments of love sitting untouched, valves and pads clogged with the dust of every song we wanted to sing with pride, but never sang for fear instead. Dust which settles over our gold and our glit, which piles up in the corners where we keep our hoarded wealth; our building funds, our mission funds, our rainy-day funds, all sitting around just waiting for someone to throw them excitedly into a waiting and wanting world filled with poverty and despair, but which just sit there.
Waiting.
Gathering dust.
Dust which testifies to our complicity. Our inhospitality. Our cruelty.
Dust which testifies to the lie that is told whenever a church claims to follow the risen Christ while driving those who bear his image and his heart right out the door.
Dust which that selfsame Christ shakes out on their doorstep, for all the world to see.
No words are necessary, when the dust can testify well enough on its own.
No miracles are needed when the dust can testify to exactly where the Spirit is at work, and where it is not.
No testimony is stronger then dust off a sandal, on the doorstep of communities that refused to hear the words of Christ Jesus.
It can be hard, really hard, when you’re gifted this magnificent gospel of Christ’s unfailing love, but no one wants to listen. It can be so very hard when they dismiss you for it, when they write off God’s love in favor of a hatred that is so much more palatable instead. When you are told that you are small, inexperienced, unknowing, uncomprehending, or even millennial because you do not share their dedication to the broken and harmful ways of the past, when you are cast out the front door - or worse, over the nearest cliff - for preaching release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for those who are oppressed, and the arrival of the year of the Lord’s favor, remember that Jesus was there too.
And he knew that there was no way to win that fight, no way to argue, debate, or convince them into hearing the word of God which is within you. There is nothing you can do to testify to God’s grace, love, and mercy in a place that isn’t ready to hear it. But that doesn’t mean it will remain hidden, that the world will never see what happened in this place, or that light will never shine among them again.
Because the dust will testify for you.
So do not be afraid to walk through that door, my friends. Shake the dust off your sandals and step out into the light once more, following Christ into a world that needs that love, needs mercy, and needs you, more than you know!
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