July 4th Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Ezekiel 2:1–5
2 Corinthians 12:2–10
Mark 6:1–13
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer.

What a curious thing!  Here we are on the Fourth of July, ready to celebrate our country’s glorious strength, its many victories – and the lectionary offers us instead a whole series of readings whose common denominator is humility.
Certainly, the young Hebrew priest Ezekiel, sitting by the Chebar River in Babylon with all the other exiles, is feeling humbled.  Almighty God had finally had enough of Israel’s rebellious ways – and had allowed the despised Babylonians to take the people captive and put them to forced labor in a foreign land — just as he’d threatened he would, through one prophet after another, as Israel ignored all he’d ever told them.  But that realization – that they had brought this disaster on themselves – isn’t immediately clear to the discouraged refugees.  They think Almighty God has simply abandoned them.  They think all hope is lost.  So in the passage we heard a few minutes ago, the Spirit of God now arrives on the scene and begins to reveal to Ezekiel what Yahweh plans to do to redeem Israel.
But Ezekiel and his fellow exiles aren’t the only ones in our readings this morning who have been put down and disparaged.  The Apostle Paul, who established the Church at Corinth and lovingly kept it going for years has now been scorned as a spiritual lightweight by some new arrivals in that city – men who call themselves ‘Super Apostles.’  These newcomers are boasting they are far more eloquent than Paul, far more gifted and closer to God than Paul ever dreamed of being.  Moreover, they accuse Paul of profiting at the church’s expense.  Clearly, human pride, jealous competition is threatening to pull the Church at Corinth apart.
Paul is hurt.  He’s outraged by the unfairness of their attack.  But he refuses to respond in kind.  Instead, he says he knows a fellow who once was taken up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of it, he won’t say.  And there, he says, he was shown things that so elated him, so amazed him that God had to introduce a thorn, an affliction in his flesh to remind him not to speak of such things, and certainly not to boast of them.  That thorn – whatever it was — is doing its work.
So rather than boast about this spiritual experience, rather than describing it to prove how close he is to God, Paul simply reminds his beloved congregation that the Christian life is not about superiority or strength or power.  Rather, he says, it is about God’s amazing grace flowing through each one of us weak creatures.  In fact, he says, God has reminded him that it’s only when we acknowledge our weakness before him that God will flow his amazing grace, his strength and gifts though us.  Eugene Peterson puts God’s words to Paul this way:
My grace is enough; it’s all you need.
My strength comes into its own in your weakness.
Lest we miss that message our lectionary editors offer it to us one more time – well, really, two more times – in the Gospel passage from Mark when Jesus visits his hometown of Nazareth and preaches at the local synagogue.  At first the townspeople exclaim over their native son’s eloquence and wisdom.  But in the next breath they are saying to each other, “Wait a minute.  We know this guy.  He grew up right here among us, a child in his father’s carpenter shop.  Who does he think he is?  Somebody better remind him of his place.”  It’s as if they think that Jesus’ low status in that society — his weakness, to their way of thinking — means he can’t possibly be speaking God’s wisdom to them.  His father, they remind each other, was a carpenter, a working man, just as they are.  His mother was a housewife with a bunch of children.  How can he possibly be speaking the wisdom of God to them?  Once again, you see, a human way of thinking has overshadowed the grace of God.  And Mark comments that Jesus could do no work of miracles there.
So it’s no accident that in the very next paragraph of his Gospel, Mark describes Jesus sending his own disciples, the ones who have been such slow learners, out to minister in his Name.  They are to take no money, no extra clothes, no spare supply of food.  They are to depend on God alone and on His grace – for the words they will speak, for the welcome they will receive and for their own well–being.  And when they are not received – for that seems to be a certainty – they are simply to walk away.  Don’t argue.  Don’t try to defend yourselves.  Just leave the whole situation in God’s hands.
I can’t help thinking this morning, on this Fourth of July holiday, this day when we’re tempted to celebrate our strength, that these three scripture passages have special relevance for us – as a nation and as individuals.  For this nation, along with the rest of the world, has just gone through an extraordinarily difficult year.  We’ve been divided politically.  We’ve been shaken by the grief of losing so many to the Covid pandemic – and the fear that it might yet affect us.  Many of us have been separated from our families for far too long.  And all around us businesses have gone under.  People have lost their jobs.  And even as the economy rebounds, there’s an uneasy awareness that climate change has begun to change everything.
But it’s not just the pandemic, not just the nation’s politics, not just climate change that’s affecting us.  Beyond all that, we know our personal limitations.  Even as Christians we know that.  We know how difficult it is to be the kind of Christians we would like to be.  We don’t understand the Scriptures well enough; we don’t pray enough; we never seem to have enough time for God, for our neighbors, or even for ourselves.¹  It all seems to add up to being weak in faith.
But — praise God! — it’s right there that God’s grace overtakes us.  For it’s precisely our weak faith that God uses.  He never called us to fix all the problems in the world.  He never called us to understand everything about him or the Christian faith.  He called us in our weakness and he uses our poor efforts — because that’s the way God does things.²  It’s how he worked through Ezekiel – setting him up on his feet again and strengthening him to deliver a message of redemption to the dispirited exiles in Babylon.  It’s how he worked through the apostle Paul, when Paul was accused by some in his own congregation at Corinth.  And it’s how he worked through those newly minted disciples in Galilee when Jesus pressed them into service long before they felt ready.  By his grace alone, God worked through their weakness . . . and he will work through ours as well.
That’s our Good News this morning, the amazing good news of God’s grace — to those who confess their need of him.
On this national holiday that some call Independence Day we can celebrate our dependence on God – knowing, as the old book puts it, that it’s he who has made us, and not we ourselves.  We can celebrate the fact that he holds us all in the palm of his hand.  And it’s right there that he will bless us – as a nation, as individuals and as a congregation.
To God be the glory!!
Amen.
¹ Brian Spinks  “Into the Third Heaven”   The Living Word, April 27, 2021
² Ibid
 
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