Can Any Good Come From Nazareth? (Epiphany 2b)

 

Can Any Good Come from Nazareth?  

Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
14 January 2018: 8 am Spoken and 10:00 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Parish Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20); 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I grew up in Moses Lake, Washington, something of a backwater in a backwater, in the dry Eastern half of the state.  Many small lakes dotted the area, called potholes.  And so one of the terms of derision we youngsters had for our home town was “Moses Hole.”   After Mount St. Helens dumped about 2 feet of pulverized pumice on our town in 1980, we called it the “Ash Hole” of Eastern Washington.  I personally thought all this was sad, since I had learned, through camping and hiking in high school, to see the stunning beauty of the big sky, the channeled scablands, lakes, rivers, sand dunes and deserts around my home town. And seeing the recovery of vegetation and life after the ash fall was itself beautiful, nothing short of miraculous.  But despite this, Moses Lake remains something of a joke to its young people, yearning for the glamour and green of Seattle or just the more comfortable life of Spokane.  

Jesus’ home town, Nazareth, was something of a joke to people in 1^st century Palestine.   It was a backwater of a backwater. Galilee was kind of like the Eastern Washington of ancient Palestine.   In the Talmud, there is a story of a rabbi who replies to a less than average student by saying to him, Galili Shote' “You Galilean fool!”  And Nazareth was just a tiny village, with maybe 200 or 300 people at most.  Archeology reveals that it was made of crude unfinished stone blocks or mud wattle, with tiny narrow alleys as streets that were filled with garbage and refuse, still there millennia later after archeological digs uncovered them.  Just about 3 miles away—maybe an hour and a half brisk walk over the steep hills of the region—was the provincial capital Sepphoris, at that time a newly rebuilt, modern, gleaming Greco-Roman city complete with gymnasium, sports arena, schools and colleges, and a booming business district.  Its name comes from the Hebrew word for a bird, and it is probably the “city perched on a hill” that Jesus proverbially taught “cannot be hidden.”

So Nazareth, a punchline in a bad joke, was all the more a place from which you could not be proud to hail.  Nathanael in today’s Gospel reacts to hearing about Jesus: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”   Andrew can only answer, “Come and see!”  And so Nathanael goes, contrary to his presuppositions and biases, to see this man from Nazareth.  When he meets him, Jesus for his part, doesn’t take Nathanael’s disparagement of his home town ill: “Here comes a man without any deceit in him at all! He’s telling it like it is! But he also goes to find out on his own.”   And Nathanael begins the great journey of following Jesus, and learns just how wrong his presuppositions were. 

This last week, many of us were reminded of Dorothy Parker's witty greeting on the telephone: "What fresh hell is this?"  According to most participants in an oval office meeting, the President used a crude vulgarity for an outhouse to say that Haiti, El Salvador, and the countries of Africa were places unworthy of sending immigrants to the United States.   Faced with an outpouring of disgust and outrage at this blanket disparaging of countries with majority people-of-color populations, he denied that he had used the word, but stood by what he said was his point—that we shouldn’t accept immigrants and refugees from what he thought were defective countries.   Many of his supporters took exception with the vulgarity, but also said that “at least he’s telling it how it is.” 

What they mean by this, of course, is that the point the President is making resonates with them, rings true to them, even if the details might be wrong or the words ill-chosen. 

Herein lies a cautionary tale for all of us.   

Nathanael was a man “without guile” not simply because he told things as he saw them, but also because he was willing to go and see, and test received wisdom and bias by firsthand experience.  Simply telling how you think and feel is not enough:  the risk of self-deception is too great, the temptation to deceive others too strong. 

I raise this not to point fingers or blame one political leader or another.  I raise it to point to what Jesus is calling us to.   The fact is, we all have biases and prejudices.  Simply expressing them is not honesty.  Putting them to the test, and making oneself vulnerable by going and seeing how things really are is necessary if we are to overcome bias.  This is truer all the more if such clarity of vision puts our privilege and power in question. 

Fr. Jim Martin wrote the following in response to the President’s question:

“Why are we having all these people from [such] countries come here?”
1.) They are our brothers and sisters in need.
2.) They are often fleeing war, violence or famine.
3.) There are children among them.
4.) The Old Testament asks us to care for the "alien."
5.) Jesus asks us to welcome the “stranger.”
6.) Jesus asks us to love one another.
7.) We will be judged on how we care for the stranger.
8.) They come bringing hope.
9.) It's the right thing to do.
10.) That’s who we are."

We Americans like to think of our nation as exceptional.  But we deceive ourselves if we think that this means we are better or truer than other nations.  I have lived and worked in many countries labeled by the President, to use the Latin word, as a cloaca.  They all had stunning physical beauty, and amazing and generally warm hearted, generous, and hard-working people.   They face challenges, to be sure, and hardships we see rarely here.  But they are the homes of God’s creatures, our brothers and sisters, who have the same hopes and aspirations we have.  In my experience, America is exceptional only when it hopes and aspires to be its better self, and lives out its best values.  It is run-of-the-mill or worse when we play power politics, defend privilege, look down on others, and harden our hearts to the cries of those less fortunate than ourselves.  Honesty requires that we test all our beliefs and feelings in the light of the experience of others and in the teachings of Jesus.    

The fact is, we all tend to want to set up ourselves by putting others down.  Fr. Jim Boston from Grants Pass told me an old joke about this Southern Oregon region of ours years ago:  the people in Ashland look down on people who live in Medford.  People in Medford look down on people who live in Grants Pass.  People in Grants Pass look down on people in Kerby and Selma and the rest of the Illinois Valley.  But the people in the Illinois Valley, especially now that they are flush with cannabis money, look down on everybody else.  

Jesus was from a backwater of a backwater, a butt of jokes, a cloaca.  His neighbors and teachers tended to look down on people who did not share their religion, foreigners.  But he taught, again and again, that God is our loving Papa, our Abba, who gives the blessings of rain and sun to righteous and wicked, to Jew and gentile alike.  When he tried to exclude a Syro-phoenician woman from blessing, she turned his slur about dogs into a plea for crumbs under the table.  And he, like Nathanael, went and saw.   He opened the gates of blessing to all.  This is what he calls us to. 

    

Merciful God, give us hearts of compassion and love, and help us to stand with and serve the least of these, your family members.  Help us to hear and recognize your voice as it calls us in the night, and follow where it leads.   Help us to come and see, with Nathanael, where you are and what you what you want of us.

In the name of Christ, Amen