14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

No one really knows
     how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume
     that it happens
But no one else is in the room
     where it happens
~The Room Where it
Happens, Hamilton
 
Being human is messy. This pilgrim way is just messy. Despite our best attempts to mask it, deny it, dismiss it, we are known more by what we don’t know than what we do, by our limits more than our superpowers, by our doubts more than our certainty.
 
And yet, we have to move forward. We have to do something. And that—perhaps more often than not—can get shut down, dismissed, denied. Jesus knew something about this when he came back to his hometown to speak…and was shut down.
 
“Prophets are not without honor,” Jesus says, perhaps more to those of us who look on two millenia later with new prophets to welcome, or not, than to those already decided, “except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”
 
These are not the most hopeful words we could we hope for as we anticipate welcoming new leaders into our midst. Elders and deacons who would lead us, to whom we promise to pray for (easy), to encourage (still easy), to respect (sure, but let’s not get carried away), to follow as they guide us (wait, what?), serving Jesus Christ…
 
And then there’s this other thing. It is not easy to lead in a time when we don’t really know where we are going. When questions are far more abundant than answers. When scarcity and danger seem to rule the day. When communities are devastated by increasingly powerful storms, and cities by well-meaning policies that seem only to create more suffering. In a sense many, if not the vast majority of us want the same thing. We just aren’t in agreement as to how to get there. There’s a thorn in one’s flesh if we’ve ever seen one!
 
David has the far easier gig in today’s readings. A community proud of their new leader. A shepherd to be followed. But this is the beginning of the story, not the end.
 
This is the territory in which we live, the theater in which our songs are sung, our stories given meaning, our future charted. The room where it happens. Only to be sent out. Surprisingly, thankfully, with little. It isn’t, you see, what we carry, what we have, what superpowers we possess, or the “sausage” that is our human process. It is the One who is already out there…and in the room where it happens, going before us, with us, beside us, sometimes against our best intentions for the sake of the kindom for which we hope, for which we long.
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 † Psalm 48 or Ezekiel 2:1-5 † Psalm 123 † 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 † Mark 6:1-13
 
 
About the Art: Pilgrim with staff, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54923 [retrieved June 24, 2024]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pilgrim_Path_Waymarker_(Ireland).jpg.

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