Most of the time, the better you know someone, the less likely you are to pay attention to anything they say.
Mark 6:1-13; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Psalm 123; Ezekiel 2:1-5
It’s often said that the hardest sermon a pastor ever has to preach is to his or her home church. I have had the experience once of preaching at Good Shepherd down in Sandy, and it was a wholly nerve-wracking experience. There is something about trying to preach God’s law and gospel at people who remember you when you were, for lack of a better term, and idiot kid.
For example, when I was growing up, my parents went to the earliest of Good Shepherd’s three services, which was also the most traditional — hymns, organ, choir, the works. My friend Stephen, who for the rest of this story I’ll be calling Reggie since that’s how I’ve called him the past ten years or so, and I, being the only youth attending the early service, always got roped into acolyting. Now, the way it was done at Good Shepherd was the acolytes wore albs: the fancy name for the dress I’m currently wearing, complete with tincture: the fancy word for this rope that is pretending to be my belt, and sat in the front of the church for all to see.
This wouldn’t be such a bad thing except, being a Jr. High School boy, we got bored. So we’d do things to entertain ourselves. We would talk about the latest video games we were enjoying, doodle things on our bulletins, or, most obviously, get in rope fights. In our naivety, we thought that no one noticed our behavior, of course this was wholly untrue. It turns out that not only was it noticed, but Reggie and I were held up as examples of how not to behave while acolyting for the next several years.
So of course, when at one’s home congregation, they remember these things, among others. Sometimes this makes the message trying to be presented harder to take, as they remember a stupid kid, not the person in front of them. I imagine that Jesus and Ezekiel were in a similar position when they found themselves preaching at home.
Their situations are remarkably similar. God called Ezekiel to preach to a “rebellious nation” who “are obstinate and stubborn”, yet he was one of them. Ezekiel would have been a priest had it not been for the Exile, and at the time of his call he had just reached the age at which one became his vocation as a priest, that being 30. And so he was sent to preach a return to God among his own people, those who had already deserted God.
In Jesus’ case, he returned to his childhood home in Nazareth, though he now resided in Capernaum, to preach in the synagogue. Instead of listening to him, the people said, as translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message, “He’s just a carpenter—Mary’s boy. We’ve known him since he was a kid. We know his brothers, James, Justus, Jude, and Simon, and his sisters. Who does he think he is?”
Jesus’ and Ezekiel’s ministry was both made more difficult because they knew they people to whom they were preaching too well. In Jesus’ case, the inability of Jesus to do miracles in his hometown is contrasted with the effectiveness of the Twelve when Jesus sent them out. Mark tells us: “They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.”
So what does this tell us today? Many of us have close family and friends who we really want to know the Lord, but do not. We try over and over again to tell them of the joy we have, but they simple don’t want to listen. They seem, to us, to be “obstinate and stubborn”, like the people of Israel. But sometimes the same closeness that makes us want these people to know Jesus as we do becomes a liability in presenting the message. These people know too much about us, and because of it discount our message.
It often takes another voice, one that is not as well-known, to tell them the same thing. This is something that we’ve all experienced in some way or another, not just involving matters of faith. It often takes a measure of patience, trust, and most of all prayer for those whom we love to experience the love from God that we know already.